Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Many cultures, it seems, responded to earthquakes by crying out a variant
of “We're still here!” They intended to “alert the beings who have produced
the earthquake . . . and who are not by nature hostile to men, that men are
still on the earth, so that they will put an end to their earth-shaking move-
ments.” They were calling out not in anger, but as a plea for mercy. Like
Tylor, Lasch observed that earthquake myths were a form of causal reason-
ing that could not be neatly distinguished from science. in the Niassa prov-
ince of southeastern Africa, for instance, “wise men” attributed earthquakes
to the reverberations caused by a star crashing into the ocean. friedrich
Ratzel had deemed this a sign of “remarkable progress towards a rational
perspective.”
38
As Lasch put it, earthquakes made it difficult for anthropolo-
gists to “differentiate between scientific theory and myth.”
39
Humboldt thus provided a template for the earthquake narratives of
later scientific travelers. When Charles Darwin felt his first temblor at Con-
cepción, Chile, in 1835, he had been primed by his readings of Humboldt
and Tschudi. Paul White has shown that Darwin successively revised his
impressions of the earthquake in order to transform the emotion of fear
into an acceptable and productive scientific attitude. By viewing the earth-
quake through the romantic lens of the sublime, he could transform terror
and sympathy into intellectual pleasure and detached scientific interest.
40
Darwin's published account of his experience at Concepción echoed Hum-
boldt: “A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world,
the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust
over a fluid; one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea
of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.”
41
Like
Humboldt, Darwin framed the earthquake survivor's doubts as a visceral re-
action, rather than the result of intellectual “reflection.” Humboldt's model
would also have led Darwin to expect a heightening of perception in the
earthquake's aftermath—and that is indeed what he experienced. Surveying
the Chilean coast, Darwin noted that the shaking had apparently produced
a permanent elevation of the land. Here was evidence that, in his own day,
the earth's surface was subject to lasting changes, not just temporary fluc-
tuations. Those dry inches of coastline became another piece in the great
puzzle of evolution.
42
Humboldt's earthquake narrative was philosophically and politically
subversive. By contrasting the undue panic of europeans with the sobriety
of New World natives, it inverted the hierarchies of colonizer and colo-
nized, scientific observer and savage. it further celebrated nature's own
“revolutionary” force, prescribing a dose of earthquake to free europeans
