[During this quake, as virtually the entire town had been constructed on a sand bed, the ground literally turned to a liquid consistency and, in place, the seawater was pushed up from the bottom and created temporary, fast-moving underground rivers, that would frequently force their way up to the surface as surprise water geysers. People would be sucked into the earth, tossed about, and pop back up into the air in a different spot.]
[…] a lucky few hit subterranean rivers that had been born just minutes ago and were carried horizontally under the earth at great speed, whipping beneath the feet of their fellow residents, only to crash into another geyser moving upward and so shoot back to the surface a half mile from where they first went down into the earth, drenched but unhurt.
One woman ran out of her house into the street and saw the sand before her “rising up”; she clutched her black servant, and they dropped together into the earth, “at the same instant the Water coming in, rowl’d them over and over,” until in this sunken world they saw a beam from a house passing and grabbed on to it and were saved.
A merchant named Lloyd gave his story: He’d been in his shop when the “earth opened and let me in.” He was carried along in an underground channel until he was pushed up through a wooden floor and found himself lying with other victims, many of them critically wounded. He himself was nearly unhurt, but his house had disappeared completely into the muck that had swallowed him up.
One French refugee, Lewis Gauldy, was sucked down and released not once but twice, popping up at various points in the landscape like a target at a shooting gallery. The next day he announced that he’d found God.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Apocalypse.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 294-95. Print.
Further Reading:
I bet he did. Haha.