rth, it came down, hour after hour, as if to a point upon a stationary earth. An attempt to explain was that there may have been an eruption in some little known part of Australia. In Australian newspapers, there is no mention of an eruption in Australia, at this time; and in my own records, there is only one instance, and that one doubtful, of an eruption in Australia, at any time. I am not here including New Zealand. There was, at this time, no eruption in New Zealand.
Krakatoa was in a state of minor activity. Wisemen from Batavia, localizing, like the wisemen at Vesuvius, in April, 1872, were studying only Krakatoa. Consid- [335/336] ered as a thing in itself, out of relation with anything else, conditions here were not alarming. The natives were told that there was no danger -- and natives -- Columbia University, or east side, west side, New York City -- or Java -- believe what the wisemen tell them.
April 19th, 1872 -- the dust if unknown origin that fell from the sky -- it preceded, by one day, the eruption of Vesuvius.
August 25th, 1883 -- the ashes of unknown origin that fell from the sky --(4)
August 26th -- Krakatoa exploded. It was one of this world's biggest noises, and surrounding mountains doffed their summits. Or, like a graduating class at Annapolis, they fired off their peaks, which came down, as new reefs in the ocean. The bombs that shot out were like meteors. The mountain was a stationary meteor-radiant, and shot out Krakatoatids. Had the winds gone upwards, the new meteor stream would have been also of houses and cattle and people. The explosion shatered shores so that all charts were useless.(5)
Early in the morning of the 27th, the Straits of Sunda went up. The unit of its slaughters were villages. 95 villages went up, in waves that were 90 feet high, 100 feet high, 120 feet high. From the 95 villages, tens of thousands of humans were recruited, and they went dead into warring confusions. In the gigantic waves, armies of the dead were flung upon each other. There was no more knowledge of what it was all about than in many other battles. Charges of dead men rushed down the waves, and were knocked into rabbles by regiments spouting up from the bottom. Onslaughts of corpses -- and in the midst of them appeared green fields that were the tops of palm trees. Raiders in thousands dashed over momentary [336/337] meadows, and there were stampedes that were as senseless as the charges.
Stone clouds were rolling over the conflict. Furies of dead men were calming under bulks of pumice, and slimy palm trees were protruding. The waves were going down under pressures of pumice, twenty feet deep, in places. Battlefields on land have, after a while, turned quiet with graveyards: but change in the Straits of Sunda was of the quickest of mortuary transitions. The waves were pressed flat by pumice. There was a grey slab of stone over the remains of the people of 95 villages. Black palms, heavy with slime, dropped on each side of this long, grey slab.
By volcanic dust, the sun was dimmed so that unseasonable coldness followed. In places in Victoria, Australia, where for twenty-five years snow had not been seen, snow fell. I'd like to have this especially noted -- that at places far away, the volcanic bombs were mistaken for meteors -- or they were meteors. An account of volcanic bombs from Krakatoa, which looked like "shooting stars," as seen from a vessel, about 90 miles from the volcano, is published in the Cape Times (Weekly Edition), Oct. 3, 1883.(6) At Foochow, China, the glare in the sky was like an aurora borealis. For this record, which is important to us, see the Rept. Krakatoa Committee, Roy. Soc., p. 269.(7) People in Texas heard sounds, as if of a battle. Off the Cape of Good Hope, vessels lurched in waves from the catastrophe.
It is my expression that the explosion of Krakatoa was stimulated by, or was a reaction to, an eruption in a land of stars that is not enormously far away. Afterglows that were seen after August 26th were attributed to Krakatoa --
That the preceding afterglows and the fall of ashes