October 12, 2016 • 29 mins
In January of 1700, a tsunami struck the coast of Japan. While the connection between earthquakes and tsunamis was known, it actually took a very long time to figure out where the catalyzing earthquake had taken place.
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get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(01:12):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we're talking about the story that has three totally
distinct parts. The first part we're going to talk about
is that in January of seventeen hundred, a tsunami struck
the coast of Japan. And this is a tsunami that's
really well documented in records and maps and art from
the time period, and by this point that people of
(01:34):
Japan knew that tsunamis could follow earthquakes, and especially when
it came to domestic tsunamis, where both the tsunami and
the earthquake that caused it happened. There in Japan, people
had a really clear sense that when an earthquake struck,
a tsunami could follow. But sometimes an earthquake spawns a
tsunami that makes landfall somewhere really far away. And since
(01:55):
instantaneous communication over thousands of miles is an incredibly recent engine,
uh connecting these florigen tsunamis to the earthquakes that spawned
them as really the work of later scientists. After an
earthquake in Chile in nineteen sixties spawned a tsunami that
struck Japan, a worker at a weather station figured out
(02:15):
that tsunami that had struck Japan in sixteen eighty seven,
seventeen thirty, and seventeen fifty one had come from Peru
and Chile. This seventeen hundred tsunami continued to be a
mystery for ant of the thirty plus years, though it
became known as the Orphans tsunami, and that tsunami, the
earthquake that caused it, and how people finally figured out
(02:36):
which was which are what we are talking about today.
So the first written record of a tsunami in Japan
is from the year six eighty four. An earthquake struck
the province of Toza now known as Kochi. Afterwards, quote
the Province of Tosa reported that a great tide rose
and caused many of the ships conveying tribute to sink
(02:57):
and be lost. The word tsunami wasn't coined until later,
though It combines the character to which means harbor and nami,
which means wave. Its first use in writing is from
sixteen twelve to describe one that's struck on December two
of sixteen eleven, roughly four hours after an earthquake off
(03:17):
the coast of Japan. This tsunami was disastrous, killing thousands
and thousands of people and from there. The word tsunami
made its way into English in the late eighteen hundreds.
By the nineteen fifties, it had become one of the
few Japanese loanwords in the English Languages Physics Lexicon. This
known connection between earthquakes and tsunami was so solid in
(03:40):
the eighteenth century in Japan that when the seventeen hundred
tsunami struck, most of the people writing about it didn't
actually call it at tsunami a tsunami. Instead, almost all
of the surviving written records use words like high tide, flood,
high water, and unusual seas. The headman of the village
of Miho did wonder in his record whether it was
(04:00):
a tsunami, which is something that he spelled out phonetically
rather than using the Japanese character for tsunami, So it's
probably a word that he had heard but didn't know
how to write. But he clearly seems puzzled at whether
this could have been a tsunami, since there had not
been an earthquake beforehand, and we have lots of writing
(04:20):
from lots of different people about this particular tsunami in
seventeen hundred Japan was about a hundred years into the
Tokugawa period also called the Edo Period, and this was
the nearly two hundred and fifty years span of relative
peace and stability under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
If you want a bit more detail about the Tokugawa
(04:41):
and the culture of the Edo period, there is a
lot more about it in our past podcast on Hokusai.
During this period, literacy was pretty widespread among social classes
and the culture of governmental bureaucracy that there were a
lot of records being kept about basically everything. Records of
the tsunami survive in the paperwork of the daimyo or
(05:02):
the feudal lords, as well as the merchants and people
of the peasant class who were basically leaders in their
individual villages. The tsunami reached Japan on January, or in
the Japanese calendar, the eighth day of the twelve month
of Genroku twelve. The path of the tsunami arcd from
(05:23):
the northeast to southwest down Japan's coast, striking Kawagasaki in
the north, first on the close to midnight, and then
moving south until it reached to Nabe the following morning.
All the surviving written records come from towns and villages
on the island of Honshu, which is Japan's largest island
and was also home to the capital city of Edo,
(05:44):
which is today Tokyo. So we're going to walk down
the path. The tsunami took from north to south, and
it started at least according to the records and the
fishing village of Kawagasaki, which is on the northwest edge
of Miyako Bay. The tsunami struck in the middle of
the night without any warning, and although the people who
were living there were able to escape to higher ground
(06:07):
and no one was injured, the combination of floodwaters and
fires destroyed about ten percent of the town's three houses.
The water itself was responsible for the destruction of thirteen homes.
The records from Kuagasaki are the only ones to conclusively
were use the word tsunami to describe the seventeen hundred flood.
