It made St. Louis a city of mourning for weeks and impoverished numberless families.
Yet Galveston surpassed these cities in the frightful nature of its calamity. Hundreds of insane people are being cared for, their reason having been overthrown by their great sufferings. This was one of the saddest features of the shocking visitation. These poor creatures, first bereft of home, family and property, are now living legacies of the most stupendous catastrophe this country has ever known.
Great Calamities Caused by Flood and Gale During Past Centuries--Millions of Lives Lost Through the Fury of the Elements.
Since the great flood which covered the earth, and of which Noah and his family were the only survivors, the world has seen many calamities of this nature, and millions of lives have been lost through gales and rushing waters.
At Dort, in Holland, seventy-two villages and over 100,000 people were destroyed on April 17, 1421.
At a general inundation of nearly the whole of Holland in 1530, upward of 400,000 people lost their lives.
In Catalonia, in 1617, 50,000 persons perished by flood.
Six thousand perished by the floods in Silesia in 1813, and 4,000 in Poland in the same year.
The loss of life during the recent floods in Austria-Hungary and in China have never been fully reckoned, and though 100,000 persons are said to have perished in the Chinese inundations, the figures are not regarded as trustworthy. These are the only floods on record where the loss of human life has been estimated at over 5,000. The list of smaller similar disasters is almost an endless one.
Holland, the little lowland country "redeemed from the seas," has suffered worst, from the nature of its situation. Protected, as it is, by dikes, which separate the land from the water by artificial means, a constant vigilance has been required of its people to prevent the ocean from claiming its own. In both the deluges of 1421 and 1530 the immediate cause was a breaking down of the dikes. The records of both are meager, although the mere lists of the drowned suffice to show how awful the havoc must have been. The inundation at Dort began at Dordrecht, where a heavy storm caused the dikes at that point to give way. In that territory alone 10,000 people were overwhelmed and perished, while over 100,000 were drowned in and around Dullart in Friesland and Zealand. The subsequent inundation of 1530 was the most frightful on record. It nearly annihilated the Netherlands, and only to the indomitable pluck and industry which have ever characterized the inhabitants of that country was its subsequent recovery due.