p. 125 | Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, February 4, 1868

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 8

The Year of Terrors.

UNDER this head the New York Mercury lately published a remarkable article on the “convulsions in heaven and earth which have alarmed the world the past year, from which we make the following extracts. They are just such commotions as were to mark the last days, and furnish one of the prominent signs that this dispensation is near its close.

Fearful thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, both by land and sea, tornadoes and inundations have followed each other with scarcely any intermission; and at this moment there is widespread mourning in every one of the four quarters of the world we inhabit, for immense losses of life and property, occasioned by these convulsions of nature.

Frightful typhoons at Porto Rico, San Domingo, and St. Thomas, sweeping, as we learn by the latest advices, along the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent regions to Matamoras, thence westward to the Pacific, hurling death and ruin as far northward as the shores of Alaska, and finally swooping down upon Australia, China, Japan, and the British East Indies; the submersion of the island of Tortola for many hours; the sudden eruption of Vesuvius, and consequent volcanic perturbation of Ætna in Sicily, of Stromboli and the Ionian Isles; the threatened eruption of mountains in our Territory of Montana, and the sulphurous conflagration extending for scores of leagues in the country west of the Yellowstone; the alarming activity of a crater in the populous Valley of Mexico, whose fires have been apparently extinct for centuries; shocks of earthquake in Portugal, Russia, Bokhara, and other portions of the globe, augmented in their effect by the singular solar obscurations observed within the year, and the sublime meteoric display, visible over two Continents on the morning of the 15th instant, have convinced the learned that the cosmic shell, upon the outer surface of which we live, the vast system that embraces it, and even the ethereal spaces beyond, extending for myriads of millions of leagues into the Milky-Way, are now undergoing some peculiar vicissitudes.

After speaking of the various floods which have occurred, more especially within the last one or two hundred years, the article continues:

After contemplating these facts we may find the asserted fate of Tortola less surprising than it seemed at first, if it has, indeed, been submerged. Since we have not only this encroachment of the sea, long working silently and gradually, then sweeping all before it, at last, but

VOLCANIC ACTION

sufficient to account for it. In April, 1819, the island of Sumbava, in the East Indies, became the scene of a volcanic eruption, which lasted for months, and was heard 1,000 miles in one direction, and 750 in another, or over a diameter of 1,750 miles in all. The sea rose from two to twelve feet along the entire coast, and the Bank of Bima, which had been six fathoms below water, was left dry, while in the opposite direction the waves rushed to the very foot of the volcano, overwhelming the town of Timboro and the whole adjacent country. They left a depth of eighteen feet of water where none at all was seen before, and of 12,000 inhabitants on the island only 24 escaped.

On the 19th of March, 1865, the ship Veritas, in 20 degrees and 35 minutes north latitude, and 140 degrees and 5 minutes east longitude, saw a new and magnificent island-volcano in mid-ocean. A crater with four vents shot fire, ashes, and lava thousands of feet into the air, offering a spectacle of appalling sublimity at midnight. It was on the 30th of January, 1866, that the tremendous volcanic eruption commenced, which lasted until the end of March with awful violence, and threw up three new islands in the roadstead of Santorino. In the Greek Archipelago, the trio finally uniting and forming a promontory to the adjacent land.

Similar eruptions have occurred elsewhere in all ages. Strabo, the historian, speaks of one in his time on the island of Methone. In more modern times, among the grandest have been that of Skapta in Iceland, in 1783, which covered the sea with cinders for hundreds of miles, and caused an island crater to spring up amid the waves. The eruption and the appearance of a new island among the Azores, June 15, 1811, had a crater a mile wide, and threw out volumes of scalding water above a cone two hundred feet high. It disappeared the next October, and by February, 1812, nothing could be seen of it but a cloud of vapor arising from the spot. In 1638, 1691, 1719, and 1757, there had been similar eruptions in the same group—the one that left its crater longest visible dating an island existence of three years. In 1796 an island rose out of the sea in the Aleutian group, near Oumak, and continued to increase. Four years afterward, it emitted smoke and vapor, and in 1805 was still so hot that a man could not land on it. It was 2½ miles in length and 180 feet high, and threw off a pleasant odor of petroleum.

By-the-way, this peculiar odor was mentioned by ancient historians—was noticed at the earlier eruption of Santorino, in 1650, at the great eruption of Vesuvius in 1805. It gives a hint as to the probable connection of the volcanic fires with the interior reservoirs of naphtha, suggesting at the same time a very easy way by which (as Professor Loomis thinks) the entire Globe might be blown up like an over-heated steam-boiler.