(06:29):
Officials in the neighboring town of Miyako, which was also
the administrative seat for Kuagasaki and other villages in the area,
started a relief effort, and in the following days, stipends
of rice were distributed to a hundred and fifty nine
people who had been affected by the tsunami, and officials
in Miyako also requested allotments of low grade woods so
(06:49):
that they could build temporary shelters. The tsunami waters traveled
all the way through Miyako Bay, uh damaging and destroying
structures along the coast, and eventually reaching the village of Sugarushi,
which was a kilometer inland, and this caused a panic
among the people who were living there because of the
shape of the bay, which funneled the water into a
(07:11):
relatively narrow space. The crest of the tsunami was probably
the highest here, about five ms or sixteen feet. The
records at Tsugaruishi don't mention the word tsunami, but they
do mention the absence of an earthquake. And also due
to a clerical error, these records also misrecord the date
by a full month. Yeah, there was this and one
(07:33):
other thing that both were like, oops, we just they
just noted the wrong the wrong date there. Continuing south
in the port of Otsuchi, most of the damage was
two crops. There were rice patties and vegetable fields that
were planted close to the sea that were destroyed. Two
houses and to saltkins kilns were damaged as well. In Knaka, Minato,
(07:56):
high waves prevented a boat carrying four hundred and seventy
bales of ice from entering the mouth of the river
and continuing inland to its destination of Edo. When it
couldn't reach the river, the boat dropped anchor, and as
the sea's got rougher, it jettisoned part of its cargo.
But then the sea's continually got worse, the anchor line
broke and the boat was driven into the rocks, causing
(08:18):
the loss of the rest of its cargo, which was
twenty eight metric tons of rice, and the deaths of
two of its crew. Of all the descriptions of the
tsunami that survived until today, this incident is the one
that seems to go on for the longest. Most likely,
the boat was really struck twice, once by the incoming
water which kept it from entering the mouth of the river,
(08:39):
and then it was struck a second time by the
rebound of that water off of the land and the
currents from the mouth of the river, And so that
second wave is what drove the boat onto the rocks.
The headman and Miho population three, The same one who
had wondered whether the strange seas were a tsunami, evacuated
the village's elderly residents and its children to shrine on
(09:00):
high ground. He described the unusual seas as a series
of seven unusually large waves. Because Mijo was relatively sheltered,
the crest of the tsunami there was probably smaller than
in Miyako Bay, where the shape of the land funneled
the waters. The city of Tanabe, is on the southern
end of the recorded journey of the tsunami's path to Nabe,
(09:22):
was much larger and had a population of about hundred,
including the mayor for the whole district. There, the tsunami
flooded a government storehouse and a castle moat, and it
flooded farmland around the bay. This stretch of Japanese coastline
covers nearly one thousand kilometers. It's about six and twenty
one miles at various points along that span. The crest
(09:44):
of the tsunami seems to have ranged from two to
five meters or six and a half to sixteen feet,
so it was definitely enough to cause damage and alarm,
but it was a smaller influx of water than say
the flood from a typhoon or a very powerful storm urge. Yeah.
So this, although it was damaging and there was some
loss of life, this is one of those things that
(10:06):
by comparison, like a really bad storm, could have had
a similar or worse effect on the island. This is
also much much smaller than, for example, the tsunami that
was spawned by the March eleventh earthquake that reached heights
of up to forty meters or a hundred and thirty
one feet, and that was smaller than the tsunami that
was spawned by this same earthquake when it struck North
(10:28):
America's specific northwest, which is what we're going to talk
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it professional, make it beautiful. Unlike in Japan, where a
(11:33):
government that was really into record keeping combined with a
population that was highly literate to give us lots and
lots of written records at the tsunami, in northwestern North America,
history as were being kept at this point through oral
tradition and sevent hundred The Cascadia region, which encompasses what's
now in northern California all the way north to Alaska,
(11:54):
was home to four distinct cultural language groups, the Coast Sailish,
the Wacation That, the Chinookan, and the and the Shopton.
These encompassed a dozen distinct languages and many many more
distinct tribes and bands, all of them with their own
traditions and customs and cultures and stories. When the earthquake happened,
(12:17):
this part of North America had not yet experienced sustained
contact with Europeans it would be another seventy plus years
before Bruno Hesseta would land in what's now Washington State,
or Captain James Cook would explore Vancouver Island. Europeans started
colonizing the Pacific Northwest about a century later, and it
was another fifty years before European arrivals started writing down
(12:39):
that region's oral traditions. But in that roughly century and
a half between first contact and the effort to document
Native American in First Nations people's oral histories in Cascadia,
as many as ninety five percent of those distinct oral
traditions were lost. Warfare, European introduced diseases, loss of traditional
(13:00):
territory to European colonists, and cultural assimilation all played a
role in the loss of a whole lot of Cascadia's
unwritten history. However, it's clear from the symbolism in many
of the surviving Native stories that the Native people of Cascadia,
like the people of Japan, understood the connection between earthquakes
(13:20):
and floods. There are lots of references to earthquakes and
floods in their oral histories, their folklore, and stories throughout
the region. Stories about thunderbird battling with whale are common
among many Pacific Northwest People's likely drawn from the region's
seismic activity and the connection between shaking ground and rushing water.
(13:41):
And some of these stories thunderbird sinks his talents into
whales back as they're fighting, and whale drags thunderbird down
to the bottom of the ocean, and others thunderbird flies
into the sky with whale like holding whale and then
drops whale onto the ocean, causing a massive flood. The
mythology is a little bit different further to the south.
(14:03):
For instance, the Uruk tribe, who historically lived along the
southern part of Cascadia and along Klamath River and are
a federally recognized tribe in California today, has a story
about thunder and earthquake. Thunder went to earthquake because the
people didn't have enough to eat, thinking that if the
planes became ocean, people could fish there. So earthquake ran
(14:24):
along the land, causing the land to sink and fill
with an ocean full of salmon, whales and seals. Uh.
