London and New York
The Ruins of the Magnificent City Hall of San Francisco
The great earthquake of 1906 caused this destruction. Some of the distortive effects of an earthquake movement can be perceived.
But if the San Francisco earthquake of April 18th, 1906, was not of itself a very great earthquake, it brought about an enormous amount of damage. The heavy shocks came without warning at about five o'clock in the morning of April 18th. They lasted about a minute, and then went off into lighter quakes, which were felt till evening, and for many days after, gradually growing smaller and smaller. The loss of life, though great, was but a tenth of what it would have been had the worst shocks come at a later hour when men were at their places of business and the children in school. As it was, the greatest loss was due to the fire which was started by the earthquake, and which was soon beyond control, because the water-main had been snapped by the earth movement. The cause of the earthquake has been generally assigned to the slipping of the strata of California. Athwart the whole state runs a straight furrow, like an ancient earthquake crack of primeval times, which is about four hundred miles long, and the rocks about which are still liable to slip. As we have said, however, the Californian earthquake, though accompanied by great destruction of property, and by the characteristic accompaniments of fissures in the ground, and slight elevations and depressions of the country over a line sixty miles long, was not a very profound earthquake.
Rather a curious coincidence may be here noted. We have spoken of submarine earthquakes and volcanoes and of islands which are raised by something akin to volcanic action or earthquake action underneath the sea.
Some weeks after the Californian earthquake the officers and crew of the U.S. Fish Commission steamer Albatross, while on their way to investigate, with Professor Charles H. Gilbert, the fisheries of Japan, passed the group of islands known as the Bogoslofs, and to their astonishment perceived that a third island had been added to the other two. Professor Gilbert, in a letter concerning the first sight of the island, on May 28th, wrote: "When I saw the Bogoslofs in 1890 there were really two small islands about 1½ miles apart, one of them steaming and the other cooled off. This has been the condition for a number of years, so the hot one had received the name of Fire Island, the cold one, Castle Island. When they came in sight yesterday, we were astonished to find that Fire Island was no longer smoking, and that a very large third island had arisen half-way between the other two. It was made of jagged, rugged lava, and was giving off clouds of steam and smoke from any number of little craters scattered all over it. Around these craters the rocks were all crusted with yellow sulphur. The new cone, occupying much of the space between the two older ones, was somewhat higher than either, but was certainly far from 900 feet high—300 feet would be an extreme figure. There was no evidence of a central crater. The steam and fumes were given off most abundantly from cracks and fumaroles on the slopes. About these were heavy incrustations of sulphur. We saw no indications of boiling water, nor did we believe that landing would be impossible."
All three of these Bogoslof islands, which are about 120 miles south of the Pribyloff Islands, belonging to Russia in the Behring Sea, have risen above the waters hot and steaming in the last 150 years. The oldest Bogoslof, now called Castle Island, rose from the sea in 1796; and Kotzebue describes the first glimpse of it, as seen by a trader, named Krinkof, who had been forced to seek refuge from a storm on a neighbouring island. The birth of the volcanic islet was accompanied by an earthquake which shook the island where the trader had taken refuge, and by an outburst of fire with thunderous explosions. The island was said to emit fire for months afterwards, and for eight years afterwards the water round it was warm and its ashes unbearably hot. The eruption of 1883, in which the second Bogoslof, called Fire Island, was born, had no witnesses; but in September of that year great volumes of steam and smoke, accompanied by showers of ashes, were thrown out from the summit and through fissures in the sides and base, the bright reflections from the heated interior being visible at night. At the time of this eruption a severe earthquake was felt in the sea off Cape Mendocino, apparently in the line of the Californian furrow or rift.
The islands were visited in 1884 by the officers of the U.S. revenue cutter Corwin, and Lieutenant J. C. Cantwell and Surgeon H. W. Yemans made the ascent of New Bogoslof. Lieutenant Cantwell thus describes his experience in the Cruise of the Corwin:—
"The sides of New Bogoslof rise with a gentle slope to the crater. The ascent at first appears easy, but a thin layer of ashes, formed into a crust by the action of rain and moisture, is not strong enough to sustain a man's weight. At every step my feet crushed through the outer covering and I sank at first ankle deep, and later on knee deep, into a soft, almost impalpable dust, which arose in clouds and nearly suffocated me. As the summit was reached the heat of the ashes became unbearable.... On all sides of the cone there are openings through which steam escaped with more or less energy."
Seven years after that Drs. Merriam and Mendenhall, of the Behring Sea Seal Commission, found the newer island still smoking, steaming, and occasionally roaring like a giant steam escape. The older island had quite cooled, and had become a sheer cliff or hill of cold ashes, and was, and is, the home of countless sea birds, as well as of a small herd of sea lions. Captain Cook, in the eighteenth century, had passed by the neighbourhood of this island. This was eighteen years, however, before it was born, and he named a pillar of ash or rock which he found there Ship Rock. Ship Rock fell in ruins five years after the birth of Fire Island.