Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of the Pacific', until activity ceased in 1958. Such terrifying and
seemingly continuous activity as that in the western Pacific in
the first decades of the nineteenth century is a world away from
the calm views of Mount Fuji and its landscape surroundings
made by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) in the last few years
before his death.
Nearly three decades before Darwin made his
Beagle
voyage,
the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
sailed to Central and South America, where between 1799 and
1804 he observed Andean volcanoes such as Cotopaxi and
Sangay in both eruptive and quiescent states. Humboldt began
to surmise a direct connection between earthquakes and volcanic
activity, reaching the inaccurate conclusion that a network of
interconnected geological events brought about the series of
earthquakes that destroyed Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1812,
those in the Mississippi basin in February 1812, and the erup-
tion of Souffrière in St Vincent, West Indies, in April 1812. When
Cotopaxi, in Ecuador, erupted in January 1803, Humboldt and
his travelling companions were 290 km (180 miles) away at Guay -
aquil, where they heard 'day and night the noises proceeding from
it, like the discharges of a battery [of cannon]'.³³ Humboldt's
writings, in particular his
Cosmos
and
Personal Narratives of
Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America
(1845-62), inspired
Frederic Edwin Church, the energetic and successful young
American landscape painter, to travel to South America: 'Are we
not justified,' Humboldt wrote,
in hoping that landscape painting will flourish with a new
and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists of merit shall
. . . be enabled far in the interior of continents, in humid
mountain valleys of the tropical world, to seize, with genuine
freshness of a pure and youthful spirit, on the true image of
the varied forms of nature?³4
In 1853, and again in 1857, Church followed Humboldt's
route in Colombia and Ecuador, where he made studies of the
volcanoes Chimborazo, Cotopaxi and Sangay. Sketching Sangay
