This morning a magnitude 3.6 earthquake struck underneath Buzzards Bay, off the southern coast of Massachusetts. Yale seismologist Maureen Long said it was "a fairly typical earthquake for New England." But that hasn't always been the case, and first we need to go to Portugal.
At about 9:30am on November 1, 1755 - All Saints' Day in the overwhelmingly Catholic capital city - an earthquake hit Lisbon, Portugal. There were actually three separate earthquakes over the course of ten minutes estimated at a range from 7.7 to 9.0 on the Richter scale that were felt as far away as Morocco. Church bells rang due to the vibrations of the ground in Austria. An estimated 50,000-70,000 people were killed in the earthquakes, some by falling buildings like the many residents who had retreated to the safety of St. Paul's Church after the first earthquake, and were killed when the resulting aftershocks collapsed the buildings. Others in that number were killed as the resulting fires that lasted for five days were fanned by strong winds, or by a 20' foot tall tsunami that slammed into the coasts of both Portugal and Morocco. The tsunami continued across the Atlantic, a 9-to-16-foot wave hitting the Caribbean island of Antigua. It was a real bad day.
The Rev. Charles Davy wrote in his journal that he was "instantly stunned with a most horrid crash, as if every edifice in the city had tumbled down at once. The house I was in shook with such violence, that the upper stories immediately fell." Virtually all of the architecture and culture of Lisbon was wiped out and rebuilt from the literal rubble, including some of the first instances of pre-fabricated houses.
Since the earthquake happened on a major religious holiday, priests and other religious authorities said the sin of the people was to blame. The Enlightenment-era's Voltaire soon wrote a poem called "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of That Axiom 'All is Well,'" in which he clapped back at philosophers like Alexander Pope who said that the world is an inherently good place where Things Happen for a Reason:
Oh, miserable mortals! Oh wretched earth!
Oh dreadful assembly of all mankind!
Eternal sermons of useless sufferings!
Deluded philosophers who cry, 'All is well,' ...
...What crime, what error did these children,
Crushed and bloody on their mothers' breasts, commit?
Did Lisbon, which is no more, have more vices
Than London and Paris immersed in their pleasures?
Lisbon is destroyed, and they dance in Paris!
Still, the science of seismology can be traced back to the Lisbon earthquake after Portuguese King Joseph I had the Marquis de Pombal go throughout Portugal to find out how many shocks the people felt, at what time, how far apart, descriptions of damage, etc. that have allowed seismologists to go back and get an accurate picture of what exactly happened in Lisbon. This growing field of study would have another opportunity to grow soon.
Shortly before 4:30am local time on November 18, 1755 - seventeen days after the Lisbon earthquake - the ground started to shake in New England. 25 miles east of Cape Ann, Massachusetts was the epicenter of a 6.0-6.3 earthquake. While it did not have the same effect on New England that the earthquake in Lisbon did, the Cape Ann Earthquake did knock over about 1/3 of the chimneys in Boston (around 1,600 chimneys), bent church steeples, and caved in several brick walls after the shaking lasted for 7-10 seconds. Some Boston streets were impassable due to the number of bricks clogging them up. It was felt from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Winyah, South Carolina. There was damage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine. Fences fell down all the way to Montreal.
The Boston Gazette reported on November 24 that sailors on a ship 210 nautical miles away from Boston thought they had run aground, such was the shaking on the ship, and realized it was an earthquake only when they saw fish "large as well as small" dead on the surface of the Atlantic. Future Founding Father and President John Adams was just 20 years old when the Cape Ann Earthquake happened. At 20 years old it was this event that marked the first of thousands of pages he would write in his diary:
We had a severe Shock of an Earthquake. It continued near four minutes. I was then at my Fathers in Braintree, and awoke out of my sleep in the midst of it. The house seemed to rock and reel and crack as if it would fall in ruins about us. Chimnies were shatter'd by it within one mile of my Fathers hosue.
I know that we've talked a lot about chimneys as a measure of destruction. And you, dear reader, may sit there thinking, "So what? It's a chimney." And I understand that. But losing your chimney in New England in the middle of November was no joke. Your fireplace was your source of heat and your source of cooked food. I've lived in Upstate New York in the middle of November and, buddy, I wouldn't recommend it.
