p. 8 | The Cyclone in India

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 28, 1876

The Cyclone in India.

A few weeks since we mentioned as a news item the fact that a terrible cyclone had swept over the islands of Hattiah, Sundeep, and Daklim Shahabazpore and other smaller islands off the coast of India, and stated that 20,000 persons were swept away by it. This news, when first reported by cable, seemed almost incredible, but later tidings not only confirm it, but state that no less than 250,000 persons perished by it.

The following on the subject from a leading New York paper will be of general interest:

“An hour before midnight, without a note of warning, an immense wave, rolling up from the south, swept with resistless force over the luckless islands. In the briefest possible space afterwards it reached the mainland, and hurled itself over the level plains on its terrible rush of death. The wave was twenty feet in height, and as it swept on with irresistible velocity, nothing could withstand it. The buildings in that part of the world are constructed of light material, generally of bamboo, and they were carried away like so many straws. Not a house was left standing in the wake of the wave; not an animal was left living; not a vestige of the crops was left in the fields. It was one wide track of death and ruin. There is not a household on the islands or the adjacent mainland that does not mourn the loss of many of its members. In one short hour more lives were sacrificed than the number who actually fell on the field in all the battles of our four years of civil war.

“The largest of the islands over which the recent cyclone swept had an area of eight hundred square miles and a population of a quarter of a million. The other islands were much smaller, and had a combined population of one hundred thousand. In these Oriental countries the density of the population affords full sweep for pestilence, earthquake or flood.

“The authorities say that where the storm wave passed it is believed that not a third of the inhabitants survive, and that the islands have not one-fourth of their population left. It is no wonder, therefore, that intense suffering followed on the heels of this deadly hurricane. The wretched survivors were left without food or shelter. From every quarter, over a district hundreds of miles in extent, arose the stench from putrefying bodies that could not be buried by the starving people who were left alive. As rapidly as possible the Government relieved their wants and strove to repair the ravages of the storm, but the suffering in the meantime was intense. In addition to the danger of actual famine, the cholera made its appearance on the edge of the afflicted district, and it was feared that it would spread over the whole country, finding food wherever the cyclone had interfered with the processes of nature.

“The calamity in India is the most terrible on record. The destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii was insignificant in comparison with it. Perhaps the calamity that most nearly approached it in horror was the inundation at Dort, in Southern Holland, in 1421, when the sea broke over the dikes and drowned one hundred thousand people. That terrible flood is said to have swallowed up seventy villages, with all their inhabitants. To it the island of Dort owes its formation, the city having previously stood on the mainland. In almost all other cases of the wholesale destruction of life by water, the calamity has been caused by the action of earthquakes. Such was the fearful tidal wave that swept upon the city of Lisbon, in Portugal, on the 1st of November, 1755, when the sea suddenly retired from the harbor, leaving the bar dry, and in a minute returned in the shape of a great breaker fifty feet or more in height. Sixty thousand people perished in the space of six minutes. Part of the city was engulfed by the ocean to the depth of six hundred feet, where the ruins still remain. At this time, also, many small towns were destroyed by inundation on the coast of Africa.

“A few years later, in 1783, one hundred thousand persons perished in the earthquake in Calabria, and a sea-wave entered the harbor of Messina and destroyed the city. In India, the earthquake of 1819 submerged a tract of two thousand square miles at the mouth of the Indus, and elevated a neighboring region proportionately. The western coast of South America has frequently been visited by tidal waves, the most destructive of which occurred at Arica on the 13th of August, 1868.”