THE GREAT SEA WAVE REACHES CHILI.
This wave is doubtless surpassed only by the great wave set in motion by the convulsion of Krakatoa, mentioned in the chapter on volcanoes. It travelled to a distance of 10,500 miles from its starting point, at a speed of from 400 to 500 miles an hour, according to the direction. Yet it has had several strong rivals. Had the great wave of 1867, at the time of the earthquake at St. Thomas, been raised in the open sea, instead of in the comparatively shut in Caribbean, it might have travelled to an equal distance. The sea wave which followed the earthquake at Simoda, Japan, in 1854, completely wiped out that town, leaving only fragments of a temple-wall, and some wrecked vessels, two miles inland. Most of the people perished. Recoiling from the coast, the wave rolled in upon the shores of California, travelling 5,000 miles in twelve hours.
The terrible earthquake that ravaged Jamaica in 1692, produced a wave that swept thirty-three feet of water over the highest house in Port Royal, destroying 3,000 persons. An English frigate, the Swan, was deposited on the top of a large building, breaking in the roof. The waves of the Lisbon and Calabrian earthquakes have been noticed elsewhere.
This same district in Peru has suffered similarly several times. Callao, with the ground on which it was built, was swept away in 1746. Only fifteen of its people ever reached Lima, six miles inland. When the town was rebuilt, a second disaster of this sort nearly destroyed it. Iquique and Arequipa, in Peru, were again destroyed May 9, 1877; and a wave seventy feet high swept the coast, and recoiling reached Japan next day, travelling two hundred and eighteen yards per second.
The cases given illustrate well the stupendous power and destructiveness of vibrations in the earth’s surface. But few have been given, nor have all the greatest been detailed. Mention only must suffice for the one which shook Naples and vicinity, December 5, 1456, destroying forty thousand people. Another in Persia, June 7, 1755, destroyed Kaschan, with forty thousand people; one at Cairo, Egypt, the preceding year, killed twenty thousand. Another in the Abruzzi, Italy, November 3, 1706, killed fifteen thousand persons; one at Palermo; Sicily, September 13, 1726, killed six thousand; one hundred thousand perished in the Pekin earthquake of November 30, 1731; two thousand were destroyed by an earthquake in the Kutch district, India, in 1819. Constantinople was overturned in the year 1800; six thousand people perished in an earthquake in Murcia, Spain, in 1829; fifteen hundred were killed by Italian earthquakes in 1835-36; Southern Syria suffered greatly in 1836; Hayti was shaken, and four thousand people perished, in 1842; one hundred thousand houses and thirty thousand people destroyed by an earthquake in Japan, 1854; Montenerro, Calabria, and ten thousand people in 1857; five thousand people in Ecuador, 1859; Northwestern Khorassan, Persia, with thirty thousand people, in 1871; Antioch again nearly destroyed in 1872; three thousand people killed in Cashmere, 1885.
Terrible as this list seems, the total but little exceeds the havoc wrought by the single Bengal famine of 1866. There would be little difficulty in proving that drought, with the consequent famine, has proved the most terrible agent of destruction known to man; and yet it is one that facilities for rapid transit should render least destructive.
Scientific men have within forty years made efforts to keep a sort of catalogue of shocks; but the frequency of earthquakes has rendered this a profitless task. Great ones are long remembered; but as for numbering the minor shocks, one might as well count rainfalls; several