The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was the most powerful natural sound ever experienced by humans. Captain Sampson of the British vessel Norham Castle, 40 kilometers away, wrote, “I am writing this blind in pitch darkness. We are under a continual rain of pumice-stone and dust. So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced that the Day of Judgment has come.”

During the maelstrom the Dutch steam gunship Berouw was picked up by a wave and smashed down at the mouth of the Koeripan River, probably killing all 28 of her crew. Then a second enormous wave picked her up and carried her two miles inland, all the way up the river valley, and set her down upright, athwart the river and 60 feet above sea level.

The crew of a rescue ship discovered her there the following month: “She lies almost completely intact, only the front of the ship is twisted a little to port, the back of the ship a little to starboard. The engine room is full of mud and ash. The engines themselves were not damaged very much, but the flywheels were bent by the repeated shocks. It might be possible to float her once again.”

That never happened. In 1939 visitors reported that she was rusting in place, covered with vines, and home to a colony of monkeys. A few pieces remained in the 1980s, and today all trace of her is gone. In Krakatoa, Simon Winchester notes that Berouw is the Dutch word for “remorse.”