THE GREAT EXPLOSION AT

ASAMA.

Next we talked about the explosion of Asama, the great one of 1783, which Landgrelle, a distinguished authority, regards as one of the most frightful eruptions in the history of volcanoes. There is special reason for referring to this mountain since its ragged shoulders, from which the head was blown at this time, were the scene a few years since of an interesting and rather hazardous experiment attempted by Professor Milne and a party of friends. Asama rises to a height of over 8,000 feet, and in its great paroxysm it sent down, so the records say, a river of mud from five to ten miles broad, that overwhelmed forty-two villages. "In some places," continue the records, "the mud was so hot that it did not stop boiling for twentyfour days. In the Tonezawa River immense masses of lava remained red hot even in the river itself. In Kurogano a stone 120 by 264 feet, one among many, fell into a river and formed an island. Two rivers were sucked up into the mud torrent and their places taken by dry land, and the noise of the explosion was like a thousand thunders. The lakes were poisoned, and fish sickened, the rivers were full of dead dogs, deer, and monkeys, with hair singed from their bodies."

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The crater of this volcano, as it stands today, measures a mile and a quarter in circumference, and never ceases to belch forth pungent, strangling vapors of hydrochloric acid and sulphurous anhydride, to breathe which is to die. The depth of the crater has been a subject of endless discussion among the foreign residents of Tokio, some putting it at 1,000 feet, others at 8,000, and it was to settle this controversy that the experiment just referred to was undertaken. A party set out one day, headed by Professor Milne and United States Minister Edwin Dun, with no less an object than to

sound Asama's crater. They took with them elaborate chemical and physical appliances, a great quantity of rope, and a number of coolies to haul it. When they reached the edge of the crater, keeping carefully to the windward of the vapors, they proceeded to execute an idea of Minister Dun for measuring the depth, an idea that had been adopted after much discussion. First, with extreme difficulty, a rope was stretched across the crater, a distance of about 500 yards. Then a pulley was run out on this fixed line with another rope that could be lowered straight down (a thick wire was tried first, but it kinked and broke), and at the end of the vertical rope was made fast what the explorers called their "chemical and physical laboratory," that is, special thermometers, bits of metal and other substances that would fuse at various temperatures, pieces of red and blue litmus paper, etc.

Finally, when all was ready, the coolies

were told to lower away, and the rope began to go down in the very thick of the vapor clouds, while all waited expectantly. Everything went well until a depth of 735 feet was reached, and then the experiment came to an abrupt and disconcerting end by the burning up of thermometers, rope, and everything. And that is the only attempt that has ever been made to penetrate the mysteries of Asama's crater.

THE GREATEST EXPLOSION EVER KNOWN.

Coming now to the explosion of Krakatoa, let me note that although we have here what is admittedly the most formidable volcanic convulsion of modern times, perhaps the most formidable in our whole history, yet the place of its occurrence was quite insignificant. Krakatoa on those memorable days in 1883, the 26th and 27th of August, was a poor neglected little island in the Strait of Sunda, between Java and Sumatra. No one lived there, no ships touched there, and in the presence of forty-nine towering volcanic

mountains on the neighboring island of Java, some of them 12,000 feet high and most of them in chronic disturbance, no scientist had ever paused to observe the peculiar situation of Krakatoa with its one humble peak, measuring scarcely 3,000 feet. Had he given much heed, he would have made some important discoveries, notably that this humble peak was not the real volcano at all, but only a tooth in the ragged jaw of its vast crater, a crater that was largely submerged, and included not only the island of Krakatoa, but several other islands in the Strait of Sunda. And he would have seen that here, at some time in the dim past, had stood a great mountain that may have joined Java and Sumatra, and that certainly had a girth of twenty-five miles at its base and a summit towering with the best of them. That was the real volcano Krakatoa, after the work of its building up with lava layers had been completed, and before the phase of its selfdestruction had begun. Then, in the pride of her strength, Krakatoa proceeded to tear herself to pieces; she blew her head off, she

blew her shoulders off, she scattered her body far and wide, and finally left herself only a basal wreck," in the words of Darwin, to rest upon, and that half under water. All this the scientist would have discovered, and also that, broken and disfigured though she was, Krakatoa still stood at the intersection of two great lines of volcanic energy, and therefore marked the most dangerous volcanic focus on the surface of the earth.

But all this came as after-knowledge, and the giant force imprisoned in that unheeded crater was allowed to rend asunder its fetters with a quaking of the earth and a blazing of the heavens before any suspicion of its presence went abroad. For nearly 200 years Krakatoa had done nothing; then on Sunday morning, May 20, 1883, she began to rouse herself, merely a matter of steam and falling ashes, with a roaring heard plainly in Batavia, a hundred miles away. Then followed three months of menacing prelude, as if she wished to give the world fair warning. Then, on the

24th of June, a second crater opened. Soon after this a third crater opened.