In 1830 a small volcanic island made its appearance off the Iceland coast near Reykjavik, bestrewing the sea for many miles with scoriæ from a submarine crater. In June and July the island of Fernandina, or Julia, appeared off the coast of Sicily with a splendid eruption, covering the water with dead fish and filling the atmosphere for leagues around with sulphuric acid gas.

The Santorino group, to which the attention of the world was attracted a year ago, is composed of three islets, all volcanic, called the Kammeni, or Burnt Isles. In many places the masses throw up from the depths of the sea are 1,200 feet high. They had repeated eruptions during the Christian Era, and the one of 1650 flung dust and ashes as far as Constantinople and Smyrna. Many people and animals perished, and a wave 40 feet high rolled to the other islands of the group farthest distant, and swept away churches and dwellings. In 1707, 1711, and 1712 other eruptions ensued, each time bringing more territory to the surface. Portions of these same islands had been added in the year 60 and torn away in 236 B. C. by an earthquake, as Pliny and Apollonius of Tyana state.

Thus it is clear enough that either the permanent incursion of the sea or the action of submarine volcanoes or earthquakes would account for even the sudden disappearance of Tortola, or, if that island was simply swept bare by the billows borne to an unusual height by the force of a hurricane, its fate was no more than that which overtook “Last Island” off the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, a few years ago. Last Island was low and sandy, but had become quite a favorite bathing-resort for the people of New Orleans, Mobile, and elsewhere. A terrific storm drove the sea over it; all the hotels, dwellings, and bathing stalls were torn away and 600 persons perished.

But even without recurring to the subterranean powers we find in the

TORNADOES AND THUNDERSTORMS

quite enough to account for all the devastation that occurs upon islands of the sea or on the solid mainland. The spirits of the air are sufficiently malignant and potent, whether they act in conjunction with the awful influences of the void above and the abyss below, or vent their own unaided fury upon the habitations of man. Whether they come on as the hot sirocco of Egypt, the harmattan of the Guinea Coast, or the stifling simoom of the Great Desert, they are appalling. But Victor Hugo has designated them all in language of matchless force, that has been eagerly perused by thousands of American readers in his “Toilers of the Sea.” We shall not attempt to repeat the description, but confine ourselves to a few salient incidents.

Our daily papers, particularly the organs of the French population residing in New York, have given accounts more or less desultory and incoherent of the frightful cyclone which seems to have ravaged all the West India islands, excepting Havana, within the last thirty days. We may briefly state that the Danish Colonies, being the northernmost of these groups, were the first to feel the tempest which struck St. Thomas, on the 25th of October, coming from the northwest, and raged from 2 o’clock until 6, P. M., destroying, in the four hours, property that cannot be replaced in years. It devastated the southern half of Porto Rico on the night of the 29th, and the south of San Domingo on the morning of the 30th, everywhere blowing down houses, sweeping the country clear of crops and stock, and sinking or hurling ashore all the shipping in the roadsteads. The scene at Porto Rico is graphically described by French correspondents, and must have been appalling. The invasion of the sea; the din of colliding and wrecking vessels; the deafening uproar of the wind, which beat like a solid mass; the praying and shrieking of the terrified inhabitants, almost insane with horror; the intense darkness; the rain descending, as it were, in sheets, without the slightest intermission; the crash of falling and dismantled buildings, and the screams of those whom the flying ruins crushed, must have formed a combination of mortal terrors beyond all description. The same scenes were re-enacted at St. Pierre and the Fort de France, in the French Colony of Martinique, on the night of the 7th and 8th instant; and Tortola, a British island, was, at least, completely drenched and desolated by the billows. At Calcutta, Hong Kong, Matamoras, Manila, and close to Sitka Island in the North Pacific, our new possession, the same cyclone, or its coadjutors, continued their dread work. The sum-total of property destroyed is estimated at $50,000,000, and of life lost at 10,000, including the destruction at Tortola. Over 200 ships of different nations, and 5,000 dwellings and public buildings went down; fire in some cases complicating the distress.

