July 18, 1857: Waterspout Bursts Ashore at Beauce

[donsutherland1]

On this date in 1857, a waterspout developed and moved ashore at Beauce in Canada's Quebec Province. The August 10, 1857 edition of The New York Daily Times (now The New York Times) reported that Mr. Prouly, a parish priest at St. Elizear's Church wrote a vivid account to Quebec City's Journal de Quebec.

The New York Daily Times reported of this account:

He says it made its appearance about half-past ten o'clock on the morning of that day [July 18], at first in the form of a cloud of the blackest kind, which was formed in an instant at the height of about forty-five degrees above the church. This cloud appeared to be about an acre and a half in extent, judged by the eye, and was pressed against by other masses of greyish clouds, which rolled in all directions about its flanks, with a sinister noise like the distant murmur of the sea in a tempest.

Shortly the cloud seemed to be torn in two, and a large column was seen to descend from the opening to the earth like an avalanche precipitated froma mountain top. Distended above and sucking the cloud, this column, like an immense serpent, twisted itself about with frightful rapidity, and balancing itself in the water like the tail of a paper kite, rushed to the earth with a hissing noise resembling the escape of steam. It plowed up the ground, swept away everything within reach, and planks, poles, and ruins of buildings mounted into the air like the rubbish out of a volcano.

Fields of grain were destroyed as if a heavy harrow had passed and repassed several times. Three sugar bushes were beaten down, and the trees were broken and interlaced like a field of grain which had been beaten down by hail. A maple tree of considerable diameter was plucked up and carried a distance of five acres. An enormous cherry tree was hurled thorught he air in the same manner.

Source: "A Waterspout in Lower Canada," The New York Daily Times, August 10, 1857.