Complete document

8
More than two hundred shocks were felt from the month of May 1811, to April 1812, in the island of St.
Vincent; one of the three where there are still active volcanoes. The commotion did not remain
circumscribed to that insular portion of eastern America. From the 16th of December 1811, the earth was
almost incessantly agitated in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Arkansas, 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 subterraneous noise, coming from the south-west. At the
spots between New Madrid and Little Prairie, as at the Saline, north of Cincinnati, in latitude 37° 45', the
shocks were felt every day, nay almost every hour, during several months. The whole of these phenomena
lasted 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 toward the north*.
At the same period, when this long series of earthquakes began in the Transalleghanian States, in the
month of December 1811, the town of Caraccas felt the first shock in calm
* See the interesting description of these earthquakes, given by Mr. Mitchell, in the Trans. of the
Liter. and Phil. Soc. of New York, vol. i, p. 281–308; and by Mr. Drake, in the Nat. and Stat. View of
Cincinnati, p. 232–238.