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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

28. Loud and Lethal

By the time Krakatoa’s chaos ended, whole islands had vanished in what is now Indonesia, and tens of thousands had perished. According to the Dutch colonial authorities’ estimates, the catastrophic eruptions and resultant tsunamis killed at least 36,000. However, modern estimates put the disaster’s true casualty figures at up to 120,000.

Ships sailing in Krakatoa’s vicinity after the disaster reported seeing giant rafts of floating pumice, some of them several miles wide. Indian Ocean currents carried some of those rafts up to 5000 miles, to the shores of Zanzibar in East Africa. There, horrified locals discovered that, fused to the pumice, were the bones of numerous human skeletons, monkeys, big cats, and myriad other creatures.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.