Tales From Krakatoa: Johanna's Nightmare
Posted: Tuesday, February 14, 2012
by Jack H. Schick
(Second article in this series)
Johanna Beyerinck frequently had second thoughts about having encouraged her husband, William, (badgering and nagging, he called it), to accept a position as one of the seven Controllers in the Dutch East Indies colony. He had full authority over the Ketimbang District in the Lampong area of South Sumatra. He was in charge of the police and tax collection, was chairman of the district court, and was generally responsible for the well-being of the population. Johanna was excited over the prospect of being a local ‘social elite’ and had an idyllic image of what life in the Far East would be like. She soon realized that reality was something completely different than she’d expected, and that it might not be the best environment in which to raise her three young children.
Johanna at least had one distraction. From her elegant house on a low hill adjacent to the town, the view of the Sunda Strait was magnificent. She spent many hours on the veranda staring out to sea, watching boats coming and going through the busy passage between Sumatra and Java. She jotted down her thoughts, desires and complaints in a journal. She often imagined herself aboard ships heading out from Batavia bound for Europe. On Sunday morning, May 20, 1883, she was lounging there, dreaming of civilized, far away places, when she was rudely jostled from her reverie by sharp, hammer-blow earth tremors emanating from Krakatau, a group of islands that were visible, twenty-four miles to the south.
While she was jotting down her observations--water in storage barrels in her bathroom rippling from the shaking earth; a column of smoke and steam rising from Krakatau--a prahu (native boat with bamboo outrigger) glided ashore. The occupants leaped out, ran across the muddy beach and up to the house. They had urgent news for the Controller. While gathering boat-building wood on Krakatau, they were frightened by noises like cannon fire. They ran back to the beach to see what was happening and, before their eyes, the beach split open and jets of black ash and red hot stones erupted into the air. The seas had risen. They had to swim out to their boat, which had been anchored in only waist deep water.
Mrs. Beyerinck and her husband, even though he had become concerned about the shaking and rumbling throughout his district over the past week, were both skeptical that a beach could actually split open and erupt. The Controller didn’t believe the ‘excitable’ natives, and was inclined to send them away, but his superior was present. Mr. Altheer had arrived by government launch from Telok Betong. He’d gotten a telegram from Governor-General Fredrick’s Jacobs who, having received reports from the lighthouse on the western tip of Java, and enquiries from concerned citizens in Batavia, ordered him to investigate the disturbances. Though apprehensive, he had one more month in his five year stint in Sumatra, and was determined to follow instructions to maintain his good reputation. Altheer ordered Beyerinck to join him and they left for Krakatau immediately.
When they rounded Sebuku and Sebesi islands, which blocked their view of Krakatau, they found the sea covered with masses of floating pumice and charred trees. They were battered and drenched by large, sudden waves as the sea sloshed up and down as though they were in a tub. They encountered engulfing, choking clouds of sulfurous smoke and falling ash. It took them over four hours to cover the 24 miles to the island. They were too frightened to go ashore, but observed that the northern-most beach of Krakatau was, indeed, split open and belching fire and smoke. The smallest of the three volcanic cones on the island was erupting with concussions that grew louder by the minute.
They made it back to Ketimbang in the dark. A telegram was sent to the governor who immediately responded. What he’d heard in Batavia, over 80 miles away, sounded like “the crashing, screeching roar of a great ship’s anchor chain that was being endlessly raised, its shackles banging hard and rustily against the vessel’s sides.” Other descriptive reports were filed throughout the region. What had begun as subtle rumblings ten days earlier had reached a dangerous climax. But, within two days the island quieted down. Occasional tremors and a thin plume of white smoke that rose from the crater were all that suggested violent turmoil deep in the bowels of the Earth.
Johanna Beyerinck settled back into her routine. Months passed with only minor grumblings from the volcano. But, by mid-summer she began to experience a foreboding. There had been a local outbreak of cholera. One of her maids died of it, and Johanna was worried for the health of her children. She was not superstitious, but when her ayah (elder, male servant), pointed out that the birds that flocked around the grounds seemed exceptionally restless and other omens did not look good, her strange, unexplainable concern grew worse. Then, the activity at Krakatau began to intensify again. Always considered, by herself and others, to be a strong, hard-bitten women, what Johanna was soon to endure would nearly break her spirit, drive her to the brink of sanity and almost kill her.
For over a week, the rumblings and shakings from Krakatau grew worse. It was rattling Johanna’s nerves. She had a feeling that something bad was going to happen soon. She’d come to ignore the volcano over the past few months, but now she couldn’t take her mind off of it. Sunday, August 26, 1883, began peacefully enough with the Beyerinck family attending the opening of a new market in the near by village of Tjanti. Then, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, Krakatau's noise and shaking became exceptionally severe, Joanna had an intense pang of terror and insisted that her husband take the family home.
