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these writings: comparison with the noise of a military cannonade;
the simile of the river; the depth of horror; the red-and-black
shagginess of the volcano's interior. They really do still, in the
eighteenth century, feel that they are looking into the depths of
hell: a shadow of the Middle Ages, of 'primitive' legend and
myth, has not quite gone away. Personal experience blankets out
relativity and masks any sense of proportion:
The various accounts of it, however, which I discern inscribed
in the newspapers, will convey but a very faint idea of the
sublime horror of that ever memorable night. History
perhaps does not record a more dreadful convulsion for
I believe excepting the eruptions of Mount Hekla in Iceland,
those from Vesuvius and Etna are not to be compared to it
either in point of duration or volume.
The ashes fell upon a ship's deck 600 miles to the Eastward
of Barbados, which is at least 60 miles distant from this Island.
The repeated explosions which continued all night and till
6 o'clock the following morning, can only be compared to
the roaring of ten thousand cannon, for the reports were
heard distinctly in lee of the Windward and Leeward Islands
continued to cover many of them during the greater part of
the day following . . . During the eruption a new crater was
formed . . . the old crater is in circumference about three
miles, and one in diameter, approaching in form very near
a circle. Its depth appears to be about 1,800 feet.²9
Academic and political responses followed in a tide after
the echoes of the event itself had died down. The eruption of
Souffrière sparked a meeting of a House of Commons committee,
and soon after a discussion of the event was organized by the
Geological Society.³0 J.M.W. Turner exhibited a painting of
the Souffrière eruption at the Royal Academy in 1815, by coin-
cidence hanging at the time of the Tambora eruption, whose
after-effects were to cause him such trouble in Yorkshire the
following year. Turner' s painting, whose exhibited title was
The
Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St Vincent,
