Before the Certain Eruption of AD 1883
Two centuries after the 1680 eruption that was pictured or imagined by van Schley, when Krakatoa did finally make up her mind to explode, and did so cataclysmically, the city of Batavia had become in outward appearance an entirely different place.
In the 1880s it was no longer simply a Company town, for a start. War with Britain a century beforehand had essentially done for it. Naval blockades during the war had starved the VOC of cash and had kept thousands of tons of Java's choicest exports marooned in the Batavia warehouses; and then the Treaty of Paris of 1782 that ended the fighting in 1784* broke the Dutch
Jan van Schley's early etching Het Brandende Eiland, showing two caravels passing in front of what is presumed to be Krakatoa in full eruption, in what is further presumed to be 1680.
trading monopoly in the region and placed huge financial burdens on the once grand, formerly secure Company. The Dutch share in the world spice trade promptly dwindled, the revenues from the newly imported plantation crops of coffee, tea and quinine were never sufficient to balance the VOC's enormous expenses, and after two centuries of operation the weary old Company had been declared bankrupt. Its commission to govern formally expired in 1799, and the Dutch government took charge of the East Indies as a purely colonial possession.
Six years later Holland was overrun by forces of the globally ambitious French emperor Napoleon I, who promptly installed his brother Louis on the Dutch throne. War with England then became, and remained for the next ten years, the dominant reality of all European life. It was a reality that spread east to the Indies too, and specifically to Batavia in her new role as the capital city of what was now called the Dutch East Indies. The British were on the prowl in the Eastern seas; the Napoleonic Wars that raged in Europe had a considerable effect, much of it still very apparent today, on the way that the city of Batavia and the government that was run from it were allowed to develop.
It was indeed a Napoleonic maréchal, one Herman Willem Daendels, who was to make the most evident changes, and who would determine the shape of the city that existed at the time of Krakatoa's grand ultimate explosion. His orders, which he issued promptly on his appointment to the job of governor-general in 1808, were simple: by any means possible and with no expense spared he was to render Batavia proof from any possible British military attack.
He did this by formally abandoning all the castles, warehouses and fortifications at the seaside, effectively closing down what was dismissively called benedenstad, the lower town, the old Batavia, and building an entirely new capital five miles inland, made secure by its geography from any possible sea-borne ambuscades.
Old Batavia, the now squalid, cramped and run-down creation of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, had by the eighteenth century become notorious across the Orient as a pox-ridden graveyard for its resident Europeans. The new Batavia to the south would truly be worthy, he decided, of its long-unrealized sobriquet: The Queen of the East. With this in mind he decided to call his new uptown suburb Weltevreden, or ‘Well Contented’, since that is what he fully expected its grateful Dutch residents to be.
He tore down Batavia Castle and built for himself a palace on a vast plain of neatly clipped lawns, where the governors-general of the East Indies would maintain their city headquarters for decades to come. And as he moved the epicentre of administration, so genteel society moved with him, such that by the middle of the nineteenth century a vacuum had been left in the old town, as the famous British colonizer Thomas Stamford Raffles* was to note in 1817:
Streets have been pulled down, canals half filled up, forts demolished and palaces levelled with the dust. The Stadhuis, where the supreme court of justice and magistracy still assemble, remains; merchants transact their business in town during the day, and its warehouses still contain the richest productions of the island, but few Europeans of respectability sleep within its limits.
By 1858 a passing Dutchman, A. W. P. Weitzel, was to amplify the theme:
After sundown Batavia is silent and empty; not only the offices and large warehouses but even the shops are closed; no carriage is heard any more and the few indigenous people who move along the streets make no noise at all on their bare feet; and if the police had not ordered them to carry torches, they would wander there as dark shadows.
