Simon Winchester on Volcanoes

You’ve chosen Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Well, I think we all read that as children and I was most particularly excited by it a couple of years ago when I was in Western Iceland researching a big book on the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to climb up the side of Snaefells Ness and look into what was, of course, the entry point for Verne’s explorers in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. So I did and I looked in and felt duly stimulated.

The book is a fantastic piece of science fiction – it’s basically about explorers who want to know what’s inside the earth and they go in via Snaefells Ness in Iceland and they find lakes and crystal caves and wonderful things and then, eventually, they are blown out back into Iceland by an enormous eruption. When it was written, in the mid-19th century, there was this debate between two groups of scientists arguing about the origins of the earth. The Neptunists believed that all rocks came about from the precipitation of sea water. The Plutonists believed that all rocks had been belched out from the middle of the earth. Jules Verne knew about this debate, of course, and rather sided with the Plutonists. So modern-day geologists can read it to see how fanciful and stupid people’s ideas about the earth were. Jules Verne got it completely wrong. It’s fun but foolish.

The Last Days of Pompeii by George Bulwer-Lytton.

This is an amazing book. It’s very Victorian and very pompous but absolutely accurate. It was written in 1835 and is a scrupulously well-researched piece of work about what it must have been like in Pompeii in the days leading up to the eruption. He builds brilliantly to the eruption of Vesuvius itself and describes the panic and how so many people died. Most of the people who were rescued were rescued by a blind woman called Nydia, because, of course, the blind can see when things go dark better than the sighted. When there are blackouts in New York you get the blind leading the way.

Were they really rescued by Nydia?

No, that’s a fiction. It was a hugely popular book in the 19th century and perhaps it seems rather arch nowadays but it is very touching. It didn’t teach us much about the science of volcanoes but it taught us the aphorism that man lives on this planet subject to geological consent which can be withdrawn at any time. I think this book brought home to an English readership how capricious and powerful volcanoes are. He’d done a lot of research – there is good geology in it. He spoke to Charles Lyle, one of the founders of modern geology, and he told him all about what must have happened at Pompeii.

The Crater by James Fenimore Cooper.

This was also written in the mid-19th century and it’s an adventure story, a bit like Robinson Crusoe. A chap called Mark Woolston sails across the Pacific and is shipwrecked. He lands on an island surrounded by coral reefs and it turns out to be volcanic. He uses the volcano to store fresh water and provisions and then the volcano erupts, forms a new vulcan’s peak, and he survives the eruption and climbs to the top of the volcano from where he can see passing ships and he is saved. It’s a rollicking good adventure story but it also tells us something about the volcanic origins of coral atolls, something that Charles Darwin wrote about in the Voyage of the Beagle. It was written around the same time that Melville wrote Moby Dick and these books are all of a piece. Americans were writing about the natural world.

Are we fascinated by volcanoes because they are dangerous and unpredictable?

I think so. I think that’s the reason we visit them so much as tourists. Earthquakes are altogether different because there’s not as much to see, but a volcanic eruption is like a gigantic waterfall or a huge storm and it’s very attractive, a visible manifestation of the power of the earth. In all three of these books the volcano is almost a living creature that we love and admire. When I was writing my book about Krakatoa I grew very fond of it. I mean, it exploded and had a baby.