Johanna Beyerinck

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Johanna Beyerinck, her husband Willem and their three children lived in the coastal village of Ketimbang in the Lampong area of South Sumatra, only 25 miles north of the island of Krakatoa.

Mr. Beyerinck was employed as controller of Ketimbang, one of seven such Dutch colonial civil servants in the area. He had full authority over the Ketimbang District, where he was in charge of the police, tax collection, chairman of the district court and was generally responsible for the well-being of the population.

One of the most complete accounts of the 1883 eruption and its aftermath came from Johanna. The following story is drawn from Johanna's published diaries and notes written by the BBC from their research in attempting to re-create the disaster on film.

Summary of Events

Sunday, Aug. 26:

• Mr. and Mrs. Beyerinck attend the opening of a new market in Tjanti. Mrs. Beyerinck has a terrible feeling of foreboding, and doesn’t want to be there.
• At 1 p.m., at Mrs. Beyerinck's urging, they return home.
• Mrs. Beyerinck notices that Krakatoa is no longer visible. She pleads with her husband for the family to flee to their hut in Amboel Balik, on the slopes of Radja Bassa. He refuses, afraid the natives will create pandemonium if they see them fleeing.
• By 8 p.m., having seen the increasing height and violence of the waves, Mr. Beyerinck decides that they should prepare to flee to their hut.
• A tsunami strikes the house, destroying the staircase and all outbuildings, including the office where the controller and his clerk are working. The two men climb a tree to escape the water.
• At 8:30 p.m., the family begins the arduous journey to the hut, arriving at around midnight. Three thousand natives also seek refuge around the hut.

Monday,Aug. 27:

• After 5 a.m., Mrs. Beyerinck ventures outside and witnesses fires everywhere.
  
• Natives set off around 6 a.m. to Ketimbang and return to report that the10:30 a.m. tsunami has completely wiped away the town.
  
• The survivors at the hut are hit by a pyroclastic flow from the explosion at 10:02 a.m., suffering severe burns. Mrs Beyerinck's limbs are swollen to "three times their size." Her sarong is tattered and she is almost completely naked. Her 14-month-old baby makes an attempt to suckle, then dies. Her grief is silent.
  
• There is great animosity toward the Europeans — the natives blame them for the disaster, calling it a "judgement for your cruelty toward the Achimese."

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It's difficult to work out from Mrs. Beyerinck's long and agonized story exactly what she and her husband saw and heard. They were less than 24 miles from the point of eruption.

Mrs. Beyerinck says she heard a distinct noise and noticed that Krakatoa was no longer visible, being surrounded by pitch-black clouds through which the sun looked blood red and its rays reddish. She doesn’t remark on the size or shape of the cloud or the intensity of the explosions, which others observed.

Between 1 p.m. on Aug. 26 and Sept. 1, when they were rescued, Mrs. Beyerinck underwent an experience that almost unhinged her mind.

Read on for her full account.

In her story (published in several Javanese newspapers) Johanna describes the last wretched evening she spent at her home, surrounded by her servants:

If I shut my eyes, I see it all before me, the pieces of chicken, the rice and my faithful young Radjah exhorting me to eat. "You must eat, Madam, for you don't know what is going to happen. Come now, take a little rice." He served some up but I could not get it down. It was if my throat was sealed. I went to the front balcony. The pumice had been falling for hours but in pieces no bigger than peas. Then I saw someone coming up the garden with a lantern.

It was Jeroemoeidi (one of her servants) who said to me in a very worried manner, "The Antoe Laoet (the Sea Ghost) is close by. The sea has gone. Far, far away I hear the waves."

"How can it have gone? Perhaps it is at low ebb," I said.

"Come and see. It should now be high tide. It is a worrying sight, for all the coral reefs along the coast, which at the lowest ebb lie a fathom below the surface and which I can sail over in my sloop, are now dried out."

A whole lot of natives now came up to the house and corroborated Jeroemoeidi's story.

My eldest boy was playing with the ayah (babu) on the sofa. My eldest girl was standing in the bedroom. I was lying on the bed and the maid was standing near me. I was feeding my youngest son. Then I heard, above the noise of the pumice falling on the roof, above the thunder from the mountain, a frightful roaring, which approached at lightning speed. My hair stood on end. I leapt up clutching my youngest child and shouted, "Come here, come here, everyone together!"

The wave reached the house but it didn't go further than the back yard. It destroyed the office and surrounding outhouses, and my husband and Mr. Tojaka (his clerk) were only just able to escape with their lives by climbing up a cocoa-nut tree after they fled from the office.

