Chapter One
Chronicle: A Year of Living
Dangerously
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!
Sir William Watson, “April,” 1903
So far as the ancients of china are concerned, 1906 was a year of the Fire
Horse – a time of grave unpredictability that comes along every six
decades, and a time when all manner of strange events are inclined to
occur. So to the seers and the hermits in their faraway mountain aeries
such events as unrolled during the year would have come as no surprise.
The rest of humankind was less well prepared, however, and were caught
unawares. And what instruments we have agree that, so far as matters of
the earth were concerned, 1906 was, yes, a very bad year indeed.
At least it was bad seismically speaking, being a very violent and a very
lethal year. And the flurry of activity that marked what the numbers show
to have been among the most ill behaved of times of the entire century
began in the morning of the last day of January, when there was an
enormous earthquake under the seabed of the Pacific Ocean.
It is said today to have been the greatest and most powerful earthquake
that had until that moment ever been registered by the machines of
humankind, and it struck a score of communities along the South American
coast, devastating towns, inundating fields, and causing huge waves to
tear out into the open ocean. Its shaking lasted for more than four
minutes, and as many as 2,000 people are thought to have died in the
disaster. Scores of thousands were injured and made homeless, and
countless villages and at least one major port city were totally
destroyed. The effects of the huge traveling sea waves from the event were
felt as far away as San Diego, and in Honolulu Harbor in Hawaii all the
steamboats waiting at anchor were spun around and carried upward on an
enormous tsunami, which ebbed and flowed like a tide every few minutes,
bringing confusion and alarm in its wake.
The epicenter of this earthquake, whose details are still pored over, is
now calculated to have been some eighty miles due west of a prominent
headland known as El Cabo de San Francisco, in Ecuador.
The town that was all but destroyed – but which has since been rebuilt,
only to be damaged many times subsequently – was the island port of
Tumaco, now a prominent oil terminal. But in 1906 it was a place where
fishermen brought in sizable catches of tuna and sardines, and where
traders hawked bales of rubber and pallets of cinchona bark, ready to be
pressed for quinine. Tumaco is some thirty miles north of the Ecuadoran
frontier, in Colombia.
Both Ecuador and Colombia suffered grievously from the earthquake, and
even today people in the villages by the mangrove swamps of the estuaries
speak fearfully of the morning when several hundred miles of their
coastline, from the port of Guayaquil in the south to Buenaventura in the
north, were devastated by the power of the water and the four minutes of
ground shaking. Seismologists working in the 1930s, when Charles Richter
created his scale of magnitude, estimated that the Ecuadoran-Colombian
Earthquake of 1906 had a magnitude of 8.4, as high as anything then known;
new calculations today suggest an even greater magnitude, of anything
approaching 8.8 – as bad a disaster as could possibly be imagined,
whether it rated 8.4 or 8.8 or somewhere in between, for the two young
republics struggling to their feet.
But the earth wasn’t done yet. Sixteen days later there was another very
large earthquake, this time on the island of St. Lucia, one of the four
specks of Caribbean limestone, sand, and coral that make up what was then
the British crown colony of the Windward Islands. According to
interpretations of the damage data made in the 1970s, it rated somewhere
between VII and VIII on the magnificently named Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik
Earthquake Intensity Scale. Just as with the Ecuadoran event of the month
before, this February earthquake had its epicenter in the sea too,
somewhere off the northeastern tip of St. Lucia, and about twenty miles
south of the French possession of Martinique.
This event, which collapsed buildings on both St. Lucia and Martinique,
and which was felt by the populations of other islands in the eastern
Caribbean, including Dominica and Grenada and St. Vincent, did not kill
anyone. But it triggered a burst of smaller earthquakes – probably a
swarm of so-called volcanic earthquakes, which tend to occur when spurts
of magma force their way up into the earth’s upper crust, after the crust
has been weakened by a deeper earthquake that has been caused by the
movement of tectonic plates. This wave of lesser earth movements went on
for two or three weeks, and for a while the placid life of an island whose
people produced, according to the Colonial Office report of the time, a
heavenly confection of “sugar, rum, cocoa, coconuts, bananas, bay oil, bay
rum, spices and sea island cotton” was dangerously interrupted. The
colonial governor, who had his headquarters in Grenada, was alerted, and a
Royal Navy warship was dispatched from the squadron in Bermuda. Assistance
was offered, assessments were made, and St. Lucia was from that moment on
formally designated an earthquake-prone territory, risky enough to be of
note but not sufficiently dangerous to be abandoned.
Still it was not over. Five days later a tremendous outbreak of ground
shaking occurred in Shemakha, an ancient town of mosques and temples …
(Continues…)
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-057199-3
Excerpted from A Crack in the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester Excerpted by permission.
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