At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight.

The atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.
Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava entered the sea.

The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and drowning a number of natives.

The devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable.

Only a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the story of the irruption immortal..