Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History

by Allen Howard Godbey

There was a time when men stood aghast at small-pox, cholera, yellow fever, and many similar calamities, and spoke with bated breath of the “mysterious visitations of providence,” the “scourge of God,” and so on. When the Turks once besieged a plague-stricken city, a comet appeared in the sky. The pious inhabitants prayed “O Lord, deliver us from the devil, the Turk and the comet,” and usually such people believed such plagues were the judgment of God on them for their sins. Modern science holds that about the only sin the Lord punishes in that way is the sin of filthy streets, or back-door cess-pools. When man has once learned the means of control and prevention, evils lose their mysterious witchery.

On the other hand, let the laws of any force in nature be every so well understood: yet, so long as they are beyond the control of man, they will retain for him an eerie uncanny fascination. The pigmy has harnessed the steam and chained the lightning: but when the storm clouds lower and the forests moan, the sea roars and the lightning glows, he stands in fear and awe before a power whose might he but vaguely comprehends. He may know of the winds, whence and whither bound; but when the Stygian darkness has passed on, leaving wreck and ruin, want and woe, desolation and despair, shattered homes and hopes, and bleeding hearts, this knowledge of law is, for the nonce, forgotten, and the hurricane is transformed, in his disordered vision, into a demon of wrath, or caprice; or he speaks, hesitatingly it may be, of the mysterious dispensation of an inscrutable providence. But in the mighty wind, as in the soughing breeze, there is only obedience to universal law. But when the Author of law displays his power, man’s instinct, however unwilling his reason, acknowledges a God.

CHAPTER V.
THE LOUISVILLE TORNADO.

“At eve along the calm resplendent west
I marked a cloud alive with fairy light,
So warmly pure, so sweetly, richly bright,
It seemed a spirit of ether, floating blest,
In its own happy empire! While possest
With admiration of the marvelous light,
Slowly its hues, opal and chrysolite,
Waned on the shadowy gloaming’s phantom breast.
The cloud became a terror, whose dark womb,
Throbbed with keen lightnings, by destruction hurled,
Red bolt on bolt, while a drear ominous gloom
Enveloped Nature: o’er the startled world—
A deep alarum—burst the thunder boom
And the swift Storm his coal-black wings unfurled!”

HERE is a perspective of news as well as of art, which requires that such features in a view as are supposed to be nearest to the observer must be given larger detail. It is a natural consequence of the fact that a small object near by may conceal from view a mountain in the distance.

So in the news world a dog run over on Washington avenue takes rank with a wreck in the Indian Ocean. A fight in a neighboring saloon gets ten inches: a strike in Germany ten lines. Your neighbor’s new barn is a good item for the county paper whose editor cares nothing for the new bank in Boston. The Widow Jones gets a puff for whitewashing her fence; the refitting of the White House gets a line. A million of people who have heard of George Washington, never heard of Alfred the Great.

Now, not a few will think that there is injustice in this. Doubtless the tendency of the time is to exaggerate perspective to obtain startling effects. Caricature is characteristic of the age. And yet, there was never before a time when so many people took interest in things that lay beyond their own narrow circle; even if that interest be from mere curiosity.

Sometimes this self-centered condition of humanity has an amusing aspect: as if one should imagine the earth terminated with his own apparent horizon. Some South Sea Islanders called the first white men who visited them, “sky-breakers.” The reason is simple. Dwelling on their little islets, mere specks in the deep, and in all their myths and legends having no account of any other race, they supposed themselves to be the only people in the world. Their sky was a vast wall of blue stones raised by one of their mythical heroes. It shut in the world and could not be far away, though none of them had endeavored to reach it. So these strange white creatures were not of this world; neither were they of the race of the gods; they came from no one knew where, and had somehow broken through the blue wall that bounded the world. And white men are in some islands called “sky-breakers” to this day.

Something of the same spirit is manifested by the Chinese. The devil of their mythology is white. So our occidental sensibilities received quite a shock when we learned that we were “foreign devils.” The Japanese more considerately called us “foreign beasts,” as though uncertain of our status in the animal kingdom. And to this day our magnificent vessels are gravely styled “devil ships” by the Chinese.