NAPLES, December 28. – The destruction of a city which
numbered 23,000 inhabitants is so startling a fact that I trust I shall not
weary you by sending some statistics which I have this week gathered on the
spot. Covered with snow, vomiting ashes
still like a ten thousand horse power factory chimney, with a ruined city lying
at its feet, such is the spectacle which Vesuvius at this moment presents. Unable to restrain my curiosity to know what
was passing behind the clouds of ashes which intervened between us and the
mountain, I went down again on Tuesday last, and directed myself to the
committee who had been sitting in permanence since the 8th instant. The municipal building, a fine old historical
edifice of the times of the Arragons, has been destroyed, so that the committee
was sitting in a suppressed monastery on the outskirts of the town, and not on
the bed of old lava. – The cloisters and the stairs were filled with squalid
misery which come here for relief, and the Syndic and his coadjutors, to whose
courtesy I am much indebted, gave me the following information. Out of a population of 21,000, 15,000 are
fugitives. Between fifty and sixty
houses have already fallen, and three hundred and twenty are falling, the rest
are more or less injured. Out of eleven
churches four only are uninjured, but there is another fearful source of danger
– the sulphurous exhalations which are emitted in every direction, and which
render houses in other respects comparatively safe, uninhabitable. By these exhalations, five or six persons,
and all the animals, such as cats, dogs, mice and birds, and the fishes in the
sea, have been killed. In fact two
thirds of the city have been destroyed.
The committee begged me to appeal to the British public on
their behalf, at least to Italians resident in England, and then sent two of
their members to accompany me again over the city. I must confine myself to such new features as
I have not yet described, and they are of great interest. My companions took me through a narrow lane,
on either side of which the houses were on the eve of falling, down to an
orange garden belonging to one of them, at the furthest extremity of which
gaped a crater twenty feet wide and as many deep. Planks were thrown across, and getting upon
them I looked in and saw the walls of a church which had been destroyed in
1798, graves which had given up their dead, for the skeletons had been removed
as soon as discovered – and the frescoed walls of the inner chamber of some
house. The smell of sulphur was here
strong, and almost insufferable, in the streets through which I afterwards
passed. Dead animals lay here and there
and amidst these signs of mortality and sign posts of danger which met the eye
at every turn, while to soil was still heaving beneath our feet, while Vesuvius
was throwing out more violently than ever, and when at midnight only the poor
who had returned had fled from their houses, alarmed by another shock, I met
some persons coming in with their household goods on their backs. A few steps brought me to the sea, which was
boiling furiously for some distance, like a cauldron, not the effect as I
thought first, of springs of fresh water gushing up, but of volcanic action,
and the smell of the gasses escaping was so intense that I found it necessary,
for safety, to cover my face with a handkerchief. Here I met my friends Cappacci, Guiscardi and
Palmieri, who had come over as a scientific commission to make investigations. They bottled up the gas on the spot, which
they reported to be carbonic acid and carburretted hydrogen.
How long the eruption might continue Palmieri ahd no means
of calculating, it was going on as violently as ever, and his seismograph was
always registering. From Sunday until
Monday morning at 5 a. m., there had been eight shocks, and from that time to
when he spoke to me they had been continual.
The soil had risen five palms and the subsidence might be attended with
great danger. “Until this has taken
place,” he said to my municipal conductors, “you must not think of rebuilding,
and you must carefully note the fissures in the houses and the streets, to
observe wither the approximate.” I have said
that the number of fugitives was 15,000 only, several thousand having returned
to their houses on the confines of the bed of lava on which the great part of
Torre is built. One old woman I saw who
had taken up her dwelling in a house which was rent from top to bottom, and
almost leaning against the poles which were put up as props to the arches on
which it rested. I stopped and spoke to
a thriving shopkeeper, who was looking out eagerly for customers. – “What can I
do?” he said, “I have 20,000 ducats invested here, and I must look after them.” Of the Carbineers I heard only golden opinions
– their praise was in every man’s mouth, and I must express my opinion that
even in England greater order could not have been preserved, fewer acts of
violence committed, or that the Government and local authorities could have
lavished more care and attention than have been displayed in Terro de Greco on
this sad occasion. General La Marmora has
been down several times to inspect, and the National Bank, according to the
last night’s Gazette, has contributed 5,000 lire and opened a subscription for
the relief of the poor. – {Cor. Of the London Times.
– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye,
Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, February 8, 1862, p. 2
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