Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
charged with cinders were thrown out in the form of smoke,
which became beautifully white in proportion as it rose.'5 Some
even more evocative and colourful notes came from the pen of
John Davy:
The bright light ultramarine hue of the sea underneath the
dark brown Volcano canopied with sultry and snowy clouds
of vapour of very great beauty and the surrounding sky
where free from vapour of a similar hue less intense.6
Before the island sank back into the sea the following Janu-
ary, taking all conflicting national hopes and their flags with it,
it became the most picked-over piece of real estate in the Medi-
terranean. The art dealer James Ackerman published a spirited
lithographic sketch of the island by an unknown naval oicer as
early as September,7 while another drew a set of precise water-
colours of the island spitting and heaving as a party of sailors climb
to the crater. Sir Walter Scott, by then an old and sick man, but
generally regarded as a national treasure in both Scotland and
England, landed on the island on 20 November when he was
touring the Mediterranean in hms
Barham
. He wrote about his
brief exploration to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which
he was president, and told how he sank up to his knees in the
soft ash, and so climbed onto the shoulders of a stout sailor who
carried him to the summit. His daughter Anne, who was accom -
panying him, burnt her shoes 'quite through' when picking her
way across the hot sands.8 On the island he saw two dolphins,
'killed apparently by the hot temperature', and a robin that
appeared to have starved to death, and picked up a large block
of lava and some shells for the Royal Society of Edinburgh.9
But even Britain's own Prospero could not halt the geological
processes working beneath the Mediterranean, and this magical
island grew gradually smaller and smaller before disappearing
altogether. Within a year it had become known as 'Graham
Bank', and by 1841 it was 3 metres (ten feet) below the surface.ยน0
The Napoleonic Wars were by now long over and, having
demolished its rival navies, Britain ruled the seas. With a large
