HISTORY OF MAURITIUS. 
J 75 
Description of an Hurricane in the Isle of France , April 10, 1773, 
by M. Brunei. 
il The storm made its appearance about nine at night, just as the moon began to 
appear in the horizon ; but its greatest violence was between eleven at night and 
one in the morning, when the blended noise of the wind and the thunder was terrible 
while the lightnings, which gave a fiery appearance to the atmosphere, heightened the 
horror of the scene. The terror of the inhabitants did not begin to subside till towards 
five in the morning. They had all passed the night in an impatient state of alarm, but 
when the day began to appear, the spectacle was most horrible: upwards of three 
hundred houses in the town of Port Louis were destroyed, the roofs of all of them 
were carried away, and the principal church was reduced to an heap of ruins. Many 
of the inhabitants were buried in the rubbish ;• others, with bruised and broken limbs, 
solicited the help of their neighbours, who were not in a condition to succour them ; 
while the streets were strewed with nails, timbers, and fragments of houses and fur¬ 
niture. All the vessels in the port, to the number of thirty-two, had been thrown 
on shore, and more or less injured; of many small boats nothing was seen but the 
keel; dead bodies were floating among the wrecks; while the seamen who were 
not yet exhausted, were exerting their remaining strength in useless efforts to gain 
the land. In short, all that presented itself to the view was consternation, disaster, 
and misery. The interior desolation was equally great: the .maize, rice, and corn, 
were blown about and dispersed : the coffee and cotton plants, the sugar canes, and 
the cinnamon trees, were all torn up by the roots; the old timber trees were laid 
low by the violence of the wind; the shops and manufactories were destroyed; and 
the grass was parched and dried up, as if it had received the impression of fire. In 
one of the districts of the island, to the windward, the sea was driven to forty feet 
beyond its ordinary limits, and compelled the inhabitants to seek for refuge on the 
neighbouring heights; while it left every kind of fish on the land. This disaster 
occasioned so great a dearth of provisions, that bread was sold at eighteen pence a 
pound: in a short time however assistance of every kind arived from the coast of 
Coromandel, the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Madagascar, and the Persian 
Gulph.” 
