The Radical Plan to Save the Fastest Sinking City in the World
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s
I. The capital of catastrophe
In the 17th and 18th centuries, European workers flocked by the thousands to a faraway colonial Dutch port later to be known as Jakarta. The lure of the tough, six-month ocean journey was easy enough to see: seemingly limitless island forests of clove and nutmeg, spices that commanded a fortune back home. But half died horribly within months of getting there, numbering 2,000 and more victims a year. The main culprit was malaria, but the colonizers also succumbed to typhus, cholera, dysentery, and dengue fever. Even when they survived the tropical sicknesses, they suffered rash, heat, and a dozen other grievances in what was called “the unhealthiest town in the world.”
Then, in 1815, there emerged a new nightmare. In a terrifying, week-long eruption, a volcano called Tambora pushed out waves of tsunamis, killing an estimated 70,000 local people and casting a chill shadow across the planet. The subsequent summer, the volcanic pall caused snow and hail storms in Maine, New York, and Virginia, killing their corn and oat crops. In China, Tambora wiped out the rice…
