The British ship Charles Bal nosed cautiously eastward in the Straits of Sunda, bound for Batavia, capital of Java and chief distributing point for the Dutch East Indian possessions. It was Sunday, August 6, 1383. The morning had been sultry and hot, with the sky hanging ominously low over the sea like a steaming blanket. Not a ripple disturbed the glassy expanse of water. Ten miles ahead, in the middle 5f the 60-mile-wide straits, shouldered Krakatoa volcano, its island base of nine square miles pitted with large holes from eruptions the preceeding May and June.
It was approaching 1 p.m. As: the hour was reached, as if nature had planned her awesome tableau on schedule, a tremor shook the vessel; then, in a few seconds, the entire island appeared to lift from the horizon and go rocketing skyward. Straight up in a steady stream spewed huge lava and pumice stones, the solid masses enveloped in a twisting shroud of flame and billowing smoke.
Moments later came the noise. a cannonading so deafening that the sailors stuffed cotton in iheir ears, and sustaining its intensity in an unbroken roar. As the startled seamen watched. the whole eastern sky quickly vanished behind a backdrop of ebony black extending miles into the air, its Stygian darkness streaked by continuing flashes of lightning.
Ashes and pumice stones, many of them the size of a man's head, began to shower the ship smashing equipment exposed on the superstructure, and in ten minutes had piled the decks to one depth of more than one foot.
Everywhere within a radius of hundreds of miles ships' crews were kept busy sweeping their decks free of ashes. Navigation soon was impeded by a layer of pumice five feet thick on the surface of the sea.
Seventy-six miles away another ship watching the disgorgement measured the spurting column; it was seventeen miles high, and had the shape of a gigantic pine tree. As the afternoon wore on the bombardment grew steadily fiercer. At 3 p.m. it was heard 150 miles away. By five every eardrum in Java and Sumatra was being hammered to the bursting point.
The thunder continued through the night, with the people in distant cities and villages afraid to go to bed. Instead, they hastily packed their belongings and hurried to the country, in the fear that the mysterious disturbance. was an earthquake which would topple the walls of their homes about them.
A mere 1/50th of the volume thrown up and tumbling back into the water would have created a wave ring 20 feet high and 350 feet wide with a circumference of 100 miles. The displacement actually involved was estimated at 200,000,000,000 cubic feet, and it trimmed the island to one-third of its former area of nine square miles.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.