THE ERUPTION OF KRAKATOA.


Before the year 1883 physical geographers, in speaking of the most
disastrous volcanic eruption on record, referred first, in point of
time, to the celebrated eruption of Vesuvius, in A.D. 79, when the
cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii and several smaller towns on the slope
of the mountain were destroyed by lava or buried under a mass of
pumice stones and ashes; second to that of Hecla and Skaptar Jokull,
contiguous mountains in Iceland, in 1783, when two enormous lava
streams, one 15 miles wide and over 100 ft. deep and the other
scarcely inferior, flowed, the first, 50 miles and the other 40, till
they reached the sea, pouring a flood of white hot lava into the
ocean, destroying everything in their paths and killing in the waters
of the ocean the fish, the mainstay of the inhabitants, who were
reduced by the disaster, directly or indirectly, to less than
five-sixths of their former strength; and third to that of Galungung,
in 1822, which devastated such an immense area in Java; but all the
eruptions known besides were as mere child's play to the terrible one
of Krakatoa in 1883.

If the reader will examine the map of the East Indies he will find
represented in the straits of Sunda, which lie between Sumatra and
Java, the little island of Krakatoa. In maps made before 1883 he will
hunt in vain for the name, for like Bull Run before 1861, it was then
unknown to fame, though navigators who passed through the straits knew
it as a beautiful tropical isle, with an extinct volcanic cone in the