The Great Earthquakes in New England in the Eighteenth Century.
By D. T. Taylor
The first of these came October twenty-nine, seventeen hundred and twenty-seven. It occurred not without some previous warning. The heat of the summer had been unusually great, and of long continuance. A great drought appeared at one time to threaten the land. This was followed by convulsions of the atmosphere, with great thunder and extraordinary flashes of lightning, which occurred on Saturday, the sixteenth of September. This was followed by a wind-storm and rain that fell all over the country. So fiercely did the lightning blaze athwart the skies, that the appalling spectacle suggested the last day, and one clergyman declared that New England “saw some resemblance of the day of God,” while we are told that “all the people, as they in Ezra’s time, sat trembling for the great rain.” The storm was very devastating. Orchards were prostrated and destroyed, chimneys were blown down, forests were leveled to the earth, and the wharves and shipping at Boston were much injured. A number of persons were wounded, and one—a girl at Boston—was killed.
But the night of the earthquake was perfectly calm, and the heavens serene and clear. No clouds were visible, no sign appeared. Only the day before, at Barbadoes, two thousand miles away over the sea, there was a severe convulsion, causing the streets to rise and fall like the waves of the ocean, but the news had not yet reached New England. The immediate presages of the event were flashes of electrical light, which seemed for a moment to illuminate the skies and glance by the windows. The brutes were the first to be startled, and dogs gave a sudden bark and then ran away and hid themselves in affright. Nearly all the inhabitants of the land were in bed at the time. At first was heard a gentle murmur like a slight roar of wind; then came a more noisy rumbling as of thunder at some distance, which seemed to approach nearer, and grow louder and louder, until the sound was a loud and terrible roar. It was the unseen fire-bolt on its march. The earth-wave followed, lasting full a minute and a half. The calm serenity of the night had been little ominous of an earthquake; and so violent was the heaving and tossing of the ground that a season of general terror followed, and men, women, and children, in city and country, rose from their beds and went to prayer.
Houses tottered and reeled with the tremulous motion, the ground rose and fell, dishes and other articles were thrown from the shelves, and in all places clocks were stopped by the concussion. The water in wells was discolored and rendered brackish and unfit to use. Wood piles were flung down, stone fences were destroyed, chimneys were toppled over, and the tops of many others shattered, hand-irons jumped off the hearth, while the walls of numerous brick and stone houses were so cracked and rent as to require repairing. The historian Drake quotes an old eye-witness as testifying that “the houses rocked as if they would have fallen down, and the people being amazed ran out into the streets calling upon the Lord for mercy.”
The first shock was felt at Boston at thirty minutes past ten in the evening. At Newton, clocks stopped forty minutes past ten. At Haverhill, the clock in the house of Rev. John Brown stopped precisely at the time first named above. At eleven, a second shock was experienced. At just before twelve at midnight, a third shock; and a fourth and a fifth shock was felt at the hours of three and five on the next morning. Slight shocks, accompanied with a confused roar, continued to be felt in various localities almost daily down to the 20th of November; some three weeks intervening between the first and last throbs of the perturbed earth. The region of the Merrimac river appeared to be the center of the earthquake disturbances.
At Haverhill, it was more severely experienced than at any locality further east or north; but at Concord, in the Province of New Hampshire, as also at Boston, Cambridge, Hingham, Dedham, Wrentham, Medford, Watertown, Lynn, and Newburyport, it was the same, all feeling the earthquake force in the destruction of property and the engendering of fear, the very cattle and horses running about the fields, bellowing and snorting with fright and agony. There was no more sleeping that night. Similar shocks had caused the land to tremble in former years. But the oldest man had never felt a trembling like this. It was the greatest earthquake ever known in New England, up to that date, by any European settler, and the impression made on the minds of the people was deep and abiding.
The force of the concussion was best felt at Newburyport, where the ground was so powerfully heaved as to open in five or six places, and a hundred cartloads of cinereous matter, mingled with mud and water, was thrown up from the rents. But the most awful phenomena attending the convulsion was the development of the electric fire and the rushing of the tidal waves. Great quantities of flaming gases were released from the earth, and rose into the air in numerous places after the first great shock had passed; and in one town, the name of which was not given by our authorities, the atmosphere was observed to be in a universal flame, without the occurrence of thunder or lightning. There could have been no mistake in this. It was undoubtedly the escaping gases, such as are witnessed in all great and destructive convulsions of this kind. Released from confinement by the earthquake bolt, they seek the surface of the earth and flash out into the air. So it was in the mighty earthquake at Lisbon, in 1755, when men saw the heavens as if they were all on fire.
