On 27 August 1883, after a day of alarming volcanic activity, an obscure, uninhabited island now widely known as Krakatoa (or Krakatau)[1] erupted with a force more than ten thousand times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Thornton 1). The world quickly took notice. Officials reported the eruption via undersea telegraph cables. People thousands of miles away heard the explosion, and instruments around the world recorded changes in air pressure and sea level. In the months that followed, newspapers and journals printed vivid accounts of spectacular sunsets caused by fine particles that the volcano spewed into the upper atmosphere and that circled the globe, gradually spreading further north and south. The Royal Society, a British academy of scientists, formed a special Krakatoa committee to collect these articles, other eye-witness testimony, and more precise data (such as barograph readings of air pressure) to analyze the material meticulously and to publish a thorough report of their findings. Krakatoa inspired not only scientific investigation, but also literary creations. Gerard Manley Hopkins published a letter describing the Krakatoa sunsets in evocative and figurative language. Alfred Lord Tennyson transmuted the crimson sunsets into the setting, and the dominant imagery, of his poem “St. Telemachus.” In Blown to Bits, R. M. Ballantyne interwove a detailed, factual account of Krakatoa’s destruction with an invented tale of exploration, revenge, and romance, centered on fictional characters who narrowly escape the eruption and tsunamis. M. P. Shiel used a volcanic eruption as the major plot device in his last man novel, The Purple Cloud, and, in his depiction of a fictional eruption, Shiel mimicked the central place of the telegraph and the periodical press for scientists’ and laymen’s knowledge of Krakatoa.