MS 
BAIUUKA ISLASTD. 
motions which may be attributed to subterranean fires. 
The following series of phenomena seems to indicate com- 
munications at enormous distances. On the 30th of 
January, 1811, a submarine volcano broke out near the 
island of St. Michael, one of the Azores. At a place where 
the sea was sixty fathoms deep, a rock made its appearance 
above the surface of the waters. The heaving-up of the 
softened crust of the globe appears to have preceded the 
eruption of flame at the crater, as had already been observed 
at the volcanos of Jorullo in Mexico, and on the appearance 
of the little island of Kamcni, near Santorino. The new 
islet of the Azores was at first a mere shoal ; but on the 
15th of June, an eruption, which lasted six days, enlarged 
its extent, and carried it progressively to the height of fifty 
toises above the surface of the sea. This new laud, of which 
captain Tillard took possession in the name of the British 
government, giving it the name of Sabrina Island, was nine 
hundred toises in diameter. It has again, it seems, been 
swallowed up by the ocean. This is the third time that 
submarine volcanos have presented this extraordinary spec- 
tacle near the island of St. Michael ; and, as if the eruptions 
of these volcanos were subject to periodical recurrence, 
owing to a certain accumulation of elastic fluids, the island 
raised up has appeared at intervals of ninety-one or ninety- 
two years.* 
At the time of the appearance of the new island of 
Sabrina, the smaller West India Islands, situated eight 
hundred leagues south-west of the Azores, experienced 
frequent earthquakes. More than two hundred shocks were 
felt from the month of May 1811, to April 1812, at St. 
Vincent ; one of the three islands in which there are still 
active -volcanos. The commotion was not circumscribed 
to the insular portion of eastern America ; and from the 
lGth of December, 1811, till the year 1S13, the earth was 
almost incessantly agitated in the valleys of the Mississippi, 
* Malte-Brun, Geographie Universelle. There is, however, some 
doubt respecting the eruption of 1028, to which some accounts assign the 
date of 1038. The rising always happened near the island of St. 
Michael, though not identically on the same spot. It is remarkable that 
the small bland of 1720 reached the same elevation as the island ol 
Sabrina in 1811. 
