Blown to Bits The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago   By: Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894)

This book is a most enjoyable read. We can, however, detect that Ballantyne had been reading up various works by W.H.G. Kingston and by G. Manville Fenn. It's just the knowledge of forest life in Java and Sumatra that makes us think that. But that knowledge is good, for it makes those parts of the book that take place in these forests ring all the more true.

As so often with Victorian authors writing for teenagers there is a delightful coloured auxiliary hero. But there is another even more important auxiliary hero, van der Kemp, and it is this man and his doings that form the real interest of this story. He had made himself a home in an island of the Krakatoa group, and a very interesting home it is, too. He travels about, mostly, in a three seater canoe of the Rob Roy type, that seems able to travel great distances over the sea, sailing some of the way, and to withstand heavy weather, in a most surprising manner.

There is a good description of the eruption, or rather explosion, of Krakatoa. This was one of the major geological events of the century, and might well have been taken for granted, with the author assuming that his youthful readers knew all about it, but, thank Goodness, he does not.

BLOWN TO BITS, A TALE OF THE KRAKATOA VOLCANIC EXPLOSION, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE PLAY COMMENCES.

Blown to bits; bits so inconceivably, so ineffably, so "microscopically" small that but let us not anticipate.

About the darkest hour of a very dark night, in the year 1883, a large brig lay becalmed on the Indian Ocean, not far from that region of the Eastern world which is associated in some minds with spices, volcanoes, coffee, and piratical junks, namely, the Malay Archipelago.

Two men slowly paced the brig's quarterdeck for some time in silence, as if the elemental quietude which prevailed above and below had infected them. Both men were broad, and apparently strong. One of them was tall; the other short. More than this the feeble light of the binnacle lamp failed to reveal.

"Father," said the tall man to the short one, "I do like to hear the gentle pattering of the reef points on the sails; it is so suggestive of peace and rest. Doesn't it strike you so?"

"Can't say it does, lad," replied the short man, in a voice which, naturally mellow and hearty, had been rendered nautically harsh and gruff by years of persistent roaring in the teeth of wind and weather. "More suggestive to me of lost time and lee way."

The son laughed lightly, a pleasant, kindly, soft laugh, in keeping with the scene and hour.

"Why, father," he resumed after a brief pause, "you are so sternly practical that you drive all the sentiment out of a fellow. I had almost risen to the regions of poetry just now, under the pleasant influences of nature."

"Glad I got hold of 'ee, lad, before you rose," growled the captain of the brig for such the short man was. "When a young fellow like you gets up into the clouds o' poetry, he's like a man in a balloon scarce knows how he got there; doesn't know very well how he's to get down, an' has no more idea where he's goin' to, or what he's drivin' at, than the man in the moon. Take my advice, lad, an' get out o' poetical regions as fast as ye can. It don't suit a young fellow who has got to do duty as first mate of his father's brig and push his way in the world as a seaman. When I sent you to school an' made you a far better scholar than myself, I had no notion they was goin' to teach you poetry."

The captain delivered the last word with an emphasis which was meant to convey the idea of profound but not ill natured scorn.