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 a tree there. Several tenements at Yallows were buried under land-slips; and one plantation was removed half a mile from its place, the crops continuing to grow upon it uninjured. Between Spanish 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.
Mountains shattered.—The Blue and other of the highest mountains are declared to have been strangely torn and rent. They appeared shattered and half-naked, no longer affording a fine green prospect, as before, but stripped of their woods and natural verdure. The rivers on these mountains first ceased to flow for about twenty-four hours, and then brought down into the sea, at Port Royal and other places, several hundred thousand tons of timber, which looked like floating islands on the ocean. The trees were in general barked, most of their branches having been torn off in the descent. It is particularly remarked in this, as in the narratives of so many earthquakes, that fish were taken in great numbers on the coast during the shocks. The correspondents of Sir Hans Sloane, who collected with care the accounts of eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, refer constantly to subsidences, and some supposed the whole of Jamaica to have sunk down.[710]
Reflections on the amount of change in the last one hundred and sixty years.—I have now only enumerated some few of the earthquakes of the last 160 years, respecting which facts illustrative of geological inquiries are on record. Even if my limits permitted, it would be an unprofitable task to examine all the obscure and ambiguous narratives of similar events of earlier epochs; although, if the places were now examined by geologists well practised in the art of interpreting the monuments of physical changes, many events which have happened within the historical era might doubtless be still determined with precision. It must not be imagined that, in the above sketch of the occurrences of a short period, I have given an account of all, or even the greater part, of the mutations which the earth has undergone by the agency of subterranean movements. Thus, for example, the earthquake of Aleppo, in the present century, and of Syria, in the middle of the eighteenth, would doubtless have afforded numerous phenomena, of great geological importance, had those catastrophes been described by scientific observers. The shocks in Syria in 1759, were protracted for three months, throughout a space of ten thousand square leagues: an area compared to which that of the Calabrian earthquake in 1783 was insignificant. Accon, Saphat, Balbeck, Damascus, Sidon, Tripoli, and many other places, were almost entirely levelled to the ground. Many thousands of the inhabitants perished in each; and, in the valley of Balbeck alone, 20,000 men are said to have been victims to the convulsion. In the absence of scientific accounts, it would be as irrelevant to our present purpose to enter into a detailed account of such calamities, as to follow the track of an invading army, to enumerate the cities burnt or rased to the ground, and reckon the number of individuals who perished by famine or the sword.
Deficiency of historical records.—If such, then, be the amount of ascertained changes in the last 160 years, notwithstanding the extreme deficiency of our records during that brief period, how important must we presume the physical revolutions to have been in the course of thirty or forty centuries, during which some countries habitually convulsed by earthquakes have been peopled by civilized nations! Towns engulfed during one earthquake may, by repeated shocks, have sunk to great depths beneath the surface, while the ruins remain as imperishable as the hardest rocks in which they are inclosed. Buildings and cities, submerged, for a time, beneath seas or lakes, and covered with sedimentary deposits, must, in some places, have been re-elevated to considerable heights above the level of the ocean. The signs of these events have, probably, been rendered visible by subsequent mutations, as by the encroachments of the sea upon the coast, by deep excavations made by torrents and rivers, by the opening of new ravines, and chasms, and other effects of natural agents, so active in districts agitated by subterranean movements.
If it be asked why, if such wonderful monuments exist, so few have hitherto been brought to light, we reply—because they have not been searched for. In order to rescue from oblivion the memorials of former occurrences, the inquirer must know what he may reasonably expect to discover, and under what peculiar local circumstances. He must be acquainted with the action and effect of physical causes, in order to recognize, explain, and describe correctly the phenomena when they present themselves.
The best known of the great volcanic regions, of which the boundaries were sketched in the twenty-second chapter, is that which includes Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and Central Asia; yet nearly the whole, even of this region, must be laid down, in a geological map, as "Terra Incognita." Even Calabria may be regarded as unexplored, as also Spain, Portugal, the Barbary States, the Ionian Isles, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Syria, and the countries between the Caspian and Black seas. We are, in truth, beginning to obtain some insight into one small spot of that great zone of volcanic disturbance, the district around Naples; a tract by no means remarkable for the violence of the earthquakes which have convulsed it.
If, in this part of Campania, we are enabled to establish that considerable changes in the relative level of land and sea have taken place since the Christian era, it is all that we could have expected; and it is to recent antiquarian and geological research, not to history, that we are principally indebted for the information. I shall now proceed to lay before the reader some of the results of modern investigations in the Bay of Baiæ and the adjoining coast.
PROOFS OF ELEVATION AND SUBSIDENCE IN THE BAY OF BAIÆ.
