Intelligence and Miscellanies, 36 f 



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 re- 

 tained its original level, in the midst of a wide lake created 

 by the earthquake. 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 accumulating waters of the river had again 

 cleared their current. There w^ere a great number of severe 

 shocks, but two series of concussions were particularly terri- 

 ble, far more so than the rest. They remark that the shocks 

 were clearly distinguishable into two classes ; those in which 

 the motion was horizontal, and those in which it was perpen- 

 dicular. The latter were attended by the explosions and 

 the terrible mixture of noises, that preceded and accompa- 

 nied 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 togeth- 

 er, 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 continued glare of vivid flashes 

 of lightning, and of repeated peals of subterranean thunder, 

 seemed to proceed as the flashes did from below the hori- 

 zon. They remark that this night, so conspicuous for subter- 

 ranean thunder, was the same period in which the fatal 

 earthquakes at Caraccas occurred, and they seem to sup- 

 pose these flashes and that event parts of the same scene. 



The people without exception were unlettered back- 

 woods-men, of the class least addicted to reasoning. And 

 yet it is remarkable how ingeniously and conclusively they 

 reasoned from apprehension sharpened by fear. They re- 

 marked that the chasms in the earth were in direction, from 

 south-west to north-east, and they were of an extent to swal- 

 low up, not only men but houses, ' down quick into the pit :" 