Aftershocks followed well into December, but the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony was quick to determine the real cause: the sin of all mankind. It is unlikely that residents of Boston would have known about the Lisbon earthquake (the sailing time between the two places would have been about 23 days). Still, many religious leaders in Massachusetts reacted in much the same way their Catholic counterparts did across the Atlantic.
The Massachusetts Historical Society estimates that in the weeks and months following the Cape Ann Earthquake, no fewer than 27 "sermons, poems, and accounts of other earthquakes" were written in New England. Massachusetts' Jeremiah Newland wrote a broadside called Verses Occasioned by the Earthquakes in the Month of November, 1755 that reminded fellow Puritans that, if they didn't change their sinful ways, God would punish New England "strong enough to sink the whole Creation..." just like He did Lisbon. Newland wasn't alone.
Thomas Prince was New England's first historian (his A Chronological History of New England, in the Form of Annals began with, no kidding, Adam & Eve) and the minister of the Old South Church in Boston, who followed up the events of November 18, 1755 with Earthquakes the Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure, which really rolls off the tongue, but it doesn't exactly mince words about what caused earthquakes: God's wrath. He was already on-record as saying a 1727 earthquake in New England was an example
Eliphalet Williams (whose brother William, yes, William Williams was a signer of the Declaration of Independence) wrote The Duty of a People, Under Dark Providences, or Symptoms of Approaching Evils, to Prepare to Meet their God soon after the Cape Ann Earthquake - just 64 pages of bleakness indicating that the recent events of Boston and surrounding areas were shots across the bow from God Himself. And the Reverend Doctor Eliphalet Williams was 29 when he wrote that!
It's important to remember that the earthquake coincided with the end of a period of revivalism generally known as the First Great Awakening, that called people a call to get back to the original principles of God (often with dramatic reminders that, at literally any moment, God could plunge you into the very pit of hell). Part of the reason for this was that many Puritans who had come to Massachusetts to participate in the City Upon A Hill experiment were now two, three, sometimes four generations deep. In order to be a full participating member of the Puritan Church you needed a conversion narrative, in which your life was different before and after one specific event that confirmed your belief, faith, and trust in God. Well, if you had grown up in Massachusetts, life dominated by the Puritan Experience, you were unlikely to have one of these conversion experiences. And so on for your children and grandchildren: Puritanism was simply your way of life. There was no Before. If you weren't a member in good standing in the Puritan Church, you weren't going to Heaven, end of story.
Prior to the First Great Awakening, not even considering the eternal implications of being a good Puritan, if you weren't a full member of the Puritan Church in Massachusetts you couldn't hold office or vote. Grandparents got nervous, and this led to the passing of the Halfway Covenant, a 17th-century compromise between Puritan leadership and its members that allowed children to be baptized at birth, but not take the Lord's Supper (thus achieving full membership) until that conversion experience happened. Puritan leaders like Jonathan Edwards argued against the Halfway Covenant as unnecessary and many Puritan churches granted full membership to convinced believers - kind of an iffy arrangement, but one that all of organized religion has gone with ever since.
Still, the effects of the Enlightenment were beginning to make their way into New England by the time of the earthquake. Benjamin Franklin's discoveries with lightning, in a very on-brand move, saw lightning rods as safe ways to protect people and property from lightning strikes. The aforementioned Thomas Prince, however, updated his God's wrath-caused-the-1727-earthquake theory to say that lightning caused the earthquakes, since the lightning rods were directing lightning directly into the ground. And it's hard to argue with a 1755 brain genius for assuming that lightning rods were causing the very ground to crumble. Lightning rods were Man's way of trying to outsmart God. Thus, earthquakes were a reminder that Man wasn't crap. John Winthrop (not THE John Winthrop, but the professor of math & science at Harvard) said electricity was to blame for the earthquakes, but that lightning rods might just have been a gift from God.
Perhaps the events of the First Great Awakening, the fire & brimstone sermons, the Cape Ann Earthquake, were what could push the good people of Massachusetts to a conversion experience or at least a change of heart about how you had been living your life. Maybe the largest earthquake in New England history was just the event that got you to Heaven. And it only cost some chimneys.
You can click this link to see just how many earthquakes there have been in the Northeast, just from 1975-2017. But if another Cape Ann Situation hit Boston today, the damage would be far more than chimneys. Since Boston is built on a literal landfill (which makes so much sense, tbh) a 6.0-6.3 earthquake anywhere near there would cost billions of dollars in damage and kill/injure thousands. Enjoy your night!
