THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 147 



of snow and ice lacquer, in white, thread the bold black crown of 

 this, the " booming " or " noisy " volcano of the Eussians. It has 

 not been in action since 1820, when it then threw showers of ashes 

 and pumice ; but those fires in its furnace are only banked, as it 

 has been smoking in inky brown and black clouds at irregular and 

 frequent intervals ever since ; loud mutterings, deep rumblings 

 and wide-felt tremors of land and sea are aroused by it constantly. 

 This Island of Oonimak has been always regarded by the Russians 

 as the roof of a subterranean smelting furnace with many chim- 

 neys through which telluric forces ascended from the molten masses 

 beneath. It has been, and is still, the theatre of the greatest 

 plutonic activity in Alaska. Eussian eye-witnesses have described 

 violent earthquakes here where whole ridges of the interior and 

 coast have been rent asunder, cleft open, from which torrents of 

 lava poured and columns of flame and clouds of ashes, steam and 

 smoke, have risen so as to be viewed and noticed for a circuit of 

 hundreds of miles around. These manifestations were always 

 accompanied by violent earthquakes, and tidal-waves which often 

 submerged adjacent villages on the sea-level, and also whole native 

 settlements were swept away in mountain floods caused by the 

 sudden melting of those big banks of ice and snow on such vol- 

 canic summits and their foothills, upon which the hot breccia from 

 a vomiting crater fell.* 



This great island in olden times was the one most densely 

 populated by the Aleutes. The excesses and terrible outrages of 

 Eussian promishlyniks, followed by the wholesale work of death 

 wrought by small-pox, have utterly eliminated every human settle- 

 ment from the length and breadth of Oonimak, upon which no one 

 has resided since 1847. Euins on the north shore show the aban- 

 doned sites of numerous large hamlets ; one was over four thousand 



* Bishop Veniaminov, who witnessed one of these eruptions in 1825, 

 describes the occurrence: "On the 10th March, 1825, after a prolonged sub- 

 terranean noise resembling a heavy cannonade, that was plainly heard on the 

 islands of Oonalashka, Akoon, and the southern end of the Aliaska Peninsula, a 

 low ridge at the northwestern end of Oonimak opened in five places with 

 violent emissions of flames and great masses of black ashes, covering the coun- 

 try for miles around ; the ice and snow on the mountain tops melted and 

 descended in a terrific torrent five to ten miles in width, on the eastern side 

 of the island. The Shishaldin crater, which up to that time had also emitted 

 flames, continued to smoke only.'' 



