After months of preparation, Friar Blas del Castillo could put it off no longer. On 13 April 1538, he tied his habit tightly round himself, crossed his stole over his chest and jammed a metal helmet on his head. Equipped with only a hammer, a flask of wine and a wooden cross, he climbed into the waiting basket and prayed as his three companions lowered him into the crater of one of Nicaragua’s most active volcanoes. The local people believed the volcano was a goddess; the Spanish conquistadores thought it was the gateway to hell. But the intrepid monk was convinced the strange lake at the bottom of the crater was filled with liquid gold.
FRIAR Blas del Castillo knew that going into the crater of an active volcano was dangerous. He didn’t know much about volcanoes and nothing at all about lava lakes, but he had looked over the crater’s edge. He had seen the red glow, the smoking fissures and the spitting, bubbling lake of fire. He had smelled the sulphurous gases. And, as if all that wasn’t disturbing enough, he had heard the stories.
Spanish forces had marched into Nicaragua in 1522. Two years later, the short, squat mountain they called Masaya erupted. The volcano, one of the strangest and most active in Nicaragua, had been the subject of both fear and fascination ever since. It had twin craters, one of which contained a permanent lava lake. At night, the mountain lit up as incandescent smoke poured from the summit. Gases came hissing from cracks in the mountainside. Those who dared to peer over the crater’s edge saw red-hot lava, sometimes heaving gently, sometimes boiling, and frequently erupting into fiery fountains.
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The Spaniards learned that the Indians thought the volcano was a goddess and made human sacrifices to her. Local chiefs, it was said, sought advice from an ugly old sorceress who lived in the volcano. Unfamiliar with volcanoes, and convinced the sorceress was the devil, the conquistadores concluded that the fiery lake was the mouth of hell.
So pervasive was the belief that in 1529 Friar Francisco de Bobadilla planted a cross on the mountain overlooking the lava lake to exorcise the devil. That same year, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdéz, one of Spain’s most famous chroniclers, climbed the mountain “to see the fire”. At the top he found an abyss “so big and round that no shotgun would in my opinion reach from one side to the other”. On the crater’s south side was a pit where the floor had collapsed. “At the bottom of that hole there was a fire that was liquid as water and that matter was burning more fiercely than red-hot coal and more ardent in colour; burning more than any fire can ever burn, if that is possible.”
Blas knew all this, but he had also heard rumours that the pool contained gold. He had looked into the crater and seen bright crusts that looked like melted silver, and a seam of yellow that shone like gold. For such riches, he was willing to risk the heat and the gas – and perhaps even a brush with the devil.
“For such riches the friar was willing to risk a brush with the devil”
The friar studied the crater for months, then secretly ferried up the gear he would need for a trip into the crater to collect samples. On 13 April 1538, three men lowered him down to the crater floor in a basket. When he reached the bottom, he climbed out, kissed the cindery ground and set about hammering lumps off the shiny crusts and yellow seam. The lake, he decided, was too dangerous to sample without help, and after three hours in the crater he asked his men to haul him out.
Three days later, the friar and his men were back. This time they all clambered into the crater, and rigged up a system of pulleys that would allow them to lower a cauldron into the lake. When the pot touched the lava, it stuck. With an enormous effort, the men pulled it free, retrieving a small amount of molten lava and a few glowing cinders. A third expedition with four more men produced a few extra lumps of half-melted lava before the cauldron stuck fast and the chain broke. Analysis of the samples found only worthless black stone.
On the face of it, the story of Blas del Castillo and his search for gold is a simple parable of greed. For José Viramonte, a volcanologist at Salta National University in Argentina, and Jaime Incer-Barquero, geographer, historian and former Nicaraguan environment minister, the friar’s report of what he saw contains a wealth of useful detail about the volcano’s past activity (Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, ).
Masaya is one of a string of volcanoes that stretches from Guatemala in the north to Costa Rica in the south. This particular volcano is unusual in that it consists of a nested series of cones and craters clustered in the middle of a vast caldera, itself created by a catastrophic eruption thousands of years ago. In the 16th century, there were two active craters, one confusingly called Masaya, the other Nindiri. Today, both are extinct and the volcano’s activity centres on a newer crater called Santiago. Volcanologists can infer a volcano’s eruptive history by mapping and dating the many lava flows and explosive deposits. But, as Viramonte and Incer-Barquero point out, it’s hard to beat eyewitness accounts with precise dates, and the early colonists’ fascination with the volcano meant they left plenty of them. Viramonte and Incer-Barquero have now translated some of these accounts from the original Old Spanish, and found that leaving aside discussions of deities and devils, they are impressively accurate. “Oviedo and Blas del Castillo left extremely detailed accounts. Their descriptions are amazing,” says Viramonte. Oviedo also left a helpful sketch showing Masaya’s twin craters.
It’s clear from Oviedo’s account that the lava lake was in the Nindiri crater. Some observers recorded the changing shape and size of the vent while others measured the depth of the crater and the size and position of the lava lake. From these details it’s apparent that the lake wasn’t always in the same part of the crater and that its level varied enormously. In 1670, lava rose to the top of the crater and overflowed, at which point the bottom of the crater collapsed and the lake vanished altogether.
The last recorded eruption from the Masaya crater was in 1772, when lava flowed non-stop for eight days. Famously, the local bishop headed up the mountain bearing an image of the Christ of Nindiri and ordered the lava to stop. It did. In 1853, after another collapse, the Santiago crater began to form. It has been extremely active ever since.
So what must it have been like to climb into the “Mouth of Hell”? Ken Sims, a volcanologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has a good idea. He travels the world collecting samples of gas from volcanoes, and has climbed into the Santiago crater five times. Although it has no permanent lava lake, it has much in common with the Nindiri crater of the 16th century: it’s hot, constantly belches out choking gases, and could spew out hot rock and ash at any time. Unlike the monk and his men, Sims is an experienced climber, has state-of-the-art equipment and only enters volcanoes that are constantly monitored for signs of activity.
The Nindiri crater was probably never so deep, nor its walls so sheer, says Sims, but the crater’s edge would have been just as unstable and prone to collapses. Once on the crater floor, Blas would have been in danger from falling rocks and gas, and there was always the risk of being hit by a fountain of molten lava. “Messing about with a lava lake – that’s impressive,” says Sims. “A lava lake degasses phenomenally and the fumes are horrible. They burn your eyes and if you aren’t wearing a mask can cause respiratory problems.”
What did he think of the Friar’s sampling methods? “Dunking a bucket in a pool of lava? I’d say it was insane,” says Sims. But then he admits he has tried it himself. “During an expedition to Mount Etna a colleague wanted some lava samples but we had no protective fireman suits or probes – so we went off to a hardware store and bought a bucket and some chain. I got the job of throwing the bucket in.” When the lava is viscous, as it is at Etna and Masaya, it’s like fishing for boulders embedded in glue. “Our bucket just bounced off the surface. We tried a few times then gave up.”
After reading Blas’s original account of his adventure, Viramonte has nothing but admiration for the man who unwittingly became America’s first volcanologist: “Given the technology of the time, what he did was a real feat – on a par with landing men on the moon in the 20th century.”