As soon as the wave receded, my husband dashed to the house, but he could not get upstairs as they had been washed away. He shouted, "Wife, wife, come downstairs quickly — just jump and I'll catch you!" And to the servant he called, "Turn the horses and animals loose."

It must have been about 8:30 p.m. when the Beyerinck family began their flight into the interior. They didn't dare take the coastal road and were forced to walk through an extensive paddy field full of water, then through a wood with no path.

They sank into mud at every step — sometimes it reached Mrs. Beyerinck's knees. Behind came a terrible roaring, as if the sea was trying to catch them.

When Mrs. Beyerinck tried to say something to Mr. Tojaka, who was helping her along, she found she couldn't speak. It felt as though her throat was dried out and someone was trying to cut her tonsils with a knife. She felt her neck. To her horror, it was covered with leeches.

When they reached the wood they lost their way. A crowd of natives came fleeing in their direction. One of them led the way with the Beyerincks following, holding onto one another. They reached their hut at midnight.

Mrs. Beyerinck laid the exhausted children on the bed and opened the box of provisions. The family settled down in the tiny room, which had two windows covered by bamboo slats.

Everything was smothered in ash and sheets of pumice — ash and dust continued to fall.

No one could sleep because the noises coming from Krakatoa were ghastly. Around the hut lay 3,000 terrified natives, moaning and crying and praying to Allah for deliverance. The journey had taken five hours.

At about 5 a.m, my husband said to one of the servants, who had faithfully stood by us, "Kill a chicken and cook some soup quickly; maybe we shall have to flee still further."

I wanted to go out and see what it was like. My husband said, "I shouldn't. It will only worry you." Naturally I went in spite of what he said. But what I saw then! Thousands of tongues of fire lit up the surroundings; some only small tongues, some longer. As they disappeared they left a greenish light. Others quickly filled their place. On tops of the trees I saw flames. I heard a crack and noticed a sheet of fire right by me. The sea was not to be seen. Everything was smothered in ash. I could not see my hand before me. I went into the house again. The soup was served. We started to eat and as far as I can remember there were 16 of us in the room.

Natives sent on reconnaissance by the controller at 6 a.m. returned to the hut to report that Ketimbang had disappeared. The tsunami had come sweeping in at 10:30 a.m.

Mrs. Beyerinck describes what happened next — the outermost edges of a pyroclastic flow enveloped her family and their acquaintances, killing many and sparing others.

Someone burst in shouting "Shut the doors, shut the doors!" Suddenly it was pitch dark. The last thing I saw was the ash being pushed up through the cracks in the floorboards, like a fountain.

I turned to my husband and heard him say in despair, "Where is the knife? The knife on the table. I will cut all our wrists and then we shall be sooner released from our suffering."

The knife could not be found. I felt a heavy pressure, throwing me to the ground. Then it seemed as if all the air was being sucked away and I could not breathe. Large lumps cluttered down on my head, my back and my arms. Each lump was larger than the others. I could not stand.

I don’t think I lost consciousness for I heard the natives praying and crying "Allah il Allah!"

I felt people rolling over me. I was kicked and felt a foot on part of my body. No sound came from my husband or children. Only part of my brain could have been working for I didn't realize I had been burnt and everything which came in contact with me was hot ash, mixed with moisture. I remember thinking, "I want to get up and go outside." But I could not. My back was powerless.

After much effort I did finally manage to get to my feet, but I could not straighten my back or neck. I felt as if a heavy iron chain was fastened around my neck and was pulling me downward.

Propping my hands on my knees, I tottered, doubled up, to the door. I knew it was in the corner. It was stuck fast. I fell to my knees in the ash.

Later I noticed that the door was ajar and I forced myself through the opening. I looked for the stairs. I tripped and fell. I realized the ash was hot and I tried to protect my face with my hands. The hot bite of the pumice pricked like needles.

My long hair, which reached to my knees, usually knotted into a tight bun, was loose.

Without thinking I walked hopefully forward. Had I been in my right mind I would have understood what a dangerous thing it was to do, to leave the vicinity of that house and plunge into the hellish darkness.

Then came sudden, terrifying stillness. When I had walked about 15 paces, still in my doubled-up position, I stubbed my toe on something very peculiar. I ran up against large and small branches and did not even think of avoiding them. I entangled myself more and more in that nightmare of branches, all entirely stripped of leaves.

