Geoscience Reference
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of eruption. When Captain Tillard, anchored off San Miguel in
the Azores, heard reports in June 1811 of an island rising out of
the sea off Ponta da Ferraria, he immediately set sail in his
frigate hms
Sabrina
to see it. His artist made a dramatic study
of the fountains of smoke and lava and, like Graham Island in
the Mediterranean twenty years later, this scrap of hot, dry land
was claimed for the British crown, and named Sabrina. It then
vanished forever.³4
Growth in knowledge of volcanoes led to growth in under-
standing and misunderstanding of them. Lord Byron told his
publisher, John Murray, of an encounter in Ravenna between
Humphry Davy and Lord Byron's mistress at the time, Teresa,
Contessa Guiccioli:
J.M.W. Turner,
Vesuvius in Eruption
,
1817, gouache.
who by way of expressing her learning in the presence of
the great Chemist then describing his fourteen ascensions
of Mount Vesuvius - [Teresa Guiccioli] asked 'if there was
