Anthropological Approach to Vulnerability and Major Hazards - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 271

The din of the lava flowing away across the forest
sounded very much like the noise of a hurricane.
[MAR 14, p. 389]
Robert Fletcher, the morning of the 5th December, wrote the
following to his old friend and colleague Bohun Lynch:
Yesterday, I spent the evening, sitting on a folding chair,
on the shore, to contemplate the most beautiful spectacle
a man could wish to witness. The moonlight was
splendid. The waves were breaking on the reef with a
noise like thunder and forming a broad, white and radiant
strip. In the bush, the fire roared and bellowed, the great
trees came crashing down with a roar. The ravines
bubbled like giant serpents of flame that crawled towards
the sea. And I was there to smoke a good pipe and drink a
glass of whisky and water from time to time, absolutely
incapable of imagining that I was running the least
danger. [FLE 89]
This almost “joyous” attitude, initially blind to the destructive
potential of the volcanoes, was not shared by the natives who worked
for Fletcher. He had to threaten them with his winchester, “otherwise
they would have fled into the sea”. What Fletcher feared, in fact, at
that moment was not the eruption - of which he enjoyed the spectacle
- but the thought of finding himself alone face to face with the locals
who were “not easy to handle ”.
This initial subjugation rapidly gave way to worry and terror
unusual in the old adventurer from Oxford. The following day, he
didn't write. His next letter, dated the 7 December, relates the brutal
degradation of the “spectacle ” very briefly:
This letter, I am beginning, at least, in bizarre
circumstances. Pay good attention. I expect every hour
(even every minute or from one second to another) to be
engulfed by a flow of lava thrown up by a volcano, with
pestilence and death. [FLE 89, p. 89]