Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
darken the air at Ternate, forty miles off, and to almost entirely destroy the growing crops on
that and the surrounding islands.
The island of Java contains more volcanoes, active and extinct, than any other known dis-
trict of equal extent. They are about forty-five in number, and many of them exhibit most
beautiful examples of the volcanic cone on a large scale, single or double, with entire or
truncated summits, and averaging 10,000 feet high.
It is now well ascertained that almost all volcanoes have been slowly built up by the accu-
mulation of matter—mud, ashes, and lava—ejected by themselves. The openings or craters,
however, frequently shift their position; so that a country may be covered with a more or
less irregular series of hills in chains and masses, only here and there rising into lofty cones,
and yet the whole may be produced by true volcanic action. In this manner the greater part
of Java has been formed. There has been some elevation, especially on the south coast,
where extensive cliffs of coral limestone are found; and there may be a substratum of older
stratified rocks; but still essentially Java is volcanic; and that noble and fertile island—the
very garden of the East, and perhaps upon the whole the richest, the best cultivated, and the
best governed tropical island in the world—owes its very existence to the same intense vol-
canic activity which still occasionally devastates its surface.
The great island of Sumatra exhibits in proportion to its extent a much smaller number of
volcanoes, and a considerable portion of it has probably a non-volcanic origin.
To the eastward, the long string of islands from Java, passing by the north of Timor and
away to Banda, are probably all due to volcanic action. Timor itself consists of ancient strat-
ified rocks, but is said to have one volcano near its centre.
Going northward, Amboyna, a part of Bouru, and the west end of Ceram, the north part of
Gilolo, and all the small islands around it, the northern extremity of Celebes, and the islands
of Siau and Sanguir, are wholly volcanic. The Philippine Archipelago contains many active
and extinct volcanoes, and has probably been reduced to its present fragmentary condition
by subsidences attending on volcanic action.
All along this great line of volcanoes are to be found more or less palpable signs of up-
heaval and depression of land. The range of islands south of Sumatra, a part of the south
coast of Java and of the islands east of it, the west and east end of Timor, portions of all the
Moluccas, the Ké and Aru Islands, Waigiou, and the whole south and east of Gilolo, consist
in a great measure of upraised coral-rock, exactly corresponding to that now forming in the
adjacent seas. In many places I have observed the unaltered surfaces of the elevated reefs,
with great masses of coral standing up in their natural position, and hundreds of shells so
fresh-looking that it was hard to believe that they had been more than a few years out of the