And though the first Thomas Cook guide was written in 1903, twenty years after the eruption, it did manage to catch something of the atmosphere of the new city that Daendels had created out of the wreck of the old Company town, and that was well into its full flowering at the century's end:
Whilst Batavia proper – the lower town with its counting houses and shops, its native and Chinese populations, its canals and moats, its dust and dirt, and old-fashioned mansions – makes anything but a charming impression, the upper town, to which all Europeans return in the evening, reminds one of a gigantic park, in which villas are built in rows, and great trees shade the broad and gravelly paths, and spacious squares bring air and wind.
The years immediately before the eruption were stable, prosperous, expansive. Whatever setbacks the city had endured in the aftermath of the VOC's collapse at the end of the eighteenth century had been more than amply reversed in the cosmopolitan, buccaneering, free-marketeering years of the latter half of the nineteenth. The Suez Canal opened in 1869: an appetite for goods from the East – now far closer to European markets, with the short-cut through the desert and ever faster ships on routes – meant that new trading houses were springing up, and new markets for new tropical commodities and wares were emerging on all sides. The population of Batavia, like that of other favoured Eastern cities, began to grow, and fast: it jumped from half a million in 1866 to well over a million at the time of the eruption (merely 12,000 of those were Europeans, 80,000 Chinese, the rest all native East Indians understandably eager to take advantage of the growing wealth around them). As early as 1832, according to an account written by the renowned Dutch scholar of Javanese, Professor P. P. Roorda van Eysinga, there were widespread signs of an accelerating prosperity:
... hundreds of carriages of European officials and shop-people raising clouds of dust on the streets, while the Chinese, with their recognizable and unpleasant features, with their long pigtails and silk caps, are everywhere busy hammering, sawing, painting, sewing, building and so on. Rich Arabs and Chinese rode through the streets, half-clad Javanese carried heavy loads, shabby Eurasian clerks walked beneath their sunshades to their offices, old women sold cakes, an Indian sat calmly eating his rice on a banana leaf, and vegetable, milk and fruit sellers, butchers and hill-dwellers offering monkeys and birds all mingled together in the crowd.
This gathering crush of people and the ever accelerating bustle and pace of Batavian life had a further effect: just as in British India, so the wealthier and more influential of the European townspeople moved from the sweltering streets of the capital city up into the hills, to a cool and green town that the government promptly christened Buitenzorg, or ‘Without a Care’, the equivalent of the French sans souci (it has now reverted to the native name it had before, the decidedly less carefree-sounding Bogor).
Buitenzorg, just like its corresponding hill-stations at Simla and Murree and Ootacamund in India, had already become a fashionable place at the beginning of the century, its reputation firmly anchored once Daendels had decided, in 1808, to shift his personal headquarters to a great country house that had been built there by an eighteenth-century VOC commander. His officials
A Jakarta city scene, around 1865.
warned him against trying to make the journey: in the torrential winter rains, they said, it would take thirty teams of horses to get him there. ‘I shall use thirty-one,’ he snorted – and promptly moved into what would be the principal palace for all the governors-general that followed him, Raffles included.
The house survives today, essentially unchanged: a vast, one-storeyed gleaming white palace, its immense airy rooms currently filled with pictures of well-endowe
d and slightly clad young women, the pictures and their subjects both equally assiduously collected, it is said, by Sukarno,* who brought modern Indonesia to independence. The parklands around the istana are alive with thousands of roe-deer, imported by the Dutch a century ago to provide affordable and acceptable meat for the official banquets they so delighted in giving.
The modern world then came with an unexpected suddenness to the Dutch-created world of colonial Java.
On 24 May 1844 Samuel Morse transmitted the famous biblical message ‘What hath God wrought!’ from the Supreme Court in Washington to his colleague, Alfred Vail, forty miles away in Baltimore. Twelve years later, over almost exactly the same distance, the electric telegraph – which was to play such a crucial role in the spreading of the story of Krakatoa – was formally introduced to the Indies, with the connection of the great palace at Buitenzorg in the summer of 1856 to the colonial offices down in Batavia. From then on the pace of technological innovation in Java quickened. The island was connected internationally in 1859, acquiring an undersea line to Singapore (though this failed after a few days) and then, in 1870, links to both the Malay States and Australia. These proved to be totally stable: and so by the time of the Krakatoa eruption, the places where the explosion was seen and felt and heard and suffered were all connected, by the dots and dashes of Mr Morse's code, to the world beyond.
