Until nearly the end of the nineteenth century volcanology had scarcely achieved the status of a science. But then came the awesome explosion of Krakatau (formerly Krakatoa), which made its mark, one way or another, on every one of the earth’s 197 million square miles.

One of a group of volcanic islands, Krakatau lay in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, a collision zone between two of the great plates that make up the earth’s crust. Krakatau had already undergone several eruptions, the greatest occurring about 500,000 years ago, with only Stone Age Homo erectus (Java ape man or pithecanthropus) as witness. On this occasion the island’s original 6,000-foot-high cone vanished into dust, leaving several small island fragments around the rim of the caldera, a craterlike basin created by the collapse of the volcano. Ash and lava continued to bubble up from the caldera’s southern rim, until a new half-mile-high cone, Rakata, was created. Eventually two smaller cones, Perboewatan and Danan, developed to the north and united with Rakata. They formed Krakatau Island, five miles long and on to three miles wide.

For centuries the volcano remained quiet. Then in 1680 the smallest of Krakatau’s cones, Perboewatan, came to life. This eruption killed off the island’s vegetation, and there were two more centuries of silence. The jungle grew back on Krakatau, and as far as anyone knew the volcano was extinct.

On May 20, 1883, Dr. Van der Stok, director of the observatory in Batavia, Java (now Djakarta, Indonesia), was disturbed by rattling and banging of doors, windows, and china at his home. From the north-west came a low rumbling that sounded like distant artillery fire. He correctly surmised that somewhere a volcano must be erupting. He entered this fact in his official diary, as well as the time of day – 10:55 A.M. The rumbling continued throughout the day, and he timed each explosion. He was not alarmed because volcanic eruptions were a part of life in this area of the world. On Java there were forty-nine active volcanoes.

At Anjar, the chief port on the Java shore, the disturbance was much greater, and one of the Dutch officials turned his telescope on the strait to locate the source. He checked the island group of Krakatau and noted that the sky was clear and no cloud rose above the three tiny volcanoes. Krakatau was a calm and peaceful mass of greenery, clothed from base to summit in luxurious forest and tropical vegetation, a landmark for ships coming from the west. The great eruption on this island 200 years before, when the sea had been choked with pumice and the shore resembled a moonscape, was chronicled in local legends.

In the afternoon seamen on the many ships that sailed through the strait’s fast shipping lane witnessed more menacing activity. The Dutch mail ship Zeeland passed within five miles of Krakatau, and its crew observed steam and debris spewing from the northern cone. Over the island hung a dark, heavy cloud, out of which came a series of flashes accompanied by unbroken crackling like nonstop machine-gun fire. Sailors on other ships watched columns of ash and steam rising from the volcano and fiery red clusters gushing from its base. Loud detonations made nearby ships tremble, and crewmen within five miles of the island could feel heat radiating on their faces and hands. Although the ships’ crews were anxious to move on, the sky became so dark that they were forced to proceed at half speed. Thirty miles from the island a sailor lowered a bucket into the sea and brought up pumice with scarcely a drop of water.

Most people in the area considered Krakatau a burned-out crater slumbering in its old age and were more curious than alarmed as volcanic activity continued unabated throughout the week. The excursion steamer Loudon brought a party of sightseers to Krakatau, where they picnicked and climbed the slopes of the most active cone. They sank up to their calves in ash, sulfur troughs of bubbling mud swirled near their ankles, and a crackling, grumbling column of steam rose in the air above. They climbed to the top and peered into the crater at a vent thirty yards wide from which gushed lava and steam. The more foolhardy adventurers climbed partway down into the crater to gather souvenirs of pumice and lava. As darkness fell, the Loudon steamed away, surrounded by an awe-inspiring spectacle of beauty and grandeur.

A three-week calm was followed by rekindled volcanic activity throughout July, and on August 10 a Dutch official who landed on Krakatau found it too dangerous to carry out a detailed survey. The island was completely devastated; only a few tree trunks remained, and the ground was covered by a layer of ash and sulfur at least two feet deep. All three of the peaks on Krakatau were now erupting.

The fissures underlying Krakatau provided subterranean corridors from deep beneath the earth’s crust; during earthquakes a few years before, many new vents had been opened. These conduits were easy escape routes for the huge mass of gas-charred, explosive magma building up in the white-hot chasm below. They were also ports of entry for sea water to seep downward. On contact with molten rock the water entering the magma chamber was transformed into steam and its volume increased enormously. The new vents provided channels for the release of pressure building up below. Liberated gases rose in the volcano’s chimney, where magma frothed and bubbled. The rising magma clogged the vents and plugged the chimney.

Above ground, along the shores of the strait, 36,417 people worked and slept, ate and drank, played and quarreled, unaware that they would shortly become victims of nature’s greatest catastrophe. Krakatau’s three months of menacing prelude were over, and nature’s three-ring circus was about to begin.

