Happy Saturday. On January twenty seventh, seventeen hundred, a tsunami struck Japan, although centuries passed before anybody made the connection between the tsunami and the earthquake that had spawned it. That's the subject of today's Saturday Classic on what came to be known as the Orphan Tsunami. This episode originally came out on October twelfth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we're talking about a 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 at an art from the time period. And by this point, the people of 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 instantaneous communication over thousands of miles is an incredibly recent invention, connecting these foreign tsunamis to the earthquakes that spawned them as really the work of later scientists. After an earthquake in Chile in nineteen sixty spawned a tsunami that struck Japan, a worker at a weather station figured out 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 one of the thirty plus years, though it became known as the Orphans unami. And that tsunami, the earthquake that caused it, and how people finally figured out 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 Tosa, 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 and be lost. The word tsunami wasn't coined until later, though. It combines the character tsu, which means harbor, and nami, which means wave. Its first use in writing is from sixteen twelve to describe one that struck on December two of sixteen eleven, roughly four hours after an earthquake off 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 become one of the few Japanese loanwords in the English language's physics lexicon. This known connection between earthquakes and tsunami was so solid in the eighteenth century in Japan that when the seventeen hundred tsunami struck, most of the people writing about it didn't actually call it a tsunami. Instead, almost all of the surviving written records use words like high tide, flood, high water, and unusual seas. The headmen of the village of Miho did wonder in his records whether it was 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 from lots of different people about this particular tsunami. In seventeen hundred, Japan was about one hundred years into the Tokugawa Period also called the Edo Period, and this was the nearly two hundred and fifty year span of relative peace and stability under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate. If you want a bit more detail about the Tokugawa 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 meant that there were a lot of records being kept about basically everything. Records of the tsunami survive in the paperwork of the daimyo or 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 twenty seventh, seventeen hundred, or in the Japanese calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of Genroku twelve. The path of the tsunami arcd from the northeast to southwest down Japan's coast, striking Kuwagasaki in the north, first on the twenty seventh, 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, 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, in the fishing village of Kuwagasaki, 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 and no one was injured, the combination of floodwaters and fires destroyed about ten percent of the town's three hundred houses. The water itself was responsible for the destruction of thirteen homes. The records from Kuwagasaki are the only ones to conclusively use the word tsunami to describe this seventeen hundred flood. Officials in the neighboring town of Miyako, which was also the administrative seat for Kuwagasaki and other villages in the area, started a relief effort, and in the following days, stipends of rice were distributed to one hundred and fifty nine people who had been affected by the tsunami, and officials in Miyako also requested allotments of low grade woods so that they could build temporary shelters. The tsunami waters traveled all the way through Miyako Bay, damaging and destroying structures along the coast and eventually reaching the village of Sugaruishi, which was a kilometer inland and thus caused a panic among the people who were living there Because of the shape of the bay, which funneled the water into a relatively narrow space. The crest of the tsunami was probably the highest here, about five meters or sixteen feet. The records at Sugarui Shi 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 other thing that both were like oops, they just noted the wrong date there. Continuing south in the port of Otsuchi, most of the damage was to crops. There were rice paddies and vegetable fields that were planted close to the sea that were destroyed. Two houses and two saltkin kilns were damaged as well. In Nakamenado, high waves prevented a boat carrying four hundred and seventy bales of rice 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 seas got rougher, it jettisoned part of its cargo. But then the seas continually got worse. The anchor line broke and the boat was driven into the rocks, causing 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 survive 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, 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 in Miho, a population three hundred, the same one who had wondered whether the strange seas were a tsunami, evacuated the village's elderly residents and its children to a shrine on high ground. He described the unusual seas as a series of seven unusually large waves. Because Miho was relatively sheltered, the crest of the tsunami there was probably smaller than in Miaco 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. Tanabe was much larger and had a population of about twenty six hundred, including the mayor for the whole district. There, the tsunami flooded a government's storehouse, castle moat, and it flooded farmland around the bay. This stretch of Japanese coastline covers nearly one thousand kilometers. It's about six hundred and twenty one miles at various points along that span. The crest 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 surge. Yeah. So this, although it was damaging and there was some loss of life, this is one of those things that 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, twenty eleven earthquake that reached heights of up to forty meters or one hundred and thirty one feet, and that was smaller than the tsunami that was spawned by this same earthquake when it struck North America's Pacific northwest, which is what we going to talk about after a brief word from a sponsor. Unlike in Japan, where a government that was really into record keeping combined with a population that was highly literate to give us lots and lots of written records of the tsunami, in northwestern North America, histories were being kept at this point through oral tradition. In seventeen hundred, the Cascadia region, which encompasses what's now northern California all the way north to Alaska, was home to four distinct cultural language groups, the Coast Salish, the Wakashian, the Shinookan, and the Sahaptan. 