A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  For perhaps two or three seconds the occurrence excited no surprise or comment. Then by swift degrees, or all at once—it is difficult to say which—the sound deepened in volume, the tremor became more decided, the ear caught the rattle of window-sashes, gas-fixtures, and other movable objects; the men in the office, with perhaps a simultaneous flash of recollection of the disturbance of the Friday before at Summerville, glanced hurriedly at each other and sprang to their feet with the startled question and answer, “What is that?” “An earthquake!” And then all was bewilderment and confusion.

  The long roll deepened and spread into an awful roar, that seemed to pervade at once the troubled earth and the still air above and around. The tremor was now a rude, rapid quiver, that agitated the whole lofty, strong-walled building as though it were being shaken—shaken by the hand of immeasurable power, with intent to tear its joints asunder and scatter its stones and bricks abroad, as a tree casts its over-ripened fruit before the breath of a gale.

  There was no intermission in the vibration of the mighty subterranean engine. From the first to the last it was a continuous jar, adding force with every moment, and, as it approached and reached the climax of its manifestation, it seemed for a few terrible seconds that no work of human hands could possibly survive the shocks. The floors were heaving underfoot, the surrounding walls and partitions visibly swayed to and fro, the crash of falling masses of stone and brick and mortar was heard overhead and without, the terrible roar filled the ears and seemed to fill the mind and heart, dazing perception, arresting thought and, for a few panting breaths, or while you held your breath in dreadful anticipation of immediate and cruel death, you felt that life was already past and waited for the end, as a victim with his head on the block awaits the fall of the uplifted ax.

  For a second or two it seemed that the worst had passed, and that the violent motion was subsiding. It increased again and became as severe as before. None expected to escape. A sudden rush was simultaneously made to endeavor to attain the open air and fly to a place of safety but before the door was reached all stopped short, as by a common impulse, feeling that hope was vain—that it was only a question of death within the building or without, of being buried beneath the sinking roof or crushed by the falling walls. The uproar slowly died away in seeming distance. The earth was still and oh! the blessed relief of that stillness!

  But how rudely the silence was broken! As we dashed down the stairway and out into the street, from every quarter rose the shrieks, the cries of pain and fear.

  Almost a hundred people died in the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886, thousands, out of a population of 49,000, were injured, and it was said that seven in every eight houses—most of them substantial and very beautiful houses—were damaged, some a total ruin. Paul Pinckney, who as a young man had witnessed the destruction of Charleston, had the ill fortune to be in San Francisco twenty years later when it was destroyed by its own great earthquake; he wrote, “I do not hesitate to assert that the temblor which wrecked Charleston was more severe than that of April 18 last, and in relative destruction considerably worse.”

  In technical terms he was quite wrong—though there seems to have been an extraordinary degree of ground shaking in Charleston, caused by locally peculiar factors: wet ground, compaction of the soil, and so forth. But what did happen was very big indeed, and very dangerous.

  A comprehensive study of the Charleston event, published in 1977 by the U.S. Geological Survey, and which included rigorous analysis of all the anecdotal evidence from around the country, showed that the city had suffered an extraordinary and unprecedented seismic assault. The reverberations were felt as far away as New York, Chicago, Milwaukee (where “a lady living on Huron Street was so frightened she fainted,” reported the Sentinel), Nashville, and Baton Rouge. In the immediate neighborhood of Charleston there had been at least a dozen foreshocks—like the two experienced in Summerville that had prompted the warning in the Atlanta newspaper—and several hundred aftershocks, which can be dispiriting and demoralizing to a population already terrified by what seismologists refer to, with the clinical brutality of their trade, as the mainshock. The aftershocks were as powerful as magnitude 5.3, though they tailed off after a week, allowing the city to get back on its feet and to rebuild.