The morning of Sunday, August 26, 1883, broke fine and clear in the Sunda Strait. The sun rose high in the cloudless sky, and faint wisps of steam rose from Krakatau’s three small cones. As long as the plugged chimney resisted the impulsive forces from below, nothing of the volcano’s fury was evident on the surface. The churning gases at the top of the magma column surged upward with increasing strength and pounded on the plugs like a raging demon that had been held captive for centuries. At 1:00 P.M. the plugs’ resistance to the pressure gave out, and the volcano erupted. An explosive pillar of steam and a cloud of debris shot into the air, accompanied by an ear-shattering fusillade.

Within an hour the cloud had risen to seventeen miles, three times the height of Mount Everest. Steam and debris climbed in a thick column, mushrooming out in the shape of a gigantic Christmas tree with the waters of the strait with ominous sound effect. The natives who flocked together on shore were convinced that the end of the world had come. By 3:00 P.M. it had grown dark and the roaring of the volcano had become so relentless that the ground trembled underfoot. Terrifying detonations came every two or three minutes, and the air was charged with sulfurous fumes.

Captain Logan of the ship Berbice recorded in his log at sea:

By 10:00 A.M. on Monday a pall of ash had blanketed the Strait of Sunda. The dust cloud rose to an altitude of at least fifty miles; darkness extended for over a hundred miles. Krakatau’s roar finally died down to a mere murmur. To the thousands of exhausted people the sudden silence brought the hope that the volcano was at last in retreat and its fires extinguished. The appearance of tranquillity was temporary and deceptive. At two minutes after ten, on that memorable morning of August 27, 1883, two-thirds of Krakatau Island collapsed into the chasm beneath.

Nineteen hours of continuous eruption had drained the magma from the chamber faster than it could be replenished. With its support removed, thousands of tons of roof rock crashed into the void below. Sea water rushed into the cauldron of seething rocks and magma and was instantly turned into steam. Up from the volcano huge rocks and clouds of dust, debris, and steam shot high in the air. This was Krakatau’s Big Bang!

A mighty blast roared from the volcano. The force of this explosion is estimated to have been twenty-six times greater than the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated in an underground test. Krakatau literally blew itself to pieces, and only eleven square miles remained. The spectacle of Krakatau’s grand collapse, the flashing explosion, and the great wave was enacted unseen. No one witnessed the entire pageant. A small number of survivors who beheld a fragment of nature’s destructive power, with limited knowledge, did their best to recount what had happened. The best observations were made by the crews of ships at sea.

A seaman aboard the Hope later recorded his memories of Krakatau’s fury during the cataclysmic day of August 27.

Despite the intense ordeal that Mrs. Beyerinck had experienced, she managed to survive, as did her husband and two of their three children.

In the twenty-one hours during which Krakatau went through a frenzy of explosions there were several thousand casualties. All of the victims of its rain of burning ash and red-hot pumice had been claimed in southeastern Sumatra. But more death and destruction from Krakatau was about the be delivered.

Of all the weapons in Krakatau’s arsenal, the tsunamis (tidal waves) took the heaviest toll. The collapse of Krakatau’s three cones had created a subterranean caldera 900 feet deep. The sea poured into the basin and was ejected at once with explosive violence. A wave of gigantic size and shape gushed out of the frothing whirlpool, and from the truncated island a wall of water rolled outward in an ever-widening circle. This huge mass of sea water moved through the Sunda Strait in all directions, rearing to mountainous size as it approached shores where sea beds were shallow. It ravaged beaches, rolled across the countryside, and clawed at hills, destroying everything and everyone in its path. The wave lashed and battered shores all around the strait, killing thousands of people before they knew what had struck them.

The first wave came with little warning and was preceded and followed by a tempest of wind. The wave rose higher than the tallest palm tree and dwarfed everything. A towering, solid wall of water, it moved at tremendous speed. People were hurled into a maelstrom of tossing, twisting black chaos. Those who stood on high ground did not wait to watch this wonder of nature but turned to run in gasping, tortured flight.

After each surge the water would recede and there would be several hours of deceptive calm. Then another, even greater wave would roll in, killing those who had ventured near the shore during a lull. The raging waters surged over the Sumatran town of Kalimbang to a depth of over 80 feet. After the Javan town of Merak had been hit twice, hundreds of people crowded into several stone houses at the top of a 135-foot hill. But a giant wave slammed into these buildings, tearing them apart. Of the town’s 3,000 residents, only two survived.

At Telok Betong the great wave reached within six feet of the top of a hill 122 feet above sea level, completely destroying the town. Strongly built houses were torn from their foundations; heavy treasure chests, anchored to the ground by strong bolts, were carried like straws and dashed against the hill 300 yards away. More than 5,000 residents died from assaults by the seismic sea waves.

