Residents Experience Doomsday as a 100-Metre Tsunami Strikes Ambon
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia — In 1653, George Berhard Rumphius finally arrived in Ambon after months of sailing from Portugal. He first passed through the Strait of Magellan and was buffeted in the Atlantic Ocean en route to a region he had previously known only from word of mouth.
He then landed as a soldier tasked with maintaining security in Ambon for an indeterminate period. Daily, Rumphius oversaw the inhabitants and supported the exploitation of spices by the VOC.
However, the VOC authorities regarded Rumphius as lazy; he instead studied the natural environment and the society of Ambon, rather than shouldering arms. As a result, he was transferred to the civil service. This transfer was welcomed and allowed Rumphius to study nature and culture. Eventually, this effort earned him a place in the history of science as a renowned naturalist. He subsequently wrote his observations on nature in the thick book titled Herbarium Amboinense.
The book not only contains living creatures but also testimonies of a catastrophic disaster in Ambon on Saturday, 17 February 1674. That day, Rumphius worked from sunrise to sunset as usual.
Nothing unusual happened until the clock showed 7:30 pm local time. There was no wind and rain; bells at Victoria Castle, Ambon, rang and clanged by themselves. Many people, including Rumphius, wondered what was happening. But all was disrupted by the ground moving like water.
“People fell as the ground shifted up and down like the sea. When the quake began to shake, the entire garrison, save for a few who were trapped atop the fort, retreated to the field below the fort.”
They went to a large field hoping to be saved. Unfortunately, that was wrong. After a few seconds, the seawater suddenly rose onto the land. Practically everyone fled to higher ground to save themselves.
“The water was so high it rose above house tops and swept the village clean. Coral rocks were cast ashore far from the coast,” Rumphius recalled.
Born on 1 November 1627, he became one of the few who could run quickly to higher ground. Meanwhile, 2,322 others on Ambon and Seram Island were buried under rubble and swept by the sea. Two of Rumphius’s thousands of descendants/his wife and daughter were among the dead.
Earthquake and Awe-Inspiring Tsunami Throughout History
Centuries after the quake, Rumphius’s testimony opened the curtain on the history of natural disasters in Indonesia. BMKG says the story is the first in history and the oldest tsunami record in Nusantara.
“The Ambon earthquake of 1674 was the first major earthquake and tsunami in Nusantara’s records,” said the head of BMKG’s Earthquakes and Tsunamis Directorate, Daryono, in the webinar “Tsunami Ambon 1674 Commemoration”, Tuesday (18/2/2025).
In contemporary research it is known that the quake is estimated to have had a magnitude of around M7.9 and was highly damaging. Not only due to the seismic shaking, but also the subsequent impacts.
The quake caused Ambon land to undergo liquefaction or a loss of soil strength due to earthquake shaking. The land swallowed everything on top of it. This is proven by Rumphius’s account of the “ground moving up and down like the sea”.
As for the tsunami, it is estimated to have had a height of 100 metres washing over Ambon. Daryono said the extreme tsunami in Ambon was not only caused by the shaking, but also by other factors, namely coastal landslides triggered by the earthquake.
“If we look at tsunami cases in Indonesia. (For example) the Flores 1992 tsunami, if you only look at a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, that tsunami was not as severe as 30 metres and even jumped over the island of Babi. Even the Aceh tsunami, if you look at the magnitude, isn’t that large. In other words, a significant contribution in forming tsunamis is landslides,” said Daryono.
Thus, the Ambon Tsunami of 1674 becomes evidence that landslides are a major source of tsunamis in Indonesia. Because many tsunamis in the modern era were caused by earthquakes followed by landslides. Therefore, the 1674 Ambon Tsunami, which produced waves up to 100 metres, was the largest wave in Nusantara’s history.