SCENES AT RABAUL.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 178, 29 June 1937, Page 6

SCENES AT RABAUL.

PASTOR’S EXPERIENCES. RAIN OF VOLCANIC ASH. Per Press Association. AUCKLAND, June 28. “We are done, finished. We can go no further.” Fainting women collapsed and men struggled in the darkness almost smothered in smoking ash, while natives cried: “Jesu” in a prayer tor help. Inis was tne scene on one of the roads out of Rabaul on the night of the eruption as told in an interview today by Pastor A. G. Stewart, vice-pre-sident of the Australian Union Conference of Seventh Day Adventists, who is the fiist arrival in New Zealand since the disaster. He was taken to a refuge ship by air liner.

Pastor Stewart said that after a two months’ visit to mission stations in Papua and New Guinea he had gathered the European missionaries together at the mission headquarters-on the island of Matupi for a convention. When they arrived by schooner on Friday, May 28, they learned that the place had been violently shaken by an earthquake an hour beiore. Tanks had burst and water supplies had been lost. The following morning the quakes began at daybreak and continued until 4.25 in the afternoon. Then occurred a tremendous upheaval from the volcano on Vulca.n Island about a mile from the mission across the harbour. “People were crossing from Rabaul to Matupi Island,” he said, “to view another crater there which had been smouldering for a few years but had remained undisturbed until Sunday, the 30tli, at noon. Then it, too, went up in a violent eruption. Ash was hurled thousands of feet and smoke reached to a height of probably 15,000 feet in an enormous black cloud.

“Right then I thought of my cameia and. took several hundred feet of film before starting from Rabaul in a car with three missionaries to get out of range of the approaching rain of volcano ash which by now was covering more than half the harbour and was rapidly nearing the town. ’ Pastor Stewart added that they went to Nordup where 10,000 people had been taken to a refuge camp on the south-east coast. Hundreds of natives were missing and whole villages were buried.