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. Earthquake happened, this part of North America had not yet experienced sustained contact with Europeans. It would be another seventy plus years before Bruno Jsseta 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 that region's oral traditions. But in that roughly century and a half between first contact and the effort to document Native American and 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 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 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 peoples, likely drawn from the region's seismic activity and the connection between shaking ground and rushing water. In some of these stories, thunderbird sinks his talons into whale's 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. 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. I 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 along the land, causing the land to sink and fill with an ocean full of salmon, whales, and seals. In addition to stories like these, themes of shaking and flooding and an inner play between The two are also present in masks, art, dance, and ceremonies among many of Cascadia's native peoples. But apart from the more general tradition of folklore, myths and legends, which of course are open to lots 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 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. They're stories that combined both flooding and shaking, and describe family connections or other details that put the story into that right time period. Three of them are 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 of that year. Swin wrote that Billy Blatch told him about water that flowed and then receded and then rose again quote 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, and lives that were lost. In nineteen twenty nine, a woman named Agnes Mattz, who was a member of the Teloa tribe also known as the Tiloa de 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 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 the coastal region from British Columbia to northern California was and how many native peoples 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. Can you fishing nets, stored food and everything else that was necessary for survival. And we're going to talk about how these two events on opposite sides of the Pacific were finally connected. But first we're gonna pause and have a loll sponsor break. Here is what we know today. At nine pm local time on January twenty sixth, seventeen hundred, the Cascadia subduction zone ruptured along its six hundred and eighty mile or one thousand, ninety four kilometer 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 the quake and experienced the tsunami that followed. It only would have taken about twenty minutes for the water displaced toward the North American coast to actually reach it. Researchers estimate that that 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 of about sixteen feet or five 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 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. Yeah. Seven is still pretty big earthquake, yeah, but not the size needed to spawn this level of destruction. But throughout the nineteen eighties, researchers basic 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 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, 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 and other archaeological evidence of destroyed homes of native peoples. But for a long time, the conventional wisdom was the trees had been killed through a slow rise in sea levels, not an earthquake in a sudden drop of the land, but other bits of evidence started to point toward the earthquake theory. There were layers of silt that could only have come in along its tsunami, and entire marshes were buried and preserved under layers of silt and sand that could only have arrived 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 Honshu in seventeen hundred with the earthquake that happened on the same day in the Pacific Northwest. By that point, radiocarbon dating had already pinpointed the date of the creation of these ghost forests in Cascadia as sometime between sixteen ninety five and seventeen twenty. In nineteen ninety seven, the date was further refined that having happened sometime between August sixteen ninety nine and May seventeen hundred, so between the end of one grow both phase and the beginning of the next. For these trees, what they did was they compared the ghost trees' roots which they excavated for this purpose, to the rings of neighboring trees that had survived since before seventeen hundred. And you can read so much about the science behind this earthquake and tsunami in the Orphan Tsunami of seventeen hundred Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in North America which was prepared by the US 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 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 mystery of what caused the Orphan 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 into the conversation around how resilient buildings and bridges and other 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. Two of my siblings live in the Pacific Northwest. I lived there when I was a kid, and I know 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 if it was last year or the year before. It was within the last couple of years. There was a whole wave of articles about this whole thing, and I'm not sure exactly what's spawned those articles because at that point, I mean, this book about the seven teen hundred earthquake and tsunami had been out for a while, and it was one of those things that I read and I thought about my brother and sister in law at that point, I mean, they live they live in Seattle, and at that point they were living 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 going to fall on us. And so I remember reading all these articles and being like, you guys got to go now, you need to go now. So yeah, that's it's it's now building standards are taking into account the idea that, yes, the magnitude seven is not the upper limit. Here magnitude nine plus is. