cked the springs
that fed them. In order to get water it was necessary to descend to
the river Guayra, which had risen to a great height, and there were
very few vessels left to get it in.

It was necessary, also, to dispose of the dead with all dispatch, and
in the impossibility of giving decent burial to so many thousand
corpses, detachments of men were told off to burn them. Funeral pyres
were erected between the heaps of ruins, and the ceremony lasted
several days.

The fierce shocks which had in less than a minute occasioned such
great disasters could not be expected to have confined their
destructive effects to one narrow zone of the continent, and these
extended to a great part of Venezuela, all along the coast and
specially among the mountains inland. The towns of La Guayra,
Mayquetia, Antimano, Baruta, La Vega, San Felipe, and Merida were
entirely destroyed, the number of deaths exceeding 5,000 at La Guayra
and San Felipe.

In November, 1822, the coast of Chile began to be violently convulsed
by a succession of shocks, the first of which was of great severity.
The heavings of the earth were quite perceptible to the eye. The sea
rose and fell to a great extent in the harbor of Valparaiso, and the
ships appeared as if they were first rapidly forced through the water,
and then struck on the ground. The town of Valparaiso and several
others were completely overthrown. Sounds like those produced by the
escape of steam accompanied this earthquake, and it was felt
throughout a distance of 1,200 miles along the coast, a portion of
which--extending to about 100 miles--was permanently raised to a
height varying from two to four feet. At Quintero the elevation was
four feet, and at Valparaiso three feet; but about a mile inland from
the latter place the elevation was as much as six or seven feet; while
the whole surface raised is estimated at nearly 100,000 square miles.

The year 1868 proved very disastrous in South America. On the 13th of
August of that year a series of shocks commenced which were felt over
a large extent of country, stretching from Ibarra on the northwestern
border of Ecuador to Cabija on the coast of Bolivia, a distance of
about 1,400 miles. The effects were most severe about the southern
portion of the Peruvian coast, where the towns of Iquique, Arica,
Tacna, Port Ilay, Arequipa, Pisco, and several others were destroyed,
and in the northern parts of Ecuador, where the town of Ibarra was
overthr