E

Historical Seismologist

Tom La Touche and the Great Assam

Earthquake of 12 June 1897: Letters from
the Epicenter
Roger Bilham
University of Colorado at Boulder

Online Material: Transcriptions of Tom La Touche’s letters

1882–1910; a brief biography of La Touche illustrated with
contemporary photographs.

Richard Dixon Oldham’s classic memoir on the great Mw = 8.1

Assam earthquake of 1897 is seminal for its seismological obser-
vations, insights, and conclusions (Oldham 1899). Teleseismic
arrivals of waves from Shillong led Oldham (1858–1936) to
distinguish the three types of seismic waves and eventually to
recognize from them the distinctive presence of the Earth’s
core. Oldham, however, did not feel the earthquake. He had
left the Calcutta office of the Geological Survey of India (GSI)
in the care of his colleague Thomas Henry Digges La Touche
(1856–1938) two weeks previously (see figure 1). Now recently
discovered letters written by La Touche from Calcutta and the
epicentral region to his wife, Nancy, provide a firsthand, day-by-
day account of the post-earthquake investigation and include a
seismogram from an instrument that he constructed in the field
at a cost of “less than sixpence” from pieces of tin, a suspended
boulder, a glass bead, and a bamboo needle that scratched a
glass plate (LaTouche papers, 1880–1913). ▲▲ Figure 1. A young La Touche, probably taken when he joined
In his memoir Oldham notes that he focused his team of the GSI in 1882 (courtesy of the Director General, GSI, Calcutta).
geologists on the physics of the earthquake. Their reports were La Touche was born two years before Oldham and died two years
submitted “under specific instructions to report only on the after him.
facts observed, and to refrain from any expressions of opinion
as to the conclusions to be drawn, as this could only be prof- Oldham, then acting director of the GSI, was hundreds of kilo-
itably done after a review of the whole of the facts, of which meters from Shillong at the time of the earthquake and quite
only part could become known to each individually.” (Oldham unaware of its magnitude or the extent of its devastation. It
1899, p.257). He deduced from their observations that local took telegrams and letters to draw him back to headquarters in
accelerations in the earthquake had exceeded 1 g, that veloci- Calcutta, where his colleagues were busy documenting urban
ties had exceeded 3 m/s, that electrical currents in the ground damage. Once aware of the seriousness of the quake he dis-
had accompanied aftershocks, that postseismic crustal defor- persed all available geologists (like a bombshell) to the damaged
mation continued to deform the plateau in the year following regions in northeast India. They returned with quantitative esti-
the earthquake, and that many of the largest aftershocks lay 15 mates of shaking, which, together with Oldham’s own traverse
km beneath the plateau. Because he dismissed as frivolous most of the region in the winter months, formed a 62-page observa-
discussion of the societal response to the earthquake, anecdotal tional appendix to Oldham’s memoir. The first and largest of
accounts of its effects are rare in his memoir. the field observation reports was contributed by La Touche. In
More than a century after Oldham published his account, this article, and more fully in an electronic supplement to this
La Touche’s recently discovered letters to his wife archived in article illustrated with contemporary photographs, La Touche
the British Library, London, and transcribed here, reveal that describes his experiences during the postseismic investigation.

