REMARKABLE EARTHQUAKE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 3, Issue 830, 27 July 1881, Page 2

REMARKABLE EARTHQUAKE.

An old yet well-recorded instance is the earthquake of Jamaica in 1692, The ground swelled and heaved like a rolling sea, and was traversed by numerous cracks 200 or 300 of which were seen at a time, opening and closing rapidly again. Many people were swallowed up: in these rents: some the earth caught by the middle and squeezed to death; the heads only of others appeared above the ground and some were engulfed and then ca3t forth again with great quantities of water, Such was the devastation, that even in in Port Royal, then the capital, threequarters of the buildings together with the fjrouud on which they Btood on, sank down with . their, inhabitants entirely underwater. The large atone houses on the harbor subsided so as to be from 24 to4B feet under water; yet'many remained, for it is said that after the earthquake the mast-heads of several shipswrecked in the harbour, together with the chimneys-tops of the houses were aeon just projecting above the waves, A'tract of land about the town 1000 aores in extent sank down'in less than one minute during the first shock, and the sea immediately rushed in. The breadth of one of the streets is said to have been just doubled by the earthquake,.. Out of town the ruin was vast. Some plantations sank, and were covered in after years by a lake of water. ' Several tenements were buried in,landslips, and one plantation was removed half a mile by a slide from its place-growing crops and all. Between Spanish Town and • "Sixteen mile Walk" the high and perpendicular cliffs bounding the 1 river fell in, stopped the passage of the river and flooded, the latter place. The Blue Mountains were much shattered, fissured, and their soil 1 set loose in land slips,-From Professor P. M, Duncan's paper on Earthquakes, in 'Science for All." ..