This shows but one of the many disasters to lighthouses in Sunda Straits.

A Dutch man-of-war—­the Berouw—­was lying at anchor in Lampong Bay, fifty miles from Krakatoa.  The great wave came, tore it from its anchorage, and carried it—­like the vessel of our friend David Roy—­nearly two miles inland!

Masses of coral of immense size and weight were carried four miles inland by the same wave.  The river at Anjer was choked up; the conduit which used to carry water into the place was destroyed, and the town itself was laid in ruins.

But these are only a few of the incidents of the great catastrophe.  Who can conceive, much less tell of, those terrible details of sudden death and disaster to thousands of human beings, resulting from an eruption which destroyed towns like Telok Betong, Anjer, Tyringin, etc., besides numerous villages and hamlets on the shores of Java and Sumatra, and caused the destruction of more than 36,000 souls?

But it is to results of a very different kind, and on a much more extended scale, that we must turn if we would properly estimate the magnitude, the wide-spreading and far-reaching influences, and the extraordinary character, of the Krakatoa outburst of 1883.

In the first place, it is a fact, testified to by some of the best-known men of science, that the shock of the explosion extended appreciably right round the world, and seventeen miles (some say even higher!) up into the heavens.

Mr. Verbeek, in his treatise on this subject, estimates that a cubic mile of Krakatoa was propelled in the form of the finest dust into the higher regions of the atmosphere—­probably about thirty miles!  The dust thus sent into the sky was of “ultra-microscopic fineness,” and it travelled round and round the world in a westerly direction, producing those extraordinary sunsets and gorgeous effects and afterglows which became visible in the British Isles in the month of November following the eruption; and the mighty waves which caused such destruction in the vicinity of Sunda Straits travelled—­not once, but at least—­six times round the globe, as was proved by trustworthy and independent observations of tide-gauges and barometers made and recorded at the same time in nearly all lands—­including our own.

Other volcanoes, it is said by those who have a right to speak in regard to such matters, have ejected more “stuff,” but not one has equalled Krakatoa in the intensity of its explosions, the appalling results of the sea-waves, the wonderful effects in the sky, and the almost miraculous nature of the sounds.

Seated on a log under a palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands.  He was a somewhat delicate son of the sea.  Want of self-restraint was his complaint—­leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in general.  He was smoking—­that being a sovereign and infallible cure for indigestion and all other ills that flesh is heir to, as every one knows!