A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  When Caruso eventually arrived back in New York, he learned that readers of the penny dreadfuls understood him to have wandered the streets of San Francisco displaying his magnificent embonpoint in his nightshirt, or less. Stuff and nonsense, he retorted. He was fully dressed, indeed really very well so. But then did he breakfast at the Palace? Did he go to the St. Francis? Did he lie down for a short snooze in Union Square while the disaster raged about him? Or, as many say, did he step over the rubble, cigar in hand, and mutter endlessly and to no one in particular, “’ell of a town! ’ell of a town!”?

  THERE WAS MUCH MORE certainty out at sea. A scattering of ships experienced the full effects of the rupture, the evidence preserved with dispassion and accuracy in a number of surviving masters’ logs.

  Many of the captains of these vessels thought they had run up on the rocks. In the far north, the steam collier Wellington, for example, was under way in sixty fathoms off Point Diablo; and the steamer Alliance was in similarly deep waters close to the seismically complicated Mendocino Triple Junction. Both vessels felt a sudden huge shock, “as if we had run into rocks at high speed,” according to one of the captains. The captain of the Argo, ninety miles off Point Arena, thought he had struck a raft of submerged logs. Closer to San Francisco was the schooner John A. Campbell, doing seven knots in 2,400 fathoms about 145 miles west of Point Reyes. It was 5:15 A.M., with clear weather and a fresh north-northwesterly wind, when suddenly there came a strange sensation, “as if the vessel struck, slightly forward, and then appeared to drag over soft ground, and when aft a slight tremor was felt; and the whole lasting only a few seconds.”

  The Wellington, entering the Bay at exactly the moment the fault ruptured, was said by her captain to have “shivered and shook like a springless wagon on a corduroy road,” even though the sailors at the taffrail looking back at the sea that morning had reported it as smooth as mirror glass.

  The pilot boat Gracie S. was waiting by the lightship at the bar off the Golden Gate to come alongside the German steamship Nyada and guide it to its berth; it felt a shock “as if the chain were running out of her hawser pipe,” and the German, when boarded, was white faced and shaking, convinced that he had somehow inadvertently managed to ram into a reef. The pilot boat Pathfinder made a similar report: at 5:15 A.M. a heavy bang as if running aground, even though the charts insisted there were 120 feet beneath the keel.

  One of the maritime reports, the most colorful, is also a little puzzling: It is that of a man named James Denny, the chief engineer of the steamship National City, which early that Wednesday morning was heading south along the coast some twenty-nine miles offshore, well to the north of San Francisco, close to the mouth of the Gualala River. The fault is close to shore there, lying behind a low range of hills. So when the shock hit, it hit hard.

  “The ship seemed to jump out of the water; the engines raced fearfully, as though the shaft or the wheel had gone; and then came a violent trembling fore and aft and sideways, like running at full speed against a wall of ice.” To add credibility to his report Denny added a courteous and possibly helpful postscript: “The expression ‘a wall of ice’ is derived from my experience in the Arctic.”

  The single puzzling aspect of this one report is its timing: The ship’s log records the event as having occurred at 5:03 A.M.—nine minutes before the mainshock is known to have originated off Mussel Rock. It has to be assumed that the log is wrong, or that the National City’s chronometer was ill set: There seems to be no corroborating evidence of any earlier shock. But, as in all other respects the vessel’s encounter seems to have been scrupulously recorded, it does leave one to wonder if perhaps the San Andreas was misbehaving itself locally at earlier moments.

  Out on the southernmost of the Farallon Islands, which stand thirty fog-shrouded miles due west of the epicenter—and so just to the west of the fault trace—there was further evidence of chronological complications. The rupture was felt there quite distinctly (and in the usual fashion, with two intense shocks, the second greater than the first), but it was felt at 5:06 A.M. This time was, moreover, confirmed by a secondary source, because at the same moment James Boyle, the U.S. Weather Bureau observer on the Farallons, was talking by telephone to his colleague, a Mr. Legler, in the bureau office in the lighthouse at Point Reyes, twenty nautical miles to the north. Legler experienced the shock wave first, about three seconds before Boyle; both men reported that objects were thrown in an easterly direction—though at the Farallon Observatory a stone weighing a hundred pounds was moved six inches just to the west of south, and it was rotated, very slightly, in a counterclockwise direction. The time for both observers was a puzzling six minutes after five o’clock—still dark out at sea, with only the vaguest hint of dawn coming up from over the land.

