On the morning of Sunday, May 27, 1883, a steamer full of sightseers from Batavia reached a volcano erupting on an empty island in the strait between Java and Sumatra. Many of them went ashore and climbed it, ankle-deep in pumice, while a photographer on deck took the photograph you see at the start of this film. They all went home after what one of them called "a festive and pleasant day." Ninety-one days later, the same island made a sound that was heard nearly 3,000 miles away, on the island of Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean. By how far it was heard, it is the loudest sound ever recorded.

This film tells the thirty hours of August 26 and 27, 1883, in widening rings. First the ships inside the cloud, where Captain Watson of the Charles Bal saw "chains of fire" above the island and another crew saw balls of fire resting on their mastheads. Then the coasts at Anjer and Telok Betong, where the steamer Loudon turned her bow into the great wave and survived. Then Batavia, 94 miles away, where a pressure gauge at the gasworks drew the great explosion as a line that ran off the top of the paper. More than 36,000 people died, by the count made afterwards, almost all of them in the waves, and almost all of them the Javanese, Sundanese, Lampung and Chinese people of the coasts.

Then the world writes back. The Royal Society asked, in a letter to The Times, what people everywhere had seen and heard, and the replies came in: a police chief on Rodriguez who heard "the distant roars of heavy guns"; barographs from London to South Georgia that recorded the air wave seven times, four going out and three coming back; tide gauges from Ceylon to Cape Horn; rafts of pumice drifting for months; and the red skies of November 1883, when fire engines in New Haven and Poughkeepsie were called out to a fire that wasn't there. And, as a theory rather than a fact, the red sky in Munch's The Scream. The film ends with Anak Krakatau, the child of Krakatoa, rising from the sea in 1927 in the middle of the old island. And yes: Krakatoa is west of Java, not east.

About two hours long, narrated slowly enough to fall asleep to or listen to closely.

A note on sensitive content: the deaths of 1883 and of the 2018 tsunami are described with care and never shown.

Chapters
0:00 Cold Open: Twenty-Five Guilders
4:20 West of Java
12:35 A Nine Days' Wonder
20:35 Sunday, One O'Clock
29:23 Chains of Fire
37:09 Half Past Five
44:42 10:02
55:49 Ninety-Four Miles
1:03:24 Where Anjer Stood
1:10:39 A Letter to The Times
1:19:01 Nearly Three Thousand Miles
1:28:04 Seven Times
1:35:38 The Sea, and the Dust
1:44:04 Fire Engines for a Sunset
1:52:17 Anak Krakatau

Watch the illustrated version, with real archive photographs: https://youtu.be/xyTvbosytqg

Sources are listed in the YouTube description. Narration uses an AI voice.

At about ten o'clock on the night of Sunday, October 8, 1871, a priest named Peter Pernin pushed a wagon into the Peshtigo River in northern Wisconsin. In it was the white tabernacle from his church, and behind him his town was burning. On the bank, he wrote, people stood "motionless as statues". When he pushed one man into the water, the man climbed straight back out, murmuring "I am wet." At that same hour, some 220 miles to the south, Chicago was burning too.

Everyone has heard of that fire, and everyone knows who started it: Mrs. O'Leary's cow, kicking over a lantern. The record never convicted the cow. The cow-and-lamp story was in a Chicago paper while the city was still on fire, before anyone had asked Catherine O'Leary a single question. She swore she had been in bed with her husband and five children, and the official inquiry found "no proof that any person had been in the barn after nightfall" and said it was "unable to determine" the cause.

This film tells the Chicago fire witness by witness: the neighbor who ran to the nearest alarm box, the alarms that never reached the central office, the watchman who sent the engines to a box a mile beyond the fire, firemen worn out by another fire the night before, and a pumping station with a wooden roof. Then it goes back to the river, to the fire the same gale drove through Peshtigo and the farms around it, the deadliest wildfire in American history, told through a priest's memoir and a Green Bay book of survivors' accounts. Last, it puts the cow on trial, along with the later suspects, a reporter's claim forty years on and a comet, and asks why one fire became a legend and the other was almost forgotten.

About two hours long, narrated slowly enough to fall asleep to or listen to closely.

A note on sensitive content: around 300 people are thought to have died in Chicago, perhaps fewer. In the Peshtigo fire more than 1,200 died, perhaps twice that; the true number will never be known. Deaths are stated plainly and are never shown.

Chapters
0:00 Cold Open: "I Am Wet"
3:11 The Inquiry Room
10:20 A Summer Without Rain
18:15 DeKoven Street
26:12 Box 342
34:58 The River Is No Wall
42:44 The Water Stops
51:01 The Sound
1:00:25 The River
1:08:57 The Same Night
1:16:47 Morning
1:23:50 Rumor and Record
1:31:09 The Cow on Trial
1:41:13 Fire from the Sky
1:47:59 The Forgotten Count
1:54:45 Rising

Watch the illustrated version, with real archive photographs: https://youtu.be/LoDllu9DV2U

Sources are listed in the YouTube description. Narration uses an AI voice.

In the year 1338, in a high valley under the Tian Shan in what is now Kyrgyzstan, a community of traders buried its dead and carved a few lines on each stone. One reads, in the words of the scientists who translated it: "This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. He died of pestilence." In 2022 the teeth of people buried there gave up the genome of a plague strain at the root of the family tree behind the Black Death. Eight years after those stones were cut, the same disease was outside the walls of Caffa on the Black Sea; within ten it had reached Italy, France and England.

Most of what we picture when we hear "the Black Death" came later, or rests on very little: the beaked mask, the children's rhyme about a ring of roses, the bodies thrown over the walls of a besieged city, even the name. This film follows the disease west, town by town and season by season, through the words of the people who were there or who wrote down what they heard, from Boccaccio's Florence to Avignon, Paris, the Dorset coast, Strasbourg, Bergen and Moscow, and says plainly which witnesses saw it and which wrote later. Then it settles each myth against the record, and the rats debate fairly, on both sides.

About two hours long, narrated slowly enough to fall asleep to or listen to closely.

A note on sensitive content: historians estimate the plague killed between a third and well over half of the people, depending on the region, and in some towns Jewish communities were falsely blamed and murdered. Deaths and persecution are stated plainly and are never shown.

Chapters
0:00 Cold Open: "Died of Pestilence"
4:44 Issyk-Kul, 1338
12:36 Caffa, 1346
20:11 The Sea Lanes, 1347
27:05 Pisa and Venice, Winter 1348
32:41 Florence, Spring 1348
45:25 Florence and Siena, Summer 1348
51:52 Avignon, Spring 1348
58:48 Paris and Givry, Autumn 1348
1:06:07 Melcombe, Midsummer 1348
1:13:19 Strasbourg, Winter 1349
1:20:32 Bergen and Moscow, 1349–1353
1:27:48 The World They Made, 1349–1381
1:39:35 The Mask, the Rhyme and the Rats
1:53:41 Happy People of the Future

Watch the illustrated version, with real archive photographs: https://youtu.be/uolFPDY0G1I

Sources are listed in the YouTube description. Narration uses an AI voice.