Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 83
ОглавлениеHON. JOSEPH D. SAYERS
GOVERNOR OF TEXAS
SHOWING TERRIBLE DEVASTATION ON AVENUE 1. BETWEEN TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH STREETS
THE JOHN SEALY HOSPITAL, GALVESTON
A RESIDENCE CARRIED FROM ITS FOUNDATION BY THE RUSH OF WATERS
REMOVING DEAD BODIES TO THE BARGES FOR BURIAL AT SEA
GENERAL VIEW ALONG THE GALVESTON BEACH AFTER THE FLOOD
CREMATING BODIES EXCAVATED FROM THE RUINS
MEDICAL DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, GALVESTON, DAMAGED BY THE FLOOD
STORY OF THE LOST ATLANTIS.
The world, with the lapse of centuries, has not even been able to outgrow the tradition of the lost Atlantis. Perhaps this is the oldest of all traditions of cataclysms which have blotted out cities and continents. It may be that it is because this one comes handed down to us from the illustrous hand of Plato that we yield to it a veneration which prolongs its life. Certainly it can never be more than tradition, without a return to the ages of miracles. Our lately found expertness in deep sea soundings have given us no new light on Atlantis.
And yet we cling to the old story, and are loath to turn from the spectacle of a continent in the agonies of a watery burial, or to take down from the walls of our brain cells the pictures of a submerged world in which sea moss trails over and around great temples and monuments. More than half the world believes that there is a lost Atlantis. The Egyptians believed so, long before Plato’s day. It is in the mouth of an Egyptian priest, talking to Solon, that Plato puts the description of the vanished land. That description makes of Atlantis a land larger than the Texas of to-day.
BELIEVED THE SEA HAD CONCEALED A LAND.
The Greek philosopher located it off the shores of North Africa, a little to the southwest of Gibraltar. The Platonian description of the interior of the Atlantis of ancient times is surpassingly beautiful, but not more so than the rare imaginative power with which Plato writes of the country and its people, a most fabulous and engaging history.
All this, of course, is the work of pure fancy, and only important, beyond the fact that it is the work of Plato, as showing how deeply the conviction had taken hold upon the mind of that age that the sea had taken away a land which the ancients knew as the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had left nothing but a boundless waste of waters west of Europe. Speculators have located the lost Atlantis near the Canary Islands, and these islands are, in fact, supposed to be the remnants of the lost continent. There is positively nothing tangible upon which to hang the story of the lost Atlantis.
But, like most traditions which persist in living on after the world has grown too practical to have any more use for them, it has, doubtless, a foundation in some important fact of olden time, the tragedy of which was in that sacrifice of the earth to the waters of the deep, which had become familiar even to the ancients. Byron’s apostrophe to the ocean is so singularly powerful and beautiful because it expresses that awe and fear of man for the sea which is an instinct with us, and which, if it had not been instinct with us at the first, would have become so through the many and heavy afflictions visited upon the race by Neptune, god of the sea.
TIDAL WAVES ON ENGLISH COASTS.
That the coasts of England have been visited by many and disastrous tidal waves there is abundant evidence. In fact, the ocean bar, which surrounds nearly the whole of England and Scotland, is evidence enough that the entire shore line, as it exists to-day, is itself the result of a great submersion, or series of submersions, which ages ago overflowed the old coast, rushed in shore, made new land lines, and, hollowing out between the new line and the old, a new ocean bed, leaving what had been called the coast line to be forever after called the “bar.” The bar is to be found in nearly every port of England, eloquent testimony to the tidal waves of the past. But there is comparatively little of other testimony save such as has been preserved in the records of seaport towns.
One of the greatest cataclysms ever occurring on the British coast was that on the coast of Lincolnshire in 1571. This has been commemorated in verse by Jean Ingelow in the poem entitled “High Tide Off the Coast of Lincolnshire.” The Lincolnshire coast is almost uniformly low and marshy—so low, in fact, at some places that the shore requires the defence of an embankment to save it from the encroachments of the sea.
A sea wall had been built when the great tidal wave of 1571 came, but it appears to have been absolutely useless as a defence of the country and the people of that time.
