bounds; and a mountain was torn from Libanus and cast into the waves, where it protected, as a mole, the new harbor of Botrys in Phoenicia. At Antioch its multitudes were swelled by the conflux of strangers to the festival of the Ascension, and 250,000 persons are said to have perished." To the many who-unsatisfied with any briefer manual-study at once both facts and language in the pages of Gibbon, I ought to apologize, perhaps, for having made extracts so long from a work so easily accessible. As we approach nearer to our own times, these convulsions continue frequent; and the discovery of America opens a new source of materials to swell the mournful history. It would be a painful and useless task to trace them in all their details. The disappearance of entire cities was not an unusual occurrence, and as many as 40,000 persons have perished at once. Sea-ports have been swallowed up by the advancing waters, and the whole of their population drowned. In China, too, the records of these calamities carry us back to 1333; when there was a succession of shocks which continued for ten years; destroying its capital, and multitudes of its crowded population. If I had to refer to sources of more ample information, I should say-as may easily be anticipated that the best history of these phenomena, and the most philosophical views as to their effects, with which I am acquainted, are to be found in the works of Sir Charles Lyell. Few, however, of the events he mentions throw any new light upon their causes, and I shall merely notice-from these and several other authorities-such of them as were attended with the most remarkable circumstances. In 1759 there were destructive earthquakes in Syria; and at Balbec alone, 20,000 persons are said to have perished. In 1783, Guatimala, with all its riches, and 8000 families, was swallowed up; and every vestige of its former existence obliterated. The shocks felt in Calabria in the same year continued to the end of 1786, and extended over an area of 500 square miles. Deep fissures were produced; houses engulfed; new lakes formed; buildings moved entire to considerable distances; 40,000 persons perished at the time; and 20,000 more died from various consequences. A fourth of the inhabitants of some of the towns were buried alive. For some instants their voices were heard and recognized, but there was no means of saving them. The earthquakes of Chili, in 1835, are chiefly noticeable from their having occurred during the voyage of the Beagle, and from their phenomena having thus been observed more scientifically than usual. But their more obvious effects in the destruction of entire towns; in the appearance of valuable merchandise, fragments of buildings, and articles of furniture (which had been carried away by the advancing and retiring waters) still floating along the coast;-and in the sad sight of structures, the labor of generations, crumbled in a moment into dust,-are also ably and strikingly described. Shortly after the shock, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onwards with irresistible force." There were some incidents worthy of remark attendant upon an earthquake which took place in Antigua in 1843. Owing to its having occurred early in the forenoon, when few people were in the houses, there was very little loss of life; but the destruction of property has rarely been more extensive. There was scarcely a building on the island that was not thrown down or seriously injured. Of 172 sugar-mills, only 23 remained capable of being worked; and of these, not half had escaped damage. The walls of the cathedral (which was large enough to contain 1800 persons) fell, in crumbling masses; and the roof, which still held together, rested upon them like a huge cover. In the open country, trees were seen to rise and descend vertically, several times, during the continuance of the vibrations. Many of these convulsions, and in various parts of the world, have produced extensive and permanent changes of surface. This was particularly the case, more than once, during the first half of the present century, in different parts of Chili. At Valparaiso two entire streets were constructed on what was before the bottom of the sea; and the permanent alteration of level is conjectured to have extended over 100,000 square miles. The writer from whom I have before quoted thinks that the effects of these changes are eminently beneficial; and that they constitute an essential part of that mechanism by which the integrity of the habitable surface of the world is preserved, and the very existence and perpetuation of dry land secured. But, after all that has since occurred, the most popularly-remembered of such events are still the earthquakes at Jamaica, in 1692, when its loftiest mountains were torn asun der, and its finest harbor sunk, in a moment, into the sea;-those in Sicily, the following year, when Catania and 140 other towns and villages, with upwards of 100,000 persons, were destroyed; the fearful calamity at Lisbon in 1755, when 60,000 persons perished in about six minutes; and when many of the survivors would have perished also, but for the timely aid of British charity; and, lastly, the earthquakes which preceded the eruption of the Souffrière at St. Vincent in 1812. It is because I myself witnessed some of the phenomena connected with these events, and because there were atmospheric circumstances, not very dissimilar from those attendant upon the slight shocks which were not long since felt in England, that I have been induced to gather my recollections upon the subject, and to mix them up with the contents of my note-books. A were within its course in instant destruction. Proceeding up the harbor, the first object it struck was the flag-staff of one of the forts, which