Note inserted Dec. 28, 2004, after the earthquake and tsunami. A better strategy, if you are seeking maps, is
- Visit Google
- Click "Images" above the search window
- Enter a search string like this: krakatoa map
- Press Enter or click the search button
Don't expect the service to be up to date; today I tried the string map 2004 tsunami and got a photo of a kitten. Less focus! A string like sumatra map will produce at least a good general image.
Krakatoa
by Simon Winchester
I've read only three of the author's fifteen books, The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World being the other two. His list goes back many years before these, and I bet some of the titles are first-rate. His map book, for instance, was all new and rather exciting.
So why did I find Krakatoa so aggravating? It contains a great deal of fine research; turns out that we didn't know in the 1960s everything there was to know about this cataclysm, and Winchester brings in accounts and insights that haven't been widely published before. The book is competently written and has some fascinating imagery, including photos of the new mountain that's growing where Krakatoa used to stand and promises to make its own fireworks one day. And it gains through the author's broad knowledge and experience as a geologist as well as his notes from visits to the place.
A few years ago I read Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War. Along with a text that you soon understand as the great man's apologia for his leadership, that five-volume work contains a couple of hundred maps illustrating strategies, large- and small-scale movements, and blunders. And almost no map in the whole set aids the text it accompanies. If it comes in a chapter about operations in the Mediterranean, there's about a 50-50 chance that it won't identify Tobruk or that Tripolitania will fall just outside the neatlines. Someone should have counseled the editor: If Winston Churchill thinks it's worth talking about, you had best put it on the map.
I had the same maddening experience with Krakatoa. The book contains one good map locating the theater of action, in the Indian Ocean. It has one map drawn from an old mariner's chart and showing some islands as they existed before the 1883 eruption. Then there's this one titled "Southeast Asia, with the western islands of the immense archipelago of what is now Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies." Aside from some passages about the Spanish Netherlands and Alfred Russel Wallace's boyhood, everything in the book relates to the area shown in this map. Comparing the title with the map itself, I conjecture that Winchester wrote the book referring to one map and then a madcap editor substituted another one for it.
I'm sure I would feel different if the narrative had centered on a familiar spot, such as Alabama or Spitsbergen, but for heaven's sake, this is faraway Indonesia we're talking about. Yes, I can (and did) go to an atlas to get a picture of the geography, but why is this map included in the book? Its symbols are backward (land areas stippled, sea marked by depth contours), suggesting a range of mountains between two bays. It doesn't show Southeast Asia, it shows a corner of Sumatra and one end of Java. It lacks names for big features such as the Sunda Straits, and it's cropped so that when you look for a strait ("a narrow bit of sea between two large land masses" according to my private lexicon) you find only the northeastern end of the real strait. It names a dozen places, some as they were called in the 1880s, others as they're called today. And it doesn't include names, or even dots, for places you might think important to the story, such as . . . well . . . Krakatoa.
Pardon me, I mean to run on about this. You may go to your happy place till I finish. Here's a story where everything hinges on geography: The nearby collision of two continental plates generates a zone of powerful volcanism; a colonial empire finds economic and political values in a small region; world commerce results in hundreds of ships sailing through a slender passage; a special configuration of islands and peninsulas allows effects of a giant explosion to propagate in some directions but not others. And to tell you the geography you need to know, the book provides a useless-to-misleading map. Let me give an example.
When you sail your pepper ship out from Amsterdam, you have to pass through the Sunda Straits because the pepper is at the other end (cloves and nutmeg, too), and then back again. You procure sailing directions: En route from Europe to the Indies, look for Java Head (not identified on the map) at the southern end of the Sunda Straits (not identified); your next mark is the lighthouse at Anjer (not identified). Coming from Sumatra to Holland, look for a distinctive group of islands including a hazardous one called Thwart-the-Way (not identified) with the fuming cone of Krakatoa (not identified) in the background. No sailor, I don't know how far away a background is, so I consult the map and see this narrow bit of sea between the large land masses of Sumatra and Java (both identified) and some islands. Aha, one of those must be the volcano. Besides, Winchester tells us Krakatoa lay in the northern Sunda Straits, so I've got it now.
You guess right: I've sunk the ship and wasted all the pepper. The straits stretch way down to the sou'-sou'west, another 50 or 75 miles beyond where I was looking, and the site of Krakatoa is roughly halfway along. But I couldn't tell that from the map. As a result, I misunderstood roughly the first half of Krakatoa. I'm still mad about it.
· · · · · · ·
Putting my map obsession aside. The geologist author lays due stress on the historical aspects of his subject; after all, what distinguishes Krakatoa from a dozen volcanic outbreaks that dwarf it in terms of numbers is that people saw it and heard it. The mountain was in the middle of a busy shipping lane, so the history of European commerce with the East figures in the story as well. And European commerce with the East between 1500 and about 1970 meant colonial empires, so he goes into the Portuguese, Dutch and British exploitation of Indonesia and East Asia in some depth. This moves us along: The vitality of trade between Dutch possessions in Java and Sumatra and Chinese and British ones to the northeast, to say nothing of treasure that had to be carried back to the home country, impelled communications firms to lay undersea cables and create a worldwide telegraphic system. And Winchester argues that the disappearance of Krakatoa in 1883 was really the first event the whole world's peoples shared in more-or-less real time -- thanks to those cables and the network of commercial and political reporters they supported. Krakatoa became a byword for a literally earth-shaking disaster in part because everybody knew about it within a few days after it happened.
Sort of knew about it. Until eighty years later, no one could tell what had happened. The volcano blew up, tidal waves killed tens of thousands, the blast wave circled the globe seven times . . . and the wrath of the god Orang Alijeh was genuinely as good an explanation as any. In the 1960s, following the lead of Alfred Wegener, earth scientists adopted the notion that our continents rest on "plates" that cover the Earth's surface. The seams between plates play host to complicated processes; the San Andreas fault with its jinks and jolts is such a seam, and the new Icelandic territory of Surtsey sits on another. Processes at the one south of Indonesia promote a high-energy form of volcanism; the people of the islands have always lived with booms from over the horizon and occasionally closer in. Krakatoa exploded more than once, though the 1883 event was probably the biggest of all its bangs. Plate tectonics at last offered a way to account for the process, and the author gives a pared-down story of how the pressure built up down below until it could only relieve itself by vaporizing a whole island. His telling could have been more detailed, but the aim of the book was to integrate lots of stories, not to drill very deep into any one of them.
You know how your friend's tale is all plausible up to where the duck answers the bartender -- and then you have to doubt every other fact in it? Authors and publishers have two tricks for avoiding that sudden collapse of belief: fact checking and copy editing. If the author says something that isn't so, the damage isn't permanent because a checker or an editor will call for proof, and will fix the text if the fact is wrong. I do sincerely wish that Winchester's publisher had checked one wisecracking duck of a claim. In summing up Krakatoa-themed reports in the press of many lands, the author quotes a sentence from the New York World (an issue from December 1883) and then footnotes: "Of baseball's World Series fame." It's so easy to show that it isn't true, and such a disappointment that the checker let the statement pass. Here, for example, the claim is debunked once and for all.
I wouldn't recommend against reading Winchester's Krakatoa, but now that the duck has said his piece, I find it hard to know what's new and right and what may be a story the author heard somewhere. Sorry. Oh, and if you do pick it up at the local bookstore, buy a bargain atlas at the same time. You'll get more out of the book and maybe not feel compelled to rant about the maps.
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