"Europe Under the Ash," read the headline after Iceland's volcano, Eyafjallajokull, cleared her throat, reminding us there is no wrath like a back of the hand from Mother Nature.

Once skies cleared and stranded travelers were airborne, the airline industry had lost nearly a billion dollars and cancelled 100,000 flights.

Travel insurance companies will begin paying claims made by passengers. The companies' choice was to declare Eyafjallajokull's eruption an act of God and risk ill will or to chalk up black ash as bad weather, ponying up tens of millions owed. They opted to pay.

Eyafjallajokull's ash plume paralyzed the airline industry, wrecked travel plans and nearly bankrupted Africa's flower market when bloom bound for Europe was grounded.

A volcano in Iceland, of all places, recalled a phrase from the late 1800s, "the global village," defining a world connected. Recently, we saw the European Union and the United States as players in an Icelandic event.

For geologists and volcanologists, Eyafjallajokull's spewing of black ash brought on cold shudders and remembered stories of a volcanic explosion on a small group of islands in the Indian Ocean in 1883.

The eruption of that volcanic mountain, Krakatoa, (vanishing from the face of the earth after it blew sky high) killed more than 36,000 people. It was the first major catastrophe to take place after a network of telegraph cables was laid, linking the far corners of the globe.

Following the disaster, Morse code found its way under oceans, reporting the cataclysmic event to Americans and Australians as well. The Krakatoa eruption cemented a new "brotherhood of knowledge," as information about the volcanic explosion crossed time zones and found readers in diverse cultures.

In his book, "Krakatoa," author Simon Winchester, sums up the explosion off the coast of Java as the "first story about a truly enormous natural event that was both about the world and told to the world" with scant delay.

In contrast, Winchester points to an earlier tragedy in 1865, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. That terrible news was hand-carried aboard the SS Nova Scotia, then handed off to a whaling boat and finally telegraphed to London. The details of Lincoln's death appeared in print in England a full 12 days after his murder.

Though writer Winchester's story is tied to the explosion of Krakatoa, he is also intent on connecting the dots and dashes of communication in a far-flung world when no airplanes dotted the sky, but where news was beginning to circle the globe, thanks, of all things, to botany.

A London firm is credited with discovering a waterproof rubbery substance, oozing from an evergreen tree, christened "gutta percha." Covering copper wires, it protected underwater cables from breaking in the middle of the ocean.

Yet, consider the ingenuity of a newspaper man, Winchester writes, one so eager for a "scoop" he trained carrier pigeons to ferry news items (taped to their legs) from France to Brussels.

The Krakatoa disaster claimed only meager mention in London newspapers initially, but as weeks went by and more stories of loss and destruction from the volcano's explosion reached Europe, newspaper readers began to empathize with those who lived beyond their horizons.

An explosion of gas and pumice, fire and smoke shot from the mouth of Krakatoa, 24 miles into the air. The millions of tons of dust in the East Indies moved through the atmosphere for years, transformed into "extraordinary phenomena," according to Winchester.

Sunsets, so vivid, their afterglows sent artists to their palettes, were recorded as filling the sky with pink, orange and purple hues. One well-known painter, Frederic Church, an American, captured a fiery sunset in his painting of a bay on Lake Ontario.

Debris from a volcano near Java colored the sky over Canada. The concept of the planet as a "global village," as places and lives intertwined by events beyond reach or sight, changed a world on the cusp of the 20th century.

Judy Elliott is an award-winning columnist from Marietta.