We have had many tornadoes on this continent, but none comparable in fury to the West Indian storms, although, in Iowa and other Western States, whole districts have suffered. The most terrific of these tornadoes ever known in the United States was that which enveloped Charleston, S. C., on the 2d of May, 1761. It was nearly equal to the worst cyclone. It came up Wappo Creek like a dense column of smoke, and contained such a prodigious mass of vapor, in such rapid revolution, that the channel of Ashley River was completely laid bare. When it reached the river it made a noise like continuous thunder. Its diameter was calculated at 1,500 feet, and its light, seen from Charleston, was 25 degrees. However it was met by another mass; and then, with redoubled fury, rose to 40 degrees. It was first seen at noon, about fifty miles southwest of the harbor, and came on so swiftly, sweeping everything before it, level with the ground, that no one could tell whether the five vessels it sank went down under the weight of the wind, or of the water it carried with it and hurled on board. The loss was $5,000,000.

Among the Antilles, in the Gulf of Mexico, or in the East Indies, these cyclones seem like a return to original night and chaos. Sometimes, again, the whole sky and sea appear in flames. Vessels caught in them, if they live at all, lose every sail, and half a dozen stalwart men, working together for their lives, can hardly hold the helm.

In an awful storm of this kind, on July 25, 1825, at Guadeloupe, the wind at the height of its intensity seemed luminous; a silvery flame played from all the points and interstices of the walls, keyholes, and other issues, and made the trembling inmates of the houses think that the heavens were on fire! The diameter of these cyclones or circular storms varied from 50 to 100 miles, and their height from one to ten miles. The Chinese call them the iron whirlwinds. Margolle characterizes them by referring to the frightful sea they raise; the terrific violence of the wind veering and shifting from all quarters; the dangerous calm that reigns at the center of the disk and leaves a ship motionless and exposed to the pounding of the monster waves; the torrents of rain; the appalling tumult of the elements, all combining to overwhelm the mariner.

But these dreadful tempests are not by any means confined to the more torrid portions of the earth, as the experience of France, England, and the United States only too fully proves. The tropical record is one long narrative of disastrous storms, increasing, however, in intensity in these later years. The annals of the temperate zones do not offer so many instances, but there have been some which history and tradition will transmit to the remotest generations.

Of these, the most recent and terrible may, with propriety, be briefly mentioned here. July 16, 1866, was made memorable by the most awful thunder-storm ever witnessed at Paris. About 1 P. M., the clouds gathered with magical rapidity over the city until, in less than fifteen minutes, the capital was plunged in darkness. The rain fell in such torrents that the streets were immediately inundated, and many workmen employed in the public sewers, not having time to regain their ladders, perished. The thunder was continuous and perfectly appalling for three hours, and the lightning struck in more than two hundred places, directing its chief fury upon the Quartier Latin, and including churches, hospitals, and academies, in its destructive attacks. The whole atmosphere seemed at times in a blaze; the fiery bolts, shaped like the letter V, darting hither and thither with inconceivable velocity and force, crashing through walls, shattering trees, rending and twisting the heaviest ironworks, cutting

through gas-mains and setting the gas alight in scores of places. Living flames literally ran along the ground, up the walls of the buildings and over roofs and steeples. A huge torch of intensely brilliant blue and red flame played on the extremity of the cross on the topmost pinnacle of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, like a visible sign of the presence of the Avenging Angel, confirming thousands in the belief that the Day of Judgment had come.

Gay, skeptical Paris was struck dumb with horror and “the bravest held his breath for a time.” The statue of liberty surmounting the column of July, on the site of the old Bastille, was dazzlingly illuminated and surrounded with a halo of ruddy light, until evening. All night long, fear rested on the hearts of nearly 3,000,000 of people, and it was twenty-four hours before they breathed freely again.

On the 20th of last August, about 9 in the evening, a thunder-storm unequaled in violence for a century past, burst upon London, and lasted all night, blowing off roofs, causing conflagrations and leveling crops in the surrounding country, with an extent of damage amounting to £1,000,000 sterling. Nearly a hundred persons were struck by the lightning, and a lady of rank residing some miles from the metropolis died of fright at the height of the tempest. Several counties suffered, and their inhabitants were wild with alarm.

