EnvironmentSimon Winchester has written a masterpiece of scientific melodrama. With characteristic encyclopaedic zeal and descriptive flair, he tells the story of the 1883 volcanic devastation and surprising renaissance of the East Indian island of Krakatoa. Schools might well adopt the book as an instructive text in tectonics and vulcanology. Furthermore, for the ordinary reader, there is richly diverse entertainment
The volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, one of a group of small islands in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, is believed to have been only the fifth most-explosive volcano in recorded geological history, Winchester writes. Mounts Toba and Tambora in the East Indies, Taupo in New Zealand and Katmai in Alaska were probably larger, "at least in terms of the amount of material they hurled into the sky and the height to which all that material is thought to have soared". But Krakatoa, he says, made the loudest noise. Its detonation was "the most devastating volcanic event in modern recorded human history, and it killed more than 36,000 people".
"There were sounds - bangs, cracks, thunderous roars, shattering low- and high-frequency noises - that were so loud they could be heard thousands of miles away." Krakatoa made "almost certainly the greatest sound ever experienced by man on the face of the Earth. No man-made explosion, certainly, can begin to rival the sound of Krakatoa - not even those made at the height of the Cold War's atomic testing years . . . Under the impact of Krakatoa's explosion, 13 per cent of the Earth's surface vibrated audibly . . . " Winchester is not in the habit of gushing superlatives promiscuously. In the context of his carefully measured presentation of verifiable historical facts, his lurid descriptions of catastrophic extremes are therefore most impressive.
The volcano's consequent tsunamis and towering sea-waves, devastated 165 villages and brought the death-toll up to 36,417. Winchester tells of a ship freakishly undamaged by being washed a mile-and-a-half from the coast up the Koeripan River, and of a telegram, one of "only momentary lapses into levity", received by the Dutch colonial administration in their capital, Batavia: "Fish dizzy and Caught with Glee by Natives."
He has a keen eye for bizarre details on the fringe, and even beyond the fringe, of his main narrative. For example, he recounts picturesque irrelevancies about John and Anna Wilson's Great World Circus, which arrived in Batavia shortly before the eruption.
After preliminary long passages of geological didacticism, Winchester seems light-heartedly inspired to share some of the sorts of magpie gleanings for which Michael Caine is famous.
Before Winchester wrote this book, not many people could have known that the Wilsons' mammoth new tent seated 5,000 spectators to watch "Cannonball Holtum from Denmark, and His Incredible, Death-Defying Feats of Courage and Fearlessness".
Most significantly, in Winchester's well-founded opinion, the Krakatoa disaster was the first of its kind to be immediately, universally reported.
The recently established network of overland and submarine cables and their prompt use by insurance agents and news agencies "ensured that the world's most advanced peoples learned about the eruption within moments of its happening". They must have been given their earliest awareness that they lived in what Wendell Willkie, in 1940, called "one world", and Marshall McLuhan, in 1960, called the "global village".
The Krakatoa eruption evidently seemed to the local Muslim population to be an omen of godlike disapproval of Western colonialists and served as a catalyst for revolutionary uprisings.
This eminently readable, though predominantly grim, survey warns that "one in 10 of the world's population is currently reckoned to live near volcanoes that are either active or have the potential to become so. So far as volcanoes are concerned, there are a great number of people - in the Philippines, in Mexico, on Java, in Italy even - who are currently living in harm's way." And, perhaps, Winchester might have added, in California.
"Krakatoa", he points out, "is a stark reminder of the truth of Will Durant's famous aphorism 'Civilisation exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice'." The lava is always bubbling, the pressure building up.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded 27th August 1883 By Simon Winchester Viking, 432pp, £16.99