My hair got caught up, and each time with a twist of the head I managed to free myself. Then something got hooked into my finger and hurt. I noticed for the first time that my skin was hanging off everywhere, thick and moist from the ash stuck to it. Thinking it must be dirty, I wanted to pull bits of skin off, but that was still more painful. My tired brain could not make out what it was. I did not know I had been burned. Worn out, I leaned against a tree.

She can hear nothing now, no human or animal, and she thinks she must be dead, and on the path to heaven or hell.

Was it imagination or did I hear something after all? I listened and heard, first dampened and then more clearly, someone shouting and screaming for me. Everything was once more clear in my mind. I recognized my husband’s voice calling me and shouting. Why was I dead and the rest of them still alive?

I heard Tojaka (clerk) say to him, "Master, be calm, the children are still alive."

I tried to shout, and at last succeeded in calling "I am live." I shouted loud and long, "I’m coming! I’m coming!" I couldn't find the way back, and ran in the opposite direction. But when I realized that my husband's voice got further and further away, I turned round again. Had I gone any further, I would have fallen into a ravine we discovered later.

The controller carried his wife to the hut. "Let us stay here and die together," he cried.

"No, we shall be rescued and taken to hospital in Batavia," she answered, hearing the sound of her own voice as if another person spoke. "Who knows whether Batavia still exists," he said.

Of the 3,000 natives who clustered around the hut, 1,000 died of burns and the skin of the survivors was blistered and burned. The body of one man was found weeks later sprawled in a sheet of pumice, arms spread, legs askew, just as he fell in panic-stricken flight.

Only in southeast Sumatra did Krakatoa claim lives with red hot ash and pumice; elsewhere it was the tsunami that killed.

Mrs. Beyerinck sat on the ground by the hut. The ayah gave her the youngest child. From the way his mouth was working, she could see he was very thirsty. She tried to give him her breast, but suddenly the child lay still in her arms. He was dead.

She felt him all over and laid her ear to his heart. She could hear nothing. "Thank God this child is at least put out of his agony," she told the ayah, who was crying bitterly. But Mrs. Beyerinck could not shed a tear. "Wrap the child in a blanket and lay it on the bed" she tried to say, but the frightful thirst caused by the hot ash dried the words in her throat.

There was still deep darkness. We couldn't light a fire, as matches were put out almost immediately. At last the head boy, the only remaining male servant, managed to start a small fire, and we began to hear signs of life from the people in the village, some of whom came to the light, asking for water. They were crazy from thirst and anxiety, so that it began to be dangerous for us. My husband said, "I have no weapons, but there is an axe behind the bed." The house boy fetched it. When my husband held it he said, "I cannot do anything with it. I have lost the use of my hand."

"Then give it to me," I said and clutched the axe. I was suddenly furious that my children's lives depended on it. I would have cut down the first person to stand in my way. When three men came toward the hut, the house boy advised us to put out the fire, as one of them was carrying a kris.

We quickly threw ash on the fire and again we were in darkness. I don't know how long we had been sitting when we saw people approaching, carrying torches. There must have been 30 of them. They shouted, "Sir, if you are still alive, come with us. We must leave because soon there will be more fire."

"From whence?" asked my husband.

"From Radja Bassa — look," they cried. We looked up and saw a ray of greenish light on the mountain.

"Wait for us, we'll get ready," said my husband.

Once again, the Beyerincks made to flee, mistakenly believing that the old volcano they stood on was about to join Krakatoa in erupting.

Mrs. Beyerinck saw that none of the female servants had enough strength to carry her 3½-year-old son, so she had him strapped to her back. Her husband led their daughter by the hand. Her hands and face were badly burned.

They descended the mountain and across the paddy fields below. The path had vanished, and even the largest trees had fallen. Mrs. Beyerinck suddenly realized the awful danger she had been in earlier. When she ran from the hut, she had been entangled in the roots of an enormous tree. She saw her footsteps from that time, and hanging on the tree were shreds from her sarong. Now, an enormous tree lay across the spot where she had stood.

She couldn't walk another step. The child was very heavy. Some people came up. They had survived the ashfall by bathing in a river. All their houses had collapsed, and most of the inhabitants of the district had been killed, they told the controller.

It started to rain again, no longer ash, but hot, heavy mud. The Beyerincks didn't dare return to their hut, because so many dead lay there. Mrs. Beyerinck sent a servant back instead, to bring down a large table, under which she placed the children — she and her husband lay on either side to protect them.

All this was done, she said, by the light from a tiny flame made by the house boy from a piece of felt roofing. She sent him to fetch water from the river. He returned saying it wasn’t fit to drink — it was all muddy.

