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Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 419, 19 May 1902, Page 4

THE FORMER ERUPTION OF. THE SOUFRIERE. The following graphic description of the great eruption of the Soufriere of St. Vincent, in 1812, is from the Rev. Charles Kingsley's book 11 At Last,” an account of a Christmas he spent in travelling in the West Indies : St. Vincent is a single volcano peak, like St. Kitts, or the Basse Terre of Guadeloupe. Very grand are the vast sheets, probably of lava covered with ash, which pour down from between two rounded mountains just- above the town. I Rich with green car-'?, they > culra.- t j stiOnob with the hrown iv-y’d •■b!cight mu. left of shrill, and 'l'll mure v.sh she awful depths beyond and above, wti: re, underneath a canopy of bright white clouds, scowls a purple darkness of clitls and glens, among which lies, unseen, the Souffriere.

In vain, both going and coining, by sunlight, and again by moonlight, when the canetields gleamed white below and the hills were pitch-black above, did we try to catch a sight of this crater peak. One fact alone we ascertained, that like all, as far as I have seen, of the West Indian volcanoes, it does not terminate in an ashcone, hut in ragged cliffs of blasted rock. The explosion of April 27th, 1812, must have been too evident, and too short, to allow of any accumulation round the crater. And no wonder; for that single explosion relieved an interior pressure upon the crust of the earth, which had agitated sea and land from the Azores to the West Indian islands, the coasts of Venezuela, the Cordillera of New Granada, and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio. For nearly two years the earthquakes had continued. The almost forgotten volcano of St. Vincent was muttering in suppressed wrath. It had thrown out no lava since 1718. The mountain is said to have been slightly active in 1785. In 1812 its old crater had been for some years (and is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around 800 feet in height. But for twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks, that it had its part to play in the great subterranean between rock and steam, and on the 27th April, 1812, the battle began. A Negro boy—he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent —was herding cattle on the mountain side. A stone fell near him ; and then another. He fancied that other boys wero pelting from thq cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return. But the stones fell thickor; and among them one, and then another, too large to have been thrown by human hand. And the poor little fellow woke’up to the fact that not a boy, but the mountain, svas throwing stones at him ; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the crater above was not harmless vapor, but dust, and ash, and stone. He turned, and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate, while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans —to which all man’s engines to destruction are but popguns —roared on for three days and nights, i covering the greater part of the island ip ashes, burying crops, breaking branches of the trees, and spreading ruin from which several estates never recovered ; and sc the UOth of April dawned in darkness which might bo felt. Meanwhile, on the same day, to change the scene of the campaign two hundred and ten leagues, “ a distance,” as Humboldt says, “ equal to that between Vesu vius and Paris,” 11 tho inhabitants, noi only of Carnecas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over a space o: four thousand square leagues, were terri lied by a subterranean noise, which re sembled frequent discharges of the loudes cannon. It was accompanied by m shook ; and, what is very remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues distance inland ; and at Caraccas, os wel as at Calabozo, preparations were made t( put the place in defence against an enemj who seemed to be advancing with heavj artillery. The noise was, there can bo n< doubt, nothing else than the final explo i sion in St. Vincent far away. The sarui explosion was hoard in Venezuela, thi 1 same at Martinique and Guadaloupe ; bu ■ there, too, there were no eartliqualsi 3 shocks. The volcanoes of the two Frenci j islands lay quiet, and left their Bnglisl brother to do tho work. On the same day J a stream of lava rushed down from th( mountain, reached the sea in four hours j and then all was over. The earthquake; . which had shaken for two years a sheet o the earth’s surface larger than half 1 Europe, were stilled by tho eruption ol this singlo vent. t The strangest fact about this eruption • was that tho mountain did not make usi of its old crater. The original vent musl 3 have become so jammed and consolidate; in the few years between 1875 and .1812 that it could not be reopened, even by : steam force, the vastness of which ma; i be guessed at from the vastnesa of thi • area which it had shaken for two years So, when the eruption was over, it wa found that the old crater-lake, inoredibl 3 as it may seem, remained undisturbed, a i far as has been ascertained. But close tc 1 it, and separated only by a knife-edge o - rook some 700 feet in height, and si narrow that, as I was assure 4 by one wh< had seen it, it is dangerous to crawl along it, a second crater, nearly as large as the first, had been blasted out, the bottom oi which, in like manner, is now filled with water.

The day after the explosion, “Black Sunday,” gave a proof of, though no measure of, the enormous force which had been exerted. Eighty miles to windward lies Barbadoes. All Saturday a heavy cannonading had been heard to the eastward. The English and French fleets were surely engaged. The soldiers wore called out; the batteries manned ; but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder. On the Ist of May the clocks struck six ; but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to tho call. The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning wore on. A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over tho whole island. Tho Negroes rushed shrieking into the streets, purely the last day was come. Tho white folk caught (and little blame to them) tho panic; and some began to. pray who had not prayed for years. Tho pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbados) < were not proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the ehurches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds, And still the darkness continued, and the dust fell. I have a letter, written by one long since dead, who had at least powers of description of no common order, telling hoW, when he tried to go out of his house upon the east coast, he could not fintl the trees on his own lawn, save by feeling for their stems. He stood amazed, not only in utter darkness, bufe in utter silence. For tho trade-wind had fallen dead ; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone ; and the only noise was the crashing ol branches, snapped by tho.weight of the clammy dust. He went in again, and waited. About one o'clock the veil began to lift j a lurid sunlight stared in from tho horizon; b.ut all was black overhead. Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away ; and saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilising, dust. The tradewind blew suddenly once more out of the clear east, and tho surf roared again along the shore. One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks, and others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious panic which accompanied it. Finding it still dark when he rose to dress, he opened (so tho story used to run) his window ; found it stick, and felt upon the sill a coat of soft powder. The volcano

in St, Vincent has broken out at last, said the wise man, “ and this is the dust of it.” So he quieted his household and his Negroes, lighted his candles, and went to his scientific books, in that delight, mingled with an awe not the less deep because it is rational and self-possessed, with which he, like other men of science, looked at the wonders of this wondrous world.

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