  It did so most nobly. Within four years the population had increased by a tenth, and masons and bricklayers and carpenters were busily removing all the scars of an event that some supposed might ruin the city forever. Some of the original colonial buildings were demolished, but most were shored up and repaired, and modern Charleston is one of the architectural gems of the South, and indeed of all America, because of this wonderful stock of eighteenth-century mansions.* As most of the citizens were suffering under the blight of absolute poverty that had followed the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War—Charleston, it should be remembered, is where the War between the States began, with the Confederates’ capture of Fort Sumter in 1861—the majority of earthquake victims chose to patch up and preserve their damaged houses rather than tear them down and rebuild. “Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash,” was a saying of the time—and it led to a recovery that was based on preservation, not wholesale renewal. The legacy is a city of beautiful houses—gracious homes, as they would say locally—and so a blessing for which all who visit today must be thankful.

  But why an earthquake? A look at any map will prompt the question—for Charleston, a town built at the confluence of three sluggish rivers on a muddy coastline, is hundreds of miles from anything that looks even remotely geologically active. The Appalachian hills are too distant to be even blue smudges on the city’s western horizon. There is not a volcano in sight, not a hot spring, nothing but mud and gravel and low cliffs and beaches of white sand. The eastern edge of the North American Plate is pulling itself away from the western edge of its European neighbor 1,500 miles away at least, somewhere beneath the waters of the Atlantic. The western edge of the North American Plate is 3,000 miles away, close to the San Francisco toward which we are slowly driving. There are no colliding tectonic plates anywhere near here, not crashing into each other, not easing themselves beneath each other, not slyly rubbing against each other, edge against edge.*

  It can be said without too much of a challenge that all of these places—Charleston, Peekskill, Wappingers Falls, Annsville, and Summerville—stand more or less in the geographical middle of the North American Plate (though not in the middle of North America) and so in a place where earthquakes are simply not supposed to happen. The more agitated business of the world is conducted at the edges of the plates: 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur there, while barely anything goes on in the plates’ centers.

  So what mechanism caused such a great disturbance in so improbable a center-plate location as Charleston, South Carolina? Why the Wappingers Falls Sequence of 1974, in an equally seismically unpropitious place? Why Peekskill, New York? And why does the Ramapo Fault System exist where it does, with its swarm of minor but irritatingly mobile faults—causing puzzling vibrations throughout the suburban lots of Scarsdale and ripples on the surfaces of all the Hockney-blue swimming pools between Montclair and Bedford Hills?

  To begin to answer that—and geologists have been grappling for years with the vexing problem of those earthquakes that occur where they ought not to—I first had to drive some 600 miles west, to the site of one of the most remarkable earthquakes that America has ever known—by some accounts the biggest ever experienced in the Lower Forty-eight states. I then had to travel another 400 miles westward, to a village set deep in the midwestern plains, where a seismograph is mounted inside the general store. My second destination was a somewhat obscure and all-but-forgotten place, though one of some importance in explaining why America suffers earthquakes so far from the edges of the plate on which it stands. My first intended stop, however, was at a town that suffered an event that took place over a series of weeks during the winter between 1811 to 1812—a hitherto unr
emarkable Mississippi riverside town that has since entered the lore and the lexicon of seismologists around the world: New Madrid, Missouri.

  THE UNSTILL CENTER

  Hundreds of anecdotes and newspaper reports suggest that there was something very unusual about the violent shaking that spread from the three great winter earthquakes that were centered on the village of New Madrid, Missouri, around the end of 1811. To widespread contemporary astonishment, the quake was felt in places as far away as New York, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Charleston (where it rang the bells of Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, later to be destroyed by the 1886 quake). And it was more than merely felt: The quake caused damage far away, together with panic and despondency in large measure.