"Perhaps it may be better in a couple of hours," he said, when the water from the well on the mountain cleared it. So it proved, but the water was still covered in ash. It quenched their thirsts, but "the more we drank, the thirstier we got," said Mrs. Beyerinck.

Luckily, she still had a bottle of orange syrup, and she mixed it with the water, giving everyone a drink from time to time.

It seemed like centuries that they sat in complete darkness. Sometimes Mrs. Beyerinck slept, overcome with exhaustion.

She was afraid for her small son. He drank when she held the cup to his mouth, but otherwise he showed no sign of life. Her daughter clung to her, crying.

Mr Beyerinck clutched her arm and pointed to the sky. She saw a small patch of light. "It is the moon," cried her husband. The light grew and brightened, until it became bright moonlight. She describes this moment:

On standing up, which was very difficult, I noticed that my limbs were swollen to three times their normal size. No one spoke. We all held our breath, for after such a long darkness, we yearned for God’s heavenly sun or moonlight. The circle of light gradually became blood red. The strong wind tore apart the mass of ash, and we saw the wonderful, glittering sunlight.

Mr. Beyerinck got busy. He promised two unwounded natives, "I will richly reward each one of you if you will each take a child of mine on your back and follow me."

The men agreed, and he told his wife and Mr. Tojaka to follow him. "There are too many bodies here. Let us get away."

Mrs. Beyerinck stood with her face to the sun, her eyes closed, and prayed for further protection, thanking God for the sunlight. When she opened her eyes, her husband had gone — only Tojaka remained.

Her husband and the men carrying the children were far ahead. Looking at the clerk, she noticed with surprise that he had turned his head away. When she asked why he wouldn’t look at her, he seized her, his whole body trembling. The poor man, she noticed, was nearly blinded and his body was terribly burnt. Looking at her at last, he said in a secretive way, "I saw that face of yours in my dreams a week ago." At first she didn’t understand what he meant. When she put her hands to her face, the skin was hanging in shreds.

She and Tojaka caught up with her husband. It was light enough to see for some distance. She could see across the Sunda Straits. Where was Krakatoa, she wondered. She could see only half of the large cone; the smaller cones were gone.

Instead, eight little islands had sprung up, each smoking. She saw that all the villages by the beach were gone. On the sea floated a wide belt of pumice. On it lay roofs of houses, fallen trees, their branches snapped, and dark shapes which she couldn’t identify at first, and which she learned later were the bodies of men and animals.

"Come," called her husband. She looked back to where the body of her dead child lay. "We cannot even bury him," she thought. "Come, come, we must leave," her husband said. She couldn’t move. She saw that she was more or less naked. Her sarong was gone; her hair hung loose. When she tried to put it up, her hands hurt. Her legs were bleeding, the skin raw. She held ash against the wounds to stop them from bleeding.

She hobbled on for half an hour, leaning on Tojaka. "I can’t go any further, let me lie here," he moaned. She tried to help him. "Go," he said, "you will be lost if you stay here. The wind will bury you in ash."

Supporting her husband’s clerk, she staggered on. The sun was now at its zenith and the heat was terrible. Mrs. Beyerinck thought she was going to collapse. Her hair stifled her. It was heavy with ash. "If I don’t get rid of my hair, I shall become unconscious," she told Tojaka.

A native came up with a knife in his hand. She asked him to cut off her hair. He told her to lie on a fallen tree trunk, which she did. Tojaka turned his head away. He told Mrs. Beyerinck later that he thought the man was going to cut off her head. The man cut off her hair, shook the ash from it, and offered it to her. Mrs. Beyerinck told him to throw it away.

She and the clerk walked on, reaching a road on which the ash had been beaten flat by countless feet. "If we rest here, they will be able to find us," she told Tojaka. They sat by the road for hours.

Her husband sent some people to search for them. They found her and Tojaka and took them to a half-demolished house, the only one still standing in the village.

The next morning an old man, whom she had known since childhood, brought Mrs. Beyerinck some chicken and a bowl of rice.

She called her husband. He made a grunt, but the children didn’t react at all. "Heavens, are they dead?" she thought.

She tore the chicken apart in her wounded hands and put a piece into the mouth of each child. The boy didn’t have enough strength to chew, although he made movements as though he wanted to eat. She chewed the piece to soften it for him, and put it back into his mouth again. The boy sucked and swallowed it.

She did the same for her husband and daughter, and slowly they regained consciousness. She gave them each a drink.

When they were better, she asked the old man if he could find her a piece of paper and a pencil. "I will ask the commissioner to send someone to fetch us. We can’t stay here. Our wounds are beginning to stink."

