SCENE AT CHARLESTON.
gases may be discharged in districts remote from any volcanic region. In some instances, we are informed that immediately after severe shocks, the streams and vegetation have proved poisonous to cattle. There were light shocks felt in 1732, 1737 and 1744; but none of these are said to have done any damage beyond throwing down a few stone walls. Thus we find within a century fourteen earthquake periods in New England alone; and in several cases the shocks were numerous, extending over a period of several months. Comparing the small area with the whole region, and remembering that shocks are more frequent in the central, southern and western portions of the country, it is fair to conclude that the merest tithe of those actually occurring could have come under the notice of our ancestors.
The most violent shock ever known in New England came eighteen days after the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, preceded by a peculiar, rumbling roar. Then came a “rapid, jarring, vibrating motion,” with an upward shock: then a “violent, prodigious shock, as suddenly, to all appearances as a thunderclap breaking upon a house and attended by a great noise.” Then followed a series of “quick and violent concussions, jerks and wrenches, attended by an undulating, waving motion of the whole surface of the ground, not unlike the shaking and quaking of a large bog.”
Several writers give a graphic account of the behavior of the good people of Boston at this juncture. The shock came at a little past four in the morning. Some sprang from their beds and ran into the street; some lay shivering with fear, not daring to rise; others rushed to the windows, and, seeing in the gloom their unclad neighbors rushing about the streets, shrieked aloud that the judgment day was at hand. Others thought that they heard Gabriel’s horn, and fell on their knees, crying for mercy, or fainted away. The boldest feared the crash of tottering houses; children ran about crying for their parents; dogs howled dismally; birds flew aloft with frightened cries; cattle bellowed with fear as they dashed about their pens. Screaming horses struggled in their stalls. Numbers of fish were killed by the shock. Changes were wrought in springs and streams, after the manner of 1727.
The damage done was not so great as might have been expected from the unusual alarm shown. A large number of chimneys in Boston were thrown down; clocks were stopped; a new vane was broken from the market house, the spindle being snapped at a place where it was five inches thick; but we are not told of any serious loss of life or property. The shock extended southward, and was plainly felt along the east side of the Chesapeake, but not on the western shore. The sea wave set in motion travelled southward, and it is supposed to have occasioned the unusual commotion of the water in the West Indies. At St. Martin’s the sea suddenly fell five feet below its level, and then rose six above.
The time of the shock was determined exactly by an accident. Prof. Winthrop, of Cambridge, had placed a long glass tube in his tall clock, as a safe place. This tube, thrown against the pendulum, stopped the clock, which the day before had been adjusted to meridianal noon; and as Prof. Winthrop had compared his watch and clock the night before, he was able to show that the shocks began at eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds after four A.M., November 18, and continued about four and a half minutes.
Eighteen periods of earthquakes are noted in the next fifty-five years; and at one of these, in 1791, nearly one hundred and fifty shocks were felt.