Lisbon, Felt in a Derbyshire Mine

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 lasted six seconds in the city and threw down every church and large building in it. What is stranger is where else it surfaced.

At Eyam Bridge in Derbyshire, the overseer of the lead mines was sitting in his writing-room when the chair beneath him was raised up and set down again, distinctly enough that he felt his feet leave the floor^[1]. He ran outside and met the miners coming up in terror. One had seen the rocks move, another had heard them grind against one another, and all had heard a rumbling like groans out of the ground.

That evening at White Rock in Glamorganshire, about two hours after the ebb, water came roaring up out of the riverbed, floated two vessels — the smaller of two hundred tons — clean off their moorings and drove them down the river. The whole rise and fall took under ten minutes, and it was felt nowhere else along the river, "so that it seemed to have gushed out of the earth at that place."