Book of Biography Author:James Parton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOHN HOWARD. November the 1st, 1755, the people of Lisbon were alarmed by that awful rumbling beneath the earth which, as they well knew, usually preceded an ... more »earthquake. Before they could escape from their houses, the shock came, which overthrew the greater part of the city, and buried thousands of persons in its ruins. The sea retired, leaving the bottom of the harbor bare, but immediately returned in a fearful wave fifty feet high, overwhelming everything in its course. The inhabitants who could get clear of the ruins rushed in thousands to a magnificent marble wharf, just completed, which seemed to offer a place of safety. This massive structure, densely covered with men, women, and children, suddenly sunk, bearing with it to unknown depths the entire multitude. Not a creature escaped ; not a human body rose again to the surface; not a fragment of anything that was on the wharf was ever again seen by human eye; and when, by and by, the water was sounded over the place where it had stood, the depth was found to be six hundred feet. Within the space of six minutes, sixty thousand persons are supposed to have perished; and those who survived were so encompassed about with horror, that they might well have envied those whom the sea had submerged or the falling houses crushed. Not Lisbon alone, but all Portugal, was shaken by this tremendous convulsion, which was felt, indeed, over a third part of the earth. The same shock which almost destroyed Lisbon shook down chimneys in Massachusetts and jarred the habitations in Iceland. But it was in Portugal that its force was chiefly spent. There, mountains were rent, towns engulfed, farms moved away in a mass, rivers turned from their course,the whole land desolated, and all the inhabitants paralyzed with terror. When the earthquake ...« less