Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
they would be tormented by them forever. One shaken English
eyewitness reported of the July 1737 eruption:
One can scarce frame to oneself a sight of greater destruction;
ten successive Northern winters could not have left it in a
worse condition, not a leaf or a tree, vine or hedge to be seen
all the way we went . . . Here and at the town they had a
new Earth, about two feet deep, some said more, and by
the account of the miserable Inhabitants who were a dismal
spectacle (tho' they had recovered their fright) they had a
new Heavens for 18 hours but very different from those
which St Peter mentions . . . In one convent two or three
Nuns were overlaid, a death which came far out of its way to
those poor unhappy wretches, who had locked themselves up
for mankind. At Somma on the North East side it has made
great havock, a Monastery of Nuns was destroy'd, and the
Drones soon fled & dispers'd 'tis hoped to make up the time
they have lost.²²
The typical response of Neapolitans in the eruptive periods
of Vesuvius was not to run away, but to bring out the portrait of
St Januarius (San Gennaro), a third-century bishop who had
been martyred in the lava fields west of Naples. He became the
patron saint of the city, and was believed to have a salutary effect
on the lava flow and to stop it in its tracks.
British natural philosophers travelled south to Vesuvius and
Etna and in 1772 north to Iceland to make their early studies
of volcanoes. Patrick Brydone climbed Etna in 1774, and in a
series of letters to William Beckford extolled the majesty of
what he saw:
The immense elevation from the surface of the earth,
drawn as it were to a single point, without any neighbouring
mountain for the senses and the imagination to rest upon;
and recover from their astonishment in their way down to
the world. This point or pinnacle, raised on the brink of a
bottomless gulph, as old as the world, often discharging