could have offered little surface of resistance, though of more than ordinary strength and thickness. This was snapped in a moment; and, with equal ease, houses of considerable size were not merely unroofed or injured, but completely overthrown, like the playthings of an infant. Large beams of wood, and masses of lead and iron, were carried for several hundred yards, and nearly buried in the walls of other buildings; yet so confined was its operation to a particular current, that corners and parts of houses were taken off, as cleanly as if divided by some mechanical instrument, and the remainder of the buildings were left uninjured. About twenty lives were lost, some of them under remarkable circumstances. A lady was, with her sister, on a bed in an upper I was then residing on the southern coast apartment when the tornado was approachof North America. The close of the pre-ing. The noise so alarmed a negro girl, her vious year was accompanied, in those cli- attendant, that she sought refuge under the mates, by some remarkable phenomena. We bed upon which her mistress was lying. may pass over the appearance of a comet, stack of chimneys that had been struck, falland an eclipse of the sun, as merely coinci- ing upon the roof, forced its way through dent, and witnessed in common with other the house to the ground, precipitating the countries. In addition to these, the small floors along with it. The bed fell with island where I was staying was completely them; the ladies (who were nearest the falldeluged by one of those inundations of the ing roof) escaped without injury; but the sea that occasionally occur in tropical climates negro girl beneath was crushed to death. In about the time of the autumnal equinox; another instance, a young female, who was and, excepting a space considerably less than attending her dying mother, was carried by a quarter of a mile, the wide waters of the the hurricane from the room in which she Atlantic, and the mainland at some distance, sat, and dashed against a building at a very were the only objects on which the eye could considerable distance; the bed of the invalid rest. This inundation had scarcely subsided, remaining in its place. In the interval bewhen the city of Charleston (my next place tween this calamity and the concussions of of sojourn) was visited by a tornado more the earth, (the first of which occurred on the dreadful in its extent and effects than any in 16th of December,) various meteors and the memory of the inhabitants. The wind, balls of fire of different sizes and appearances which had been for some days light and va- were observed. One of them, of a magniriable, had shifted on the 8th to the north- tude calculated to excite alarm, was seen by east; and, blowing very fresh through the spectators who were a hundred miles asunnight, it continued in the same quarter all der on the evening of the 21st of November, the day and night of the 9th. During the moving with great rapidity in a south-west whole of this time there was an almost unin- direction. It illuminated the ground and terrupted fall of rain; and on the morning the surface of the waters, as if a torch of of the 10th the wind blew with increased burning matter had been passing over them, violence. About ten o'clock it shifted to the and was conjectured (though it must have south-east, and soon after twelve it suddenly been vaguely) to have been about ten or fifbecame calm. A heavy rumbling noise, re- teen feet in diameter. The season was unusembling the sound of a carriage rapidly sually warm. Large apples, the produce of driven over a pavement, was then heard, and second crops, were seen in November; and a tornado, extending only about one hundred on several plantations there were second yards in width, passed like lightning through crops of rice, which had not occurred for a considerable section of the city, involving forty years. It may also be remarked, that alike the habitations and inhabitants that there was considerably less thunder during the year 1811 than usual; the number of were frequent and unusual. The shock of days, which commonly, in those climates, av- the 7th of February was attended by a noise erages sixty, having only amounted to thirty-like distant thunder, and that of the same eight. Sir Charles Lyell considers many of these phenomena (Fire from beneath, and meteors from above) as, generally, the accompaniments of the convulsions which followed. On the morning of the 16th of December, about three o'clock, the first shock of earthquake was felt. It awoke me, and was said to have been preceded by the usual rattling noise. Being unapprehensive of such an event, my first impression was that the house was falling, and the cracking of its timbers strengthened me in this impression, When I had reached the ground-floor, however, (and the noise having subsided,) I began to be doubtful how far I might be under the influence of some mental delusion; and, returning to my bed, I found it rocking from the effect of a second shock; and a third and fourth, a few minutes before and after eight o'clock, left me perfectly certain as to the cause of what had occurred. From this time to the 11th of February fourteen distinct shocks were felt, their duration from twenty seconds to two minutes; with one exception, when the tremor did not entirely subside for seven minutes. evening was accompanied by a sound like the rushing of a violent wind, and with some sharp flashes of lightning... " The thermometer at eight o'clock on the evening of the 15th of December was 52 deg., and the barometer 30 deg. 45 min. The following morning, when the first shock took place, the barometer continued the same, but the thermometer had sunk to 46 deg. The last of these awful visitations was a slight tremor on