THE EARTHQUAKE AT SAN SALVADOR.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VI, Issue 286, 24 July 1873, Page 6

THE EARTHQUAKE AT SAN SALVADOR.

San Salvador, the flourishing and prosperous little capital of one of the most flourishing and prosperous of the smaller South American States, was absolutely destroyed by earthquake between midnight on the 18th and daybreak on the 19th of March. Commander Kennedy, of H. M. sloop Reindeer, which lay in the harbor of Ceranto, was an eye-witness of the calamity, and his account of it runs as follows : — On the morning of March 19 came a telegram from the capital announcing its complete destruction, " not a house left standing," and calling urgently for instant succor. Commander Kennedy put himself and his crew at once into the good work. He Bent up his whole force of marines to aid in the preservation of the public peace, ordered all his disposable stores of provisions to be forwarded with them for the use of the stricken people, and hurried up to the scene of suffering himself. It is a long and painful journey, over poor roads, from La Union to San Salvador. Commander Kennedy found the way choked up as he approached the city with carts, waggons, fugitives on horseback, on muleback, on foot. Not by hundreds, but by thousands, the inhabitants of the doomed city were seeking refuge in the little towns and hamlets, in haciendas, or in the open fields. They had all but one tale to tell: "San Salvador had ceased to exist." One town lying westward of the capital, and some 200 ft. higher, Santa Tecla, which contained but 1,500 inhabitants on the ISfch of March, by noon of the next day contained nearly E.OOO. .And yet under the houses of Santa Tecla itself rumbled the same awful mysterious forces which had shaken down >an Salvador into the dust— literally into the dust. When Commander Kennedy reached what had been the city, he found there a parched and horrible plain heaped with ■roses of fallen ■tone and adob*, over which

hung, like a pall, a vast cloud of fine brown dust, floating like the smoke of a great conflagration over the crumbling ruins, but low and Hear the ground, so that man and beast passing through it were choked and stifled* as in the wake of a great army marching over the dust-baked roads of Syria" or of Mexico. In the whole city, which numbered somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, Commander Kennedy found but one solitary bnilding standing uninjured. This was a large wooden edifice belonging to an ecclesiastical body, and known as the Colesio Tridentino, or ' ' College of Trent. " Besides this the wooden facade of the cathedral stood erect. The body of the church, built of adobe, had fallen ; the bell-tower, of stone, had been thrown out of the perpendicular, and stood leaning, like another tower of Pisa, at a considerable angle. The only other edifices not completely levelled with the earth were the Government-house and the Hotel del Parque, both built of stone, and both, be it noted, of two stories in height, the rest of the city having been built of but a single story, in accordance with tLe old architectural traj dition of the tropics. Both of these edifices had suffered severely, but their positions and outlines at least were recognisable. Of the rest, not a definable trace could be made out, excepting where block after block the walls of hundreds of houses lay prone, one lapping over upon another like the rows of bricks which children put up for the pleasure of knocking them all down again by a smart blow struck at the last of the file. Among those wastes and ruins the authorities and many of the people were hard at work, saving all that could be saved of public and of private property. Let it be recorded to the credit of this plucky little republic, that the first order issued by the President, General Gonzales, was a decree authorising and requiring all citizens instantly to shoot down any man found with portable property of which he could not give a satisfactory account. Thanks to the energy and decision of the Executive, the horrors of this appalling scene were not aggravated by any such outbursts of human devilry and lawlessness as those which make the blackest feature in the terrible story of the dostruction of Lisbon a century and more ago.