  THREE OTHER ISLANDS, well known locally, reported the events. On Angel Island—which stands foursquare in San Francisco Bay, and which in the aftermath of the quake was to be the main receiving station for Chinese immigrants and the consequent center of much amusing mischief, as we shall see—there was a Mrs. Nichols, who reported:

  The shock resembled the jolting of a railway train which running at full speed had left the tracks and was bumping over the ties. It was accompanied from the beginning by a loud noise which gradually decreased as the jolting motion ceased. Water standing in a pail was thrown out six feet from northeast to southwest. The clock was stopt. The bay was calm. Acement pavement was cracked. The station was on solid rock.

  At the Naval Training Station on Yerba Buena Island—now best known as the midway point on the Bay Bridge—sailors felt a “heavy vibratory shock”; and on Alcatraz—which by then had its Citadel, its lighthouse (the first on the West Coast), and its military prison—the commandant distinctly felt three shocks, the second of the three being the strongest.

  Then, from fifty miles south of the epicenter, at Santa Cruz, came an oceanside report from an early riser, an observation that serves as a reminder that the shock was also traveling southeastward along the fault track, and causing damage and destruction at places other than on the northwesterly track toward Shelter Cove and Point Diablo confirmed by most of the ships. This report came not from a ship but from the wharfinger on a wooden quay that extended into Monterey Bay from the Santa Cruz docks.

  This man was standing on the quay, which extended out to sea in a southeasterly direction, when he heard a loud rumble coming from directly ahead. (The fault is fairly close to where he was standing, about twelve miles due east, close to the garlic-growing town of Gilroy.) He next saw, with perfect clarity, the shock wave coming fast toward him across the water: He felt two distinct sets of vibrations as the waves traveled through, the second being much the greater. The wharf seemed to pitch lengthwise—doing the same bronco-bucking dance that the Washington Street pavement was performing up in San Francisco.

  And then the shock waves hit land: The stunned wharfinger could only report that they caused “great rattling and crashing” as they tore through town. The sea, meanwhile, looked strangely unruffled: There was no surf where the shocks passed, and the water’s surface appeared only “like that in a tub, when jarred.”

  The earthquake was indeed felt in Santa Cruz, and in thousands of other communities besides, as it roared its unstoppable way northward, southward, and eastward. In Santa Cruz giant fissures opened up beside the San Lorenzo River, which itself first churned into foam, then sank many inches below its normal level, and finally slowed down to a crawl. A man nearby reported being first thrown to the east, then to the west; and the grove of eucalyptus trees he was idly contemplating in the dawn light started to sway violently in the same direction.

  A little farther north, in Los Gatos, people reported smelling sulfur once the two shocks had passed, and a well owned by a local blacksmith produced sulfur-tainted water for several years. Pianos seem to have been thrown around with frenzied violence—an observation that says as much about the popularity of pianos as it does about the strength of
the shocks—and clocks by the tens of thousands stopped, something that, since the pendulum has since largely gone the way of the holystone and the whiffletree, would not have happened to a similar degree today.

  The reports from the south, from the entire length of what was later to become Silicon Valley, and from around San Jose and back up north among the factories and docklands of the East Bay, display an admixture of gentility and rural charm, with the quake having its effects on a world of manners that is still entirely recognizable today, but that is nonetheless dated, and different.