As already hinted, the floor of the ocean was lifted, and the sea in all the seaport towns rose up in furious waves, that, with a hideous, terrifying roar, dashed suddenly on to the coast. How far these tidal waves extended has never been ascertained. As there was no wind, these could have been none other than the products of the earthquake, though unknown before or since in any earthquake which has shaken the shores of the Atlantic. We are told that the inhabitants residing on the coast regarded their sudden destruction by the rolling movement of the sea as imminent. The extent of the earthquake is uncertain. We know that at the time of its occurrence a country more than five hundred miles in length and breadth was shaken, and in a later day it was said that all the country east of the Rocky Mountains felt the shock. The ministers of New England said to the multitudes who thronged into the churches, “Never did the city of Boston, in the ninety-seven years that had rolled over it, see such a night.” Like Humboldt of a later day the men of that time styled the earthquake’s roar, “the subterranean thunder.” And the wisest confessed that no one could explain the phenomena of the earthquake. Indeed, with all our superior advantages in the vanguard of the march of science, our wisdom is still at fault; none can explain them now. The voice of New England’s reason, under the guidance and stamp of a strong religious feeling, exclaimed, “This is the finger of God;” “It is the voice of the Lord from the deep places of the earth.” And the quaking of Sinai at the descent of Jehovah in fire and thunder upon it was pointed to in confirmation of the view that God was in the earthquake.
And with such views of the convulsions of the globe, we cease to wonder at the salutary effects that followed. It was as when God shook the prison of Paul and Silas, reformation followed on the heels of fear. At Haverhill, a general fast was held on the next day, and also on the Wednesday following. The Rev. Mr. Brown admitted and propounded one hundred and fifty-four persons for baptism and the Lord’s table, in the short space of three weeks that occurred between the first and last shock. At Exeter, forty persons were baptized within a fortnight’s time. At Amesbury, the whole time, for many days, was given up to divine worship and religious services. At Cambridge, Dr. Mather’s, Mr. Lowell’s, and Mr. Foxcraft’s churches were crowded with solemn and devout worshippers. Evil men grew alarmed, and drunkards and swearers ceased to riot and blaspheme. Some laughed at the earthquake, and others at their fears. But thinking men and women were sobered, and the churches all reaped a harvest of souls.
The State authorities, partaking of the universal awe which the strange event had inspired in the minds of the inhabitants, awoke to a sense of the danger that had seemed to threaten the whole Province, and the Thursday following the night of alarm was appointed by the Lieutenant Governor as a day of prayer in all the churches. Rev. Thomas Foxcraft preached an earnest and pointed discourse from Psalms 95: 4–8, before the General Court at the opening of the session on Nov. 23 following. The Speaker, William Dudley, through a committee of three, Messrs. T. Cushing, S. Wells, and J. Foster, extended the thanks of the House to the preacher for his solemn and thrilling discourse, and a copy was secured for publication. In it the faithful minister dared to say to the assembled wisdom of Massachusetts and New Hampshire: “Hence, then, how severely are they to be reproved who are nothing affected with the awful dispensation this land is under! We can scarce believe what is reported, that some are so hardened as to treat this providence with no serious regard at all, but rather make light of it, and laugh at the superstitious weakness of those who entertain it with anything of surprise and a trembling posture of spirit. Oh, amazing stupidity! The very heathen soldiers and crucifiers of our Lord shall rise up in judgment with these pretended Christians, and shall condemn them, for they, when they saw the earthquake and the terrible appearance that accompanied the death of Christ, are said to fear greatly, and to glorify God. Yet these Christians are not afraid! Oh, their stupidity! It is worse than heathenish, even brutish; yea, worse than brutish, for the very beasts tremble at an earthquake. But these men (if they may be allowed the name who have so shamefully forfeited it,) are insensible, as if they had transformed themselves into very stocks or images. Give ear, O Heavens! Hear, O Earth! And be astonished, yea, be horribly afraid. And let these sottish creatures hear and be ashamed. Go to the brutes, ye fearless wretches, and learn of them to fear God.” And in a spirit of reverence and admonition at the judgments of God which we, in these earthquake times, would do well to imitate, he exclaimed, “God says now unto New England, ‘Surely thou wilt fear me; thou wilt receive instruction; so shall thy dwellings not be cut off.’”
