Lost Empire (40 page)

“Rivera showed up a few hours later, pleasant as can be. During the night Morton had scrounged up some of Blaylock’s papers—pages from his journal, the original manuscript of the biography, random drawings and maps—”

“The Moreau Madagascar map,” Remi predicted.

“Yes. He’d seen the tiny writing on it and tore away that section and gave the bigger piece to Rivera. Morton says that seemed to satisfy Rivera. They completed the transaction, and Rivera left. Morton, being the clever fellow he is, figured Rivera wasn’t quite done, so he moved the Blaylock material again, out of his home to another location.”

“And that night his house was burglarized,” Sam said.

“Right. Morton made it a point to stay out all night with friends. The ruse worked, he said. Rivera never returned.”

“And then we show up five years later, asking the same questions.”

“Why didn’t he pull the same trick on us?”

“He said he liked you. And he wanted to retire and take care of his grandkids. When you offered sixty thousand instead of twenty, he decided to throw it all in and hold nothing back.”

“Then we don’t know what Rivera knows, do we?” asked Remi.

“No,” Sam replied. “By dumb luck, Morton sold him enough to send him down some paths and make some progress, but not enough to finish it. Now with us in the picture, Rivera and Garza can tag along to the end. We have to expect they’re going to show up—if they haven’t already.”

“Which brings me to my next point,” said Selma. “We finished decoding the rest of Blaylock’s letters to Constance. Care to guess the date of his last letter?”

“No,” replied Sam.

“Even the year?”

“Selma.”

“Eighteen eighty-three.”

Remi replied, “That means he was out here chasing his treasure for eleven years. My God.”

“What about the letters in between?” Sam asked.

“There were only a few a year after Blaylock captured the
Shenandoah II
. As was his habit, the plain text part of the letters was mostly travelogue . . . the rakish man of adventure. In the letters, he duplicates almost all the tall tales from Morton’s biography. They were window dressing. One of his coded messages to Constance suggests he was convinced Dudley and the others had discovered his lie about the
Shenandoah II
and were after him.”

“Were they?”

“Not as far as I can tell. And if they did know, they probably wouldn’t have cared. The
Shenandoah II
was gone. She was no longer a threat. Blaylock had done his job.”

“Back to his last letter,” Sam prompted.

“Right. It’s dated August 3, 1883, and was posted from Bagamoyo. I’ll quote the relevant part directly:

“You said the Sunda Strait, correct?” Sam asked.

“Yes.”

Sam paused. He closed his eyes for a moment, a half smile on his face. Remi asked, “What is it?”

“Blaylock left Bagamoyo on August 3, 1883. Based on his estimated transit time, he would have arrived in the Sunda within a day or two of August twenty-seventh.”

“Okay . . .”

“The Sunda Strait was where the Krakatoa volcano was. August twenty-seventh was the day it exploded.”

ASHISTORY BUFFS, SAM AND REMI WERE WELL FAMILIAR WITH the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The archipelago, which covers roughly eight square miles of ocean, sits almost dead center in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra and consisted of three islands prior to the cataclysm: Lang, Verlaten, and Rakata—the largest island in the group and home to the three volcanic cones collectively known as Krakatoa. Having undergone three major eruptions in the centuries prior to 1883, Krakatoa was no stranger to turmoil.

On May twentieth, three months prior to the final explosion, a great slash appeared in the side of Perbuatan, the northernmost cone, and steam began venting, along with plumes of ash that rose twenty-two thousand feet into the atmosphere. The residents of the nearby towns and villages, having witnessed such activity before, paid little attention, and by the end of the month their disinterest seemed validated. Krakatoa settled and remained mostly quiet for the next month.

On June sixteenth the eruptions began again, blanketing great swaths of sea and land with jet-black smoke for nearly a week. When the haze cleared, massive ash columns could be seen streaming from two of Krakatoa’s cones. Tides in the straits began running high, and ships at anchor had to strengthen their moorings lest they be beached.

