Lyell tells the following story of the Prince of Scilla, who with many of his vassals sought safety in their fishing boats. Suddenly, on the night of February 5th, while some of the people were sleeping in the boat, and others were resting on a low plain near the sea, in the neighborhood, another shock occurred, a great mass was torn from a neighboring mountain and hurled with a crash on the plain, and immediately afterwards a wave, twenty feet or more in height, rolled over the level plain, sweeping away the people. It then retreated, but soon rushed back again, bringing with it many of the bodies of the people who had perished. At the same time all the boats were either sunk or dashed against the beach, and the Prince with 1,430 of his people was destroyed. The total number of deaths caused by this earthquake in the Calabrias and Sicily were estimated by Hamilton at 40,000. Besides these about 20,000 more perished in epidemics that followed the earthquake, or died for lack of proper food. CHAPTER XXVI THE GREAT LISBON EARTHQUAKE OF 1755 Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, on the Tagus River, is built along both banks for five miles, and on several small neighboring hills. It is supplied with water by means of an aqueduct, called the Alcantara, which brings the water from springs about nine miles to the northwest. For portions of its length the aqueduct is placed underground, but where it crosses the deep valley of the Alcantara it is supported, for a distance of 2,400 feet, by a number of marble arches, which in one place are 260 feet in height. This fact is put forward not merely for the sake of its artistic interest, but because, strange to relate, this part of the aqueduct remained uninjured during that great earthquake, the greatest of modern times. On the 1st of November, 1755, this frightful catastrophe, according to Lyell, from whose excellent account much of the information contained in this chapter has been obtained, struck the beautiful city almost without any warning. Terrible sounds came suddenly from underground; almost instantly afterward a violent shock threw down the greater portion of the city; in less than six minutes 60,000 people were killed. The place from which this earthquake started must have been situated on the bed of the ocean at some distance from the coast; for the great wave thus raised in the Atlantic Ocean did not reach the mouth of the Tagus River until about half an hour after the most severe shocks were over. The arrival of this wave at the mouth of the Tagus was announced by the sea retiring to such an extent as to leave the bar dry. Then a huge wave, sixty feet in height, rolled in from the ocean and completed the work of destruction that had been commenced by the earthquake. So great was the shock that the mountains in the neighborhood were violently shaken and some of them split or fractured in a most wonderful manner.