312 Contributions to Physical Geography. 



The water at first covered the whole country, particularly 

 at the Little Prairie ; and it must have been indeed a scene 

 of horror, in these deep forests, and in the gloom of the dark- 

 est night, and by wading in the water to the middle, to fly 

 from these concussions, which were occurring every few hours, 

 with a noise equally terrible to the beasts and birds, as to men. 

 ^ The birds themselves lost all power and disposition to fly, and 

 retreated to the bosoms of men, their fellow-sufferers in this 

 scene of convulsion. A few persons sunk in these chasms 

 and were providentially extricated. One person died of fright. 

 One perished miserably on an island, which retained its ori- 

 ginal level, in the midst of a wide lake created by the earth- 

 quake. The hat and clothes of this man were found. A 

 number perished who sunk with their boats in the river. A 

 bursting of the earth, just below the village of New Madrid, 

 arrested this mighty stream in its course, and caused a reflux 

 of its waves, by which in a little time a great number of boats 

 were swept by the ascending current into the mouth of the 

 Bayou^ carried out and left upon the dry earth, when the ac- 

 cumulating waters of the river had again cleared their current. 



There were a great number of severe shocks, but two series 

 of concussions were particularly terrible, far more so than the 

 rest. They remark that the shocks were clearly distinguish- 

 able into two classes ; those in which the motion was horizon- 

 tal, and those in which it was perpendicular. The latter were 

 attended by the explosions and the terrible mixture of noises, 

 that preceded and accompanied the earthquakes, in a louder 

 degree, but were by no means so desolating and destructive as 

 the other. When they were felt, the houses crumbled, the 

 trees waved together, the ground sunk, and all the destructive 

 phenomena were more conspicuous. In the intervals of the 

 earthquakes, there was one evening, and that a brilliant 

 and cloudless one, in which the western sky was a conti- 

 nued glare of vivid flashes of lightning, and of repeated peals 

 of subterranean thunder, seemed to proceed as the flashes 

 did from below the horizon. They remark that this night, 

 so conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the same pe- 

 riod in which the fatal earthquakes at Caraccas occurred^ 



