The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1902. THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION AT MARTINIQUE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIII, Issue 112, 13 May 1902, Page 4

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1902. THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION AT MARTINIQUE.

Fop the cause that lacks assistance For the wrong that needs resistance For the future in the distance \ .--^ the good that we can do.

It is difficult to realise in all its details of tragic horror and suffering a catastrophe which has involved ! the destruction of thirty thousand j human beings in a few hours. The j physical features of the great volcanic I convulsion that destroyed St. Pierre, lin the island of Martinique, are, however, more easily followed because of the occurrence of a similar eruption at Mount Tarawera, in the Hot Lake Country of New Zealand, on the 10th of June, 1886, under circumstances which admitted of close observation. The cabled accounts of the Martinique catastrophe reproduce with remarkable similitude the phenomena that attended the eruption of Tarawera, nor is there any reason for supposing that the volcanic forces exerted in the outburst on Mount felee were any greater than those which tore out the heart of the longslumbering, sombre, forest-covered mountain whose triple peaks towered in stately majesty above the smiling waters of the great lake, across which the Maori paddled his canoe, freighted with pakeha visitors to the matchless terraces of Eotomahana. The simple difference lies in the fact that Mount Tarawera stood in a thin-ly-peopled country, while the town of j St. Pierre lay only five miles from the ! base of the dormant West Indian volcano, which has thus suddenly broken into activity after centuries of somnolence. If we picture a thriving town on the site of the old village of Te Ariki, where forty-five natives and their frail dwellings were buried to a depth of thirty Wet with stones, mud, and ashes, or on the sunny slope at Moura where the ejected matter swept a Maori village and karaka forest down into the lake, we may gain an impression of the ealaimity which has overwhelmed the inhabitants of St. Pierre in a swift death. But the ill-fated Martinique town, so far as we can gather the actual facts from the descriptions cabled, was not completely buried, as happened' to Te Ariki or to Pompeii in the more famous eruption of Vesuvius, its destruction seems to have been accomplished very largely by a deluge of mud, produced through the saturation of the dust-cloud with steam, and by fires which w.ei-2 set alight through the falling of red-hot stones and ashes, like those which ignited houses at Wairoa, or through the collapse of buildings beneath a weight of volcanic-debris upon fires already alight within. The mind dwells with ~ a sense of profound pity upon the awful experiences of the doomed inhabitants of St. Pierre, before death, coming- in forms the most dreadful, released them from their agony. The premonitory earthquakes would first arouse them to a sense of danger and alarm. With the instinct of self-preservation they Would rush in terror-stricken, crowds, into the streets, having no conception of the nature of the tragedy that was about to be .enacted. Then the deep rumblings from the bowels of the mountain would turn their attention in the direction of the black cloud above its summit, gathering and spreading its accumulated mass of shattered debris with every explosion. Tliq electrical phenomena produced by the extraordinary atmospheric disturances appear to have been as conspicuous at Mount Pelee as they were at Tarawera. It was the brilliance of the lightning that first led the inhabitants'at Wairoa to ascend the

small eminence in the village which commanded a view of the

mountain six miles away across the lake and the marvellous flashes of forked, eiiain and sheet lightning, illuminating the dark peaks and inky cloud above them, were the features of the Tarawera eruption which most deeply impressed the spectators at Wairoa and more distant points of observation. But distinct • from these electrical pyrotechnics was the glare from the crimson throat ot the volcano, the flare of io-niting gases, and the showers of fiery balls of molten rock; these red-hot missiles, together with the sheets of mud, falling like downpours of tropical rain, would drive the panicstricken inhabitants from the streets to the nearest shelter. Then came

the falling of houses, crushing- men, women and children beneath, their loads of timber and earth, the out* break of fires, the agonies of torture in every shape—crushed, mangled, roasting- humanity—amid frantic efforts to save the children, from

death, amid the shrieks of women, the despairing cries and groans of strong men--so sack St. Pierre to the doom that befel the stricken cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The earthquakes accompanying the eruption set up a tidal wave, which was accountable for a good deal of the damage to the shipping. Of the. 60,000 who perished in the great Lisbon earthquake the greater number were refugees who had assembled on the beach, and were swept away by a gigantic wave set in motion through terrestrial oscillations. But tires which arose from the falling, of red hot stones also contributed to the havoc among the shipping at anchor in St. Pierre harbour. The maelstroms of red hot raud, swept down by the tornado' that followed the atmospheric concussions around the mountain, also figured among the death-dealing agencies. A similar hurricane, on the night of the Tarawera eruption, tore its way through the Tikitapu bush, twelve miles distant from the centre of disturbance, uprooting great trees- and battering the undergrowth into a shapelesa mass with fusillades of grey-blue mud. Science speaks with a very uncertain voice regarding- the causes of volcanic outbursts. We cannot see deep, into the bowels of the earth, and can only speculate as to the conditions of its interior. Shrinkages in the "crust, under immense pressure, are sufficient to generate intense heat, and the production of steam through the percolation of water from the surface into cavities walled by heated rocks, together with, the expansion of igasses, account for the eruptive energy. At Tarawera, the steam cloud ascended in a solid bank of snowy whiteness to an elevation of 16,000 feet, and enveloped the earth in an atmosphere of vapour, extending for many miles around the mouutain. There is no reason at all for supposing that the disturbance at Martinique will ,have any unfavourable influence upon the earth fissure or line of weakness which crosses the North Island from Euapehu to White Island, in the Bay of Plenty. But the eruption at St. Vincent, in the Windward Islands, proves that the disturbance is not purely local in its character, or, if its,origin was due to a local subsidence, contraction, or explosion,, thatf the effects have been far-reaching. This, however, i^ an aspect of the calamity which, opens the door for endless and, in a sense, futile speculation. The great fact j that comes home to our hearts is ! the dreadful story of human sufferj ing. and even though but a thousand of the victims belonged, to the higher races of Europe, our sympathies cannot but go out in a pitiful tide to those poor creatures who have passed through this appalling convulsion of Nature.