Eyewitness accounts came from passengers on the Loudon, which had anchored off Telok Betong that Sunday night. The first of the major surges arrived on Monday morning.

Unlike most of the ships in the vicinity, the Loudon survived the surge. The wave lifted the gunboat Berouw up a river valley, deposited her at a spot over a mile inland, and left the ship stranded thirty feet above sea level. The entire crew of twenty-eight was killed. The bones of the vessel lie at that place still, a perpetual reminder of Krakatau’s might.

No one can be sure exactly how many people perished in these mountains of water. But the official count of the known casualties was 36,417. More than a thousand villages and towns were completely destroyed.

The great wave escaped freely through the wide western end of the strait and swept across the Indian Ocean, touching at Cape Horn and rolling up the Atlantic. Two days after it left Krakatau, it lapped the shores of the English Channel, 11,500 miles away, raising the water levels by several inches!

Corpses of humans and animals floated in the sea and lay on land, prey to the wild beast prowling from the jungles. To the havoc of flood and fire was added the fear of pestilence. Distracted people sought husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and children. Despairingly, they gazed at the waste of waters as if to implore the sea to give back its dead.

A seaman on the Hope continued his log:

The Reverend Tennyson-Woods, on his tour of Bantam, Java’s northern province, in September found "nothing left. Not a house, scarcely a tree, not a road, only a confused mass of earth, branches, household utensils, and remains of human beings." Yet in all this misery and barrenness there was a glimpse of beauty. Millions of brilliantly colored butterflies, born in the ash, unable to find food, and lacking the strength to fly farther afield, fluttered, searching in the watery surface for a dry spot on which to land. They swept over the sea, alighting by the thousands on ships before they took flight.

A tempest of wind blown upward and outward from Krakatau encircled the earth seven and one-half times. Pumice was cast into the sea in such enormous quantities that shipping was slowed to a crawl. Many bays and harbors became choked with thick floating "rafts" of light, frothy lava.

Krakatau’s Big Bang was the greatest volume of sound recorded in human history. It ranged over a great circle 4,500 miles in diameter, almost sixteen million square miles in area, and was heard in the Philippines, Australia, Indochina, and southeastern India. Sheep in western Australia were stampeded by the noise, and in New Guinea, 1,800 miles distant, natives asked the missionary why the white people were firing cannons at sea. On Timor Island, 1,351 miles east, government boats were put out to sea to investigate the distress signal.

A tribe of headhunters in Borneo thought an evil spirit or avenging force was coming, and several were reported to have jumped off cliffs. The most remarkable record came from the island of Rodrigues, 2,968 miles away in the Indian Ocean. Four hours after the explosion a police chief, asked about a distant roar, attributed it to heavy guns firing at sea. Even more amazing is that scarcely anyone in the devastated area noticed the noise or remarked on its intensity. The world’s loudest noise was screened by layers of ash permeating the atmosphere and fell on ears already stunned and deafened.

A widely distributed phenomenon of singular beauty was Krakatau’s dust cloud. It spread out across the Indian Ocean, and within a few days of the explosion it formed an arc of twilight that extended over 300,000 square miles of ocean. The cloud rolled on, encircling the earth and causing strange optical conditions that gave rise to glorious sunrises and sunsets and brilliant glows that lighted darkened skies.

Throughout the southern hemisphere there were reports of green, blue, and copper suns and of the atmosphere being obstructed by a livery haze. The sunset at Yokohama, Japan, on August 29, was described as "blood red." The dust cloud widened until by October 10, it had spread across the eastern United States. In the cities of New Haven, Connecticut, and Poughkeepsie, New York, the glowing evening sky caused firefighters to rush out, seeking a nonexistent blaze. On November 23 the cloud reached London, where an artist immortalized the "twilight and afterglow effects" in watercolor as he watched a series of sunsets across the Thames.

In every catastrophe there will be some survivors, and so the survivors on Java and Sumatra struggled to their feet to count the dead and rebuild their lives. As soon as the volcanic fires had cooled, life began to move back to the charred remains of Krakatau. Just five months after the eruption one researcher found spiders crawling over the island’s ashy remains. Grasses and shrubs began to sprout on the devastated shores of Java and Sumatra; by the turn of the century trees were growing and rats, lizards, and snakes were repopulating the region.

Krakatau is, of course, not dead but merely sleeping, while deep within the earth’s crust a seething mass of gas-charged, acid magma is building up. In 1927, after forty-four years of slumber, the giant awakened, and subsequent eruptions have created a new cinder cone. There is little doubt that sometime in the future the sleeping giant will awaken with frenzied fury. And that will be another story.