MA UNA LOA. 153 



Recruiting Station, and that Ragsdale and his forty goats had not 

 come ; nor were there any tidings of the party from the ship. The 

 natives hearing of our distresses, and probably exaggerating them, 

 liad refused to furnish any thing unless at exorbitant prices. The 

 officers had very properly rejected the whole that was offered ; for, 

 although our allowance was small, we trusted that the provisions 

 from the ship would arrive in a day or two at farthest. 



I despatched a messenger to desire that the men coming from the 

 ship should be employed first in hunting up Longley, although I 

 entertained little hope of his being found alive, exposed as he must 

 have been to two such severe nights and days, without food or 

 covering from the storm. 



After getting a fire lighted, and something to eat, Drs. Judd, Pick- 

 ering, and myself, set out to reconnoitre the crater for a more suitable 

 place in which to establish the tents ; but, after much search, we found 

 none that offered so many facilities as that I had accidentally chosen 

 the first night. Dr. Pickering parted from us, and was the first to 

 make a descent into the crater. 



Nothing can exceed the devastation of the mountain : the whole 

 area of it is one mass of lava, that has at one time been thrown out 

 in a fluid state from its terminal crater. There is no sand or other 

 rock ; nothing but lava, on whichever side the eye is turned. To ap- 

 pearance it is of diff"erent ages, some of very ancient date, though, as 

 yet not decomposed, and the alternations of heat and cold, with rain 

 and snow, seem to have united in vain for its destruction. In some 

 places it is quite smooth, or similar to what has already been de- 

 scribed as the pahoihoi, or " satin stream ;" again, it appears in the 

 form of clinkers, which are seldom found in heaps, but lie extended 

 in beds for miles in length, sometimes a mile wide, and occasionally 

 raised from ten to twenty feet above the surface of the surrounding 

 lava. 



The place where these clinkers appear to me to have been formed 

 is in the crater itself; there they have been broken up by contending 

 forces, and afterwards ejected with the more fluid lava, and borne 

 upon its surface down the mountain side, until they became arrested 

 in their course by the accumulating weight, or stopped by the exces- 

 sive friction that the mass had to overcome. In this way the beds, 

 or rather streams, of them might have been formed, which would 

 accumulate for miles, and continue to increase as the crater dis- 

 charged this description of scoria. What strengthened my opinion 



VOL. IV. 39 