  So the reports are littered with descriptions of how the shock affected people who owned, or did business with, or lived among such things as anvils, wells, grand pianos, pianolas, chandeliers, milk pans, windmills, pilasters, cornices, rocking chairs (which went wild), prune orchards, trestle bridges, billiard tables, pump houses, ice chests, window weights, limekilns, molasses tanks (most notably those belonging to the Alameda Sugar Company in the East Bay), razor strops, terra-cotta chimneys, livery stables, vials of drugs, carboys, gasometers, wire-mounted butchers’ scales, gas lanterns, telegraph offices, and hanging lamps with pendant glass prisms (which swung in directions all carefully noted by Andrew Lawson—the head of the state Earthquake Investigation Commission—with the results of his notations plotted neatly onto maps that show how great or weak and in what direction the shocks were, when they came).

  And then there was Agnew’s State Hospital for the Insane at Santa Clara (its name, in common with others like the Institute for the Feeble-Minded and the Board of Commissioners in Lunacy, suggests suspicion and intolerance with which mental illness was regarded at the time). The hospital dissolved into chaos when the earthquake hit, and it was thought that in the pandemonium hundreds of inmates broke loose and roamed the streets of town, like zombies. No such thing occurred, although a falling clock tower (with the clock’s hands stopped forever at 5:12:45) did kill as many as 119 people, rendering the Agnew’s tragedy one of the greatest to befall a single building.* The scenes were utterly distressing: horribly mutilated victims, bewilderment, wailing and fear on all sides, violent patients tied to trees with sheets, screeching bloody murder.

  Though the Agnew’s disaster was especially dreadful, and though there were moderate death tolls in some other southern towns—in San Jose 19 people died and 8,000 were made homeless—to the north of San Francisco things were a good deal worse. Both the force of the shock and the displacement caused by the rupture were considerably greater than in the south, and the experiences were generally much more distressing. The vineyard country of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys—though at the time reeling from the phylloxera infestation—was hit particularly hard, and workers tell of the acres of vines taking on the appearance of the ocean, with the rows of grape arbors rising and falling in great waves as the shocks tumbled down the hillsides.

  Sonoma County’s main city, Santa Rosa, was savaged, to a degree that has been largely eclipsed by the attention given to San Francisco. It was said at the time to be the prettiest community in California, a bustling and contented market town of about 6,000. But it abounds with horror stories, not least because most of the town’s brick buildings, held together by a cheap lime mortar made with inferior sand, came tumbling heavily down—while many of the wooden frame houses merely slid neatly off their foundations and stood, sagging inelegantly, out in the streets.

  Some of the wooden houses collapsed, too. A man named Duffy was sleeping in one of them, and later said that when the shock came he was thrown out of bed and rushed to go down the stairs, but found the building swaying and shaking so ferociously he could make no headway, and so had to turn back. He threw himself in front of the dresser in his room, trusting it might protect him from the falling timbers. It saved his life. The dresser held up the beams that tumbled over him, and these in turn protected him from the falling mass of debris.

  The cities and the villages and all the farms, wineries, asylums, schools, military bases, lighthouses, railway stations, docks, observatories (the Lick Observatory, east of San Jose on top of Mount Hamilton, had its six duty astronomers that morning scrupulously recording every last cat’s whisker of a vibration) did indeed all suffer, and, as the foregoing suggests, in numbers far larger and in places more widely distributed than the often-used phrase “San Francisco Earthquake” implies.

  At the very outer edges of the roughly circular area where the event was just discernible, and where it was remembered or recorded by humankind,* its shock waves caused no damage at all. The most northerly place where humans experienced the event appears to have been the small town of Coquille, Oregon, which lies 390 miles to the north of the Daly City epicenter. One of the town’s most prominent men, Judge Harlocker, was woken up just after 5:00 A.M. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson living nearby were awakened and noticed the cord of their electric lamp swinging back and forth. And when Mr. Wilson went to work in his jewelry store, he found that his regulator clock had stopped.

