A Crack in the Edge of the World Read online

  I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible. I find the entry “5h 12m” and after that “Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds.” As I now remember it the portion “severe, etc” was entered immediately after the shaking.

  The only snag was that poor Professor McAdie somehow managed to misread his watch during all the confusion, and he wreathed himself in a magnificent maze of complications as he tried to explain the mistake. He wrote that the day before the earthquake,

  my error was “I minute slow” at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years. The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM. This is not of course the beginning of the quake. I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry. I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand’s position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock. The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the end came several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased. The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this. I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.

  However, there is one uncertainty. I may have read my watch wrong. I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experiment such things are possible. I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.

  The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make. The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s. The whole event, in McAdie’s eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.

  NINE MILES ACROSS the Bay in Berkeley slept Grove Karl Gilbert, one of the lions of early American geology and a figure still revered today as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. He was in the closing years of his career when he arrived at the University of California—appointed ostensibly to investigate whether miners should be given permission to resume the environmentally harsh (and, for half a century, totally banned) hydraulic method of mining, in which incredibly powerful jets of water were played on an exposed rock face to unseat any minerals (gold especially) that might be lodged there. At twelve minutes past five on that Wednesday morning Gilbert was rudely awakened by a sudden fierce vibration. The floors creaked and swayed below him. The light fixture swung in an arc above him—its swing aligned, he noticed, along an imaginary north-south line on the ceiling—and the water in a pitcher on the washstand splashed out on the container’s southern side. He, like everyone else, was briefly alarmed, but then that feeling was rapidly overtaken in his particular case by, of all things, pleasure. His account, no doubt written with an eye cocked to posterity, begins as if he had only recently devoured the best-known work by Jane Austen:

  It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake. The glacier is always ready, awaiting his visit; the eruption has a course to run, and alacrity is always needed to catch its more important phases; but the earthquake, unheralded and brief, may elude him through his entire lifetime. It has been my fortune to experience only a single weak tremor, and I had, moreover, been tantalized by narrowly missing the great Inyo earthquake of 1872 and the Alaska earthquake of 1899. When, therefore, I was awakened in Berkeley on the eighteenth of April last by a tumult of motions and noises, it was with unalloyed pleasure that I became aware that a vigorous earthquake was in progress.

  The net result of Gilbert’s enthusiasm was probably much to his liking. Within hours he was co-opted into all of the inevitable investigations and seismic postmortems; his name appears on every masthead of every official publication about the event for the next decade. Such fame as he had already enjoyed—from his writings on topics as diverse as the erosion of Niagara Falls, the recognizable features of the moon’s face, the Bonneville Salt Flats, and the philosophy of scientific hypothesis—was magnified a hundredfold by his authoritative account of the San Francisco events; and his reputation was in no way besmirched when he began to speculate (as legions of others have since, often unwisely) on how earthquakes might successfully be predicted.

  FRED HEWITT WAS walking home, together with two colleagues, after his night shift as a reporter on the Examiner. He lived at 500 Fillmore Street, and so to get home each morning he would turn north up Larkin Street, cross Golden Gate Avenue, Turk Street, Eddy Street, and Ellis Street, before turning west onto O’Farrell and walking up a steep hill and then down again to the valley, at the bottom of which huddled the small brick houses and shops (now all most fashionable) of Fillmore Street. It was some minutes after five o’clock when he and his two friends crossed Golden Gate Avenue, spent five minutes talking to a pair of policemen—“blue coated guardians” as he later wrote for his paper—and said their farewells. Hewitt had turned north, the policemen back south down Larkin, when suddenly:

  The hand of an avenging God fell upon San Francisco. The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide. Then came the crash … I saw those policemen enveloped by a shower of falling stone.

  It is impossible to judge the length of that shock. To me it seemed like an eternity. I was thrown prone on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looking more terrible because of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. Screeches rent the air as terrified humanity streamed out into the open in agony of despair.

  Affrighted horses dashed headlong into ruins as they raced away in their abject fear. Then there was a lull. The most terrible was yet to come.

  The first portion of the shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow. The pause in the action of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second. It was sufficient, however, to allow me to collect myself. In the center of two streets I rose to my feet. Then came the second and more terrific crash….

  AT THE VERY SAME MOMENT Clarence Judson was taking his early and very cold awakening bath in the Pacific, off Ocean Beach. He lived on Forty-seventh Avenue, less than a hundred yards from the spume and spray of the wild Pacific, and in a part of the city that was still half sand dunes and home to a few hardy souls only, he could happily put on a bathrobe and shoes and stroll to the ocean. Looking back on his short walk, he remained convinced that something was already happening somewhere under the sea. The breakers, he noted, did not advance toward the beach that morning as they usually did, in a series of parallels, each one hitting the strand with a ferocious roar of breaking water (which is what he liked, offering his work-weary bones a cold massage of highly oxygenated spray). Instead the waves were roaring in to shore “cross-wise and in broken lines, in a vicious, snappy sort of rip-and-tear fashion.”

