In no part of the volcanic region of
Southern Europe has so tremendous an
earthquake occurred in modern times as
that which began on the 1st of November,
1755, at Lisbon. A sound of thunder was
heard underground, and immediately afterwards a violent shock threw down the greater
part of that city. In the course of about six
minutes, sixty thousand persons perished.
The sea first retired and laid the bar dry; it then rolled in, rising fifty feet above its
ordinary level. The mountains of Arrabida,
Estrella, Julio, Marvan, and Cintra, being
some of the largest in Portugal, were impetuously shaken, as it were, from their very
foundations; and some of them opened at
their summits, which were split and rent in
a wonderful manner, huge masses of them
being thrown down into the subjacent valleys. Flames are related to have issued
from these mountains, which are supposed
to have been electric; they are also said to
have smoked; but vast clouds of dust may
have given rise to this appearance.
[...]
The great area over which this Lisbon
earthquake extended is very remarkable.
The movement was most violent in Spain,
Portugal, and the north of Africa; but
nearly the whole of Europe, and even the
West Indies, felt the shock on the same day.
A seaport called St. Ubes, about twenty
miles south of Lisbon, was engulfed. At
Algiers and Fez, in Africa, the agitation of
the earth was equally violent; and at the
distance of eight leagues from Morocco, a
village with the inhabitants, to the number
of about eight or ten thousand persons,
together with all their cattle, were swallowed
up. Soon after, the earth closed again over
them.
The shock was felt at sea, on the deck of
a ship to the west of Lisbon, and produced
very much the same sensation as on dry land.
Off St. Lucar, the captain of the ship Nancy
felt his vessel so violently shaken, that he
thought she had struck the ground, but, on
heaving the lead, found a great depth of
water. Captain Clark, from Denia, in latitude 36° 24' N., between nine and ten in
the morning, had his ship shaken and
strained as if she had struck upon a rock.
Another ship, forty leagues west of St Vincent, experienced so violent a concussion,
that the men were thrown a foot and a half
perpendicularly up from the deck. In Antigua and Barbadoes, as also in Norway,
Sweden, Germany, Holland, Corsica, Switzerland, and Italy, tremors and slight oscillations of the ground were felt.
The agitation of lakes, rivers and springs
in Great Britain was remarkable. At Loch
Lomond, in Scotland, for example, the water,
without the least apparent cause, rose against
its banks, and then subsided below its usual
level. The greatest perpendicular height
of this swell was two feet four inches. It is
said that the movement of this earthquake
was undulatory, and that it travelled at the
rate of twenty miles a minute. A great
wave swept over the coast of Spain, and is
said to have been sixty feet high at Cadiz. At Tangier, in Africa, it rose and fell
eighteen times on the coast; at Funchal, in
Madeira, it rose full fifteen feet perpendicular above high-water mark, although the
tide, which ebbs and flows there seven feet,
was then at half-ebb. Besides entering the
city and committing great havoc, it overflowed other seaports in the island. At
Kinsale, in Ireland, a body of water rushed
into the harbour, whirled round several
vessels, and poured into the marketplace.
Spofford, Ainsworth Rand and Charles Gibbon, The Library of Choice Literature, Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co., 1882, vol. 7, pp. 162-163.