In addition to stories like these, themes of shaking and
flooding and an interplay between the two are also present
in masks, art, dance, and ceremonies among many of Cascadia's
native people's But apart from the more general tradition of
(14:47):
folk folklore, myths and legends, which of course are open
to lacks of other interpretations as well, there are also
specific stories about specific earthquakes and tsunami that have been
passed down through generations. Modern researchers studying the connections between
native oral history and the region's seismic history have traced
(15:07):
nine different stories told to Europeans by native peoples between
eighteen sixty and nineteen sixty four that are detailed enough
to determine they probably stem from the seventeen hundred earthquake
and tsunami. Their stories that combine both flooding and shaking,
and describe family connections or other details that put the
story into that right time period. Three of them are
(15:30):
the stories of specific ancestors, grandparents or great grandparents who
either saw a survivor of the seventeen hundred earthquake or
survived it themselves. One of the most frequently cited was
written down in eighteen sixty four. A man known as
Billy Blatch told James Swan the story of a tsunami,
which Swan recorded in his diary on Tuesday, January twelfth
(15:52):
of that year. Swan wrote that Billy Blatch told him
about water that flowed and then receded, and then rose
again without any swell or waves, and submerged the whole
of the cape, and in fact the whole country except
the mountains. Billy Blatch's story goes on to talk about
people who drifted away in their canoes, as well as
canoes that came down in the trees and were destroyed,
(16:14):
and lives that were lost. In ninety nine, a woman
named Agnes Matts, who was a member of the Teloa
tribe also known as the Teloa d nine nation, told
cultural anthropologist Cora A. Du Bois a story about a
tidal wave in Oregon. Quote. There were no white people
on earth when it happened, she said, and went on
to describe a story about a grandmother warning her two
(16:36):
grandchildren who she had raised, to run to the top
of a mountain as fast as they could, and when
they looked back, they saw the water consume everything. With
so little surviving oral history, we can't reconstruct a point
by point recounting of the earthquake and tsunami in Cascadia
the way we did in Japan. But given how populated
(16:57):
the coastal region from British Columbia to northern califor Nia
was and how many native people has made extensive use
of the rivers and waterways to move inland from the coast,
the only logical conclusion is that it was catastrophic. Even
for those who felt the earthquake and survived by moving
to higher ground, the tsunami would have destroyed homes, canoes,
fishing nets, stored food, and everything else that was necessary
(17:19):
for survival. And we're going to talk about how these
two events on opposite sides of the Pacific we're finally connected.
But first we're going to pause and have a law
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now we will get back to our story. Here is
(19:11):
what we know today. At nine pm local time on
January hundred, the Cascadia Subduction Zone ruptured along as six
hundred and eighty mile or one thousand nine ko length.
This fault system is off the coast of North America
and from northern California today all the way north into
British Columbia. Today, people living on the coast both felt
(19:35):
the quake and experienced the tsunami that followed. It only
would have taken about twenty minutes for the water displaced
towards the North American coast to actually reach it. Researchers
estimate that the tsunami that's struck was up to fifty
feet or fifteen meters high. Then about ten hours later,
water displaced in the opposite direction reached Japan, reaching heights
(19:58):
of about sixteen ft or five live meters. This wave
of water traveled from northeast to southwest down the Japanese
coast for the next eight to ten hours. It took
a really long time for anyone to connect these two
events together, even after the efforts we talked about at
the very beginning of the show. And one big reason
is that for much of the twentieth century, geologists thought
(20:21):
the faults in this part of the world weren't really
capable of producing a very powerful earthquake they would max
out at around magnitude seven, and that wouldn't necessarily be
powerful enough to spawn the tsunami that ultimately reached Japan. Yes,
seven is still pretty big earthquake, yeah, but not not
the size needed to spawn this level of destruction. But
(20:44):
throughout the nineteen eighties, researchers basically trying to settle disputes
about whether Cascadia was capable of producing great earthquakes, started
to find more and more evidence that incredibly large earthquakes
really had struck the region in the past. Most of
this research studied the lay of the land in the
Pacific Northwest and the remains of forests. In an earthquake
(21:07):
of this size and type, land can suddenly drop, and
when land on the coast or otherwise near water drops,
the water rushes in to fill that void. So when
a coastal forest suddenly drops, the water that rushes in
kills the trees and creates a ghost forest. As researchers
started looking for evidence of whether Cascadia could spawn great earthquakes,
(21:28):
they started finding these sorts of ghost forests. And it
wasn't as though these ghost forests were a total surprise
researchers had already found plenty of submerged logs and stumps,
along with the hearths of and other archaeological evidence of
destroyed homes of native peoples. But for a long time,
the conventional wisdom was that these trees had been killed
(21:48):
through a slow rise in sea levels, not an earthquake
and a sudden drop of the land. But other bits
of evidence started to point toward the earthquake theory. There
were layers of that could only have come in along
a tsunami, and entire marshes were buried and preserved under
layers of silt and sand that could only have arrived
(22:08):
there suddenly, not part of a gradual process. In nineteen
ninety six, after more than a decade of piecing together
all this evidence, Japanese researchers first connected the tsunami that
struck the island of Hanshu in seventeen hundred with the
earthquake that happened on the same day in the Pacific Northwest.
