In the rainy season the earthquakes occur; and not a year passes without the experience of several shocks in different parts of the island.  The northern part is exempt from them.[D] Those which take place in the west, around the shores of the great bay upon which Port-au-Prince is situated, are severe, and sometimes very disastrous.  At mid-day the wind falls instantly, there is a dead calm on land and sea, the heat is consequently more intense, and the atmosphere suffocating; then the vibrations occur, after which the wind begins to blow again.  Sometimes, at an interval of ten or twelve hours, there is a supplementary shock, less violent than the first one.  It is said that the coast-caves bellow just before an earthquake.  Their noise probably seems more emphatic In the sudden calm which is the real announcement of the earth’s shudder.

[Footnote D:  Not entirely.  The great earthquake of the 7th of May, 1842, was very destructive at Cap Haytien.  On this occasion Port-au-Prince escaped with little injury.]

Port-au-Prince was entirely destroyed by an earthquake in June, 1770.  The Inhabitants built the new town upon the edge of the gulf which had just swallowed up their old one, convinced that the same disaster would not recur in the same spot.  But that region is peculiarly sensitive:  the subterranean connections with the Mexican and South-American volcanic districts chronicle disturbances whose centre is remote.

The rains are short and frequent showers, very heavy, and almost always accompanied by violent electric phenomena.  By June they are at their height.  Then the land-slides take place, which often affect seriously the cultivation, not only by their direct ravages, but by the changes which they make in the water-courses:  large tracts of good soil are turned into swamp-land, the rivers are forced to bend out of their direction and to desert places which depended upon them for irrigation.  These damages were seldom repaired, for the indolent planter would not undertake the work of draining and of permanently securing the tillable surface of his land.  It is good luck, if a land-slide, instead of creating a new morass, fills up an old one.

As if completely to unsettle any claim that this Creole climate might make to character, the hurricane leaves its awful trace upon the island.  This rotating storm of wind has its origin to the east of the Caribbee Islands; its long parabolic curve sweeps over them, and bends to the northeast below Florida.  In its centre, as it moves, it carries a lull whose breadth varies from five to thirty miles.  This dreadful calm comes suddenly in the height of the storm, and is as suddenly interrupted, after lasting sometimes for half an hour, by the revolving edge of the wind.  Torrents of rain go with it, and heavy thunder, and it brings from the sea an enormous wave, which sweeps harbors clean of their ships, and runs up, like an earthquake-wave, upon the shore.  This vortex, moving often a hundred miles an hour, takes hold of the Bombax ceiba like an enormous proboscis, pulls it from the thin soil of the tropics despite the great lateral clutch of its knotty roots, and swallows it up.  Houses, cultivated fields, men and animals, are obliterated by its heavy foot.