Days 38-39 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

Well, it’s 2:00am and I can’t sleep – so what better time to blog? Over the last couple of days I made it through three more chapters of Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler. Chapter seven, the Revolution, once again discusses the need for propaganda, only this time he talks about how it hurt his fellow comrades in arms. He called it “psychological mass murder.” Of course, I’m sure it was called something else when he used it.

Chapter eight: The Beginning of My Political Activity… is a rather droll chapter. This is where he meets up with Gottfried Feder who founded the German Fighting League for the breaking of interest slavery. Hitler goes on for pages about whether or not he should join this small group of people. He believed in their theories, but he wasn’t sure if they could carry them out.

On page 214 he says, “For me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland. What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose.”

This is where you start to really see the heart of Hitler. He felt his race was in jeopardy of extinction due, of course, to the Jews, and he knew something had to be done about it. It was all about finding the right tool to use against them at the right time. And thus his run in with Feder’s little group, the German Worker’s Party, which in the end, he did join (he says it was as their seventh member, but records show it was more like their 557th member).

Anyway… he continues to talk about how much more he knows about the true situation than those in government do, and how he uses his position in the army to meet other like-minded individuals. This is the beginning of his rise to power.

And speaking of power… at 10:02a.m. on Monday August 27, 1883, quite a few years before Hitler would rise to infamy, a little volcano between Java and Sumatra was about to blow itself to bits.

Wait, let’s go back a couple of months to May… when this volcano had a little throat clearing to do. Before Simon Winchester starts discussing that particular eruption, he goes through the trouble of discussing how Lloyd’s of London got involved and how the telegraph cables, laid on the ocean floor, protected by rubber grown, ironically enough, in the Java/Sumatra area, carried the news around the world. And then he discusses the rise of the Reuter’s news organization… all of them coming together in this singular event.

The May eruption was minor, and ended up becoming a tourist attraction as such, just days after. By the end of July, things had settled down, a circus was in town and people were ready for the festivities. The occasional grumblings from the volcano were now just part of the established routine. No one really gave it a thought. And so the festivities of the summer began and continued through the end of August.

“On Monday, August 27, 1883, the mountain that had been grumbling and groaning for the previous ninety-nine days finally exploded itself into utter and complete oblivion” (page 207).

Winchester says that the final hours of Krakatoa’s existence probably started about 1:06pm the previous day (which happened to be a Sunday). At first, it was just a rumbling, like an earthquake – but got very loud. Mr. Schruit, working at the telegraph office, saw the “unforgettable sight of a tremendous eruption.” The sea was already rising and falling – in bursts of sudden up and down movements. One British ship in the area judged that the plume of smoke rose up to a height of seventeen miles (that’s more than three times the height of Mount Everest), and the force of the explosion was felt in that ship that was more than eighty miles to the east of Krakatoa.

Remember, this is the throat clearing… not the big eruption.

Winchester then goes on to describe what eye witnesses saw (or did not see in some cases). The morning was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of you due to the ash blocking the sun. He spends several pages on the powerful water surges during that time. There were waves over 135 feet tall that completely obliterated every town (and every person) in their paths.

On page 232, Winchester goes into a four paragraph summary of the smaller eruptions and ends with, “And then finally, at 10:02 a.m., came the culminating, terrifying majesty of it all.”

The sky went completely black.

Seas went into dangerous waves.

The temperature fell fifteen degrees in four hours.

Lightning strikes.

More explosions.

More waves… the lighthouse at Fourth Point is hit by a wave and destroyed.

“…and then, two minutes later, according to all the instruments that record it, came the fourth and greatest explosion of them all, a detonation that was heard thousands of miles away and that is still said to be the most violent explosion ever recorded and experienced by modern man. The cloud of gas and white-hot pumice, fire, and smoke is believed to have risen—been hurled, more probably, blasted as though from a gigantic cannon—as many as twenty-four miles into the air” (page 234).

That last detonation had blasted six cubic miles of rock out of existence – Krakatoa had disappeared.

Seismic shocks were felt in buildings 500 miles away. But there were two kinds of shocks that Krakatoa unleashed. The most remarkable of them was the air shock. This burst of pressure bounced around the world, recorded by bargraphs, seven times over the course of fifteen days. That’s right – that burst of air pressure, circled the globe seven times before it dissipated into nothingness.

The sound of the eruption was heard nearly 3000 miles away on the island of Rodriguez in the western part of the Indian Ocean. It was also heard in Saigon, Bangkok, Manila, New Guinea, and in western Australia. It was called “an earthquake in the air.”

What I adore about this book is that its author, Simon Winchester, is not just an author, but a journalist. He takes great measure to detail everything. Where the bargraphs were that picked up the air shocks, how they worked and even how they were made. He goes into how Lloyd’s of London was the first to get the news of an eruption in an Dutch colony in the East Indies. Anything you can think of, even remotely related to the eruption of Krakatoa, has been thought out and put down on paper.

Oddly enough, it’s not written as a technical paper. It’s written for the average Joe. Winchester flows science into the story seamlessly and brings a greater depth to the events of that eruption that I’ve never before read.

I still have about 1/3 of the book left, but wanted to mention that this is a book that is very well done. There are footnotes about people, places, etc, that the reader might be unfamiliar with – that Winchester didn’t put into the main story. Packed full of information. I’ve never read a book on volcanoes quite like it. It really is a story of an eruption, but it is jammed packed with all kinds of information you might never have even thought of.

Happy reading!