On the night of August 18, a grand thunder-storm passed near Portland, Me., and swept over Gorham, North Yarmouth, Pownal and Durham, unroofing buildings, tearing up trees and prostrating crops. At Casco, Bridgton, Winthrop, Leeds, and Waterville, the thunder was as regular as the swift beating of a pulse, and the lightning seemed one incessant flash. It greatly resembled the storm of April 4, 1866, at Paris which, without being so imposing as that of July in the same year, was remarkable for the number of lightning strokes which fell in every direction. The United States have been remarkable for the frequency and proportions of their hailstorms. In 1851, hailstones fell at Pittsburgh, Pa., measuring two and three inches in diameter, and weighing, in some cases, more than a pound. Many animals were killed, and men seriously injured in the streets. Even iron roofs were perforated as though by shot and shell, and wood and glasswork were utterly destroyed. The writer was an eye-witness to this fearful scene, which actually suggested the idea that the heavens were a crystal vault which had been shattered to atoms by some convulsion and was falling in upon the abodes of men.

But all accounts that we have of great tempests occurring within the northern latitudes during the last two centuries are eclipsed by the story of

THE GREAT STORM OF 1703.

“The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet,” (Nah. i. 3,) is the appropriate motto of a quaint old book bearing the following title:

“The storm; or, a Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Distresses which happened in the late dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land. London, 1704.” The height of this overwhelming cataclysm was during the night of the 26th and 27th of November, 1703, at the full moon, after an unusually wet season of six months. A tremendous wind arose on the 24th, and blew on with increasing violence, day and night, until the 26th, when it became an appalling hurricane that hurled tiles, signs, timber work, stones, into indistinguishable ruin, and awakened the utmost fear that the entire city of London would be leveled. All the ships on the Thames were blown from their moorings and tossed ashore, head and stern together. This dreadful wind never intermitted for seven days and nights—from Wednesday noon to Wednesday noon—during all of which time there was not a moment when a sailor would not have admitted that it blew great guns. This tempest was, of course, felt all over the north of Europe, but the British Islands bore its brunt. Throughout South Britain and Wales the heaviest oaks were blown down or snapped off at the middle; twenty-five parks in the various counties lost one thousand trees each, and New Forest, Hants, four thousand. Strong leaden roofs were rolled up and swept away, and churches, dwellings, and windmills in the country carried off in fragments. Among the host of persons killed, were the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and his wife, who were buried in the ruins of their falling castle. The Eddystone lighthouse, with the keeper and his family, were hurled into the sea. Hundreds of vessels were destroyed in port, and scores of others never returned from sea, while at least eight thousand sailors perished! To give some idea of the force and velocity of this atmospheric current, we may mention that a vessel laden with tin was driven out of Helford at midnight, with only two men and a boy on board, dragging her four anchors, and without sail was dashed into a creek in the Isle of Wight, at 8 the next morning. Thus she must have been carried thirty miles per hour, and the velocity of the wind was probably three or four times as great.

But we might easily fill the page with the mere mention of the meteorological wonders that the last hundred years have produced, without going any farther back. We have not room to-day to do more than refer to the terrific volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, inundations, flights of shooting stars, showers of blood, stones, animalculæ, sulphur, soot, frogs, etc., that have been witnessed; vast spaces of the ocean covered with inflammable oil, or with fluids resembling milk and blood; columns of rocky fragments, sand, dust, and smoke suddenly rising from the earth and ascending to the clouds on fair days; torrents of rain descending, without a speck to be seen in the sky; dry, dark mists, evidently not of aqueous vapor, rising to the zenith, and resting over whole provinces for days together, obscuring the sun. These, and the amazing freaks of electricity in our time, would fill volumes at the narration of only a line for each.

Suffice it to say that all the resistless forces of nature which have wrought such revolutions in other epochs, even to the sandstorms of the desert that entombed the entire army of Cambyses, letting not one man escape, seem to have received some recent renewed impulse, and that phenomena multiply upon us with startling rapidity.

It has just been discovered that a comet of great size undoubtedly exists, and completes its flight within the limits of our solar system, and that it is attended by an accumulating train of cosmic matter. Close astronomical observation confirms the belief that our globe and its satellite plunged directly through the train of the comet that appeared in 1861, and since that date there has been an unusual recurrence of celestial and terrestrial phenomena reflected, as it were, in the moral and political perturbations of mankind.

The augmenting size and number of the spots visible on the disk of the sun, the gathering hosts of shooting stars now regularly looked for, and the eccentric variations of the magnetic needle, all point to some unusual phase of existence through which our earth is passing. If we look around us, on the condition of the nations, we find it agitated, confused, and expectant of calamity and change—all Europe and Asia heaving with the fires of suppressed revolution, and every part of America, including the United States, anxious and ill at ease.