The eruption of Krakatoa was, indeed, the first true catastrophe in the world to take place after the establishment of a worldwide network of telegraph cables – a network that allowed news of disaster to be flashed around the planet in double-quick time. The implications of this rapid and near-ubiquitous spread of information were profound – and to such an extent that they deserve a separate chapter, which follows later.
Houses in Batavia were connected to one another by telephone from 1882; gossip could spread, as well as news and warning and invitations. There had been a gasworks in the city, and the luxury of piped gas for cooking and street lighting, since 1862 (the present gasworks still has one ancient gas-lit street lamp outside the office, which sputters to life from time to time). There was a tramway – drawn by horses from 1869 (with ten of the tiny Sumbawan tram-ponies dying every week) and then by noisy, dirty, ever chuffing steam engines that ran from 1882 onwards (the poor – meaning the Indonesians – were forced to ride in separate carriages from the Europeans). Railway trains were first brought to Batavia by the Dutch government in 1869, with the first line – up to Buitenzorg, naturally – completed in 1873.
And in 1870 that most potent symbol of European civility brought across to the Orient finally made it to Batavia: an iceworks was built. No longer did the genever-drinking Hollanders have to drum their fingers on the teakwood bars at the Harmonie or the Concordia Military Club, as they waited for the ice-chips from Boston, the vessels of what the Americans called the frozen-water trade, to appear on the horizon off Sunda Kelapa. Now they could have locally made ice delivered to their fretworked porte cochère doorsteps in Weltevreden every day, or sent to the Indische who worked behind the club bar. And they could be content in the knowledge that if the dinner party proved too boisterous or the numbers of guests in the club altogether too many, the host could simply send out for more ice and it would be there, available for delivery, fresh and dripping cold, every day of every following year. ‘Everything in Batavia,’ wrote a well-satisfied traveller named W. A. van Rees in 1881, ‘is spacious, airy and elegant.’
Thus was Batavia quite comfortably arranged at the approach of the critical year of 1883. There was an air of calm contentment in the land (a long-drawn-out guerrilla war between the Dutch and Islamic-led forces in Aceh in northern Sumatra was proving costly for the Batavian government, but was otherwise of no great moment to the citizenry). The traders in Batavia were doing well. Just as in Kansas City, everything here was up to date: modern conveniences were being installed for the Europeans, and the huge numbers of indigènes flooding into the city each day were, if nothing else, testament to the capital's ever growing wealth.
The planters out in the countryside were rich as well, but their contentment was tinged by the perennial caution of the farmers, dependent on so many more factors than their own efforts. The newspapers of the day display an increasing concern in the 1880s, for example, that disease and blight might well ruin the crops; and so the Java planters began a programme of experiment and diversification – bringing in Robusta coffee plants from the Congo, for example, to ease the times when blight affected their Arabica or Liberia bushes.
Prospectors found tin, and began working it on the islands of Bangka and Billiton (with the brother of the then Dutch king, Willem III, the main promoter of the Billiton Tin Company). Wildcatters drilling shallow wells in Borneo found oil, though it would be some years before they thought it worth extracting, and many more years before the establishment of the huge combine that would one day become Royal Dutch Oil.
Plant importers, already delighted by the success of the cinchona trees that yielded as much as a seventh of their weight in pure quinine, brought in new rubber trees from Brazil (one of the ships carrying the precious seeds, bound for the Botanical Gardens in Buitenzorg, was passing through the Sunda Strait on the very day of the eruption).