When she noticed that smoke billowing out of the volcano totally obscured Krakatau, she tried to persuade her husband to take them to their holiday cottage in the village of Amboel Balik on the slopes of Raja Bassa instead. He refused, feeling it would cause panic among the natives if they were seen fleeing the village. Johanna was so nervous she couldn’t eat. She said, “[My servant] said, ‘You must eat, Madam, for you don’t know what is going to happen.’ He served some up but I could not get it down. It was as though my throat was sealed. I went to the front balcony. The pumice had been falling for hours but in pieces no bigger than peas.”
By eight o’clock that evening, William Beyerinck had changed his mind. Krakatau’s activity continued to increase in intensity. It was hidden behind an immense pillar of dark clouds. The height and violence of waves rushing in from the bay became frightening. There was no wind, but the surface of the sea rose and fell tremendously. A ship rushing up the bay vanished into troughs then rose high on the crests. A hail of pumice fell steadily. He told the family to prepare to leave immediately and rushed to the bungalow that served as his office a few yards down the hill.
While her husband and his clerk, Mr. Tojaka, scrambled to salvage important paperwork, Johanna waited in the house in a state of panic. She said, “[One of my servants] said to me in a very worried manner, ‘The Antoe Laoet (Sea Ghost) is close by. The sea has gone. Far, far away, I hear the waves…it is a worrying sight, for all the coral reefs along the coast…are now dried out.’ Then I heard, above the noise of the pumice falling on the roof, above the thunder from the mountain, a frightful roaring, which approached at lightening speed. My hair stood on end. I leapt up clutching my youngest child and shouted, ‘Come here, come here, everyone together!’”
The first of a series of tsunamis that Krakatoa unleashed during the final 20 hours and 56 minutes of its death agonies roared into Ketimbang. The wall of seawater blasted ashore and rushed up the hill toward the house. Beyerinck and his clerk sprinted out of the office and scrambled up a cocoa-nut tree. The bungalow was smashed to bits. The wave continued up the slope, sweeping outbuildings along with it. It crashed against the house demolishing the veranda and knocking stucco loose. It swirled around and into the backyard before finally receding.
The Beyerinck’s and their servants immediately departed, on foot across-country, toward their cottage on higher ground. Hot ash fell, thicker and thicker. Behind them, they heard a horrifying roar as another tsunami rushed inland. They waded across rice paddies waist deep with volcanic mud and became lost in the forest before finally arriving at Amboel Balik well after midnight. Johanna and her exhausted family collapsed in a tiny room with two windows covered only by bamboo slats. No one could sleep as Krakatau continued to emit frightening noises and concussions. The thousands of terrified natives who had joined them in seeking refuge at the mountainside village moaned, cried and prayed to Allah for deliverance.
At 5:00a.m. William Beyerinck instructed a servant to “kill a chicken and cook some soup quickly, maybe we shall have to flee further.” Hot ash covered everything. The forest was on fire. Johanna stepped outside of the hut: “My husband said, ‘You shouldn’t. It will only worry you.’ Naturally I went in spite of what he said…Thousands of tongues of fire lit up the surroundings….As they disappeared they left a greenish light. Others quickly filled their place. The sea was not to be seen. Everything was smothered in ash. I could not see my hand before me.”
About 6:00a.m. Controller Beyerinck sent some natives on a reconnaissance excursion. They returned several hours later to report that Ketimbang had vanished, had been smashed to bits and washed out to sea. Having already emitted three terrific blasts during the morning, at 10:02a.m., Monday, August 27, 1883, Krakatau exploded in the largest, loudest detonation heard in recorded history. It was clearly audible 2,200 miles away in Perth, Australia, and on islands 3,000 miles across the Indian Ocean. At ten miles distance, eardrums were ruptured.
At 10:30a.m. a tsunami over 115 feet high rushed ashore, demolishing and sweeping away anything that remained. A super heated pyroclastic flow rolled and boiled across the Sunda Strait toward the Beyerinck’s cottage. As it approached, Johanna said: “Someone burst in shouting ‘Shut the doors, shut the doors!’ Suddenly it was pitch dark. The last thing I saw was the ash being pushed up through the cracks in the floorboards like a fountain.”
They were being roasted alive. “I turned to my husband and heard him say in despair, ‘Where is the knife? I will cut all our wrists and then we shall be sooner released from our suffering.’ The knife could not be found. It seemed as if all the air was being sucked away and I could not breathe…I heard the natives praying and crying ‘Allah il Allah!’ No sound came from my husband or children. Only part of my brain could have been working for I didn’t realize I had been burned and everything which came in contact with me was hot ash…The hot bite of the pumice prickled like needles.”
