6, by a
tremendous earthquake. In the first twenty-four hours, two hundred
shocks were experienced. The ocean twice retired and returned
impetuously upon the land: Lima was destroyed, and part of the coast
near Callao was converted into a bay: four other harbors, among which
were Cavalla and Guanape, shared the same fate. There were twenty-three
ships and vessels, great and small, in the harbor of Callao, of which
nineteen were sunk; and the other four, among which was a frigate called
St. Fermin, were carried by the force of the waves to a great distance
up the country, and left on dry ground at a considerable height above
the sea. The number of inhabitants in this city amounted to four
thousand. Two hundred only escaped, twenty-two of whom were saved on a
small fragment of the fort of Vera Cruz, which remained as the only
memorial of the town after this dreadful inundation. Other portions of
its site were completely covered with heaps of sand and gravel.

A volcano in Lucanas burst forth the same night, and such quantities of
water descended from the cone that the whole country was overflowed; and
in the mountain near Pataz, called Conversiones de Caxamarquilla,
three other volcanoes burst out, and frightful torrents of water swept
down their sides.[695]

There are several records of prior convulsions in Peru, accompanied by
similar inroads in the sea, one of which happened fifty-nine years
before (in 1687), when the ocean, according to Ulloa, first retired and
then returned in a mountainous wave, overwhelming Callao and its
environs, with the miserable inhabitants.[696] This same wave, according
to Lionel Wafer, carried ships a league into the country, and drowned
man and beast for fifty leagues along the shore.[697] Inundations of
still earlier dates are carefully recorded by Ulloa, Wafer, Acosta, and
various writers, who describe them as having expended their chief fury,
some on one part of the coast and some on another.

But all authentic accounts cease when we ascend to the era of the
conquest of Peru by the Spaniards. The ancient Peruvians, although far
removed from barbarism, were without written annals, and therefore
unable to preserve a distinct recollection of a long series of natural
events. They had, however, according to Antonio de Herrera, who, in the
beginning of the seventeenth century, investigated their antiquities, a
tradition, "that many years before the reign of the Incas, at a time
when the co