By that point, radio carbon dating had already pinpointed the
(22:30):
date of the creation of these ghost forests in Cascadia
as sometime between sixteen nine five and seventeen twenty in
nineteen seven. The date was further refined to having happened
sometime between August sixteen ninety nine and May seventeen hundred,
so between the end of one growth phase in the
beginning of the next for these trees. What they did
(22:50):
was they compared the ghost trees roots which they excavated
for this purpose, to the rings of neighbors of neighboring
trees that had served vibe since before seventeen hundred. And
you can read so much about the science behind this
earthquake and tsunami in the Orphans Tsunami of seventeen hundred
(23:11):
Japanese clues to apparent earthquake in North America, which was
prepared by the U. S Geological Survey in conjunction with
the Geological Survey of Japan. And we will have a
link to that in the show notes. Yeah, it's one
of those books. You you can buy it and find
it in libraries, but it's also a public domain piece
because it was created by government sources that you can
read on the Internet for free. Aside from solving this
(23:34):
mystery of what caused the Orphans tsunami, this research is
incredibly important to actual life today in the Pacific Northwest.
The idea that a magnitude nine earthquake is possible or
maybe even inevitable, has a huge impact, uh into the
conversation around how resilient buildings and bridges UH and other
(23:56):
structures need to be to withstand the level of seismic
activity that's possible in the region. Not to be alarming
that a lot of things built there were built before
anyone figured this out, that is for sure. Uh. My
two of my siblings live in the Pacific Northwest. I
lived there when I was a kid, and I know
(24:17):
that they have. I don't know if they realize it's
related to this specific geological survey and research that was done,
but they have become suddenly aware of, like, oh, we've
gotten some notices about maybe looking at fortifications of our homes. Yeah,
it was. I can't re if it was last year
or the year before. It was within the last couple
of years. Uh. There was a whole wave of articles
(24:39):
about this whole thing, And I'm not sure exactly what
spawned those articles because at that point, I mean this,
this this book about the earthquake and tsunami had been
out for a while, UM, and it was one of
those things that I read, and I thought about my
brother and sister in law, who at that point, I mean,
they live, they live in Seattle, and at the at
(25:00):
that point they were living in in a condo that
was sort of under a highway bridge. And my sister
in law had said to me when I came to
visit them, she was like, when the big one happens,
that's gonna fall on us. And so I remember reading
all these articles and being like, you guys gotta go now,
you need to go now, all right, So yeah, that's
(25:21):
it's it's now building standards are taking into account the
idea that yes they're magnitude seven is not the upward
limit here, magnitude nine plus is. Do you also have
a little bit of listener mail, whether it be about
building fortification or not. I have, I have a clarification
and a correction. The The clarification stems from an email
(25:44):
we got from listener Robert and I'm not gonna read it, uh,
just because it's various details in there. But Robert is
has been a therapist for many years and wrote about
our episode on John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry Um
and how we described his methodically planning as being evidence
(26:05):
that he was not mentally ill, and that did not
come off the way that I intended it to in
the episode. I was definitely not trying to say that
people who have mental illnesses aren't able to learn or
plan things, because that's false, um. And I also wasn't
trying to say that, uh, the fact that he was
planning meant that he was not mentally ill. What I
(26:26):
was attempting to get at was that there is this
perception and a lot of history books, especially older history books,
that John Brown was quote a crazy person who had
this wild idea that he took off on suddenly, uh,
which is not accurate. Like, he definitely put a lot
of planning and research um into guerrilla warfare and things
(26:48):
like that, and he implemented that into this whole plan.
So my apologies for not articulating that very well in
that episode. The correction that I have comes in from
a Eizabeth, and Elizabeth says, Dear Tracy and Holly. In
your nineteen September episode about Mary Alice Nelson a k
A Molly spotted ELK, you discussed some of the challenges
(27:10):
she had in getting Johnny to the United States at
the beginning of World War Two. You noted that Johnny
was a socialist, which you argued caused problems because of
quote France, the Socialist Party, which Johnny was a part of,
had at one point considered uniting with Germany's Socialist Party,
which became the Nazi Party. This is untrue. Germany's socialist party,
the social Democratic Party of Germany SPD, was wholly unconnected
(27:32):
to the Nazi Party and in fact stood in stark
opposition to it. The Nazi Party full name National Socialist
German Workers Party uh n S d AP evolved out
of the German Workers Party d AP, a party at
the opposite end of the political spectrum from the SPD.
The Nazis were a far right party, while the SPD
was a party on the left, if not as far
(27:54):
left as the Communist Party of Germany KPD. The sort
of basic error is not just unacceptable but also injurious,
as it supports far too widespread conflation between Nazism and socialism.
Best Elizabeth, So thank you Elizabeth for that correction. Uh
The my big source of research for this was a
book that has gone back to the library, so I
(28:15):
cannot go back through it to confirm exactly what I
either misread or garbled when I wrote down my notes. Um,
it was definitely brought up as an issue that his
involvement with the Socialist Party in France and that party's
connection to Germany was a problem for getting his visa.
