The accounts received of the volcanic eruption in the Sandwich
Islands, chiefly in the principal- island, Hawaii (which the old travellers used to call 0 whyhee), in the first fortnight in April, show it to have been one of the most tremendous eruptions on record. The crater broke out in the great mountain of Hawaii, Mauna Loa, which is near 14,000 feet high, and from this crater a stream of lava several miles long flowed to the sea at the rate of ten miles an hour, passing out from shore in a moving causeway of a mile broad, and uniting the shore with a little volcanic island thrown up suddenly from the sea to the height of 400 feet at two or three miles' distance. This was on April 2. It had been preceded by a shock of earthquake so tremendous that men and all loose bodies on the ground were tossed about like india rubber balls. Then the mountain opened, and threw out a great shower of red earth, which covered the plain for three miles in three minutes. Then a tidal wave 60 feet high rushed in upon the land over the tops of the cocoa-nut trees, and destroyed every- thing within a quarter of a mile of the shore. Finally, the slope and part of the summit of a hill 1,500 feet high was torn off and pitched by the eruptive force sheer over the tops of the trees to a distance of 1,000 feet. Jets of lava rose to the height of 1,000 feet, and illuminated the sea for fifty miles round. This flinging about of hill-tops, red earth, lava, and sea-water might well have seemed to the poor Sandwich islanders a game of cruel romps by invisible Titans, pelting each other without reference to the convenience of the human insects who call themselves the inhabitants of the island.
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