[Daraga.] My Spanish friends enabled me to rent a house in Daraga,
[72] a well-to-do town of twenty thousand inhabitants at the foot
of the Mayon, a league and a half from Legaspi. The summit of this
volcano was considered inaccessible until two young Scotchmen, Paton
and Stewart by name, demonstrated the contrary. [73] Since then
several natives have ascended the mountain, but no Europeans.
[Ascent of Mayon.] I set out on September 25th, and passed the night,
by the advice of Señor Muños, in a hut one thousand feet above the
level of the sea, in order to begin the ascent the next morning with
unimpaired vigor. But a number of idlers who insisted on following
me, and who kept up a tremendous noise all night, frustrated the
purpose of this friendly advice; and I started about five in the
morning but little refreshed. The fiery glow I had noticed about the
crater disappeared with the dawn. The first few hundred feet of the
ascent were covered with a tall grass quite six feet high; and then
came a slope of a thousand feet or so of short grass succeeded by a
quantity of moss; but even this soon disappeared, and the whole of
the upper part of the mountain proved entirely barren. We reached
the summit about one o'clock. It was covered with fissures which
gave out sulphurous gases and steam in such profusion that we were
obliged to stop our mouths and nostrils with our handkerchiefs to
prevent ourselves from being suffocated. We came to a halt at the
edge of a broad and deep chasm, from which issued a particularly
dense vapor. Apparently we were on the brink of a crater, but the
thick fumes of the disagreeable vapor made it impossible for us to
guess at the breadth of the fissure. The absolute top of the volcano
consisted of a ridge, nearly ten feet thick, of solid masses of stone
covered with a crust of lava bleached by the action of the escaping
gas. Several irregular blocks of stone lying about us showed that the
peak had once been a little higher. When, now and again, the gusts
of wind made rifts in the vapor, we perceived on the northern corner
of the plateau several rocky columns at least a hundred feet high,
which had hitherto withstood both storm and eruption. I afterwards
had an opportunity of observing the summit from Daraga with a capital
telescope on a very clear day, when I noticed that the northern side
of the crater was considerably higher than its southern edge.
[The descent.] Our descent took some time. We had still two-thirds
of it beneath us when night overtook us. In the hope of reaching
the hut where we had left our provisions, we wandered about till
eleven o'clock, hungry and weary, and at last were obliged to wait
for daylight. This misfortune was owing not to our want of proper
precaution, but to the unreliability of the carriers. Two of them,
whom we had taken with us to carry water and refreshments, had
disappeared at the very first; and a third, "a very trustworthy
man," whom we had left to take care of our things at the hut, and
who had been ordered to meet us at dusk with torches, had bolted,
as I afterwards discovered, back to Daraga before noon. My servant,
too, who was carrying a woolen blanket and an umbrella for me,
suddenly vanished in the darkness as soon as it began to rain, and
though I repeatedly called him, never turned up again till the next
morning. We passed the wet night upon the bare rocks, where, as our
very thin clothes were perfectly wet through, we chilled till our
teeth chattered. As soon, however, as the sun rose we got so warm
that we soon recovered our tempers. Towards nine o'clock we reached
the hut and got something to eat after twenty-nine hours' fast.
[A suspicious medal.] In the Trabajos y Hechos Nolables de la
Soc. Econom. de los Amigos del Pais, for September 4th, 1823, it is
said that "Don Antonio Siguenza paid a visit to the volcano of Albay
on March 11th," and that the Society "ordered a medal to be struck in
commemoration of the event, and in honor of the aforesaid Siguenza and
his companions." Everybody in Albay, however, assured me that the two
Scotchmen were the first to reach the top of the mountain. It is true
that in the above notice the ascent of the volcano is not directly
mentioned; but the fact of the medal naturally leads us to suppose
that nothing less can be referred to. Arenas, in his memoir, says:
"Mayon was surveyed by Captain Siguenza. From the crater to the base,
which is nearly at the level of the sea, he found that it measured
sixteen hundred and eighty-two Spanish feet or four sixty-eight and
two-third meters." A little further on, he adds, that he had read
in the records of the Society that they had had a gold medal struck
in honor of Siguenza, who had made some investigations about the
volcano's crater in 1823. He, therefore, appears to have had some
doubt about Siguenza's actual ascent.
[An early friar attempt.] According to the Franciscan records a couple
of monks attempted the ascent in 1592, in order to cure the natives
of their superstitious belief about the mountain. One of them never
returned; but the other, although he did not reach the summit, being
stopped by three deep abysses, made a hundred converts to Christianity
by the mere relation of his adventures. He died in the same year,
in consequence, it is recorded, of the many variations of temperature
to which he was exposed in his ascent of the volcano.
[Estimates of height] Some books say that the mountain is of
considerable height; but the Estado Geografico of the Franciscans for
1855, where one could scarcely expect to find such a thoughtless
repetition of so gross a typographical error, says that the
measurements of Siguenza give the mountain a height of sixteen
hundred and eighty-two feet. According to my own barometrical reading,
the height of the summit above the level of the sea was twenty-three
hundred and seventy-four meters, or eighty-five hundred and fifty-nine
Spanish feet.