  Indeed, the kind of shaking (or rocking, which was the word used in the American Southeast at the time) that can bring down poorly made buildings appears to present-day researchers to have extended in 1811 over almost a quarter of a million square miles of territory—and the earthquake was felt, was detectable, over a million square miles. By way of comparison the San Francisco Earthquake, though it was much more intense and more lethally destructive, was recorded over an area of just 60,000 square miles, and its damaging heart extended to no more than a fifth of that. Clearly there is something strange about the subterranean makeup of Middle America that allows such earthquakes as begin there to radiate far more energetically beyond their epicenters than do those in the American West.

  NOT THAT MANY Americans today are especially aware of the New Madrid event. Nor, it seems, are many even aware of the existence of New Madrid, in spite of the name being so familiar to the scientific world. I confess I had some slight difficulty finding the place, tucked away as it is in the flat and featureless boot-heel territory, the cotton and soybean country where Missouri marches confusingly alongside three other southern states—Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee—as well as a part of Illinois that was once so decidedly Secessionist in outlook that it was hard to imagine it being part of the same state that also embraced Chicago. Illinois is supposed to be a place of steers and hogs and railroads and dry goods—not of cotton bolls and corncob pipes and the lazy drawl of the pecan groves. Myth has it that President Lincoln, when making speeches in Cairo, Illinois—a town a few miles across and upriver from New Madrid, and about as far south as one can go in the state—tended to play down the Abolitionist and emancipation rhetoric he was wont to employ upstate: Here, despite the name of the state, he was already deep in Dixie.

  I had been driving westward from Charleston for the previous two days. I had sped over the alluvial plains of the Carolinas for all too many tedious hours before climbing up over the ancient furrows of the Appalachians in eastern Tennessee, a state so very wide it seems as though it might have no end at all. But eventually, after descending steadily for 200 miles or so, after turning northwest near a town called Humboldt, after crossing the immense brown winding sheet of the Mississippi River near Caruthersville, and after driving north past a scattering of hardscrabble hamlets called Wardell and Braggadocio and Peach Orchard and Portage, I saw the signpost for my destination. I turned back toward the east at a junction where I was warned that I would find myself on my way to Cape Girardeau and St. Louis if I were careless enough to carry on up north. It was an icy January morning, and I drove on a narrow road through a deserted and frozen cotton field and past battalions of dead cornstalks, and in due course came to the undistinguished sprawl of double-wide trailers and small frame houses and grain elevators and a cotton-gathering plant and a scruffy little main street that is the community of New Madrid. I had been, I thought, to many more lovely towns than this.

  There was a café, a store, a frowzy-looking bar, a museum—and then the community ended abruptly, stopping against a long, low hill of frost-browned grass that was topped by a grove of locust trees. I climbed up a flight of steps, and, from the hill’s flat summit, along which ran a gravel track, I could suddenly see the Mississippi River. Spread out before me, it was vast, pale coffee brown, and slow-moving, with gigantic trains of barges being pushed silently and steadily along the navigation channel. The hill turned out to be a levee, a curtain wall built to protect the town and the cotton fields from the snowmelt floods of spring. I was looking east: There was the river, its buoys bending in the stream. Back west lay the town, and beyond, low and waterlogged meadows with wisps of gray mephitic mists.

  Almost two centuries ago this place had been Spanish land—and the Kentucky that I could see on the distant horizon, where an aluminum smelter was belching its wind-whipped plume of smoke from behind the sedges, shallow marshes, and the brown grass slopes of the river’s left-bank levee, was once the farthest extent of the United States, the western edge of the America that had existed before the Louisiana Purchase. The river had in those days been the formal frontier between America and New Spain—and the Spaniards briefly engineered a cunning and Machiavellian way of securing it, by encouraging Americans from the east side of the river to settle on Spanish land on the west side, thus forming a protective and insulating barrier against more militant Americans rather farther away.

  One man who agreed to the Spanish scheme, and thus who, in doing so, briefly turned his back on his own country, was a Revolutionary War hero named George Morgan. He took the Spanish land grant, accepted Spanish citizenship, and, along with seventy like-minded men and women who traveled downstream in four heavily armed boats, established a town on the west bank that he named, in honor of his new masters, New Madrid. It was an arrangement that had all the ingredients of a disaster. Everything soon unraveled.

