Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Has Again, It Seems, Been Swallowed Up By
The Ocean.
This is the third time that submarine volcanoes have
presented this extraordinary spectacle near the island of St.
Michael;
And, as if the eruptions of these volcanoes were subject
to periodical recurrence, owing to a certain accumulation of
elastic fluids, the island raised up has appeared at intervals of
ninety-one or ninety-two years.* (* Malte-Brun, Geographie
Universelle. There is, however, some doubt respecting the eruption
of 1628, to which some accounts assign the date of 1638. The rising
always happened near the island of St. Michael, though not
identically on the same spot. It is remarkable that the small
island of 1720 reached the same elevation as the island of Sabrina
in 1811.)
At the time of the appearance of the new island of Sabrina, the
smaller West India Islands, situated eight hundred leagues
south-west of the Azores, experienced frequent earthquakes. More
than two hundred shocks were felt from the month of May 1811, to
April 1812, at St. Vincent; one of the three islands in which there
are still active volcanoes. The commotion was not circumscribed to
the insular portion of eastern America; and from the 16th of
December, 1811, till the year 1813, the earth was almost
incessantly agitated in the valleys of the Mississippi, the
Arkansas river, and the Ohio. The oscillations were more feeble on
the east of the Alleghanies, than to the west of these mountains,
in Tennessee and Kentucky. They were accompanied by a great
subterranean noise, proceeding from the south-west. In some places
between New Madrid and Little Prairie, as at the Saline, north of
Cincinnati, in latitude 37 degrees 45 minutes, shocks were felt
every day, nay almost every hour, during several months. The whole
of these phenomena continued from the 16th of December 1811, till
the year 1813. The commotion, confined at first to the south, in
the valley of the lower Mississippi, appeared to advance slowly
northward.
Precisely at the period when this long series of earthquakes
commenced in the Transalleghanian States (in the month of December
1811), the town of Caracas felt the first shock in calm and serene
weather. This coincidence of phenomena was probably not accidental;
for it must be borne in mind that, notwithstanding the distance
which separates these countries, the low grounds of Louisiana and
the coasts of Venezuela and Cumana belong to the same basin, that
of the Gulf of Mexico. When we consider geologically the basin of
the Caribbean Sea, and of the Gulf of Mexico, we find it bounded on
the south by the coast-chain of Venezuela and the Cordilleras of
Merida and Pamplona; on the east by the mountains of the West India
Islands, and the Alleghanies; on the west by the Andes of Mexico,
and the Rocky Mountains; and on the north by the very
inconsiderable elevations which separate the Canadian lakes from
the rivers which flow into the Mississippi. More than two-thirds of
this basin are covered with water.
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