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. On January twenty seventh, seventeen hundred, a tsunami struck Japan, although centuries passed before anybody made the connection between the tsunami and the earthquake that had spawned it. That's the subject of today's Saturday Classic on what came to be known as the Orphan Tsunami. This episode originally came out on October twelfth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we're talking about a 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 at an art from the time period. And by this point, the people of 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 instantaneous communication over thousands of miles is an incredibly recent invention, connecting these foreign tsunamis to the earthquakes that spawned them as really the work of later scientists. After an earthquake in Chile in nineteen sixty spawned a tsunami that struck Japan, a worker at a weather station figured out 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 one of the thirty plus years, though it became known as the Orphans unami. And that tsunami, the earthquake that caused it, and how people finally figured out 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 Tosa, 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 and be lost. The word tsunami wasn't coined until later, though. It combines the character tsu, which means harbor, and nami, which means wave. Its first use in writing is from sixteen twelve to describe one that struck on December two of sixteen eleven, roughly four hours after an earthquake off 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 become one of the few Japanese loanwords in the English language's physics lexicon. This known connection between earthquakes and tsunami was so solid in the eighteenth century in Japan that when the seventeen hundred tsunami struck, most of the people writing about it didn't actually call it a tsunami. Instead, almost all of the surviving written records use words like high tide, flood, high water, and unusual seas. The headmen of the village of Miho did wonder in his records whether it was 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 from lots of different people about this particular tsunami. In seventeen hundred, Japan was about one hundred years into the Tokugawa Period also called the Edo Period, and this was the nearly two hundred and fifty year span of relative peace and stability under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate. If you want a bit more detail about the Tokugawa 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 meant that there were a lot of records being kept about basically everything. Records of the tsunami survive in the paperwork of the daimyo or 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 twenty seventh, seventeen hundred, or in the Japanese calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of Genroku twelve. The path of the tsunami arcd from the northeast to southwest down Japan's coast, striking Kuwagasaki in the north, first on the twenty seventh, 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, 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, in the fishing village of Kuwagasaki, 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 and no one was injured, the combination of floodwaters and fires destroyed about ten percent of the town's three hundred houses. The water itself was responsible for the destruction of thirteen homes. The records from Kuwagasaki are the only ones to conclusively use the word tsunami to describe this seventeen hundred flood. Officials in the neighboring town of Miyako, which was also the administrative seat for Kuwagasaki and other villages in the area, started a relief effort, and in the following days, stipends of rice were distributed to one hundred and fifty nine people who had been affected by the tsunami, and officials in Miyako also requested allotments of low grade woods so that they could build temporary shelters. The tsunami waters traveled all the way through Miyako Bay, damaging and destroying structures along the coast and eventually reaching the village of Sugaruishi, which was a kilometer inland and thus caused a panic among the people who were living there Because of the shape of the bay, which funneled the water into a relatively narrow space. The crest of the tsunami was probably the highest here, about five meters or sixteen feet. The records at Sugarui Shi 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 other thing that both were like oops, they just noted the wrong date there. Continuing south in the port of Otsuchi, most of the damage was to crops. There were rice paddies and vegetable fields that were planted close to the sea that were destroyed. Two houses and two saltkin kilns were damaged as well. In Nakamenado, high waves prevented a boat carrying four hundred and seventy bales of rice 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 seas got rougher, it jettisoned part of its cargo. But then the seas continually got worse. The anchor line broke and the boat was driven into the rocks, causing 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 survive 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, 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 in Miho, a population three hundred, the same one who had wondered whether the strange seas were a tsunami, evacuated the village's elderly residents and its children to a shrine on high ground. He described the unusual seas as a series of seven unusually large waves. Because Miho was relatively sheltered, the crest of the tsunami there was probably smaller than in Miaco 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. Tanabe was much larger and had a population of about twenty six hundred, including the mayor for the whole district. There, the tsunami flooded a government's storehouse, castle moat, and it flooded farmland around the bay. This stretch of Japanese coastline covers nearly one thousand kilometers. It's about six hundred and twenty one miles at various points along that span. The crest 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 surge. Yeah. So this, although it was damaging and there was some loss of life, this is one of those things that 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, twenty eleven earthquake that reached heights of up to forty meters or one hundred and thirty one feet, and that was smaller than the tsunami that was spawned by this same earthquake when it struck North America's Pacific northwest, which is what we going to talk about after a brief word from a sponsor. Unlike in Japan, where a government that was really into record keeping combined with a population that was highly literate to give us lots and lots of written records of the tsunami, in northwestern North America, histories were being kept at this point through oral tradition. In seventeen hundred, the Cascadia region, which encompasses what's now northern California all the way north to Alaska, was home to four distinct cultural language groups, the Coast Salish, the Wakashian, the Shinookan, and the Sahaptan. 