Back in Holland, the moody and clumsily undiplomatic King Willem III was on the throne. In November 1880 he made a surprise appointment: Frederik 's Jacob, a 58-year-old former sailor, map-maker and sugar manufacturer who for the previous ten years had been director-general of the Dutch Railways, was to go to Batavia as governor-general. He took up his appointment the following April and conducted himself during his first years in office with an unassuming efficiency.
Frederik ‘s Jacob, governor-general of the East Indies in 1880.
There was a great deal of ceremonial about the tasks of a Dutch colonial governor-general – and it was not at all out of the ordinary to see Mr 's Jacob in an official uniform that was adorned (the better both to impress the natives, and to maintain the morale of the settlers) with yards of ornate gold brocade trim, silver and enamel stars, ribbons and garters of red, white and blue, knee-breeches and a tall felt hat with a feathered brim and a wild cockade. He wore it for the first official function of 1883, on 19 February, the formal celebration of the official birthday of his faraway Dutch king.
Although the birthday party in Batavia was a fine and formal affair, marred by nothing more untoward than a general eagerness for strong drink, nearly ninety miles away in a straight line to the west of the palace something was stirring, deep within one of the menacingly dark and forest-clad pinnacles at the northern end of the Sunda Strait. The island with its pointed mountain, first noticed and named almost exactly 300 years before, and which had been placid and beautiful for so very long, was now becoming restless again.
5
THE UNCHAINING OF THE GATES OF HELL
And I thought: The world is our relentless adversary, rarely outwitted, never tiring.
–a Dutch pilot caught near Anjer, quoted in ‘Krakatau‘, a short story by the novelist Jim Shepard, in his collection
Batting against Castro, 1996
The rains are usually terrible in Java in the early part of the year, and the February of 1883 was no exception. There were floods in the lower-lying parts of old Batavia, and dozens of country roads were impassable. When the adjutants of the garrison artillery regiments inspected the city parade grounds on Waterlooplein on the afternoon of Sunday the 18th, they found the glutinous red mud too deep for their cannon-wheels. So they sent a message, via the aide-de-camp, to Governor-General ‘s Jacob up at his great white palace at Buitenzorg: the traditional military parade that had been planned for the following morning to offer loyal birthday greetings to his faraway imperial majesty King Willem III could not, it was greatly regretted, go ahead.
Some might have seen the cancellation as an omen. It was in any case not a happy time for the Dutch monarchy. The then head of the House of Orange – whose official titles included Kin
g of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and whose full and magisterial-sounding name was Willem Alexander Paul Frederik Lodewijk – belonged firmly to the glittering European aristocracy of a belle époque, an aristocracy that was only a very few years away from the corrosive effects of revolution and war, and neither wise enough nor prescient enough to realize it.
Willem, whose sixty-sixth birthday fell on 19 February, was a less than inspiring monarch. He had been on the throne for thirty-four years and was weary, moody, rigorously anti-Catholic and notoriously undiplomatic. He was also keenly frustrated by the limitations that had been imposed on the powers he had known as Crown Prince, which had been savagely cut back by the constitutional reforms initiated by his own father, Willem II.
But out in the distant colonies of the East, such regal maunderings were either unheard or ignored. Monday, the 19th of February, King's Day, was the culminating moment of a whole weekend of midwinter festivities. The party started on the Saturday, in the Willem III Grammar School, with a dance that the elite of the capital were expected to attend. The governor-general came down by special train from his mansion, made a speech welcoming everyone to the three-day saturnalia, inaugurated the dancing with a waltz with his wife, Leonie, admired the young girls' extravagantly full ball-gowns (waspishly noted by the columnist of the Locomotive as being fully a year behind the fashions of Paris), took part in the traditional eleven o'clock conga, and then took himself off home – leaving the party-goers to dance themselves into the kind of frenzy that was only permissible in a servant-rich colony with a long weekend of indolence and celebration stretching ahead.