The greatest proof that Wellingtonians fear these disturbances is the fact that nearly all their houses are built of wood. The Government buildings are spoken of as the largest wooden buildings in the world. Wellington is certainly wooden as well as windy. I met with quite a number of people who had seismological experiences to relate. Some apparently did not mind the shakings—just tremors, they said. These people were, for the most part, new chums, who had not yet been imbued with a due respect for plutonic force. Others told me that they did not mind earthquakes so much as at first, but that they had gradually come to have a great antipathy for them; they alarmed their wives and children so much.
There is a feeling of insecurity with these phenomena; you feel you can’t stop them, and you expect after a thing has begun, the next shake may be like that of 1855, when all the buildings came down.
‘The last good shake we had,’ said a gentleman, ‘gave a terrible fright to my neighbours, who are married people living in a two-story house. Every night they were very particular to see that things were locked up safely. I suppose they were afraid of their servants getting out at night. When they went upstairs they always took the keys with them, and put them under their pillows. One night a shake came on pretty smart, and they both bundled out of bed and bolted downstairs. It wasn’t until they had got to the bottom and tried to open the front door that they remembered that unless they went back to get the keys they were fast prisoners. Now, will you believe me, there they stood shivering in the cold at their front door, both afraid to go upstairs and get the keys, until the motion finished. They leave the keys downstairs now.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I, well—I bolted through the front parlour window, and landed on my stomach on a flower-bed. It is as true as I am here that I could feel that flower-bed palpitating as if it were alive.
‘Oh, there were some funny things happened that night. The old man who is supposed to study these things up at our observatory was found by his wife standing in his nightshirt out in the snow, with the window-sash round his neck. You know, the old ass had bolted head first through his window without stopping to open it. When his wife asked him what he was doing, he told her that he had just stepped out to make an outside observation; “I wanted to see if the chimneys moved very much, my dear,” he stammered.
‘Down at the club there were a lot of our boys and some naval officers playing poker. You don’t know that game, I suppose? It is a game where they have a pool, and this keeps getting bigger and bigger as the game goes on. They call this pool a Jack Pot. Well, when the shake came on, the pot was reckoned to be worth about £45. People never thought about money when they felt the movement and heard the timbers creaking; they just looked at each other and then stampeded. Some went for windows, some for doors, and others, who did not know the place, got jammed in the kitchen, and the ends of blank passages. One man landed in the bath-room, another found himself a prisoner in the lavatory.
‘When the thing was over, one of the party was missing. Now just guess where they found him. Why, shaking and shivering in a cupboard.
‘Well, after a laugh and a drink—for it needs something to square your nerves after a good earthquake—they sat down to finish their game. But do you think they found the Jack Pot on the table? No, sir, not a bit of it; and what was more, they never did find it.
‘It was, however, observed that the man that was shaking in the cupboard, and at whom they had laughed for being in such a funk, bought himself a new watch that week. General opinion held that he had never been in a funk at all, but had just stayed behind until his friends had cleared, and then nobbled the pool, after which he quietly walked into the cupboard.