Krakatoa

The Day the World Exploded

Simon Winchester

Viking, London 2003,

ISBN (hardback) 0670911267

(paperback) 0670914282

This is the cover as taken from the amazon.co.uk web site. Note that the date is wrong! It should be 1883, not 1803. My copy of the book has the correct date on the cover.

Everyone has heard about Krakatoa - its got such a lovely name. And in 1883, people living 3,000 miles from the volcano heard the sound as Krakatoa exploded - the loudest sound ever made. Most people thought it was a naval bombardment. And for years afterwards, the colourful sunsets caused by the volcano's dust were much admired. And in New York State a fire crew set off to fight a fire which turned out to be a particularly vivid setting of the sun!

But we, as geologists, are not concerned with such ephemera. We need to know the causes of the eruption and what it means in the context of plate tectonics. Simon Winchester aims to satisfy both markets. The book is full of the background of the Dutch East Indies (for, of course, Krakatoa was a Dutch colony at the time). Not only this but everything else about the East Indies is incorporated. If you want to know about the Wallace Line, you can find out about it here. Actually the Wallace Line (Australian fauna to the east, Indian to the west) is a consequence of the geology, but at some remove from the essentials of the story.

But it does allow him a good way of introducing Wegener and Continental Drift - and a series of entertaining stories. I particularly liked his tale about Harry Hess, one of the Godfathers of Plate Tectonics.

Winchester was Chairman of the Oxford University Geological Society. In a magnificent coup they had managed to get Hess to lecture to them and all the scientific big-wigs were to attend the lecture. But first the committee had to dine (and wine) the speaker. On the way back from a country restaurant the car broke down, they had a long walk to a pub, where Hess had a few whiskies, eventually a taxi turned up, but not before Hess had had a few more whiskies. They got to the Lecture Theatre at 10, and the audience was still there. Hess later said it was one of the most amusing and satisfying evenings of his life, but the big-wigs were not very amused by the late start, slurred speech, maps falling down, people falling over and projectors fusing. All in all it makes our taking our speakers to Browns sound very tame.

The heart of the book is the account of what happened when Krakatoa erupted and there is certainly a lot about that. I liked the picture of a Dutch gun boat stranded 2 miles from the sea, upright and not much damaged but the crew dead. The stories of people trying to outrun the tsunamis are frightening. It was these “tidal waves” which were the mass killers of the eruption.

The geological explanation of the explosion could not be given at the time of the eruption. Why the volcano was where it was is now easily explained by Plate Tectonics and this Winchester does - but so subtly that the explanation needs to be sought out.

If you want a detailed exposition of the geology of the Sunda Straits, this is not the place to look. But for a picture of life before and after the eruption in and about Java the book is a treasure trove.

The reporting of the eruption is used to illustrate the connectedness of the world brought about by the new submarine telegraphs - enabled by the discovery of the insulating gutta percha in the East Indies! The news was around the world in a few hours.

This book could have been a lot shorter and covered the subject of its title adequately. But it is all the better for being longer and discursive. One sometimes thinks that not a note made by Winchester goes to waste - everything gets thrown into the mix. But mostly it is a very entertaining mix.

A good book which hides its learning well and which will tell you lots of things you did not know - or even think that you wanted to know.