  Nevertheless, Judson discarded his robe, hat, and shoes, and went into the water, walking out to sea until he was up to his shoulders. Then, surprising but not unduly alarming him, he was hit by one enormous breaker, a wave that he could then see pounding its way high up the beach. It was a freak wave, he supposed, and, while a little odd, was nothing to bother about. There was so much water, and the wave crest was so high, that he was lifted quite off his feet, and a few seconds later the undertow began to pull him out to sea. He was a strong man and a good swimmer. He was still not especially concerned. But then out of nowhere cam
e an immense shock, a silent detonation that cannon-aded through the water like an explosion. Even while he was floating in the sea Judson was knocked down, as he described it, to his knees.

  I got up and was down again. I was dazed and stunned, and being tossed about by the breakers, my ears full of salt water and about a gallon in my stomach. I was thrown down three times, and only by desperate fighting did I get out at all. It was a close call.

  I tried to run to where my shoes, hat and bathrobe lay, but I guess I must have described all kinds of figures in the sand. I thought I was paralyzed. Then I thought of lightning, as the beach was full of phosphorescence. Every step I took left a brilliant incandescent streak. I jumped on my bathrobe to save me.

  Neither Judson the swimmer nor Hewitt the reporter nor the sleeping great explorer Grove Karl Gilbert was in a convenient position that morning to enjoy either the luxury of immediate note taking or the congenial precision of knowing the exact time of day when the crisis struck. But, upon later interrogation, having collected their thoughts and subjected themselves to forensic self-examination, they agreed that twelve minutes past five in the cool dark morning was exactly the time of day when each saw, heard, felt, otherwise experienced, or was rudely shaken awake by the singular event that these next pages will try to recount.

  ONE

  Chronicle: A Year of Living Dangerously

  April, April,

  Laugh thy golden laughter;

  Then, the moment after,

  Weep thy golden tears!

  SIR WILLIAM WATSON, “April,” 1903

  SO FAR AS THE ANCIENTS OF CHINA ARE CONCERNED, 1906 was a year of the Fire Horse—a time of grave unpredictability that comes along every six decades, and a time when all manner of strange events are inclined to occur. So to the seers and the hermits in their faraway mountain aeries such events as unrolled during the year would have come as no surprise. The rest of humankind was less well prepared, however, and were caught unawares. And what instruments we have agree that, so far as matters of the earth were concerned, 1906 was, yes, a very bad year indeed.

  At least it was bad seismically speaking, being a very violent and a very lethal year. And the flurry of activity that marked what the numbers show to have been among the most ill behaved of times of the entire century began in the morning of the last day of January, when there was an enormous earthquake under the seabed of the Pacific Ocean.

  It is said today to have been the greatest and most powerful earthquake that had until that moment ever been registered by the machines of humankind, and it struck a score of communities along the South American coast, devastating towns, inundating fields, and causing huge waves to tear out into the open ocean. Its shaking lasted for more than four minutes, and as many as 2,000 people are thought to have died in the disaster. Scores of thousands were injured and made homeless, and countless villages and at least one major port city were totally destroyed. The effects of the huge traveling sea waves from the event were felt as far away as San Diego, and in Honolulu Harbor in Hawaii all the steamboats waiting at anchor were spun around and carried upward on an enormous tsunami, which ebbed and flowed like a tide every few minutes, bringing confusion and alarm in its wake.

  The epicenter of this earthquake, whose details are still pored over, is now calculated to have been some eighty miles due west of a prominent headland known as El Cabo de San Francisco, in Ecuador.

  The town that was all but destroyed—but which has since been rebuilt, only to be damaged many times subsequently—was the island port of Tumaco, now a prominent oil terminal. But in 1906 it was a place where fishermen brought in sizable catches of tuna and sardines, and where traders hawked bales of rubber and pallets of cinchona bark, ready to be pressed for quinine. Tumaco is some thirty miles north of the Ecuadoran frontier, in Colombia.

  Both Ecuador and Colombia suffered grievously from the earthquake, and even today people in the villages by the mangrove swamps of the estuaries speak fearfully of the morning when several hundred miles of their coastline, from the port of Guayaquil in the south to Buenaventura in the north, were devastated by the power of the water and the four minutes of ground shaking. Seismologists working in the 1930s, when Charles Richter* created his scale of magnitude, estimated that the Ecuadoran-Colombian Earthquake of 1906 had a magnitude of 8.4, as high as anything then known; new calculations today suggest an even greater magnitude, of anything approaching 8.8—as bad a disaster as could possibly be imagined, whether it rated 8.4 or 8.8 or somewhere in between, for the two young republics struggling to their feet.

