I’ve made no secret of my deep love for Simon Winchester in the past. His book on the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary? Genius, and titled catchily (The Professor and the Madman). His other book, about the English geologist who makes some kind of map of England? I dunno. I assume that it’s good. In a fit of enthusiasm, I lent it to an English geologist friend before I’d read it myself.
One of the lovely things about Winchester is that his books come in all flavors. In trying to find a shelf of his books at my local bookstore back in Boston, I discovered that he’s one of those delightful writers who has books in sections all around the store. A polymath! One of those intellectual omnivores who is interested in everything. Probably good at Trivial Pursuit.
When an author like this writes a book like Krakatoa, named for a volcano that erupted itself out of existence in 1883, what results is a wide-sweeping treatise on the region.
Through wonderful asides, tasty footnotes, and liberal quotes from original sources, Winchester opens a window not only into the actual explosion, but also the East Indies spice trade, the Dutch East India Company, the history of the discovery of evolution and plate tectonics, and the long resounding effects through history of the eruption.
It’s all fascinating. Poor Krakatau doesn’t blow herself up until Chapter 8, but by that time you are well enough acquainted to know that “Krakatoa” is a typo from the an operator of the recently invented telegraph, but it stuck. The description of the destruction and aftermath has an unintended poignancy- the book was published just a year before the 2004 Tsunami that struck the same area.
Here are just a few Interesting Facts I learned. Numbered, but not in any particular order:
1. Particles in the atmosphere caused particularly vivid sunsets in the year following the eruption. Not coincidentally, paintings created during this time feature unusually lurid skies- like The Scream.
2. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species only after a poorer, less famous colleague- Alfred Russel Wallace- sent him a paper iterating ideas such as “survival of the fittest” relating to natural selection.
3. The sound the volcano made when it erupted is the loudest sound ever recorded by humans.
Here’s a footnote in part, as an example of the kinds of intriguing figures who float in and out of this story’s narrative:
(from p. 232, about Julian Tenison-Woods)
This was the kind of man whose like we do not see today. A London-born Passionist minister, amateur geologist, and naturalist, he was compelled by ill health to move abroad when he was in his twenties, and became an expert on technology and paleontology of Tasmania during the time he worked as a traveling missionary for the Catholic archbishop of Sydney. he left the priesthood in 1883, when he was fifty-one, and traveled to Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies….
And another tantalizing aside about escaped slaves in Bali, from p. 44
….one, a Balinese named Surapati, had a band of rogues so large and powerful that he formed his own fiefdom in eastern Java, which was ruled as an independent state for more than a century.
The descriptions of scientists and their discoveries in this book alone make it a worthy read. There’s the obvious romantic charm of an idealistic young school teacher Wallace and his warehouse sweeping best friend pooling their life savings to go study beetles in the Amazon. Equal in charm is the image of the canadian scientist J. Tuzo Wilson, after discovering a new class of fault, walking around 1960s university campusus (from p. 104):
He created paper-and-crayon diagrams of the moedel, cut them out, and kept them in his wallet, showing them to anyone who would give him the time of day.
As engagingly as Winchester writes about western scientists, explorers and businessmen, the voice of the indigenous inhabitants of the region is disappointingly opaque and stiff.
So. read it. I’ll add more links later.
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