On the 1st of November, 1775, a sound of thunder was heard
underground, and immediately afterward a violent shock threw down the
greater part of the city. In six minutes 60,000 persons perished. A
great concourse of people had collected for safety upon a new quay,
built entirely of marble; but suddenly it sunk down with all the people
on it, and not one of the dead bodies ever floated to the surface. A
great number of small boats and vessels anchored near it, and, full of
people, were swallowed up as in a whirlpool. No fragments of these
wrecks ever rose again to the surface; the water where the quay went
down is now 600 feet deep. The area covered by this earthquake was very
great. Humboldt says that a portion of the earth's surface, four times
as great as the size of Europe, was simultaneously shaken. It extended
from the Baltic to the West Indies, and from Canada to Algiers. At eight
leagues from Morocco the ground opened and swallowed a village of 10,000
inhabitants, and closed again over them.
It is very probable that the centre of the convulsion was in the bed of
the Atlantic, at or near the buried island of Atlantis, and that it was
a successor of the great earth throe which, thousands of years before,
had brought destruction upon that land.
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