I must admit that before I started my research, my grasp of history was wanting. I had a typical high-school understanding of American and world history, which is to say: not very good. The more I found, the more I realized that canonical history tells only half the story. The world is a shadow play. We see silhouetted antics on a screen, but have no idea what’s happening on the other side. We think our experience is what’s important, not realizing that all we see are shadows of the real world.
I read and re-read the diary of A. Denson. I tried to find out who he was, only to conclude that the name (mentioned once), may not have been real, or at the very least borrowed. A number of things in the journal tugged at my curiosity, not the least of which was the man’s age. If he was sixteen at the time of the first entry in 1862, he would have been 72 years old while fighting along the front-lines of World War I. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to prove or disprove the mysterious author’s identity, I chose instead to research those entries that stood out. The one line I kept returning to was: “August 27th, 1883. Titan fell. God help us all.”
That date is well documented for the eruption of Krakatoa. In all the sources I could find however, there was no mention of an associated person or thing named Titan. The eruption is infamous for killing thousands, being heard almost 3,000 miles distant, erasing an island from the map, and causing global weather anomalies for the next six years. Could the dates be a coincidence? Of course they could, except that it was Denson’s first diary entry in almost twenty years. Could Denson have witnessed one of the largest volcanic eruptions in modern history? It didn’t seem likely, but what else could it mean? I decided to look deeper.