UH So, at some point between that knowledge and what
(28:38):
we said in the episode, I went astray, and I
apologize for that too. That's correction corner for today's listener
mail uh If you would like to write to us
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where we will link to that paper about the tsunami
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Wednesday on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(01:12):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we're talking about the story that has three totally
distinct parts. The first part we're going to talk about
is that in January of seventeen hundred, a tsunami struck
the coast of Japan. And this is a tsunami that's
really well documented in records and maps and art from
the time period, and by this point that people of
(01:34):
Japan knew that tsunamis could follow earthquakes, and especially when
it came to domestic tsunamis, where both the tsunami and
the earthquake that caused it happened. There in Japan, people
had a really clear sense that when an earthquake struck,
a tsunami could follow. But sometimes an earthquake spawns a
tsunami that makes landfall somewhere really far away. And since
(01:55):
instantaneous communication over thousands of miles is an incredibly recent engine,
uh connecting these florigen tsunamis to the earthquakes that spawned
them as really the work of later scientists. After an
earthquake in Chile in nineteen sixties spawned a tsunami that
struck Japan, a worker at a weather station figured out
(02:15):
that tsunami that had struck Japan in sixteen eighty seven,
seventeen thirty, and seventeen fifty one had come from Peru
and Chile. This seventeen hundred tsunami continued to be a
mystery for ant of the thirty plus years, though it
became known as the Orphans tsunami, and that tsunami, the
earthquake that caused it, and how people finally figured out
(02:36):
which was which are what we are talking about today.
So the first written record of a tsunami in Japan
is from the year six eighty four. An earthquake struck
the province of Toza now known as Kochi. Afterwards, quote
the Province of Tosa reported that a great tide rose
and caused many of the ships conveying tribute to sink
(02:57):
and be lost. The word tsunami wasn't coined until later,
though It combines the character to which means harbor and nami,
which means wave. Its first use in writing is from
sixteen twelve to describe one that's struck on December two
of sixteen eleven, roughly four hours after an earthquake off
(03:17):
the coast of Japan. This tsunami was disastrous, killing thousands
and thousands of people and from there. The word tsunami
made its way into English in the late eighteen hundreds.
By the nineteen fifties, it had become one of the
few Japanese loanwords in the English Languages Physics Lexicon. This
known connection between earthquakes and tsunami was so solid in
(03:40):
the eighteenth century in Japan that when the seventeen hundred
tsunami struck, most of the people writing about it didn't
actually call it at tsunami a tsunami. Instead, almost all
of the surviving written records use words like high tide, flood,
high water, and unusual seas. The headman of the village
of Miho did wonder in his record whether it was
(04:00):
a tsunami, which is something that he spelled out phonetically
rather than using the Japanese character for tsunami, So it's
probably a word that he had heard but didn't know
how to write. But he clearly seems puzzled at whether
this could have been a tsunami, since there had not
been an earthquake beforehand, and we have lots of writing
(04:20):
from lots of different people about this particular tsunami in
seventeen hundred Japan was about a hundred years into the
Tokugawa period also called the Edo Period, and this was
the nearly two hundred and fifty years span of relative
peace and stability under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
If you want a bit more detail about the Tokugawa
(04:41):
and the culture of the Edo period, there is a
lot more about it in our past podcast on Hokusai.
During this period, literacy was pretty widespread among social classes
and the culture of governmental bureaucracy that there were a
lot of records being kept about basically everything. Records of
the tsunami survive in the paperwork of the daimyo or
(05:02):
the feudal lords, as well as the merchants and people
of the peasant class who were basically leaders in their
individual villages. The tsunami reached Japan on January, or in
the Japanese calendar, the eighth day of the twelve month
of Genroku twelve. The path of the tsunami arcd from
(05:23):
the northeast to southwest down Japan's coast, striking Kawagasaki in
the north, first on the close to midnight, and then
moving south until it reached to Nabe the following morning.
All the surviving written records come from towns and villages
on the island of Honshu, which is Japan's largest island
and was also home to the capital city of Edo,
(05:44):
which is today Tokyo. So we're going to walk down
the path. The tsunami took from north to south, and
it started at least according to the records and the
fishing village of Kawagasaki, which is on the northwest edge
of Miyako Bay. The tsunami struck in the middle of
the night without any warning, and although the people who
were living there were able to escape to higher ground
(06:07):
and no one was injured, the combination of floodwaters and
fires destroyed about ten percent of the town's three houses.
The water itself was responsible for the destruction of thirteen homes.
The records from Kuagasaki are the only ones to conclusively
were use the word tsunami to describe the seventeen hundred flood.
(06:29):
Officials in the neighboring town of Miyako, which was also
the administrative seat for Kuagasaki and other villages in the area,
started a relief effort, and in the following days, stipends
of rice were distributed to a hundred and fifty nine
people who had been affected by the tsunami, and officials
in Miyako also requested allotments of low grade woods so
(06:49):
that they could build temporary shelters. The tsunami waters traveled
all the way through Miyako Bay, uh damaging and destroying
structures along the coast, and eventually reaching the village of Sugarushi,
which was a kilometer inland, and this caused a panic
among the people who were living there because of the
shape of the bay, which funneled the water into a
(07:11):
relatively narrow space. The crest of the tsunami was probably
the highest here, about five ms or sixteen feet. The
records at Tsugaruishi don't mention the word tsunami, but they
do mention the absence of an earthquake. And also due
to a clerical error, these records also misrecord the date
by a full month. Yeah, there was this and one
(07:33):
other thing that both were like, oops, we just they
just noted the wrong the wrong date there. Continuing south
in the port of Otsuchi, most of the damage was
two crops. There were rice patties and vegetable fields that
were planted close to the sea that were destroyed. Two
houses and to saltkins kilns were damaged as well. In Knaka, Minato,
(07:56):
high waves prevented a boat carrying four hundred and seventy
bales of ice from entering the mouth of the river
and continuing inland to its destination of Edo. When it
couldn't reach the river, the boat dropped anchor, and as
the sea's got rougher, it jettisoned part of its cargo.