the day following the more distant and fatal calamities, to which I am now about to refer. In our case they passed away without sa single instance of serious personal injury, or of destruction of property; but, unaccustomed as the inhabitants had been to any thing of a similar nature-for there was no well-authenticated account of an earthquake having been felt in this part of America since its first discovery-the consternation and alarm were very considerable. A proclamation was issued by the Governor of the State, appointing the 11th of March as a day of humiliation, religious reflection, and prayer; and a tone of seriousness and pious feeling was for a long time perceptible where it had previously seldom existed. The phenomena which I have been attempting to describe were experienced, in a greater or less degree, from the shores of the Carolinas to the valley of the Mississippi, during the three months which preceded the destructive, earthquakes in Venezuela, and which were followed by the eruption of the Souffrière in St. Vincent. On the 26th of March the earthquakes in Venezuela commenced with a severe shock, which destroyed, in little more than a minute, the city of Caraccas, together with the town of Laguayra and the neighboring villages, and 20,000 persons either perished with them or were left to a lingering death amongst their ruins, The motion was generally from east to west; but it was not uniform. In December it appeared to be undulating; in January violent and irregular; and in February it seemed similar to a sudden jerking to and fro of the earth's surface. As far as our observations extend, vertical movements on such occasions appear to be less destructive than horizontal; and if this (says Lyell) should generally be the case, the greatest alteration of level may be produced with the least injury to cities or existing formations. Even between the concussions which I have been describing, a tremor was frequently perceptible, and light pendulous bodies were. then in a state of continued vibration. The motion during the severer shocks was suffi I have not adverted to the horrors attendciently violent to break the glasses in picture-ing the earthquake at Lisbon. They were frames hanging against the wall, and the repeated at the destruction of Caraccas; and pavements in several of the streets were we need not dwell more than once on details cracked. Many persons, also, found it diffi- so painful. cult to preserve themselves from being thrown down; and the guard stationed in one of the church steeples to look out for fires, gave notice to the men below that it was falling. The sky was generally, though not uniformly, dark and hazy, sometimes tinged with red, and the atmospheric changes a For those which follow, I am indebted to distinguished traveller who had visited Caraccas before its ruin, and had afterwards carefully collected and compared the descriptions given by persons who had witnessed the fearful event. "The air," he says, "was calm, and the sky unclouded. It was Holy Thursday, and a great part of the population was assembled in the churches. Nothing seemed to presage the calamities of the day. At seven minutes after four in the afternoon the first shock was felt; it was sufficiently powerful to make the bells of the churches toll; it lasted five or six seconds, during which time the ground was in a continued undulating movement, and seemed to heave up like a boiling liquid. The danger was thought to be past, when a tremendous subterraneous noise was heard, resembling the rolling of thunder, but louder and of longer continuance than that heard within the tropics in time of storms. This noise preceded a perpendicular motion of three or four seconds, followed by an undulatory movement somewhat longer. The shocks were in opposite. directions, from north to south, and from east to west. Nothing could resist the movement from beneath upward, and the undulations crossing each other. The town of Caraccas was entirely overthrown. Between 9000 and 10,000 of the inhabitants were buried under the ruins of the houses and churches. The procession (usual on Holy Thursday) had not yet set out; but the crowds were so great in the churches that 3000 or 4000 persons were crushed by the fall of their vaulted roofs. Some of these edifices, more than 150 feet high, sunk with their pillars and columns into a mass of ruins scarcely exceeding five or six feet in elevation, and ultimately left scarcely any vestige of their remains. A regiment under arms to join the procession was buried under the fall of its barracks. Nine-tenths of the town were entirely destroyed. All the calamities experienced in the great catastrophes of Lisbon, Messina, Lima, and Riobamba, were renewed on this fatal day. The wounded, buried under the ruins, implored by their cries the help of the passers-by, and nearly 2000 were dug out. "Implements for digging and clearing away the wreck were entirely wanting; and the people were obliged to use their bare hands to disinter the living. The wounded, as well as the sick patients who had escaped from the hospitals, were laid on the banks of the small river Guayra. They had no shelter but the trees. "Beds, linen to dress wounds, instruments of surgery, medicines, and objects of the most urgent necessity, were buried under the ruins. Every thing, even food, was, for the first days, wanting. Water was alike scarce. The commotion had rent the pipes of the fountains; the falling of the earth had choked up the springs that supplied them; and it became necessary, in order to have water, to go down to the river Guayra, which was considerably swollen; and even then the vessels to convey it were wanting." An eye-witness, from whom I obtained an account at the time, said, "Those who were living