The earthquake was not soon forgotten. Before us, as we write, are the titles of some fourteen old publications bearing on the event, among them being “Some account of the Earthquake that shook New England in the night of the 29th and 30th of October, 1727, with a speech made unto the inhabitants of Boston, who assembled the next morning for the proper exercise of religion on so uncommon and so tremendous an occasion. 2 Cor. 5: 2.” By Increase Mather, D. D., Boston, 1727. And so late as the 21st of December, the Governor elect, William Burnet, appointed a general fast to be solemnly observed “in all places in the Province on account of the late surprising and amazing earthquake, and the repeated shakings of the earth.” In Dean’s History of Scituate, as also in numerous other local histories, the curious reader will find many interesting details of the convulsions and upheavings of the ground in the never-to-be-forgotten event.
No earthquake of any importance had previously occurred in the country for over half a century—a shock of some degree of violence having been recorded as taking place in 1670, of which scarcely any particulars have come down to us. Public writers who imagine there is no danger of a devastating earthquake in the Atlantic States need to remember the convulsions of one and two centuries ago.
Such is our information relating to the convulsion of 1727. But a greater one was yet to occur. It fell on the land November 18, in the year 1755. That was a never-to-be-forgotten year, and many who had experienced the terrors of the fall of 1727 lived to witness the more extraordinary shaking of 1755. All summer, Europe had been experiencing earthquake shocks. Only eighteen days before, on the first of November, one of those terrific bolts had disturbed over fifteen million square miles of the land and water surface of the globe, and Lisbon, a gay, proud city, containing three hundred and fifty thousand souls, had been tossed into the air by an irresistible upward blow, and then fallen to the earth in one gigantic ruin, with sixty thousand people dead or dying, and ready to be devoured by the flames that raged unchecked for nine dreadful days. All continents had felt the mighty throb, and now ours came in for her share. In New England, meteors and other unusual appearances in the heavens had preceded the great shock; but when it came, its advent was as a thief in the night.
On the morning of November eighteen a great white frost lay on the ground, such as had not been seen for years. It was yet early, and the inhabitants were locked in deep slumber. The first great shock came on at a quarter past four o’clock on Tuesday morning, and lasted four and a half minutes. Its duration seemed an age. The roar of the approaching bolt could be heard full half a minute before the shock was at all felt. It began with a slight pulsation upward, then a universal trembling, a quick, jarring, vibratory, horizontal, and vertical motion, then a violent, prodigious shock, with a great, hoarse noise. Then followed concussions, jerks, and wrenches of the ground to and fro. So severe were these jerks that persons who had rushed into the streets and were walking or standing, could with difficulty keep their feet. Some were thrown to the ground. A great cry was heard in every dwelling, and all expected their houses to tumble in pieces over their heads. The duration of the first shock far exceeded that of 1727, and the terror inspired by its longer continuance and greater severity was great and wide-spread, all classes of individuals partaking of it. A second shock followed the first at twenty-nine minutes past five, and a third on Saturday11evening following at twenty-seven minutes past eight, and a fourth was experienced at Boston and in its vicinity at ten o’clock on Friday evening of the nineteenth of the next month, December, while very numerous shocks were felt in all New Hampshire in all the last-named month.
A good time-piece in a house at Cambridge stopped at eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds past four. At New York City the shock was felt at one minute before four. To the north and east, several hundred miles, the shock was felt at half-past four. Consequently the movement of the earthwave, it was said, appeared to have been from the west toward the east. This appears singular if we consider this earthquake as proceeding from the great convulsion which had destroyed Lisbon. It evidently, on the contrary, had no connection with the Lisbon earthquake, but was independent of it, as we are told that it passed on from New England through the Atlantic ocean to the West Indies, creating a tidal wave at two o’clock in the afternoon of the same day, some six feet high in the harbor of St. Martin’s. It is noticed by historians that the earthquake of June 3, 1638, as also that of October 29, 1727, which took place in this country, also came from the west or north-west; and we also know that the shock of December 18, 1867, which shook over one hundred thousand miles of inland, comprising the great valleys of the Champlain and St. Lawrence, also came from the west, which suggests the relation of these phenomena with the volcanoes of our north-west coast.