But then the sea's continually got worse, the anchor line
broke and the boat was driven into the rocks, causing
(08:18):
the loss of the rest of its cargo, which was
twenty eight metric tons of rice, and the deaths of
two of its crew. Of all the descriptions of the
tsunami that survived until today, this incident is the one
that seems to go on for the longest. Most likely,
the boat was really struck twice, once by the incoming
water which kept it from entering the mouth of the river,
(08:39):
and then it was struck a second time by the
rebound of that water off of the land and the
currents from the mouth of the river, And so that
second wave is what drove the boat onto the rocks.
The headman and Miho population three, The same one who
had wondered whether the strange seas were a tsunami, evacuated
the village's elderly residents and its children to shrine on
(09:00):
high ground. He described the unusual seas as a series
of seven unusually large waves. Because Mijo was relatively sheltered,
the crest of the tsunami there was probably smaller than
in Miyako Bay, where the shape of the land funneled
the waters. The city of Tanabe, is on the southern
end of the recorded journey of the tsunami's path to Nabe,
(09:22):
was much larger and had a population of about hundred,
including the mayor for the whole district. There, the tsunami
flooded a government storehouse and a castle moat, and it
flooded farmland around the bay. This stretch of Japanese coastline
covers nearly one thousand kilometers. It's about six and twenty
one miles at various points along that span. The crest
(09:44):
of the tsunami seems to have ranged from two to
five meters or six and a half to sixteen feet,
so it was definitely enough to cause damage and alarm,
but it was a smaller influx of water than say
the flood from a typhoon or a very powerful storm urge. Yeah.
So this, although it was damaging and there was some
loss of life, this is one of those things that
(10:06):
by comparison, like a really bad storm, could have had
a similar or worse effect on the island. This is
also much much smaller than, for example, the tsunami that
was spawned by the March eleventh earthquake that reached heights
of up to forty meters or a hundred and thirty
one feet, and that was smaller than the tsunami that
was spawned by this same earthquake when it struck North
(10:28):
America's specific northwest, which is what we're going to talk
about after a brief word from a sponsor. Starting your
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it professional, make it beautiful. Unlike in Japan, where a
(11:33):
government that was really into record keeping combined with a
population that was highly literate to give us lots and
lots of written records at the tsunami, in northwestern North America,
history as were being kept at this point through oral
tradition and sevent hundred The Cascadia region, which encompasses what's
now in northern California all the way north to Alaska,
(11:54):
was home to four distinct cultural language groups, the Coast Sailish,
the Wacation That, the Chinookan, and the and the Shopton.
These encompassed a dozen distinct languages and many many more
distinct tribes and bands, all of them with their own
traditions and customs and cultures and stories. When the earthquake happened,
(12:17):
this part of North America had not yet experienced sustained
contact with Europeans it would be another seventy plus years
before Bruno Hesseta would land in what's now Washington State,
or Captain James Cook would explore Vancouver Island. Europeans started
colonizing the Pacific Northwest about a century later, and it
was another fifty years before European arrivals started writing down
(12:39):
that region's oral traditions. But in that roughly century and
a half between first contact and the effort to document
Native American in First Nations people's oral histories in Cascadia,
as many as ninety five percent of those distinct oral
traditions were lost. Warfare, European introduced diseases, loss of traditional
(13:00):
territory to European colonists, and cultural assimilation all played a
role in the loss of a whole lot of Cascadia's
unwritten history. However, it's clear from the symbolism in many
of the surviving Native stories that the Native people of Cascadia,
like the people of Japan, understood the connection between earthquakes
(13:20):
and floods. There are lots of references to earthquakes and
floods in their oral histories, their folklore, and stories throughout
the region. Stories about thunderbird battling with whale are common
among many Pacific Northwest People's likely drawn from the region's
seismic activity and the connection between shaking ground and rushing water.
(13:41):
And some of these stories thunderbird sinks his talents into
whales back as they're fighting, and whale drags thunderbird down
to the bottom of the ocean, and others thunderbird flies
into the sky with whale like holding whale and then
drops whale onto the ocean, causing a massive flood. The
mythology is a little bit different further to the south.
(14:03):
For instance, the Uruk tribe, who historically lived along the
southern part of Cascadia and along Klamath River and are
a federally recognized tribe in California today, has a story
about thunder and earthquake. Thunder went to earthquake because the
people didn't have enough to eat, thinking that if the
planes became ocean, people could fish there. So earthquake ran
(14:24):
along the land, causing the land to sink and fill
with an ocean full of salmon, whales and seals. Uh.