Three weeks passed. Krakatoa’s two cones were joined by the third, and soon ash began accumulating on nearby islands, in some places up to two feet thick, killing flora and fauna and turning once-lush forests into moonscapes.

The eruptions continued through the end of June and into mid-August. On the twenty-fifth of August, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Krakatoa went into its paroxysmal phase. Within an hour, a black cloud of ash had risen eighteen miles into the sky, and the eruptions were nearly continuous. Fifteen and twenty miles away, ships were bombarded by hot pumice stones the size of softballs. By early evening, as darkness fell over the strait, minor tsunamis were rolling ashore on Java and Sumatra.

The next morning, just before sunrise, Krakatoa went into its final death throes. A series of three eruptions, each one more powerful than the next, shook the area. So loud were the explosions that they were heard in Perth, Australia, two thousand miles to the southeast, and in the Mauritius Islands, three thousand miles to the west.

The resulting tsunamis, one for each eruption, radiated outward from Krakatoa at speeds up to one hundred twenty-five miles per hour, bulldozing their way onto the shores of Java and Sumatra and inundating islands as far away as fifty miles.

 

 

AT 10:02, KRAKATOA ISSUED its final salvo with an explosion equal to twenty thousand atomic bombs. The island of Krakatoa tore itself apart. The erupting cones, having ejected all their magma, collapsed in on themselves, taking with them fourteen square miles of the island and gouging out a caldera four miles wide and eight hundred feet deep. The resulting tsunami wiped out whole villages, killing thousands within minutes. Trees were uprooted, and the land stripped of every scrap of vegetation.

Following on the heels of the massive wave came the pyroclastic flows, gargantuan avalanches of fire and ash that roared down Krakatoa’s flanks and into the Sunda Strait. Traveling at eighty miles per hour and reaching temperatures in excess of twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the surge boiled the ocean’s surface below it, creating a cushion of steam that carried it thirty miles or more, charring or entombing everything in its path, man-made and natural alike.

Within hours of final explosion, what remained of Krakatoa fell silent. In the space of thirty hours, between 36,000 and 120,000 people lost their lives.

 

 

THE LOUDSPEAKER IN THE CORNER OF THE PATIO CAFE CAME TO life: “Attention, all ticketed passengers: The
Krakatau Explorer
will be departing the docks in five minutes. Please board via the aft gangway.” The message repeated in Indonesian, French, German, then once more in English.

Sam and Remi, sitting at a corner table beside a trellis covered in blooming bougainvillea, finished their coffee and stood up. Sam dropped a pair of five-thousand-rupiah notes on the table, and they stepped out from under the awning and onto the dock.

“Any sign of them?” Remi asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Earlier that morning, as the
Krakatau Explorer
tour van pulled out of the Four Seasons turnaround, Sam thought he’d caught a glimpse of Itzli Rivera, but they’d seen nothing more during the ninety-minute ride from Jakarta to the Carita Beach Resort docks. While riding in a van packed with other tourists wasn’t Sam and Remi’s preferred style of adventuring, they were keenly aware that if Rivera and his men were, in fact, here, being caught alone on a lonely road in the Javan rain forests could be disastrous.

Moreover, this boat tour of what remained of the Krakatoa volcano and the newly opened Krakatau Museum was not only a first step in following Blaylock’s ill-fated trail—if there was one left to follow—but also an efficient way of drawing Rivera out and forcing his hand. The last thing the Mexican needed was to lose his quarry yet again. For Sam and Remi, it was akin to swimming with sharks: Better to have them in sight than wondering when they were going to swim out of the gloom and attack.

They joined the line of last-minute boarders at the aft gangplank, then boarded and chose a spot at the starboard rail. The
Krakatau Explorer
was a hundred-twenty-foot flat-bottomed skiff ferry with an oblong, pitch-roofed wheelhouse nestled high on the forecastle. The afterdeck, measuring eighty feet by forty feet, was divided into rows by blue-vinyl-covered bench seating.

