OCR Text |
Show 446 EAR1'HQU.AI\:E OF JAMAICA, A.D. 1692. heaved like a rolling sea, and was traversed by numerous cracks, two or three hundred of which were often seen at a time opening and then closing rapidly again. Many people were swallowed up in these rents; some the earth caught by the middle and squeezed to death; the heads of others only appeared above ground, and some were first engulphed and then cast up again with great quantities of water. Such was the devastation, that even at Port Royal, then the capital, where more houses are said to have been left standing than in the whole island beside, three quarters of the buildings, together with the ground they stood on, sank down with their inhabitants entirely under water. The large store-houses on the harbour side subsided, so as to be twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight feet under water ; yet many of them appeared to have remained standing, for it is stated that, after the earthquake, the mastheads of several ships wrecked in the harbour, together with the chimney-tops of houses, were seen just projecting above the waves. A tract of land round the town, about a thousand acres in extent, sank down in less than one minute, during the first shock, and the sea immediately rolled in. The Swan frigate, which was repairing in the wharf, was driven over the tops of many buildings, and then thrown upon one of the roofs, through which it broke. The breadth of one of the streets is said to have been doubled by the earthquake. At several thousand places in Jamaica the earth is related to have opened. On the north of the island several plantations, with their inhabitants, were swallowed up, and a lake appeared in their place, covering above a thousand acres, which afterwards dried up, leaving nothing but sand and gravel, without the least sign that there had ever been a house or tree there. Several tenements at Yallowes were buried under landslips; and one plantation was removed half a mile from its place, t?e crops continuing to grow upon it uninjured. Between Spamsh town and Sixteen-mile-walk the high and perpendicular cliffs bounding the river fell in, stopped the passage of the river, and flooded the latter place for nine days, so that the people ''concluded it had been sunk as Port Royal was." But the flood at length subsided, for the river had found some new passage at a great distance. The Blue and other of the highest mountains are declared SUBSIDENCEs, FLOODs, ETC. 447 to have been strange} t tered and half-naked y lorn and rent. They appeared shat-as before, but strip~e~o o~n7~r.affording a fine green prospect, The rivers on these . etr woods and natural verdure. mountams nrst cc d fl .i!' twenty-four hours, and then brouo-h ase . to ow wr about Royal and other pl · e t down Into the sea at Port aces, several h u d . d h timber which looked like fl t' . 1 n re t ousand tons of trees were in general harkedo a mg tI s ands o.n th e ocean. 'I' h e been torn off in the descent ' ~~os. of t~eir branches having this, as in the narratives of ~0 Is pa~ICularly remarked in taken in great numbers on the~::~ ~art. qu~es, that fish were correspondents of Sir Hans Sloa~ urihng t lei shocks.. The t h e accounts of eye-wi.t nesses of teh, w o co ehct ed with ca re l b ·a e catastrop e, refer con stant y to su sz ences, and some supposed the h 1 f J . - to have sunk down*. w 0 eo amaiCa We have now only enumerated the earthquakes of the last hundred and forty years respectino- h. h .i!' • • of geo Io gi·C a 1 m· qm.n .e s arc ' on record o wE Ic , "ft acts Il. lu.s trative · d · . · ven I our hmits per-m1tte ' It would be a tedious and unprofitabl t l t . al l th e ob scurc an d amb1. o-uous narrati'v f e . as. < o examme l. 5 es o simi 1a r events of ear 1er epochs, although, if the localitie . b 1 . s were now exammed y geo ogists well practised in the art f . t . monuments of physi.C al changes many ot mh e' rpretmg the 1 h . . . . ' evens w 1c1 ave hap-pened witlun the h1stoncal era mio·ht still b d t . d . . • , 5 e c ermme With preclSlon. 'l.hc reader must not imagine, that in our sketch ofth occurrences m the short period above alluded t 1 · e o, we lave gtven an. account of all, or even the greater part of the mutations whiCh the earth has undergone by the ao·cncy of bt ' e su erranean ~ovements. Thus, foi· example, the earthquake of Aleppo, 1? the present century, and of Syria in the middle of the elghteenth, would doubtless have afforded numerous pllen f t 1 · l · omena o ~r~a geo ~gtc~ Importance, had those catastrophes been de-scrtbed by scientific observers. The shocks in Syria in 1759, were protracted for three months, throughout a space of ten thou~and ~quare leagues, an area compared to which that of the Calabnan earthquake, of 1783, was insignificant. Accon, Saphat, Balbeck, Damascus, Sidon' Tripoli, and many other places, were alm?st c?tirely Ie:eJled to the ground. Many thousands of the mhab1tants perished in each, and in the valley "' Phil, Trans., 1694. |