The area over which the disturbance was felt was very wide. No earthquake that has ever occurred east of the Mississippi river had so wide a range of action. Portland, Boston, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, all were shaken. To the north-east the passengers on board the ship Atlantic, then at sea two hundred and ten miles from Cape Ann, felt the shock quite smartly, while the forests of Maine and the granite hills of New Hampshire and Vermont reverently bowed before the march of the destroying agent that moved invisibly far below. From Annapolis Royal, in Nova Scotia, where its violence was so great as to shake the bricks from the chimney tops, south-west as far as the Chesapeake Bay and the wilds of Virginia, the land trembled. Lake George and all the valley of the Champlain were affected, and an area inclosing a circle of nearly a thousand miles in diameter was more or less convulsed. Others assert its sea-coast extent to have been nineteen hundred miles, with the State of Massachusetts as the central of the great seismic disturbance.
It is not a little remarkable that in it all there is no record of the destruction of a single human being. But the damage otherwise was very considerable. At the first movement of the earth at a quarter past four in the morning, liquids in open vessels were dashed over their sides, wells and pumps were dried at once, bureaus in dwellings, stone walls in the field, and piles of wood in sheds, were upset with a crash, while cellar walls were broken or burst open and destroyed, and the plastered ceilings of dwellings were fractured and fell down. Buildings were rocked like a cradle through a considerable space of air, and the vibratory motion was extremely rapid and quick. In one instance it was so great as to burst open a distiller’s cistern, agitating and spilling the liquors on the ground. At Pembroke the ground clave asunder in four or five places. On Cape Cod the ground in places sunk to a depth of several feet, while at Scituate the ground was rent in seven places. At Casco Bay the shock was fully equal to that in Boston, while at Philadelphia it is said the “shock was smart, and lasted two minutes.”
At Newington, N. H., it was said that a chasm of considerable depth, some sixty rods in length and two feet in breadth, was opened in the earth. In the country so destructive was the earthquake that the damage estimated to have been done to stone fences alone, was set down for New England at fifty thousand pounds, current money.
A later movement, which is recorded as the most destructive in such calamities, accompanied the first great shock. This threw off bricks from the tops of chimneys to a considerable distance. From a chimney in Cambridge, of a height of thirty-two feet, bricks were detached and violently thrown a distance of thirty feet from the base, with a velocity computed to have been twenty-one feet in a single second. While the first great shock had a lateral motion, that which occurred on Saturday evening following was accompanied with a perpendicular and rotary or twisting movement, for many chimneys were partly turned around, and others appeared as if they had been twisted by a powerful hand quite down to the roof. The destruction of chimneys was extraordinary, and had the earthquake overtaken our cities in the daytime, while the streets were crowded with people, the loss of life must have been very considerable, particularly so in Boston, which was then a place of fifteen thousand souls, and where one hundred chimneys were thrown to the roof or ground and utterly destroyed; many of them breaking through the roofs, and endangering the lives of the inmates beneath. There were also fifteen hundred others so twisted round, left leaning over, and partly destroyed as to require to be taken down and rebuilt, while fifteen brick buildings were enumerated whose gable ends were thrown down as low as the roofs of the houses.
As an instance giving some idea of the force of the jerking motion of the ground, we are informed that the wooden spindle of the vane on Faneuil Hall, which was a pine stick ten feet high, and five inches in diameter, and which had withstood the most violent winds, was snapped short off; the weight of the vane, which this spindle carried being only thirty pounds. Another spindle of iron, at Boston, carrying a vane, was “bent three or four points of the compass,” and still another, holding a vane on a church at Springfield, a hundred miles to the west, was bent at right angles by the jerking of the earth during the great shock. Eye witnesses attest these facts. The bare thought of the possibility of the recurrence of an earthquake of equal or superior violence at the present time, and its effects on all our great cities, is appalling. All authorities agree in pronouncing the convulsion we are describing as the most alarming visitation of its kind ever known since the settlement of the Eastern and Middle States. The Rev. Dr. Mayhew testified it was both “greater and of longer continuance than any other which has been known among us.” Rev. Mather Byles said, “It was a terrible night, the most so, perhaps, that ever New England saw. When we remember it we are afraid, and trembling taketh hold of our flesh.” And Drake informs us that “It was the most fearful earthquake ever before or since known in New England.” The events and their results were quite fully recorded in published lectures by the Rev. Drs. Mayhew, and Chauncy, and by Prof. Winthrop of Cambridge College.