In addition to stories like these, themes of shaking and
flooding and an interplay between the two are also present
in masks, art, dance, and ceremonies among many of Cascadia's
native people's But apart from the more general tradition of
(14:47):
folk folklore, myths and legends, which of course are open
to lacks of other interpretations as well, there are also
specific stories about specific earthquakes and tsunami that have been
passed down through generations. Modern researchers studying the connections between
native oral history and the region's seismic history have traced
(15:07):
nine different stories told to Europeans by native peoples between
eighteen sixty and nineteen sixty four that are detailed enough
to determine they probably stem from the seventeen hundred earthquake
and tsunami. Their stories that combine both flooding and shaking,
and describe family connections or other details that put the
story into that right time period. Three of them are
(15:30):
the stories of specific ancestors, grandparents or great grandparents who
either saw a survivor of the seventeen hundred earthquake or
survived it themselves. One of the most frequently cited was
written down in eighteen sixty four. A man known as
Billy Blatch told James Swan the story of a tsunami,
which Swan recorded in his diary on Tuesday, January twelfth
(15:52):
of that year. Swan wrote that Billy Blatch told him
about water that flowed and then receded, and then rose
again without any swell or waves, and submerged the whole
of the cape, and in fact the whole country except
the mountains. Billy Blatch's story goes on to talk about
people who drifted away in their canoes, as well as
canoes that came down in the trees and were destroyed,
(16:14):
and lives that were lost. In ninety nine, a woman
named Agnes Matts, who was a member of the Teloa
tribe also known as the Teloa d nine nation, told
cultural anthropologist Cora A. Du Bois a story about a
tidal wave in Oregon. Quote. There were no white people
on earth when it happened, she said, and went on
to describe a story about a grandmother warning her two
(16:36):
grandchildren who she had raised, to run to the top
of a mountain as fast as they could, and when
they looked back, they saw the water consume everything. With
so little surviving oral history, we can't reconstruct a point
by point recounting of the earthquake and tsunami in Cascadia
the way we did in Japan. But given how populated
(16:57):
the coastal region from British Columbia to northern califor Nia
was and how many native people has made extensive use
of the rivers and waterways to move inland from the coast,
the only logical conclusion is that it was catastrophic. Even
for those who felt the earthquake and survived by moving
to higher ground, the tsunami would have destroyed homes, canoes,
fishing nets, stored food, and everything else that was necessary
(17:19):
for survival. And we're going to talk about how these
two events on opposite sides of the Pacific we're finally connected.
But first we're going to pause and have a law
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now we will get back to our story. Here is
(19:11):
what we know today. At nine pm local time on
January hundred, the Cascadia Subduction Zone ruptured along as six
hundred and eighty mile or one thousand nine ko length.
This fault system is off the coast of North America
and from northern California today all the way north into
British Columbia. Today, people living on the coast both felt
(19:35):
the quake and experienced the tsunami that followed. It only
would have taken about twenty minutes for the water displaced
towards the North American coast to actually reach it. Researchers
estimate that the tsunami that's struck was up to fifty
feet or fifteen meters high. Then about ten hours later,
water displaced in the opposite direction reached Japan, reaching heights
(19:58):
of about sixteen ft or five live meters. This wave
of water traveled from northeast to southwest down the Japanese
coast for the next eight to ten hours. It took
a really long time for anyone to connect these two
events together, even after the efforts we talked about at
the very beginning of the show. And one big reason
is that for much of the twentieth century, geologists thought
(20:21):
the faults in this part of the world weren't really
capable of producing a very powerful earthquake they would max
out at around magnitude seven, and that wouldn't necessarily be
powerful enough to spawn the tsunami that ultimately reached Japan. Yes,
seven is still pretty big earthquake, yeah, but not not
the size needed to spawn this level of destruction. But
(20:44):
throughout the nineteen eighties, researchers basically trying to settle disputes
about whether Cascadia was capable of producing great earthquakes, started
to find more and more evidence that incredibly large earthquakes
really had struck the region in the past. Most of
this research studied the lay of the land in the
Pacific Northwest and the remains of forests. In an earthquake
(21:07):
of this size and type, land can suddenly drop, and
when land on the coast or otherwise near water drops,
the water rushes in to fill that void. So when
a coastal forest suddenly drops, the water that rushes in
kills the trees and creates a ghost forest. As researchers
started looking for evidence of whether Cascadia could spawn great earthquakes,
(21:28):
they started finding these sorts of ghost forests. And it
wasn't as though these ghost forests were a total surprise
researchers had already found plenty of submerged logs and stumps,
along with the hearths of and other archaeological evidence of
destroyed homes of native peoples. But for a long time,
the conventional wisdom was that these trees had been killed
(21:48):
through a slow rise in sea levels, not an earthquake
and a sudden drop of the land. But other bits
of evidence started to point toward the earthquake theory. There
were layers of that could only have come in along
a tsunami, and entire marshes were buried and preserved under
layers of silt and sand that could only have arrived
(22:08):
there suddenly, not part of a gradual process. In nineteen
ninety six, after more than a decade of piecing together
all this evidence, Japanese researchers first connected the tsunami that
struck the island of Hanshu in seventeen hundred with the
earthquake that happened on the same day in the Pacific Northwest.