  In the far east of the affected region, only one resident of the Nevada desert town of Winnemucca, which lies 340 miles east of San Francisco, became aware that something seismic was up. She was a nurse at the county hospital, just home from working the night shift, and, as she told Lawson’s investigators, she was lying quietly in her bed when suddenly she saw her hanging lamp begin to swing violently back and forth. She felt nothing, however—no vibrations, no rocking motion. This single report, from a town of more than a thousand, was about to be discounted simply because it was so singular—until a pair of others, one recording a disturbance in the surface of a water tank, the other a swinging lantern, came in, unprompted, from Nevada towns close by. So, thanks to these three observations, the earthquake now had a definite eastern limit.

  And to the south, the town of Anaheim, close to Los Angeles, appears to have been about as far as credible reports of people having felt the earthquake can be found—370 miles from San Francisco. Observers there, in the community south of Los Angeles—and where Walt Disney would later build his first amusement park, in the fifties—speak of twin shocks, the first moderate, the second, as almost everywhere else, very much larger. Someone noticed that a curtain swung in and out of the window frame. A cord with a heavy brass ring swung back and forth, its motion trending from the northwest to the southeast. Wall-mounted barometers rattled against their confining metal hoops. People in the tiny inner-city community of Azusa also felt a very distinct sudden shock—a fact that is possessed of an interesting synchronicity, considering Azusa’s later importance, which will become apparent in the further telling of this story.

  Averaging these three outer limits—people feeling the quake 390 miles to the north, 340 miles to the east, and 370 miles to the south*—suggests that the effects spread over a roughly circular area of some 400,000 square miles. The western half of this circle lies mainly beneath the Pacific; of the more easterly, land-based half, the 200,000 square miles, a little more than seven-tenths lie in California. And within those 150,000 square miles of the Golden State affected by the events, it is almost too obvious to remark that the consequences become steadily more and more dramatic the closer one gets to San Francisco and the Mussel Rock epicenter.

  Although the area where the event was felt was roughly circular, the area where there was real damage was lozenge shaped, with the long axis of the lozenge following, though somewhat unsurprisingly, the San Andreas Fault. So from the outer eastern and undamaged edge in Nevada one has to travel about 300 miles westward, to reach places where the reports of real damage came in. Basically the damage spread through almost every single community between a village called Paicenes in the south and the much more substantial city of Eureka in the north. Not much damage, perhaps—but recordable (and so insurance-claimable) damage nonetheless. Eureka provides a very good example of the kind of edge-of-zone impact that the earthquake had: There were about $5,000 worth of cracked walls and broken windows in town, and the statue of Minerva on the dome of the Humboldt County Courthouse, w
hich had been seen swaying back and forth during the event, finally settled tipped in a southerly position, sloping by 43 degrees.

  Closer to the epicenter, more and more of the damage amounted to total ruin; and so, the nearer to San Francisco, there was concomitant mayhem, social dislocation, panic, terror, heroism, and a terrible amount of death. Voltaire’s much-derided remark about how knowing all allows one to forgive all springs to mind—though with earthquakes, as we shall also see later, knowing a great deal about their mechanics does not seem to mitigate their horrors or help us to avoid them.

  THE MEASURINGS AND THE MECHANICALS

  In the second century of the modern era, when in China it was somewhere near the middle of the Han Dynasty, the astronomer royal to the emperor, a man generally named as Zhang Heng, created an elegantly complicated device known as a hou fêng di dong yi, which translates approximately as “earthquake weathercock.”

  The original has never been seen, only described. It was a brass vessel, rather like a very large wine jar, that sported on the lip of its upper surface the brass heads of eight dragons, positioned equidistantly around the vessel at the major points of the compass. Each of these dragons held in its mouth—and did so very gingerly, by the points of its teeth—a small ball made of jade. Immediately below each dragon was a toad, its mouth wide open, ready and waiting to catch any ball that might drop from the dragons’ dental grasps.

  No one knows exactly what was inside the jar, but it is assumed that there was some kind of pendulum attached to eight jointed arms. Everything was arranged with mousetrap delicacy in such a way that if the pendulum swung for any reason, the arm that impeded its swing was moved; this knocked the ball from inside the mouth of the closest dragon and into that of the waiting toad. The instrument, designed to be presented to the emperor and set up by his throne, was for the specific purpose of detecting earthquakes.