At the present day the fens of Lincolnshire are defended from the North Sea by some of the finest engineering works in the world, and yet it is much to be doubted whether they would prove effective against such invasions as that which has just overwhelmed Galveston.
GREAT INUNDATION OF 1571.
There are ancient town records in nearly all the seacoast towns of Lincolnshire which tell of the inundation of 1571. There was then as there is now, a chime of bells in the tower of St. Botolph, Boston, and when the tide was seen to be sweeping away the barriers the Mayor of Boston himself mounted the belfry stairs and had played the old love song called “The Brides of Enderby” as an alarm to the country side.
But the tide came so unheralded, there having been no premonition of it in storm or tempest, that the meaning of the chimes was not understood. Savants have never had an explanation of the Lincolnshire tide, coming as it did so unheralded by anything threatening a cataclysm. The flood found the people unprepared and thousands fell victims to its fury.
There is nothing in literature, and nothing of course in the musty archives of the Lincolnshire towns, conveying as vivid an impression of the horror of the day and night as the Ingelow verses. They are written in the old, and what now seems to us the quaint, English of that day.
The story is told by an old woman whose daughter, out with her two children looking and calling for the cows at eventide, is overwhelmed and drowned.
A REAL TRAGEDY AT GALVESTON.
Perhaps it is a safe conclusion that the tragedy poetry as set for us on the Lincolnshire stage had found expression in real life along the Texas coasts. The old Lincolnshire woman’s plaintive narrative has never seemed unreal, because it is filled with the spirit of a homely life, but just now it seems like a voice from out the past telling us of the tragedy now at our doors. The poem is a very long one, but a few selections from its narration of the widespread desolation of the country will picture much of the gulf coast of Texas at this time. The cry of the housewife for the cattle dies out in the evening stillness and then the old dame sees the flood:
And lo, along the river’s bed
A mighty eygre reared his crest,
And up the river raging sped.
It swept with thunderous noises loud—
Shaped like a curling, snow-white cloud,
Or like a demon in a shroud.
And rearing Lindus, backward pressed,
Shook all her trembling banks amain,
Then madly at the eygre’s breast
Flung uppe her weltering walls again,
Then bankes came down with ruin and rout,
Then beaten foam flew round about,
Then all the mighty floods were out.
So farre, so fast the eygre drave
The heart had hardly time to beat
Before a shallow seething wave
Sobbed in the grasses at our feet;
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee—
And all the world was in the sea.
That flow strewed wrecks about the grass,
That ebbe swept out the flocks to sea—
A fatal ebbe and flow, alas,
To many more than mine and me.
TIDES AND EARTHQUAKES.
Many of the most fatal tidal waves of which we have any history, have been accompanied by earthquakes, adding to their horrors, but making it impossible to say whether the earthquake or the inundation has been the more fatal and destructive. The great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 was accompanied by a tidal wave which, rolling up the Tagus river from the ocean, submerged all the lower parts of the city and destroyed thousands of lives which might possibly have escaped the earthquake shocks.
When the earthquake came to Caraccas in 1812 there was a tidal wave at La Guyra, the entrepot of Caraccas, which destroyed many lives. Five years ago a series of tidal waves, accompanied by or alternating with earthquake shocks, visited some of the most populous islands of Japan. The tidal waves reached from fifteen to twenty miles inland, being of such a height, force and volume, ten miles from the ocean, particularly when restricted to narrow valleys, as to be capable of destroying much life.
The number of human lives lost at that time has never been stated in any English newspaper, but that it ran far into the thousands there is no room to doubt. Ten thousand is more apt to be an under than an over estimate, such were the ravages of the combined seismic and cataclysmic terrors visited upon that part of the world during nearly a week of days and nights of horror, which, fortunately, come but seldom in the experience of the race.
The affliction of Texas, while much less than this, is still monumental, and will always rank among the great catastrophes of history. Perhaps there have been events more destructive of life in times or places where it was impossible that any record of them should be left. But few such are known to history. Nor is it likely that the future will often bring to any part of the world a severer affliction than that which has fallen upon our Gulf coast.