The sun was still blocked out by the scorching hot cloud of ash. Johanna said she staggered to her feet, out of the hut and into, “the hellish darkness. Then came sudden, terrifying stillness. I noticed for the first time that my skin was hanging off everywhere, thick and moist from the ash stuck to it…I wanted to pull bits of skin off, but that was still more painful.” Johanna heard nothing, no human or animal sound. She thought she must be dead, "somewhere on the path to heaven or hell." Then suddenly, she heard, “someone shouting and screaming for me…my husband’s voice….I heard Tojaka (their clerk), say to him, ‘Master, be calm, the children are still alive.’ [I] at last succeeded in calling ‘I am live.' I shouted loud and long, ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!'”
Of the 3,000 natives gathered in teh village, nearly half of them died, the rest were blistered and burned. All were covered and choked with ash which lay several feet deep across the terrain. Trees were leafless and broken, buildings caved in and buried. Johanna, her children and servants were scorched with skin hanging off their limbs and faces. As she sat on the ground next to the hut, a servant gave her the baby boy. She could see he was very thirsty and offered him her breast, but suddenly, he lay still in her arms. When she realized he was dead she could not shed a tear. She thought, “Thank God this child is at least put out of his agony,” but she could not say it. The parching thirst caused by the hot ash dried the words in her throat.
Time seemed to stand still. It took more than three days for the survivors to make it down off the mountain to the coast through the demolished, ash covered countryside. For much of the journey Johanna carried her 3 ½ year old son strapped to her back, despite her blistered, nearly naked condition. Her husband led their daughter by her badly burned hands. Natives followed their Controller as children would the piper. They waited on the shoreline for another two days before ships could make a path through the pumice covered seas to aid them. On September 1st, Johanna and her family finally arrived at the hospital in Batavia and started down their long road to recovery.
Two thirds of the people in William Beyerinck’s district died during the Krakatoa explosions. Nearly all of the villages and towns were utterly destroyed. Though the official death toll from the catastrophe was about 37,000, most agree it was probably closer to 120,000. Only in the Ketimbang district were there a large number of deaths due to the pyroclastic flow. Most of the deaths throughout the region were a result of the tsunamis. The final, colossal Kratatoa blast sent shock waves around the globe seven times. Barometers were influenced by the atmospheric shock wave as far away as Scotland. The huge volume of ash, ejected up to 17 miles into the atmosphere, cooled the Earth for years. The island of Krakatau was nearly obliterated, but another volcanic cone soon poked its head above the water in the ocean filled caldera and is smoking and growing there still.
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Top-level comments on this article: (5 total)Indonesia (certain parts/regions) is prone to encounter earthquakes and tsunamis due to its geographical locations. I heard of Ketimbang, Telok Betong and other regions mentioned in the article. "Antoe Laoet" is :Hantu Laut" in Malay (sea ghost) "Ayah" is a child calls his dad as father, intimately. You brought me back to the omnibus books of the 1800's.........thanks for reading and commenting. not sure of my use of 'ayah'. is it wrong?"ayah" means "father", but like the Beyerincks in the story, they were away from their home and they had lived with the people who worked for them, as servants or housekeepers in the same house. I can imagine the children and the wife of Beyerinck must have developed a dependent relationship with the domestics and called them "ayah" as a respect, also may be they were elder and reliable.
Jack, it is not wrong for your interpretation here. Wonderful story and I have enjoyed reading it. Thank you .Thank you so much.
As usual a great piece of writing...Thanks for reading and commenting
Wonderful writing. Tons of words. Picturesque and scary. Just imagine if we had one of these this century. Great job.Thanks. I couldn't sleep thinking it out and structuring the essay in my head the night before. I was flushed and excited when it finished.
Thanks again for a great story.Thanks for reading and commenting
Jack, I was wondering if you could write about Johanna and her family AFTER they recovered from their burns. I saw the Discovery documentary about Krakatau. It says that William stayed on as Controller (or some other capacity) in Ketimbang for 13 years before he retired and the whole family returned to Holland. It also said that Johanna became pregnant again. Do you know if Johanna left any other diary post-eruption?
Another interesting read would be about Mr. Tojaka and his family.
Thank you for a wonderful article.My sources are limited. I'll try. I've not seen the Discovery show. I've made a lot out of a few incidents, but researdh may continue. It is not an area of expertice. There is a lot I've found not true in the show though. for example, the light house keeper lived, his wife, son and dog died. Thanks for the interest.
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