The low-lying walls of the craters had at last given way in many places, and there were white hot chasms below the level of the sea sending up to the waves their hissing challenge. Then thousands of tons of water surged downward, and the fight was on. This was Sunday afternoon, August 26th. For the first few hours the fires of the earth made short work of the sea, driving it back in splendid explosions that came every ten or twelve minutes. Each explosion sent up black columns, miles in height, steam and smoke and ash and pumice, all the scum and debris on the surface of the molten lake, and drove back the sea in great waves. Soon the darkness of night settled over Java and Sumatra and over vessels sailing in those waters, and through the darkness at intervals was seen the glory of Krakatoa, a terrifying glory.

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From a distance of forty miles," says an eye-witness on a ship, "it looked like an immense wall, with bursts of forked lightning

Borneo, 1,116 miles distant, writes: "The noise of the eruption was plainly heard all over Borneo."

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This last was as if people in Chicago had been frightened by a noise in New York. But still this is nothing. From Tavoy, Burmah, 1,478 miles distant, they sent out the police launch in alarm; and Staff Commander Coghlan, R. N., writes from Perth, West Australia, 1,902 miles distant: This coast has been visited (August 27th) by sounds like the firing of guns inland." And Mr. Skinner, of Alice Springs, South Australia, 2,233 miles distant, writes: "Two distinct reports similar to the discharge of a rifle were heard on the morning of the 27th, and similar sounds were heard at a sheep camp nine miles west of the station, and also at Undoolga, twenty-five miles east." At Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, 2,267 miles distant, the people heard sounds from the east so distinctly that they thought it must be a ship in distress. And finally, Mr. James Wallis, chief of police in the Island of Rodriguez, which is almost across the Indian Ocean, 2,968 miles from Krakatoa, writes: "Several times during the night of the 26th-27th, reports were heard coming from the east, like the distant roar of heavy guns." This was as if a noise in Philadelphia had been heard in San Francisco.

Summing up the results of many reports like the above, it stands as certain that the Krakatoa explosion was heard over a sound zone covering one-thirteenth of the earth's entire surface; also, that the sounds, as is seen from the accompanying diagram, were carried much farther toward the west than toward the east, owing probably to the fact that a strong wind was blowing at the time. Coming next to the sea waves sent from Krakatoa, the damage done by these was enormous. Two lighthouses in the Strait of Sunda were destroyed, all the towns and villages on the shores of Java and Sumatra bordering the strait were destroyed, all the boats and vessels on the same shores were destroyed, and 36,380 lives were lost. The tidal wave which started at ten o'clock was the one which wrought the worst destruction. Its average height when it struck the shores of Java and Sumatra is estimated at fifty feet, but in many places it is known to have been much higher than that. At Merak, on the Java coast, where there is a funnelshaped bay that may have heaped the water up, the wave is said to have reached a height of 135 feet. And a man-of-war, the "Berouw," lying off the Sumatra shore, was

carried a mile and three-quarters inland up a valley and left in a forest thirty feet above sea level.

These sea waves traveled across the Indian Ocean in all directions, and were recorded by tide gauges at Colombo, Ceylon, 1,760 miles distant; at Bombay, 2,700 miles distant; and at Cape Horn, about 5,000 miles distant. That is, they washed the southern. coasts of Asia and the eastern coasts of Africa. Their average rate of transmission was about 350 miles an hour; their average height, as shown by the gauges, was from six to eighteen inches.

Coming now to other effects of this great explosion, it is established on the evidence of many officers of ships and dwellers on islands, that on this day a large part of the Indian Ocean was showered with lava dust and lava mud to a depth of several inches. This applies to an area of, perhaps, about half a million square miles, but in the immediate vicinity of Krakatoa, say within a hundred miles, the sea was so thick with fallen lava dust and debris that vessels pushed through it with great difficulty, as if they were passing through a field of broken ice. As for the Strait of Sunda, it was rendered quite impassable with mud and pumice, which is as if Channel steamers were blocked on their way to the Continent, because the Straits of Dover were covered with mud a foot or more deep. In a word, the mass of mud and ashes and lava dust blown out of Krakatoa into the air would have formed a solid cube a mile and a quarter in each dimension. That is four or five times more than Bandaisan threw out.

A great quantity of the finer dust projected into the air remained in suspension there for over a year, and by a refraction of light caused the red and purple sunsets, the blue moons, and the copper suns that were seen all over the world from September, 1883, to the close of 1884, and that caused so much discussion and alarm. The whole northern portion of the island, much the greater portion, with an area of nearly six square miles and an average height above sea level of 700 feet, was submerged, and remains so to this day, under 150 fathoms of water. Two new islands had thrust up their heads, and the whole configuration of the channel was altered. All of which confirms one in the opinion that, when this old earth begins to fire off her heavy artillery that is, blow the heads off her mountains it makes human battles and explosions in powder and dynamite factories and the like look rather small.