Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [67]
Darwin didn’t realize the extent of the quake until he returned to town. In the forest, he had been isolated and far from buildings, and as he recorded it, the breeze stirred the trees and the earth rumbled and that was that. “It was a highly interesting but by no means awe-exciting phenomenon,” he wrote. In Valdivia, however, the houses had shaken violently until many of the nails had come out, and seeing the dread on residents’ faces convinced Darwin that it was considerably more awful in town. But Valdivia had been lucky. Further north, near the epicenter, an entire city lay in ruins. In what would turn out to be a considerable understatement, Darwin wrote, “I am afraid we shall hear of damage done at Concepción.”
13: CONCEPCIÓN
Shaken, Not Stirred
To my mind since leaving England we have scarcely beheld any one other sight so deeply interesting. The Earthquake & Volcano are parts of one of the greatest phenomena to which this world is subject.
—BEAGLE DIARY, MARCH 5, 1835
IT TOOK THE BEAGLE NEARLY TWO WEEKS to sail one hundred miles north to Concepción. When they arrived in the harbor on March 4, an estate owner rode down to the ship and told them that the earthquake had destroyed everything and that in Concepción and its port town, Talcahuano, not a house remained standing. Darwin went out riding and soon found proof. “The whole coast was strewed over with timber & furniture as if a thousand great ships had been wrecked,” he wrote. “Besides chairs, tables, bookshelves &c &c in great numbers, there were several roofs of cottages almost entire, Store houses had been burst open, & in all parts great bags of cotton, Yerba, & other valuable merchandise were scattered about.” On a small island in the bay at Talcahuano, Darwin recorded huge cracks in the ground and rocks covered in sea life cast high onto the beach. FitzRoy conducted his own studies by measuring mussels and seaweed on rocks that had once been underwater and concluded that the earthquake had lifted the rocks ten feet.
The next day the captain and the naturalist rode through Talcahuano and Concepción to survey the ruins. All of Concepción lay in heaps of bricks and timber, and debris clogged the streets, forcing Darwin to climb over piles several feet high to get from place to place. “The ground is traversed by rents, the solid rocks are shivered,” he wrote in a letter home. “Solid buttresses 6-10 feet thick are broken into fragments like so much biscuit.”
The earthquake had taken place at 11 A.M. and many residents had been outside, which probably saved thousands of lives. Darwin interviewed the English consul, who told him that he felt the first motion of the earthquake while eating breakfast and immediately ran outside, but only reached the courtyard before his house began to collapse behind him. The consul climbed atop part of the house that had already fallen, but the motion of the ground prevented him from standing. As he crawled up the pile of debris, the rest of the house collapsed. “The sky became dark from the dense cloud of dust; with his eyes blinded & mouth choked he at last reached the street,” Darwin wrote. “Shock succeeded shock at the interval of a few minutes; no one dared approach the shattered ruins; no one knew whether his dearest friends or relations were perishing from the want of help. The thatched roofs fell over the fires, & flames burst forth in all parts; hundreds knew themselves ruined & few had the means of procuring food for the day. Can a more miserable & fearful scene be imagined?”
Darwin guessed that “not more than 100” had died, although many others still lay buried in the rubble. In his longest diary entry from South America, Darwin described the ruins, theorized about