Crashing down from a height of four or five miles, this mass, combined with the abnormal pressure of the atmosphere engendered by it, created a tidal wave 72 feet high which rolled over the opposite shores of the straits, carrying dozens of vessels with it, and wiping out scores of towns and villages with a loss of 36,000 lives. A ship starting to put in at Anger for orders found the city completely removed from the The skipper later remarked that in 36 of sea-faring life, this was the first time ad ever found a familiar port suddenly missing:
This tidal wave travelled all the way to the west coast of Africa, and was still eighteen inches high when it reached Table Bay, 5,100 miles west of its origin.
Citizens of Victoria Plains, West Australia, 1,700 miles from Krakatoa, were mystified by what they took to be artillery fire but couldn't account for it. Diego Garcia in the South Chagas Islands, 2,200 miles away, wondered if somewhere a naval battle were in progress James Wallis, police chief at Rodriguez, spread a report of cannon fire. This was nearly 3,000 miles from Krakatoa, and it took the sound four hours to reach there.
The sky for 1000 miles around soon became hung with a thin white mantle, which the sun shone through like a dull red lamp. In 24 hours this effect had spread over the horizon to a radius of 2,000 miles.
But perhaps a still more remarkable phase of this phenomenon was the effect on the atmosphere. Nowhere was the air envelope covering the earth left undisturbed. The wind puff set up wafted around the globe to its antipodes and back seven distinctly recorded times, leaving unmistakable evidence of its passing at 40 different observatories scattered throughout the world, The dust shot 20 miles into the sky was caught by stratospheric gales and blown westward along a course bounded by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, As the cloud streamed through space, taking three days to pass a given point, it gradually spread out, until, on the fourth circuit, it extended over both the north and the south temperate zones.
One morning toward the end of November, workers crossing London Bridge two hours before sunrise believed the deep flush in the east to be a coastal blaze and reported it to the fire department. In Poughkeepsie, New York: and in New Haven, Connecticut, fire-fighting apparatus repeatedly scurried about the streets looking for imaginary conflagrations. The same false alarms were pursued frequently in continental European towns.
To scientists the eruption of Krakatoa was nature caught in an act of her most stupendous work, the reshaping of the map of the world, something which the layman somehow associates with a prehistoric past, but which in reality is taking place constantly. At Krakatoa nature put on her most spectacular display since the dawn of man's history.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.