630 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO I694. 



And though Port-Royal was so great a sufferer by the earthquake, yet it left 

 more houses standing there, than in all the island besides, all over which it is 

 said to rage more furiously than at Port-Royal ; for it was so violent in other 

 places, that people could not keep their legs, but were thrown on the ground, 

 where they lay on their faces with their arms and legs spread out, to prevent 

 being tumbled and thrown about by the almost incredible motion of the earth, 

 like that of a great sea. It scarcely left a planter's house or sugar- work stand- 

 ing all over the island : I think it left not a house standing at Passage- Fort, and 

 but one in all Liganee, and none in St. Jago, except a few low houses, built by 

 the wary Spaniards. And it is not to be doubted, but that had there been 

 500, or 5000 towns in Jamaica, the earthquake would have ruined every one. 

 In several places in the country the earth gaped prodigiously ; on the north- 

 side, the planters' houses, with the greatest part of their plantations, were swal- 

 lowed, houses, people, trees, all up in one gape; instead of which, appeared 

 for some time after a great pool or lake of water, covering above 1000 acres, 

 which is since dried up, and now is nothing but a loose sand, or gravel, with- 

 out any the least mark left whereby one may judge that there ever had stood 

 a tree, house, or any thing else. In Clarendon precinct the earth gaped, and 

 spouted up with a prodigious force great quantities of water into the air, above 

 12 miles from the sea; and all over the island there were abundance of gapings 

 of the earth, many thousands. But in the mountains are said to be the most 

 violent shakes of all ; and it is a generally received opinion, that the nearer to 

 the mountains, the greater the shake. Indeed, they are strangely torn and 

 rent ; insomuch that they seem to be of quite different shapes now from what 

 they were, especially, the blue, and other high mountains; thus breaking one 

 mountain, and thereof making two or three ; and joining two mountains, and 

 making thereof one, closing up the unhappy valley between. And at Yallowes 

 particularly, some families, who lived between two mountains, were shut up 

 and buried under them. Not far from which place, part of a mountain, after 

 having made several leaps or moves, overwhelmed a whole family, and great 

 part of a plantation, lying a mile off. And a large high mountain, near Port- 

 Morant, near a day's journey over, is said to be quite swallowed up ; and in the 

 place where it stood there is now a great lake of 4 or 5 leagues over. Those 

 things happened in lower mountains : but in the blue mountains, and the neigh- 

 bouring ones, from whence came those dreadful roarings, terrible and amazing 

 to all that heard them, may by reasonably supposed to be many strange altera- 

 tions of the like nature: but those wild desert places, being very rarely or 

 never visited by any persons, we are yet ignorant of what happened there; but 

 the astonishing noises that came from thence, and their miserable shattered ap- 