He found a dirty piece of paper and she scribbled a desperate note. She asked the old man to find someone to carry it through the desert of ash to Telok Betong. The commissioner, she learned later, received the note, but nothing was done.

Mrs. Beyerinck sent the old man to the beach to signal passing ships. After endless waiting, night fell again. Next morning, her cook's daughter came. "Where are your mother and sister?" asked Mrs. Beyerinck.

"They are all dead," answered the girl. "I buried them in the ash. All your other servants, including Jeroemoedi, are dead, too."

Some hours went by, then a man came running from the beach to report, "There is a boat but it is sailing past."

"The boat is at anchor," reported another running native. Looking toward the beach, Mrs. Beyerinck saw a man coming. He was dressed in white with a cork hat. He was small of stature and walked with a roll, like a sailor.

It was Captain Hoen, the commander of the Kederie. For four days the barge had sought a passage through the floating pumice. The coast from Ketimbang to Telok Betong was completely cut off. Everywhere Hoen could see, the country was devastated and covered with ash.

At last, on Saturday, Sept. 1, a current forced a gap in the pumice and he was able to send a boat ashore near the village of Kali Antoe. In the only house still standing he found the controller and his family. He saw at once that they were in a deplorable condition, all covered in burns. "How can I get them to hospital alive?" he wondered.

"Bring litters," he ordered the natives who were standing by. When they seemed to hesitate, he warned them that if they did not help, no one would come out alive. The poor natives said they were without food and would starve, so Hoen promised six bags of rice and three kilos of salt if they would help. While the litters were being hastily constructed from fallen bamboo stems, Capt. Hoen talked with the Beyerincks.

Mrs. Beyerinck was nearly naked, and he covered her with his coat. He lifted her gently, as if she were a child, and whispered in her ear, "I won’t hurt you. Let me drown if I don’t see you reach Batavia safely."

Mrs. Beyerinck heard her husband say, "If my wife hadn't been here, we should all have been dead. She was our hope."

"No, that is not true," she managed to say. "Everyone clings to life."

Mr. Beyerinck tried to tell the captain about the disaster:

No human tongue could tell what happened. I think hell is the only word applicable to what we saw and went through. I am sure I was burnt mainly by fire that spurted out of the ground as we went along. At first, thinking only of the glowing ash showers, we endeavoured to shelter ourselves under beds, taking the risk of the house falling in, which no doubt it did on a great many, but the hot ashes came up through the crevices of the floor, and burned us still more.

Hundreds of corpses lay in the hills, the controller told Capt. Hoen when he remarked that there were a few dead bodies by the shore.

Mr. Beyerinck told Capt. Hoen his wife had sent messages 48 miles to Telok Betong for help, but no help had come. Just then, a native headman reached the house; he had come over the hills from Telok Betong. The port had been wholly devastated, he announced. The town’s other inhabitants lay buried under the ash. This turned out to be a wild exaggeration — the majority of Europeans in the town survived the disaster.

The bearers carried the controller, Mrs. Beyerinck and the two surviving children, both of whom were badly burned, down the steep mountain road. The captain walked by their side, trying to protect them from the scorching sun with a big umbrella. It was a difficult task, as the path was obstructed with fallen trees, which caused him to stumble, exposing their gaping wounds to the fierce sunlight.

At one place, a hollow filled by seawater left by the tsunami meant that the bearers were wading up to their chests. The journey to the beach took two hours, and the Beyerincks were more dead than alive at its end.

When the party reached the barge Capt. Hoen asked if she was in pain. "No, I’m terribly hungry," she replied.

She asked what day it was. To her horror, he replied that it was Saturday. "How was it possible?" she wondered. She and her family had been in hellish darkness for four nights and three days. The eruption had started a week before.

Capt. Hoen put Mrs. Beyerinck in his own bunk, and gave her a glass of wine, which tasted like nectar, and some chicken soup. The good man, she says, fed her like a child. He told her not to worry, as her children were safe. Ketimbang, he said, had been totally destroyed by the big wave, which was estimated to have reached 100 feet high. The natives said it came over the palm trees.

Two-thirds of the population of the controller's district had died. Before the Kederie sailed, the controller begged Capt. Hoen to give all the food he could spare to the villagers, who were trying to reach the vessel through the lane in the pumice made from the shore by the ship’s boat. Hoen handed down several bags of rice.

The Beyerincks and their clerk were taken to a hospital in Batavia, where they recovered. Mrs. Beyerinck ends her story with these words:

It was a miracle. However cruel nature may be, and however mysterious God's ways, he didst save us. His name be praised.