[The following is in regards to a massive, apocalyptic earthquake that destroyed the English settlement city, and pirate haven, of Port Royal in 1692.]
Seventeen minutes before noon, the ground started to roll gently under the feet of the townspeople. “It began with a small trembling,” wrote Hans Sloane. People froze and marveled at the feeling of the earth turning oceanlike, but they were not panicked; the town had suffered these rollings ever since the English had been on Jamaica.
Dr. Heath asked White, “What is this?”
”It is an earthquake,” White said. “Don’t be afraid, it will soon be over.”
The ground swelled and dipped slightly like a wake under a ship, but the buildings stood. Then a second, stronger heaving motion rolled in from the north, and they heard a crash as St. Paul’s collapsed to the ground, followed quickly by a huge metallic clang; it was the church steeple, the pride of the town, slamming into a crowd gathered at its foot and snuffing out the lives of twelve townspeople. The tower bell shuddered out a strange ring, but it was quickly swallowed up in the sounds now vectoring in from all directions: the screams of men, the bomblike thud of three- and four-story brick buildings imploding, and a strange “hollow rumbling Noise.” The second wave had given way to a third tremor, which dwarfed the others in its ferocity. Terrified, Heath and White ran into the street and were instantly separated in teh noise and chaos.
Heath ran toward Morgan’s Fort, and the scenes that greeted him along the way were a combination of Jules Verne and Hieronymus Bosch. The tremors had literally liquefied the earthen streets on which the townspeople were fleeing for their lives; with its surface gleaming as water saturated the sandy soil, earth became water, and the streets rose and fell in nauseating ripples. People were swept along like corks tossed on a wave, and some clutched at the gables of buildings that went past like boats; one doctor snatched at a passing chimney with his two children around his neck and miraculously survived. But most did not.
”While they fled from the sea, the Earth devoured them in her gaping Jaws,” said Heath. “Or they were knockt on the head with their houses falling on them… or the Sea met them and swept them away.”
Men and women were pulled down into the sand and then cemented there, as the quake caused all the water that had surged up into the now-briny earth to be sucked away just as quickly. Some stood trapped in the earth up to their necks, crying for help. One observer reported:
That watery haitus closed again the next moment, catching hold of some people by a Leg, of others by the middle of the Body, and of others some by the Arm, etc., detaining them in dismal torture, but immovably fixed in the ground, till they, with almost the whole Town besides, sunk under Water.
The hardening sand squeezed the captives until they suffocated or until wild dogs swarmed on them and ate their heads. A drawing of the calamity shows women’s heads sticking out of the earth like cauliflowers, with dogs poised nearby, as well as a woman and her daughters who are “beaten to pieces” by smashing into each other during the quake.
”Others went down,” Sloane wrote, “and were never more seen.”
Note:
According to Wikipedia, the quake measured at a 7.5 on the Moment Magnitude scale, a modified Richter scale that, in many ways, has few differences (a 6.0 measures at about the same intensity on both scales. There are nuanced difference, but they aren’t worth mentioning as far as I can tell.). For reference, however, an earthquake on a scale of 7.0 releases about 32 times as much energy as one of 6.0 and nearly 1,000 times that of 5.0.
Also, the sand was literally liquefied by the tremors, and it’s worth nothing that virtually the entire town (at least 2/3 of it) was built on a bed of sand and not soil. "This is known as a fluidized bed. Whenever you have a sizable container of fine particles and pump up air (or water) though it from the bottom, the movement of the particles gives the material the physical properties of a liquid." Picture standing on a road of hard sand, then the sand becomes liquid, you fall in and ‘swim’ for your life, and then it becomes hard ground again, and you’re suddenly buried up to your neck in hard ground. And then dogs eat your face.
If you can bear the awful music, this is the best example I’ve yet found of this process being demonstrated.
Good luck trying to sleep tonight.
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. 291-92. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...