  Colonel Morgan himself had fierce rows with the local governor, soon abandoned his claim, and went off to become a farmer in Pennsylvania. The riverbank where Morgan had established a neatly planned little grid of a town was soon eaten away by the ferocious currents, and the town began to vanish as swiftly as it was settled. Only when it was moved northward and eastward could it flourish, to the extent that it ever did. Then, eleven years after its foundation, the Spaniards gave up their land to the French—early maps of the settlement would call it Nouvelle Madrid—and finally, three years later, the French sold the property to the United States, and what had been known officially as New Madrid, Louisiana, New Spain, in due course became the grimy little frontier town of New Madrid, Missouri, USA.

  Seven years later—rather more than two decades after this town was established—the wrath of God descended. It was to smite—as some locals imagined*—a place that was already suffering under the burdens of its strange history. It struck first in pitch dark, in the small hours of the ice-cold morning of Monday, December 16. A letter written by some long-forgotten correspondent in the town to a distant friend is taken as a fairly accurate reflection of what happened:

  About two o’clock this morning we were awakened by a most tremendous noise, while the house danced about and seemed as if it would fall on our heads. I soon conjectured the cause of our troubles, and cried out it was an Earthquake, and for the family to leave the house; which we found very difficult to do, owing to its rolling and jostling about. The shock was soon over and no injury was sustained, except the loss of the chimney, and the exposure of my family to the cold of the night. At the time of this shock the heavens were very clear and serene, not a breath of air stirring; but in five minutes it became very dark, and a vapor which seemed to impregnate the atmosphere, had a very disagreeable smell, and produced a difficult of respiration. I knew not how to account for this at the time, but when I saw, in the morning, the situation of my neighbors’ houses, all of them more or less injured. I attributed it to the dust … the darkness continued until daybreak; during this time we had eight more shocks, none of them as violent as the first.

  At half past six o’clock in the morning it cleared up, and believing the danger over I left home, to see what injury my neighbors had sustained. A few minutes after my departure there was another shock, extremely violent. I hurried home as fast as I
could, but the agitation of the earth was so great that it was with much difficulty that I kept my balance—the motion of the earth was about twelve inches to and fro. I cannot give you an accurate description of this moment; the earth seemed convulsed—the houses shook very much—chimnies {sic} falling in every direction. The loud, hoarse roaring which attended the earthquake, together with the cries, screams and yells of the people, seems still ringing in my ears.

  Fifteen minutes after seven o’clock we had another shock. This one was the most severe one we have yet had—the darkness returned, and the noise was remarkably loud. The first motions of the earth were similar to the preceding shocks, but before they ceased we rebounded up and down, and it was with difficulty we kept our seats. At this instant I expected a dreadful catastrophe….

  The disturbance that night was the beginning of a five-month-long nightmare, a seemingly unending succession of sudden movements and severely destructive earthquakes to which seismologists still refer as the New Madrid Sequence. At times the earth just shook and shook intermittently, like “the flesh of a beef just killed,” as one local farmer put it; at other times it undulated, like a ship on the sea; or it shuddered so violently that horses were knocked to the ground and trees collapsed into rents torn in the soil. Crevasses opened with no warning, emitting strange hissing sounds as they did so. Curious lights danced in the branches of trees—like the static electricity of St. Elmo’s Fire, seen on the masts of ships caught in powerful storms. Strange and generally foul smells oozed up from pores in the ground. What looked like putrefying boils suddenly bubbled out onto the surface of fields, and sand volcanoes or fountains of mud covered the meadows, briefly rendering them (had anyone been in the mood for farming) useless.

  The turbulence in both the earth and the Mississippi River after the 1811 earthquake centered at New Madrid was formidable, the stuff of legend.