  But the earth wasn’t done yet. Sixteen days later there was another very large earthquake, this time on the island of St. Lucia, one of the four specks of Caribbean limestone, sand, and coral that make up what was then the British crown colony of the Windward Islands. According to interpretations of the damage data made in the 1970s, it rated somewhere between VII and VIII on the magnificently named Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik Earthquake Intensity Scale. Just as with the Ecuadoran event of the month before, this February earthquake had its epicenter in the sea too, somewhere off the northeastern tip of St. Lucia, and about twenty miles south of the French possession of Martinique.

  This event, which collapsed buildings on both St. Lucia and Martinique, and which was felt by the populations of other islands in the eastern Caribbean, including Dominica and Grenada and St. Vincent, did not kill anyone. But it triggered a burst of smaller earthquakes—probably a swarm of so-called volcanic earthquakes, which tend to occur when spurts of magma force their way up into the earth’s upper crust, after the crust has been weakened by a deeper earthquake that has been caused by the movement of tectonic plates. This wave of lesser earth movements went on for two or three weeks, and for a while the placid life of an island whose people produced, according to the Colonial Office report of the time, a heavenly confection of “sugar, rum, cocoa, coconuts, bananas, bay oil, bay rum, spices and sea island cotton” was dangerously interrupted. The colonial governor, who had his headquarters in Grenada, was alerted, and a Royal Navy warship was dispatched from the squadron in Bermuda. Assistance was offered, assessments were made, and St. Lucia was from that moment on formally designated an earthquake-prone territory, risky enough to be of note but not sufficiently dangerous to be abandoned.

  Still it was not over. Five days later a tremendous outbreak of ground shaking occurred in Shemakha, an ancient town of mosques and temples in the Caucasus Mountains, and a place, given its location, that was long accustomed to seismic happenings. This was not an especially large earthquake—not by normal Caucasus standards, at least—and there seem to have been no reports of deaths. The same could not be said, however, of a truly enormous quake that ripped through the island of Formosa four weeks later, on March 17. This historic event, known variously as the Chiayi or the Meishan Earthquake, tore along a nine-mile fault in the west of the island, displacing the land on each side of the fault by six or seven feet horizontally and three or four feet vertically. At least 9,000 houses were destroyed, 2,000 islanders injured, and no fewer than 1,228 people killed. The Japanese, who ten years before had taken control of the island from China, organized a formidable rescue operation; but the fact remains that this was one of the largest and most terrifying quakes to have struck Taiwan for many years, and for some weeks following the disaster the situation overwhelmed all efforts to contain it.

  And then Vesuvius erupted. For ten terrifying days, beginning with a cannonade of rocks that was hurled 40,000 feet into the air above Naples on April 6, the only volcano on the European mainland underwent its most severe eruption for 300 years; some vulcanologists at the time said it may even have been greater in drama and strength than the legendary eruption of A.D. 79, when Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by rivers of gas and glowing ashes.

  In 1906 just 150 people are thought to have died. The villages of Bosco Trecase, San Giuseppe, Ottajano (the destruction of which, said a newspaper of the time, “appalled the civilized world�
�), Poggiomarino, and Somma were all covered in several feet of ash, and some of them had to be hastily abandoned. When the market in the town of Oliveto collapsed under the weight of hundreds of tons of eruptive material, scores of shoppers were trapped inside, with dozens killed. Moreover, the very shape of Vesuvius was drastically changed by the explosions. The summit crater’s edges were shaved to an almost perfect horizontality—the shape the mountain has to this day, in fact. Beforehand it had been ragged and untidy—with cliffs more than 1,000 feet high around the steaming, smoking, and seemingly bottomless crater itself.

  It was not until April 16 that the explosions subsided and the eruptions stilled. The seismometers that had been measuring this extraordinary and, in terms of its power, nearly unprecedented display fell silent later that night. After ten days of malevolent unpredictability, the needles on the instruments that were monitoring matters in southern Italy all suddenly ceased their vibrating, at last. This was the beginning of the week, a Monday, and, with the damping down of Vesuvius, there seemed some small reason to suppose that the worst might be past. To more than a few on that evening there was, no doubt, a sense of relief—a sense that perhaps the world had now done its worst, and that it would lapse into a steady quiet once again, reverting to that blessed state in which the rocks stay where they are, the earth calms itself, and peace returns.