HORRIBLE CALAMITY AT SANTIAGO

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 171, 22 April 1864, Page 3

HORRIBLE CALAMITY AT SANTIAGO

TWO THOUSAND WOMEN AND CHILDREN BURNED TO DEATH. The Alia California, of the 23rd January,

brought by the ‘ Amazon ’ to Otago, quotes from the Valparaiso Mercury, received on the 22nd the horrifying deaths of nearly 2,000 women and children, through a fire, which commenced in one of the churches of Santiago, during a religious festival in commemoration of the Immaculate Conception ; HOW THE FIEE AEOSE, AND THE HAVOC DONE.

A catastrophe gigantic, horrible, unexampled in the annals of our country, and, perhaps, in the world, has absorbed every one’s mind for many days past. We will use the utmost brevity in relating the calamity to our foreign readers.

Ever since the newly-invented mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was declared at Rome in 1857, the church of the Company, formerly belonging to the Jesuits, had become the focus of devotion of a vast sisterhood called the Daughters of Mary, in which, on payment of so much a year, almost all the women of our capital are enrolled. Every year, from the Bth of November to the Bth of December, the Day of the Immaculate Conception, lasted a splendid festival, in which orchestral music, singing, and au astonishing prodigality of incense, of lights of oil, liquid gas, wax and every luminous combustible in the world glittered and flared in every part in the cornices, in the ceiling, and particularly on the high altar. Every night the church blazed with a sea of flame, and fluttered with clouds of muslin and gauze draperies. It could only be lighted in time by beginuiug in the middle of the afternoon, and the work of extinguishing was only ended when the night was far advanced. In 1858 they thought of adopting hydrogen gas, but the engineer’s plan, though convenient and safe, was rejected. The church of the Company, built in the latter half of the seventeenth century, possessed a spacious nave, but a roof that dated back only fifteen years ago, of painted timber. The only door of easy access to the congregation was the principal one in the centre, the small doors leading into the aisle being only opened half-way and obstructed by screens. Near the high altar there was a little door communicating with the sacristy. THE BEGINNING OF THE CATA STH OI’HE. A few minutes before seven in the evening of Thursday, the Sth of December, more than three thousand women and a few hundred men knelt in - that church crammed to overflowing. However, that did not prevent a compact mass of fanatics from attempting to fight their way in from the steps, because it was the last night of the month of Mary, and no one could bear to lose the closing sermon of the priest Ugarte, who always succeeded by his exciting declamations in drowning in tears that place so soon to be a sea of fire. Eizaguirre, the Apostolic Nuncio and favorite of Pius IX, the founder of the American College at Rome, was to preach also. It is said that Ugarte, wounded in his feelings as chaplain of the daughters of Mary, because Eizaguirre had told him that the illuminations of his church could not be compared with what he had seen in Rome, exclaimed with enthusiasm : “ I will give him, when he comes to preach, such an illumination as the world has never seen !” Nobody can deny that Ugarte has kept His word.

Indeed the lighting of the caudles had hardly finished, when the liquid gas, in a transparency on the high altar, set on fire its woodwork, and wrapped in iiame a kind of tabernacle wholly composed of canvas, pasteboard, and wood. In less than two minutes the altar, about 23 yards high and 10 broad, was an inextinguishable bonfire. THE FLAMES SPREAD. The advance of the fire was perhaps even more rapid than the panic of the audience. When the fire had flown from the altar to the roof, the whole flock of devotees rushed to the principal door. Those near the lateral doors were able to escape at the first alarm ; others, more particularly the men, gained the little door of the sacristy, and lastly, those near the chief outlet forced their way through the throng even still struggling to get in, and, indeed, did get in, even in face of the fire, stimulated by the nesire of “ getting a good place,” which, on this occasion meant a good place to die in. Then, the flames having crept along the whole roof, and consequently released the lamps of oil and liquid gas from the cornices to which they were strung, a rain of blue liquid fire poured down upon the entangled throngs below. A new and more horrible conflagration broke out then in that dense living mass, appalling the affrighted gaze with pictures tenfold more awful than those wherein the Catholic imagination has labored to give an idea of the tortures of the damned. In less than a quarter of an hour about two thousand human beings had perished, including many children but very few men.

THE BUILDING A CHARNEL HOUSE. Although many heroic men performed prodigies of daring and strength in tearing some from the death-grasp of the phalanx of death that choked the door, in some cases literally tearing offtheir arms without being able to extricate them, the number of the saved by this means fellshortofso. More than 500 persons of our highest society have perished, the greater part young girls of 15 to 20 years. One mother has perished with her 5 daughters. Two thirds of the victims are servants, and there are many housei in which not one has escaped. Several houses have been noted by the police as empty because all there inhabitants have perished. The people think of nothing but the victims and obsequies. All with one voice demand the demolition of the ruinous walls of the fatal temple and the offering of a monument to the dear memory of the martyrs. The municipal body solicited this, by the medium of a commission on the 12th, and the Government is resolved on compliance. Resistance is threatened on the part of the clergy, but such exasperating and indecorous folly would infallibly call forth a general rising of the people.