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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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.
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