By that point, radio carbon dating had already pinpointed the
(22:30):
date of the creation of these ghost forests in Cascadia
as sometime between sixteen nine five and seventeen twenty in
nineteen seven. The date was further refined to having happened
sometime between August sixteen ninety nine and May seventeen hundred,
so between the end of one growth phase in the
beginning of the next for these trees. What they did
(22:50):
was they compared the ghost trees roots which they excavated
for this purpose, to the rings of neighbors of neighboring
trees that had served vibe since before seventeen hundred. And
you can read so much about the science behind this
earthquake and tsunami in the Orphans Tsunami of seventeen hundred
(23:11):
Japanese clues to apparent earthquake in North America, which was
prepared by the U. S Geological Survey in conjunction with
the Geological Survey of Japan. And we will have a
link to that in the show notes. Yeah, it's one
of those books. You you can buy it and find
it in libraries, but it's also a public domain piece
because it was created by government sources that you can
read on the Internet for free. Aside from solving this
(23:34):
mystery of what caused the Orphans tsunami, this research is
incredibly important to actual life today in the Pacific Northwest.
The idea that a magnitude nine earthquake is possible or
maybe even inevitable, has a huge impact, uh into the
conversation around how resilient buildings and bridges UH and other
(23:56):
structures need to be to withstand the level of seismic
activity that's possible in the region. Not to be alarming
that a lot of things built there were built before
anyone figured this out, that is for sure. Uh. My
two of my siblings live in the Pacific Northwest. I
lived there when I was a kid, and I know
(24:17):
that they have. I don't know if they realize it's
related to this specific geological survey and research that was done,
but they have become suddenly aware of, like, oh, we've
gotten some notices about maybe looking at fortifications of our homes. Yeah,
it was. I can't re if it was last year
or the year before. It was within the last couple
of years. Uh. There was a whole wave of articles
(24:39):
about this whole thing, And I'm not sure exactly what
spawned those articles because at that point, I mean this,
this this book about the earthquake and tsunami had been
out for a while, UM, and it was one of
those things that I read, and I thought about my
brother and sister in law, who at that point, I mean,
they live, they live in Seattle, and at the at
(25:00):
that point they were living in in a condo that
was sort of under a highway bridge. And my sister
in law had said to me when I came to
visit them, she was like, when the big one happens,
that's gonna fall on us. And so I remember reading
all these articles and being like, you guys gotta go now,
you need to go now, all right, So yeah, that's
(25:21):
it's it's now building standards are taking into account the
idea that yes they're magnitude seven is not the upward
limit here, magnitude nine plus is. Do you also have
a little bit of listener mail, whether it be about
building fortification or not. I have, I have a clarification
and a correction. The The clarification stems from an email
(25:44):
we got from listener Robert and I'm not gonna read it, uh,
just because it's various details in there. But Robert is
has been a therapist for many years and wrote about
our episode on John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry Um
and how we described his methodically planning as being evidence
(26:05):
that he was not mentally ill, and that did not
come off the way that I intended it to in
the episode. I was definitely not trying to say that
people who have mental illnesses aren't able to learn or
plan things, because that's false, um. And I also wasn't
trying to say that, uh, the fact that he was
planning meant that he was not mentally ill. What I
(26:26):
was attempting to get at was that there is this
perception and a lot of history books, especially older history books,
that John Brown was quote a crazy person who had
this wild idea that he took off on suddenly, uh,
which is not accurate. Like, he definitely put a lot
of planning and research um into guerrilla warfare and things
(26:48):
like that, and he implemented that into this whole plan.
So my apologies for not articulating that very well in
that episode. The correction that I have comes in from
a Eizabeth, and Elizabeth says, Dear Tracy and Holly. In
your nineteen September episode about Mary Alice Nelson a k
A Molly spotted ELK, you discussed some of the challenges
(27:10):
she had in getting Johnny to the United States at
the beginning of World War Two. You noted that Johnny
was a socialist, which you argued caused problems because of
quote France, the Socialist Party, which Johnny was a part of,
had at one point considered uniting with Germany's Socialist Party,
which became the Nazi Party. This is untrue. Germany's socialist party,
the social Democratic Party of Germany SPD, was wholly unconnected
(27:32):
to the Nazi Party and in fact stood in stark
opposition to it. The Nazi Party full name National Socialist
German Workers Party uh n S d AP evolved out
of the German Workers Party d AP, a party at
the opposite end of the political spectrum from the SPD.
The Nazis were a far right party, while the SPD
was a party on the left, if not as far
(27:54):
left as the Communist Party of Germany KPD. The sort
of basic error is not just unacceptable but also injurious,
as it supports far too widespread conflation between Nazism and socialism.
Best Elizabeth, So thank you Elizabeth for that correction. Uh
The my big source of research for this was a
book that has gone back to the library, so I
(28:15):
cannot go back through it to confirm exactly what I
either misread or garbled when I wrote down my notes. Um,
it was definitely brought up as an issue that his
involvement with the Socialist Party in France and that party's
connection to Germany was a problem for getting his visa.
UH So, at some point between that knowledge and what
(28:38):
we said in the episode, I went astray, and I
apologize for that too. That's correction corner for today's listener
mail uh If you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcast where at History Podcasts
at how stuff Works dot com, or also on Facebook
at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on
Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in
(28:58):
History dot tumbler dot com, or also on Pinterest at
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. You can come
to our parent companies website, which is how stuff Works
dot com and learn about all kinds of stuff, including
earthquakes and tsunami. We have articles on how both of
those things work. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com or show notes,
(29:18):
where we will link to that paper about the tsunami
that we talked about today, we have an archive of
every episode we've ever done, some frequently asked questions that
we answer because we're asking them frequently. You can say
you can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed in history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(29:42):
Does it how stuff works dot com.
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