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. Earthquake happened, this part of North America had not yet experienced sustained contact with Europeans. It would be another seventy plus years before Bruno Jsseta 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 that region's oral traditions. But in that roughly century and a half between first contact and the effort to document Native American and 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 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 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 peoples, likely drawn from the region's seismic activity and the connection between shaking ground and rushing water. In some of these stories, thunderbird sinks his talons into whale's 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. 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. I 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 along the land, causing the land to sink and fill with an ocean full of salmon, whales, and seals. In addition to stories like these, themes of shaking and flooding and an inner play between The two are also present in masks, art, dance, and ceremonies among many of Cascadia's native peoples. But apart from the more general tradition of folklore, myths and legends, which of course are open to lots 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 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. They're stories that combined both flooding and shaking, and describe family connections or other details that put the story into that right time period. Three of them are 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 of that year. Swin wrote that Billy Blatch told him about water that flowed and then receded and then rose again quote 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, and lives that were lost. In nineteen twenty nine, a woman named Agnes Mattz, who was a member of the Teloa tribe also known as the Tiloa de 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 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 the coastal region from British Columbia to northern California was and how many native peoples 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. Can you fishing nets, stored food and everything else that was necessary for survival. And we're going to talk about how these two events on opposite sides of the Pacific were finally connected. But first we're gonna pause and have a loll sponsor break. Here is what we know today. At nine pm local time on January twenty sixth, seventeen hundred, the Cascadia subduction zone ruptured along its six hundred and eighty mile or one thousand, ninety four kilometer 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 the quake and experienced the tsunami that followed. It only would have taken about twenty minutes for the water displaced toward the North American coast to actually reach it. Researchers estimate that that 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 of about sixteen feet or five 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 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. Yeah. Seven is still pretty big earthquake, yeah, but not the size needed to spawn this level of destruction. But throughout the nineteen eighties, researchers basic 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 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, 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 and other archaeological evidence of destroyed homes of native peoples. But for a long time, the conventional wisdom was the trees had been killed through a slow rise in sea levels, not an earthquake in a sudden drop of the land, but other bits of evidence started to point toward the earthquake theory. There were layers of silt that could only have come in along its tsunami, and entire marshes were buried and preserved under layers of silt and sand that could only have arrived 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 Honshu in seventeen hundred with the earthquake that happened on the same day in the Pacific Northwest. By that point, radiocarbon dating had already pinpointed the date of the creation of these ghost forests in Cascadia as sometime between sixteen ninety five and seventeen twenty. In nineteen ninety seven, the date was further refined that having happened sometime between August sixteen ninety nine and May seventeen hundred, so between the end of one grow both phase and the beginning of the next. For these trees, what they did was they compared the ghost trees' roots which they excavated for this purpose, to the rings of neighboring trees that had survived since before seventeen hundred. And you can read so much about the science behind this earthquake and tsunami in the Orphan Tsunami of seventeen hundred Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in North America which was prepared by the US 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 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 mystery of what caused the Orphan 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 into the conversation around how resilient buildings and bridges and other 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. Two of my siblings live in the Pacific Northwest. I lived there when I was a kid, and I know 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 if it was last year or the year before. It was within the last couple of years. There was a whole wave of articles about this whole thing, and I'm not sure exactly what's spawned those articles because at that point, I mean, this book about the seven teen hundred earthquake and tsunami had been out for a while, and it was one of those things that I read and I thought about my brother and sister in law at that point, I mean, they live they live in Seattle, and at that point they were living 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 going to fall on us. And so I remember reading all these articles and being like, you guys got to go now, you need to go now. So yeah, that's it's it's now building standards are taking into account the idea that, yes, the magnitude seven is not the upper limit. Here magnitude nine plus is. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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