THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 5

It is hard to believe anyone could survive such a hellhole of destruction, but the raja of
Sanggar and members of his family somehow did get away, along with a few dozen members
of his village. Perhaps the raja exerted his royal privileges in claiming the best horses from
the stables and set out early enough on the terrible evening of April 10 to escape the erup-
tion's reach, following an inland southerly course away from the sea, whose interaction with
the pyroclastic streams created the deadly whirlwind and tsunami. Keeping to the narrow
route between Koteh and Dompu—the sole band of the peninsula spared from lava inunda-
tion—their unimaginable flight involved five-meter-high molten rivers spitting and smoking
on either side, their escape like a latter-day miracle of the Red Sea. The raja of Sanggar and
his band of survivors owed what life remained to them to both the topography of Tambora,
which directed the magmatic flow of the April 10 eruption more to the northwest and south,
and the trade winds, which blew the volcanic ash in a westward direction toward the islands
of Bali and Java.
Figure 1.3. After the initial plinian jet of a Tambora-style eruption, the volcano's vent collapses, and pyro-
clastic flows of magma issue down the subsiding mountain slopes. In the case of an island eruption such as
Tambora's, these boiling streams generate enormous secondary ash clouds on flowing into the cooler sea
waters. Thus both the original plinian event and the subsequent phoenix clouds are capable of injecting
volcanic matter into the stratosphere, as happened in 1815.
On the sunless days following the cataclysm, corpses lay unburied all along the roads on
the inhabited eastern side of the island between Dompu and Bima. Villages stood deserted,
their surviving inhabitants having scattered in search of food. With forests and rice paddies
destroyed, and the island's wells poisoned by volcanic ash, some forty thousand islanders
would perish from sickness and starvation in the ensuing weeks, bringing the estimated death
toll fromtheeruption tooveronehundred thousand, thelargest inhistory. 14 Eventhewealthy
raja of the now vanished kingdom of Sanggar could not save his beloved daughter, weakened
by terror and an unrelenting diarrhea brought on by ash-poisoned water.
One day, after many weeks, the raja heard that Englishmen had come to the island with
a ship full of rice. He hurried to Dompu, where he used his title to gain an audience with
the English chief, Lieutenant Owen Phillips of the navy. Desperate and grief-stricken as he
was, the raja could not but be wary on being led alone into the presence of the English gov-
ernor's envoy. In the local zoonomia of races, the Dutch overlords were horse leeches drain-
ing the native people of their blood, while the Sumbawans themselves resembled the buffalo:
solid, long-suffering beasts of burden. But these new conquerors, the British, appeared like
red-faced tigers, down to the animal skins the officers wore to decorate themselves: dazzling
but deadly. 15
Having survived the terrible eruption of Tambora, however, the raja of Sanggar possessed
courage and wit enough for Lieutenant Phillips of the Royal Navy. He gave Phillips his de-
scription of what had happened on the Sanggar peninsula on April 10, 1815—the sole exist-
ing eyewitness account of Tambora's mighty explosion. He told his story well enough that the