JAMAICA—THE EARTHQUAKE 
271 
Seven weeks later I re-visited the museum. The only specimens 
remaining were the skeletons of a whale and a crocodile, which, 
hanging from the ceiling of the lower room, gazed as with a gruesome 
grin upon the ruins. The upper walls had disappeared and the 
roof was standing just above the joists of the first floor, having 
apparently experienced the same rotatory movement as the statue of 
Her late Majesty Queen Victoria and the writer of this account. 
Practically the whole of the walls of the upper storey had fallen 
outwards—-many tons of brickwork. That my wife escaped with her 
life is surprising, that she was unscathed is simply marvellous. 
There were other remarkable escapes in the precincts of the 
museum. A carpenter had just come down a ladder, when the wall 
against which the ladder was leaning fell outwards. A wall fell upon 
a cradle which it crushed without hurting the baby within. Another 
wall fell where a child was feeding some rabbits; the hutch was 
crushed and the rabbits were killed, but the child escaped. 
Mr. Abell, a visitor at the Constant Spring Hotel, who some 
years before had suffered a sunstroke in India, was watching a game 
of tennis, when suddenly the lawn appeared to move up and down 
in waves, like a carpet blown up by the wind. He said to himself: 
“ Gracious me ! I have got it again ! ” Then he saw a huge crack 
open at the bottom 1 of the hotel building and extend upwards to the 
top, at which he remarked: “ Well, that is not a sunstroke anyhow.” 
This occurred about six miles from Harbour Street where the 
damage was greatest. 
The earthquake occurred at 3.25 p.m., and lasted about 26 
seconds, its effects being aggravated by a destructive fire which 
greatly added to the horror of the situation. As far as could be 
ascertained somewhere about 1000 lives were lost. Mrs. Longstaff 
and I betook ourselves to a surgery to render such help as might be 
possible, but the first two surgeries we came across were wrecked and 
deserted. Scalp wounds from falling bricks were very numerous, 
in some cases extensive and positively appalling to look at, though 
the negro’s head is proverbially hard ; there were also many fractures. 
Shingles from the fallen roofs made better splints than palings, but 
bandages were a greater difficulty; for the most part one had to 
make the best of torn-up women’s garments, the trimmings serving 
(with dead grass) for padding. Mrs. Longstaff begged for bandage 
material from the women, but did not succeed in getting hold of a 
sheet till late in the day. It was impossible to attend to the cases 
1 I have not been able to think out the nature of the strain which caused this 
huge crack to run upwards from below. 
