Great Eruption of St. Vincent 269 
in the midst of the llanos, over a space of four thousand 
square leagues, were terrified by a subterranean noise, which 
resembled frequent discharges of the loudest cannon. It 
was accompanied by no shock, and, what is very remarkable, 
was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues inland; and at 
Caracas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were made to 
put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be 
advancing with heavy artillery. They might as well have 
copied the St. Vincent herd-boy, and thrown their stones, 
too, at the Titans; for the noise was, there can be no doubt, 
nothing else than the final explosion in St. Vincent far away. 
The same explosion was heard in Venezuela, the same at 
Martinique and Guadaloupe; but there, too, there were no 
earthquake shocks. The volcanoes of the two French islands 
lay quiet, and left their English brother to do the work. On 
the same day, a stream of lava rushed down from the moun- 
tain, reached the sea in four hours, and then all was over. 
The earthquakes which had shaken for two years a sheet of 
the earth’s surface larger than half Europe was stilled by the 
eruption of this single vent. 
“The strangest fact about this eruption was, that the 
mountain did not make use of its old crater. The original 
vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the 
few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could not be reopened 
even by a steam-force the vastness of which may be guessed 
at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two 
years. So when the eruption was over it was found that the 
old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undis- 
turbed, as far as has been ascertained. But close to it, and 
separated only by a knife-edge of rock some 700 feet in 
height, and so narrow that, as I was assured by one who had 
seen it, it is dangerous to crawl along it, a second crater, 
nearly as large as the first, had been blasted out, the bottom 
of which, in like manner, is now filled with water. 
“The day after the explosion, ‘ Black Sunday,’ gave a 
proof, but no measure, of the enormous force which had been 
exerted. Eighty miles to windward lies Barbadoes. All 
Saturday a heavy cannonading had been heard to the east- 
ward. The English and French fleets were surely engaged. 
The soldiers were called out, the batteries manned, but the 
cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder. On 