It is not to be supposed that such fatal consequences as seemed to threaten the land in this extended commotion would fail to be improved upon by the ministry. From all pulpits it was alluded to as a stern visitation of Divine Providence, in view of which men should reform. The attention of the people was called to a consideration of man’s utter helplessness in the midst of such dangers, and to solemn thoughts of the great day of the Lord, of which these and similar calamities were the heralds. Guilty fears were aroused. Evil was restrained. “People of all ranks,” wrote Dr. Mayhew, “were awakened to think more on God.” Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, just quoted, who was pastor of the West Church in Boston, made the earthquake an occasion for “Two Discourses” on “The expected Dissolution of all things, a Motive to Universal Holiness,” in which the second coming of our blessed Lord was very impressively dwelt upon, and the people were invited to a sober consideration of the day of judgment. Charles Chauncy, D. D., in a “Sermon on the Earthquake, preached at Boston, January 22, 1756,” from the Apocalyptic ANNOUNCEMENT, “Behold, I make all things new,” asserted the destiny of the earth to be Dissolution, Reconstruction, and Regeneration, and regarded earthquakes as being the tokens of the approach of that epoch when there would be a “new heaven and a new earth,” as foretold in Holy Writ. Rev. Thomas Prentice, of Charleston, in a sermon on the occasion, said, “And when earthquakes and such like judgments become very general, and in a manner universal, they are to be regarded as prognostics and forerunners of the destruction of the whole world.” Thus deeply did the “Great Earthquake” of 1755 impress the New England mind and heart.
Since 1620 there have been five considerable earthquakes in the Eastern States, besides numerous slight shocks. None occurred from 1670 to 1727, a period of fifty-seven years. From 1727 to 1755, a shorter period of twenty-eight years elapsed, since which last date, one hundred and fourteen years have passed with no violent or destructive shocks of a nature at all alarming. But are we safe? Is there no danger to be apprehended from the devastating effects of a great earthquake on Boston and the score of other large cities of the New England States? We answer, No city on earth is safe so long as the unseen and terrible forces that produce these convulsions of our planet lie couching in their hidden pits below the surface, ready to strike upward and carry destruction in their march in some hour when men little dream. Not safe so long as we know how the whole land was shaken in 1727 and 1755. Not so long as the eccentricity of the destroyer’s path is so well attested in a hundred instances. Not so long as we are assured that severe earthquakes, as also terrible volcanic eruptions, do occur in numerous cases suddenly, and after an interval of comparative quiet which had lasted for centuries. Not so long as geology informs us that a chain of extinct volcanic hills encircles a portion of New England, stretching from New Jersey to the New Dominion. Not so long as the White Mountains of New Hampshire do occasionally give slight evidences of volcanic action at their bases. Not so long as terrible convulsive shocks are registered as being experienced in various lands where no active volcano existed within five hundred or a thousand miles. Not safe so long as it is admitted by men of science that in the region where a great earthquake has once occurred, there a recurrence of a similar convulsion may be looked for as likely to take place. And, finally, not so long as there is need for Him, whose awful presence causeth the earth and the mountains to tremble, to inflict these judgments on cities, lands, and peoples, as tokens of his displeasure against sin and evil. There is no safe path for mortals but in right doing. Therefore let men cease to do evil and learn to do well. It may be that mercy will blunt the invisible sword that hangs lifted in the hand of the Omnipotent.
We have already had experience of a wind storm as terrible as that which overswept New England, Sept. 16, 1727. Is the earthquake to follow the tempest? or will Heaven avert the more dreadful blow?—D. T. TAYLOR, in Boston Journal.