Sam kept one eye on the docks while Remi scanned the other passengers; she estimated there were sixty aboard. “Still nothing,” she said.

“Here too.”

On the dock, a pair of workers detached the gangplank and pulled it away from the ferry. A crewman on deck shut the gate. The mooring lines were singled up and hauled aboard. Three more crewmen appeared at the rail and pushed off the dock with poles. With a blare from the
Explorer
’s whistle, the engines started, and the ferry chugged away from the docks and headed west into the strait.

 

 

THREE HOURS LATER an Indonesian-accented voice came over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, shortly the captain will be bringing the
Krakatau Explorer
around the island’s headland for our approach to the museum.”

As promised, within minutes the ferry turned to port and headed east along the island’s north shoreline. Passengers crowded the rail to stare up at the sheer, two-thousand-foot-high cliff—all that remained when the majority of the island collapsed into the sea.

 

 

THE FERRY PULLED ALONGSIDE the museum’s dock, and the mooring lines were secured and the gangplank lowered. Sam and Remi disembarked and headed toward the main building. Anchored to the seabed at the western edge of the caldera, the five-thousand-square-foot museum was constructed of inch-thick tempered glass and white-painted steel crossbeams. According to the brochure Sam and Remi had picked up at the Four Seasons, the museum contained the single largest collection of Krakatoa memorabilia and source material in the world.

The inside was fully air-conditioned, the decor minimalist, with bamboo floors, taupe walls, and vaulted ceilings. The space was divided into sections by three-quarter walls that displayed period photographs, artwork, and illustrations, while freestanding platforms held artifacts that survived the disaster. Each section also contained a multimedia kiosk, complete with an LCD monitor and touch-screen controls.

Sam and Remi strolled around on their own until they were approached by one of the guides, a young Indonesian woman in an aquamarine dress. “Welcome to the Krakatau Museum. May I answer any questions for you?”

 

 

“WE’RE PARTICULARLY INTERESTED in what ships might have been anchored in the strait at the time of the explosion,” Remi said.

“Certainly. We have an alcove dedicated to just that. This way, please.”

They followed the woman through several alcoves before arriving at one labeled THE MARITIME EFFECTS. Two of the walls were devoted to enlarged daguerreotype photos of the straits and surrounding bays and harbors. The third wall held copies of pages from ships’ logs, newspaper accounts, letters, and illustrations. On the platforms in the center of the room was a collection of salvaged hardware, presumably from vessels caught in the explosion.

“How many ships were in the area at the time?” asked Remi.

“Officially, fourteen, but on any given day in 1883 there were hundreds of small fishing vessels and cargo boats sailing back and forth. Of course, it was easier to account for the ships because of insurance claims. Also, we were able to cross-reference captains’ logs to account for all the vessels present.”

Standing before a plaque on the far wall, Sam asked, “Is this a list of the ships and their crews?”

“Yes.”

“I recognize one of these names: the
Berouw
.”

The guide nodded. “I’m not surprised. The
Berouw
is somewhat famous. She was a side-wheel steamer that was anchored in Lampung Bay fifty miles from Krakatoa. She was picked up by one of the tsunamis and carried several miles up the Koeripan River. The ship was found almost completely intact, but her entire crew was killed.”

“There are only thirteen names,” Remi said.

“Pardon me?”

“On this list. You mentioned fourteen ships, but there are only thirteen listed here.”

“Are you sure?” The guide stepped up to the plaque and counted the names. “You’re right. That’s odd. Well, I’m sure it’s an administrative error.”

Remi smiled. “Thanks for your help. I think we’ll wander around a bit.”

“Certainly. If you’re so inclined, feel free to experiment with the kiosk. All of the documents in our collection—even those not on display—are available for viewing.”

Remi walked over to the wall of photographs where Sam was standing. She said, “I was half hoping the
Shenandoah
’s name would be on the list.”

“Would a picture do?” Sam said.

“What?”

He pointed at the uppermost photo on the wall, a four-by-six-foot enlargement. The plate beside it read: