Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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- Martinique, Three Great
Extinguished Volcanoes; Vauclin, The Paps Of Carbet, Which Are
Perhaps The Most Elevated Summits Of The Smaller Islands, And
Montagne Pelee.
(The height of this last mountain is probably 800
toises; according to Leblond it is 670 toises; according to
Dupuget, 736 toises.
Between Vauclin and the feldspar-lavas of the
Paps of Carbet is found, as M. Moreau de Jonnes asserts, in a neck
of land, a region of early basalt called La Roche Carree). Thermal
waters of Precheur and Lameutin. - Dominica, completely volcanic.
- Guadaloupe, an active volcano, the height of which, according to
Leboucher, is 799 toises; according to Amie, 850 toises.
- Montserrat, a solfatara; fine porphyritic lavas with large
crystals of feldspar and hornblende near Galloway, according to Mr.
Nugent. - Nevis, a solfatara. - St. Christopher's, a solfatara at
Mount Misery. - St. Eustache, a crater of an extinguished volcano,
surrounded by pumice-stone. (Trinidad, which is traversed by a
chain of primitive slate, appears to have anciently formed a part
of the littoral chain of Cumana, and not of the system of the
mountains of the Caribbee Islands.)) Each island is not the effect
of one single heaving-up: most of them appear to consist of
isolated masses which have been progressively united together. The
matter has not been emitted from one crater, but from several; so
that a single island of small extent contains a whole system of
volcanoes, regions purely basaltic, and others covered with recent
lavas. The volcanoes still burning are those of St. Vincent, St.
Lucia, and Guadaloupe. The first threw out lava in 1718 and 1812;
in the second there is a continual formation of sulphur by the
condensation of vapours, which issue from the crevices of an
ancient crater. The last eruption of the volcano of Guadaloupe took
place in 1797. The Solfatara of St. Christopher's was still burning
in 1692. At Martinique, Vauclin, Montagne Pelee, and the crater
surrounded by the five Paps of Carbet, must be considered as three
extinguished volcanoes. The effects of thunder have been often
confounded in that place with subterranean fire. No good
observation has confirmed the supposed eruption of the 22nd of
January, 1792. The group of volcanoes in the Caribbee Islands
resembles that of the volcanoes of Quito and Los Pastos; craters
with which the subterranean fire does not appear to communicate are
ranged on the same line with burning craters, and alternate with
them.
Notwithstanding the intimate connection manifested in the action of
the volcanoes of the smaller West India Islands and the earthquakes
of Terra Firma, it often happens that shocks felt in the volcanic
archipelago are not propagated to the island of Trinidad, or to the
coasts of Caracas and Cumana. This phenomenon is in no way
surprising: even in the Caribbees the commotions are often confined
to one place. The great eruption of the volcano in St. Vincent's
did not occasion an earthquake at Martinique or Guadaloupe. Loud
explosions were heard there as well as at Venezuela, but the ground
was not convulsed.
These explosions must not be confounded with the rolling noise
which everywhere precedes the slightest commotions; they are often
heard on the banks of the Orinoco, and (as we were assured by
persons living on the spot) between the Rio Arauca and Cuchivero.
Father Morello relates that at the Mission of Cabruta the
subterranean noise so much resembles discharges of small cannon
(pedreros) that it has seemed as if a battle were being fought at a
distance. On the 21st of October, 1766, the day of the terrible
earthquake which desolated the province of New Andalusia, the
ground was simultaneously shaken at Cumana, at Caracas, at
Maracaybo, and on the banks of the Casanare, the Meta, the Orinoco,
and the Ventuario. Father Gili has described these commotions at
the Mission of Encaramada, a country entirely granitic, where they
were accompanied by loud explosions. Great fallings-in of the earth
took place in the mountain Paurari, and near the rock Aravacoto a
small island disappeared in the Orinoco. The undulatory motion
continued during a whole hour. This seemed the first signal of
those violent commotions which shook the coasts of Cumana and
Cariaco for more than ten months. It might be supposed that men
living in woods, with no other shelter than huts of reeds and
palm-leaves, could have little to dread from earthquakes. But at
Erevato and Caura, where these phenomena are of rare occurrence,
they terrify the Indians, frighten the beasts of the forests, and
impel the crocodiles to quit the waters for the shore. Nearer the
sea, where shocks are frequent, far from being dreaded by the
inhabitants, they are regarded with satisfaction as the prognostics
of a wet and fertile year.
In this dissertation on the earthquakes of Terra Firma and on the
volcanoes of the neighbouring archipelago of the West India
Islands, I have pursued the plan of first relating a number of
particular facts, and then considering them in one general point of
view. Everything announces in the interior of the globe the
operation of active powers, which, by mutual reaction, balance and
modify one another. The greater our ignorance of the causes of
these undulatory movements, these evolutions of heat, these
formations of elastic fluids, the more it becomes the duty of
persons who apply themselves to the study of physical science to
examine the relations which these phenomena so uniformly present at
great distances apart. It is only by considering these various
relations under a general point of view, and tracing them over a
great extent of the surface of the globe, through formations of
rocks the most different, that we are led to abandon the
supposition of trifling local causes, strata of pyrites, or of
ignited coal.* (* See "Views of Nature" - On the structure and
action of volcanoes in different parts of the world, page 353
(Bohn's edition); also "Cosmos" pages 199-225 (Bohn's edition).)
The following is the series of phenomena remarked on the northern
coasts of Cumana, Nueva Barcelona, and Caracas; and presumed to be
connected with the causes which produce earthquakes and eruptions
of lava.
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