were employed in digging out the dead, putting them in lighters, and burying them in the sea. When it became so rough as to prevent them being taken off, they made a large fire, and began burning forty at a time. It was shocking,' " he said, the close of day, to see heads, arms, and legs, that had remained unburnt, as the fire died away; and the effluvia was intolerable." "at The moral and religious effect of these calamities (as described by Humboldt) was rather curious. Some, assembling in procession, sang funeral hymns; others, in a state of distraction, confessed themselves aloud in the streets; marriages were contracted between parties by whom the priestly benediction had been previously disregarded, and children found themselves suddenly acknowledged by parents to whom they had never before been aware of their relationship; restitutions were promised by persons who were hitherto unsuspected of fraud; and those who had long been at enmity were drawn together by the ties of a common calamity. I am afraid that the virtue which had no purer origin would not be of long duration. The effect upon men's minds during one of the most destructive of the earthquakes in Sicily was of a very opposite description. Amongst the poor wretches who had there escaped, the distinctions of rank and the restraints of law were disregarded; and murder, rapine, and licentiousness reigned amongst the smoking ruins; and yet the kind of religion was in both countries the same, and the habits of the people were not widely different. At the town of Concepcion, in Chili, in 1835, Mr. Darwin tells us of a more mixed feeling. "Thieves prowled about, and at each little trembling of the ground, (after the fatal shock,) with one hand they beat their breasts and cried 'Misericordia!' and then with the other filched what they could from the ruins." Fifteen or eighteen hours after the great catastrophe at Caraccas, the ground remained tranquil. The night was fine and calm, and the peaceful serenity of the sky contrasted strangely with the misery and destruction public square and threw out volumes of smoke. Cumana, on the Spanish Main, was destroyed, and 4000 persons perished amidst all the horrors attendant upon similar events. And, in Greece, the town of Thebes and its neighboring villages became heaps of ruins; the springs which supplied them with water were stopped; and the inhabitants, struggling both with privation and disease, were in a miserable state of suffering. which lay beneath. Commotions attended | in Mexico, the principal buildings were with a loud and long-continued subterranean thrown down, and the ground opened in the noise were afterwards frequent, and one of them was almost as violent as that which had overthrown the capital. The inhabitants wandered into the country; but the villages and farms having suffered as much as the town itself, they found no shelter till they had passed the mountains and were in the valleys beyond them. Towards the close of the following month, the eruption of the Souffrière in the island of St. Vincent took place; and the explosions were heard on the neighboring continent, at a distance, in a direct line, of 210 leagues, and over a space of 4000. At the time of the earthquake at Lisbon, shocks were felt in other parts of Portugal, in Spain, and Northern Africa; and its effects were perceptible over a considerable part of Europe, and even in the West Indies. Two of our Scottish lakes (as we have all often read) rose and fell repeatedly on that fatal day; and ships at sea were affected as if they had struck on rocks, the crews in some instances being thrown down by the concussion. I am not aware of any volcanic eruption in the same year; but the great Mexican volcano of Jorullo was then accumulating its subterranean fires; and its first eruption was in 1759. Judging from the past, we might have presumed that the movements which have been recently felt in England were not the effects, but the indications which precede some similar explosion. So far (early in 1854) no such event appears to have occurred; but there have been earthquakes of considerable extent, and of a very serious character. Soon after the shocks which were felt in England, there were violent ones in some of the islands of the Indian Archipelago. An earthquake at Shiraz is said to have involved the entire destruction of the place and of its inhabitants. At Acapulco, I In our own favored land, exempt by the blessing of Heaven from so many calamities which are felt elsewhere, earthquakes have never caused destruction of property or life. Mr. Darwin speaks, with almost ludicrous exaggeration, of the disastrous consequences that would follow "if, beneath England, the now inert subterranean forces should exert those powers which most assuredly in former geological ages they have exerted." National bankruptcy-the destruction of all public buildings and records-taxes unpaid the subversion of the government-rapine, pestilence, and famine-are to follow the first shock; but judging from the fact that, during the last 800 years, fifty shocks, at least, have been harmlessly felt, we may hope, without presumption, that we have as little to apprehend hereafter as we have previously suffered. Even with reference to their most disastrous consequences in other portions of the globe, if we compare them with the various sources of human misery, we shall agree with the historian whom I have already quoted, that "the mischievous effects of an earthquake, or deluge, a hurricane, or the eruption of a volcano, bear a very inconsiderable proportion to the ordinary calamities of war," [or to the horrors of religious persecution;] and that man "has much less to fear from the convulsions of the elements than from the passions of his fellowcreatures." |