Besides the volcanoes contained in the preceding list there are in Columbia three volcanic peaks : The volcanoes on the Atlantic coast have been little noticed. Congrehoy Peak has the sharpest cone I have Congrehoy Peak. ever seen, almost equalling the impossible cones in Humboldt's drawings of the Cordilleras; and I regret that the only photograph I was able to make of the mountain-top rising above the low-lying clouds was defective. Trusting too securely to my camera, I did not measure the angle, although the sketch I made just before is quite as the mountain looks. The sharpness is perhaps the result of an eruption said to have taken place a few years ago, when the crater fell in and ashes were carried as far as Belize, a hundred and fifty miles. Belonging to the same system as Congrehoy and Bonito are the Bay Islands. Of these, Utila shows streams of vesicular basaltic lava, and fragments of a more compact, older basalt; but I have found neither on this island nor on Roatan any signs of a crater. The formation is, however, distinctly volcanic, and apparently of a period anterior to the eruptions which built the Island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Group, I judge by the amount of decomposition and degradation, the lavas in both cases being similar in composition and physical character. I have mentioned the deposits of volcanic sand found on the north shore of the Lago de Izabal, in a region surrounded by what are thought to be calcareous mountains; and I may add that several peaks in the Cockscomb Range of British Honduras appear from a distance of perhaps forty miles to be volcanic cones. Passing over the traditional outbreaks of the Central American volcanoes before the Conquest, the earliest recorded eruption was that of Masaya in 1522; and the Spanish chroniclers tell a very amusing story of the attempt of the Dominican friar Blase and his companions to draw up the molten gold (lava) in an iron bucket from El Infierno de Masaya, or Hell of Masaya. The bucket, as well as the chain which held it, melted on approaching the lava; and the pious Churchmen, instead of being enriched by the precious metal, were poorer by the cost of the expedition. According to the same authority, the Indios at certain seasons cast living maids into the crater to appease the fire, that it might not break forth and injure their crops. This would indicate a continued state. of activity, without an outbreak from the crater, much as in the Halemaumau of the volcano Kilauea. It is curious that in Yucatan the Mayas sacrificed maidens to water by casting them into the sacred well or Cenote of Chichen Itza; and a similar sacrifice has been made at Ilopango in modern times. In 1772 the next real eruption took place, and in 1858 another slight one. The cone is directly over the Lake of Masaya, the only source of water in that dry land; and its ejections are encroaching upon the area of the lake. But I will put the eruptions in a tabular form for convenience : 1 Brasseur de Bourbourg, ii. 44. I do not propose to weary my readers with a list of the three hundred earthquakes that have been thought severe enough to be recorded; but a picture of Central America would be unrecognizable without some color of the natural disturbances that are inseparably connected in the popular mind with this part of the continent. In 1541 the capital of the kingdom of Guatemala, now Ciudad Vieja, was a young and flourishing city. Founded in July, 1524, between the mountains Agua and Fuego, in the place called Almolonga ("water-fountain "), with the proud title of "City of Saint James of the Knights of Guatemala," it had grown to a respectable size, in spite of numerous misfortunes, to which Juarros devotes an entire chapter of his "Compendio." An earthquake in 1526, so severe, says Bernal Diaz del Castillo, that men could not stand, seems to have frightened the population less than did an enormous lion (puma ?) which descended the forestclad slopes of Agua in 1532 and made great havoc, until a reward of twenty-five gold dollars and a hundred fanegas |
