I wonder if you are aware that the the world ended on 5 April, 1761. If you haven't heard of this tragic event, well, your ancestors were just not paying attention. In a world where most people still believed in the literal history of a real Adam and Eve, a certain William Bell, trooper in the Life Guards Horse Cavalry, went about London telling everyone and anyone who would listen that doomsday was nigh. And on the date predicted, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people, acted on his prediction. And what was amazing was that Corporal Bell was right. The world did end on that year. But Corporal Bell was right for the wrong reasons. And reason made all the difference.
The 8th day of February, 1761 dawned cold, as was to be expected in a world still in the grip of “The Little Ice Age”. Most winters the Thames froze over allowing people to cross the ice. And the great city was chocking on her own coal smoke to keep warm. This Sunday The “Picadilly Butchers”, as the members of the Life Guards Household Cavalry were called, were gathering for their parade, set then, as now, on every Sunday, for 11:30 A.M.
In the tiny village of Poplar across from the Isle of Dogs in the great bend of the Thames River, chimneys were shaken apart, their bricks crashing to the ground. In ‘The City’ itself pewter keepsakes slipped off mantles and chairs were upended. It was over in a few seconds. The dust settled. Nerves calmed. Normality returned.
On Sunday, March 8, 1761, between five and six on in the morning, the Thames valley shuddered again. This time the shaking was stronger and lasted longer, roiling from north to south and back again.
Reason and logic were forgotten. All that people could think of was their fear. Panicked, the richest and poorest citizens of central London ran from their beds at the slightest suggestion of another quake, convinced their homes were about to collapse around their heads, as some already had.
But the most well known collapse caused by the twin London earthquakes of 1761 was the collapse of sanity in the person of William Bell. He was one of the “Tinned Fruit”, aka a “Picadilly Butcher", a corporal in the Household Cavalry. And he became convinced that the shaking of 8 February (the second Sunday in the month) and 8 March (the second Sunday in that month), would be followed by a truly catastrophic shaker on the second Sunday in April - the twelfth.
In his mind Bell saw the earth split open. The mighty Thames River boiled and roiled. The bridges cracked and fell. The fires of damnation burst forth from the bowels of the earth. Sinners and Saints were cowed before the angels of the Lord. Spirits of the dead rose up. And the earth was laid bare, swept clean of the sins and works of man. Corporal Bell's visions became so intense and detailed, that he began to share them with any and all who would listen. He related them with such passion that Bell's visions took hold of the entire city like a fever.
Charles Mackay’s excellent book, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (Harmony Books – 1843) records that, “…all the villages within a circuit of twenty miles …(were) crowded with panic-stricken fugitives, who paid exorbitant prices for accommodation to the housekeepers of these secure retreats. Such as could not afford to pay for lodgings at any of those places, remained in London until two or three days before the time, and then encamped in the surrounding fields…
"...and hundreds who had laughed at the prediction a week before, packed up their goods, when they saw others doing so, and hastened away. The river was thought to be a place of great security, and all the merchant-vessels in the port were filled with people, who passed the night between the 4th and 5th on board, expecting every instant to see St. Paul’s totter, and the towers of Westminster Abby rock in the wind and fall amid a cloud of dust.”
One enterprising chemist even advertised pills which he claimed to be “good against earthquakes”, although exactly how the pills proposed to save the swallower, was never fully explained.
Needless to say, the world did not actually end on Sunday 12 April, 1761, at least not in the way Corporal Bell had anticipated. As Mackay recorded, “The greater part of the fugitives returned on the following day, convinced that the prophet was a false one; but many judged it more prudent to allow a week to elapse before they trusted their dear limbs in London.”
Corporal Bell became a man scorned, a repository for all those angry with themselves for having believed his prediction. And when he tried his hand at other doomsday prognostications, Corporal Bell was confined for some months in an insane asylum, probably, in part, for his own protection. Edward W. Brayley recorded in his book “Londoninania” (Hurst, Chance and Company – 1829) that Bell “…afterward kept a hosier’s shop in Holborn Hill during many years, and …retired to the neighborhood of Edgeware where he died a few years ago”.
Some things did change because of the twin quakes. His royal highness King George II picked up the damaged Buckingham House at a bargain price.
He kept the gardens but filled in the collapsed canal behind the structure and turned it into the Parade for the Household Cavalry. He renamed the residence “The Queen’s House”, but over the years, as additional wings were added, the old name returned and it became known as “Buckingham Palace”.
The channel between the Isle of Dogs and the hamlet of Poplar was bridged at two points and eventually the inside of the bend in the Themes became the East End of London (above). But something more fundamental had changed with the Earthquakes of 1761, and while the superstitions of William Bell were largely forgotten, another man was inspired, in part by the quakes to a vision which indeed gave birth to a new world.
His name was James Hutton (above). He was an ugly little man with a great big brain who was trained as a lawyer, a chemist, a doctor of Medicine, a businessman, and late in his life, a farmer. But the earthquakes of 1761 had awakened his curiosity as to what had caused them.
He had already come to the observation that the forces of erosion he saw on his farm, (streams and rivers, wind and rain) must be have been working in the time of Adam and Eve. But how long ago was that?
Hutton did not know. Nobody did. But Hutton was curious and sure enough of his God given brain to believe that he could understand the process.
He allowed the idea to percolate in his mind until, 27 years later, in 1788, when he went sightseeing with the mathematician John Playfair (above). And while walking at the cliff edge at Siccar Point in Scotland, southeast of Edinburg, Hutton saw a single formation of rock that utterly lifted the veil of superstition from his eyes.
There, in front of Hutton (above), was a bed of schistus, (to the right) thrusting up vertically from below. And sitting directly on top of this was a bed of sandstone, (left side of picture) lying in opposition to the schist. The junction point between the two kinds of rocks came to be called an “Angular Unconformity.”
They were different kinds of rock and they could not have been formed in the same place or the same time, or even close to each other in time or place. Something between them must be missing; that something was the unconformity.
Sandstone is produced by compressing desert or beach sand under tons of more dessert sand or other rocks, with little to no water present. We now know that this particular sandstone had been formed when England was at the same latitude as the Sierra Desert is today, and looked very similar.
Schist is created by lava cooling deep under water, then reheating almost to the melting point and letting it to cool again, still under pressure but without the presence of liquid water. Each of these processes takes millions of years by themselves. But the schist rock must form in the presence of water, and the sandstone in the absence of water.
So the missing layers at the angular junction of the two beds were like the missing pages in a book, missing pages that must tell a story of mountains perhaps rising and wearing down to nothing, of seas opening and closing, of river valleys cutting through the land filling again. That would take millions of years to achieve, given the rates of erosion Hutton had observed on his farm. Those millions of years whose record had been destroyed had to be between the crystals of the schist and the grains of the sandstone.
The Angular Unconformity which Hutton stood over that day demanded an untold millions of years, and hinted at why earthquakes happen in England - not because God was seeking to destroy a sinful humanity, but because that is how God made the world - with earthquakes, one after another, millions of them over the last four billion years.
And how she is remaking it every day, out of the remains of the day before, a single grain of sand and a single crystal of schist at a time. It is the same way our minds were formed, and out of the same stuff. It is a world without end, because everything in it is reused, time and time again, Even us. Even time.
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