A SUBMARINE VOLCANO.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume XII, Issue 1229, 13 May 1857, Page 4

A SUBMARINE VOLCANO.

[From the San Francisco Herald.] Captain C. H. Newell, of the whaling barque Alice Frasier, gives the following description of the action of a submarine volcano which sprang into existence in the Straits of Oonimah, in lat. 54.30, long. 105, on the 25th of July last. There were five or six vessels in company'at the time when the volcano burst, and threw an immense body of water to a tremendous height; after which it emitted lava and pumice-stone on the decks of the vessels. This singular oceanic phenomenon is corroborated by the masters of the whaling ships William Thompson, Scotland, and Enterpiise :— “ Barque Alice Frasier, at Sea, Oct. 30, 1856. “ About the 25th of July, while passing in company with some others through the Straits ol Onnimab, I observed many of the mountain peaks upon the adjacent islands undergoing strong volcanic action, ejecting vast clouds ol dense black smoke. “ A few Ollier whalers, in company with myself, bad just rounded the west point of the island, close to the base of the volcano, upon that end ol it, having been enjoying the close view of in tremendous eruption, and listening to the lonj rumbling roar as we underwent several successivt shocks of partial earthquake, when the wind suddenly died away from a strong breeze to a calm and left us entirely at the mercy of the eruptions close in with the land. After several hours o various grades of action, everything seemed it grow for the worse. The throes of the element; and groans of the sphere became rapidly mori and more ominous. It became perfectly calm—so calm that the dense, black, unearthly smoke from the crater rushed headlong into the heavens without deviating to any point,—an indication that there was a faint hope of a coming breeze fur us; then gradually dissipated into cold gray clouds, from which fell showers of ashes, looking in the distance like rain, though falling rather like snow flakes. At this stage of things, after about 12 hours' calm, there sprang up a light

breeze from the south, seemingly about to rid us of our dangerous companion ; and you may make no doubt but we endeavoured to profit by it, even to the smallest sail we could set.

“ But then came the worst of all. The winds acting upon so dense a body of smoke, blew it flat down upon the surface of the water, making it for more than 100 miles, as I ascertained from others, an almost total eclipse, shutting the land under it entirely from sight. The ashes rained down upon us like a snow storm, covering everything from deck to truck under one gray mantle of cinders, almost blinding the people exposed, and growiag dense and more dense, nearly to suffocation, until we began to conjure up another scene of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and think we should come off rather worse than Pliny's little fleet in the Bay of Naples. As the breeze increased, we worked our way to the westward, leaving tbe scathing, suffocating mass rolling away to the north upon the eastern board. Once clear, we bad a long job to get clear of the ashes, washing end scrubbing in abundance. 1 have visited several volcanoes in their active stages, but that was a little more of the coalpit business than suited my taste in these matters. “ But tbe grand sublimity of the thing was all to come. As the breeze built up into a dashing wind along came four other ships. When, just as they got fairly in with the north base of this, mountain, gazing upon the grand ebullition above them, there followed along low rumbling directly beneath them, and there sprang into instant existence simultaneous with the sound a vast terrific volcano among tbe very fleet. First, the waters boiled and rose tumultuously into chaotic waves ; then sprang, as by an effort of some vast fountain, into a splendid column of rolling waters to a great height. This gradually dissipated. Then from earth to heaven, with a thundering sound which rocked the very welkin, there sprang a burst of smoke and flame as if earth’s whole internal fires were seeking a vent therefrom. Following this it commenced casting up lava and pumicestone, from the size of a pebble to that of a boulder, covering all the vessels with lesser fragments of each, and keeping the ship's companies in the most intense anxiety from fear of either being blown into the air or crushed beneath the sea. These grades of acti.n continued on'v for a time, the eruption sinking almost as sudden as it came, when the waters roiled into the vacated chasm with t! e rush of a whirlwind, meeting in the centre from every direction, and whirling into a vortex only equalled by the Maelstrom, uttering a voice little short of the British Niagara beard from Table Rock.

“The ships escaped, leaving tbe submarine volcano undergoing a succession of changes of comparative quietude and violent action, its throes assuming about tbe same character as the first, with unequal intervals limiting the various stages it passed through. “ C. H. Newell.”