Both travelers felt the great earthquakes while making this journey, but probably not until they had parted company at Lexington. Audubon has given a vivid account of this experience in a characteristic sketch, but as usual there are no dates.[253] He was overtaken, as he said, while "traveling through the Barrens of Kentucky ... in the month of November," when he thought his terrified "horse was about to die, and would have sprung from his back had a minute more elapsed, but at that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots; the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled waters of a lake." For "November" he should have written "January" of the year 1812.[254] This series of memorable earthquakes was followed in 1813 by a hurricane, more terrific than destructive, which swept the lower part of Henderson County, Kentucky, and cut a wide swath through the virgin forests, without causing any loss of life. Audubon's account of this event[255] is that of a close observer who escaped destruction by a hair's breadth and who related only what he himself had experienced. Critics inclined to be supercilious have complained that he exaggerated the importance of a merely local event and stretched the course of the storm some 800 miles until it had covered several states. "Sir," said Waterton, in pointing a dart through Audubon to another target, "this is really too much even for us Englishmen to swallow, whose gullets are known to be the largest, the widest, and the most elastic, of any in the world." What Audubon said was: "I have crossed the path of this storm, at a distance of a hundred miles from the spot where I witnessed its fury, and, again four hundred miles farther off, in the State of Ohio. Lastly, I observed traces of its ravages on the summits of the mountains connected with the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, three hundred miles beyond the place last mentioned. In all these different parts, it appeared to me not to have exceeded a quarter of a mile in breadth." Audubon was doubtless mistaken in his hasty inference that marks of forest devastation observed at such widely separated points were due to the same storm, but this would only illustrate a lack of caution which he sometimes displayed.