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 La Touche wrote daily to his wife, Nancy (Anna La Touche,
née Handy), whenever they were separated by his geological
responsibilities. Because this occurred 8 to 11 months of each
year, his letters provide a unique insight into the day-to-day
operation of the GSI from about 1890 to 1910. His neatly folded
four-sided letters to Nancy take the form of a starting page of nos-
talgic remarks about his love for his wife, often with a response to
the content of her previous daily letter to him. The following is a
poignant example from 25 June 1897: “I’m afraid you will find
this letter very uninteresting. No I don’t mean that, for I know
you to be interested in what I am interested in, but my head is full
of earthquakes, and my heart is full of love for you. My dearest
love to you sweet, Your own husband, Tom.” His letters invari-
ably conclude with a page of hugs and kisses for his children.
The central two pages describe what he did that day, and samples
from these are extracted in diary form below. His communica-
tions with Nancy included letters sent to him from Oldham and
others, some of which have been preserved in the archive.
In the late spring of 1897, Oldham was planning to spend
three weeks in Nainital inspecting new provisions for hillslope
drainage in which he had taken a personal interest ever since
describing a catastrophic slide there shortly after his arrival in
India in 1879 (Oldham 1880). His departure on 29 May had
been delayed by a day due to an accident in which he was thrown
from his horse and cart, which had left him badly shaken.
La Touche, who was asked to oversee the Calcutta office in
Oldham’s absence, wrote to his wife that he would have little to
do, not realizing that within two weeks the largest earthquake in
the history of the British Raj would shake Calcutta, its admin-
istrative center. The Shillong Mw = 8.1 earthquake occurred at
17:11 local time, Saturday, 12 June 1897, and within a minute
and for the next several minutes surface waves from Shillong
rocked Calcutta, causing widespread but minor damage in the
city (seismic shaking intensity V). Nainital lay in the Intensity
III zone, and Oldham may not have felt the earthquake.
A series of excerpts from La Touche’s letters to Nancy details
the days following the earthquake:
Calcutta, 13 June 1897
It was really a most alarming experience. I have felt a
good many earthquakes out here, but nothing so like
as bad as this one. I was lying on the sofa of my room
here at the hotel, which is on the upper story, having
my tea when it began, just at 5 o’clock. At first it was
very gentle, just a slight rattling of doors etc, and I
thought it would be soon over, but it got worse and
worse until the floor of the room was heaving like the
deck of a ship at sea. I thought it was time to leave then
and started for the door, but remembered that I had
no coat on and went back for it. I confess I was most
frightened in those two or three seconds I was getting
my coat than I have ever been before. When I got out
on the landing I found every one getting down the
stairs as fast as they could, some of the men in pyjamas.
Down below it did not feel as bad, but we all got out
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on the maidan [the Calcutta parade ground] as soon
as possible, where we could see the houses and even
the trees rocking to and fro. It was a very long earth-
quake, lasting between 4 and 5 minutes.
I have got as many of the survey men as I could get
hold of at short notice to go around and take photos,
& Mr. Hayden [Henry Hayden, who became director
of the GSI in 1910] and I have been hard at work all
the morning. We went to the old cemetery where there
are a lot of tall pillars and obelisks and got a couple of
very interesting overthrows which will help us to cal-
culate the direction and force of the earthquake.
Calcutta, 14 June 1897
The damage done is enormous. A great many houses
ought to be rebuilt entirely but the native owners will
probably only patch them up till the next big earth-
quake comes and then they will collapse entirely.
Calcutta, 15 June 1897
We are still engaged investigating the earthquake try-
ing to get as much information as possible before the
rains come for a great many of the damaged houses
will be falling if heavy rains come and it will be impos-
sible to say if the damage was caused by the earthquake
or by the rain.
Calcutta, 17 June 1897
The excitement about the earthquake is calming down
a bit but it is still the main topic of conversation. A
good many people are nervous about a prophesy that
there is to be another soon, but no one heard of it till
this one had come and one, of course, cannot foretell
such things. We had a few very slight shakes since but
that was to be expected. After the 1885 earthquake
[in Kashmir] there were smaller shocks till the end of
September.
Calcutta, 18 June 1897
The news from Shillong is very bad. Mr. Oldham has
woke up at last to the magnitude of the affair and is
coming down at once. He felt hardly anything at
Naini Tal.
On June 17, Oldham had written to La Touche:
Naini Tal, 17 June 1897
I have just got your letter of 15th. You seem to have
done everything that could have been done except
send me full news by wire and I am much obliged to
you for what you have done. I have just wired that
Hayden should go to Darjiling as soon as possible.
The direction you give at Calcutta places the seismic
vertical somewhere about the Garo Hills or further
north in the Himalayas, probably the former, and the
Darjiling observation will be valuable.
 Had he known of the severity of the earthquake Oldham would
most certainly have left Nainital earlier. Obliquely describing
himself in the introduction to his 1899 memoir, he states that
at the time of the earthquake there was only one person in the
GSI “who had paid any special attention to the subject of earth-
quakes, or had any knowledge of the nature of the observations
required, beyond such as might be obtained from the ordinary
curriculum of a geological student.” (Oldham, 1899, p.1). He
based this claim on his completion of his father’s articles on the
1869 Cachar earthquake and catalog of historical Indian earth-
quakes (Oldham 1882 a, b).
La Touche continued his observations in letters to Nancy the
week after the earthquake.
Calcutta, 19 June 1897
Mr. Hayden is getting ready to go up to Darjiling to
make observations. A great deal of the line is broken
down and he will have to do that part of the journey
by trolley, so he will not get up there till Tuesday. I
think the report on this earthquake will be the best
illustrated one in existence. We must have somewhere
about 50 negatives to choose from.
Calcutta, 21 June 1897
Mr. Oldham’s arrival has been like that of a bomb-
shell. Mr. Vredenberg is sent off up to the East Indian
Railway, and Grimes to Sylhet and Cachar, Hayden
has already gone to Darjiling. I have been very busy all
day getting things ready.
Calcutta, 22 June 1897
I have been very busy all day as you may suppose. In
the first place I got up at 6 and spent the morning
before breakfast writing an account of the earthquake
for Nature to go home by today’s mail. I showed it to
Mr. Oldham, who approved of it.
The title of La Touche’s (1897) Nature article was “The Calcutta
Earthquake,” since his experience of the event up to 22 June was
biased, as was Oldham’s, by the damage he and his colleagues had
documented in the city. Reports from the epicenter 150 km to
the north indicated substantial damage but were secondhand,
and telegraph lines were down. On 24 June 1897 in an editorial
piece, Nature summarized incoming information including the
exaggerated estimate by the Chief Commissioner of Assam of
4,000–6,000 fatalities on the Shillong plateau (the final death toll
in the whole of northeast India was fewer than 2,000). However,
had the earthquake occurred during torrential rain a few hours
earlier, or after dark a few hours later, the death toll would have
been an order of magnitude larger. La Touche’s (1897) Nature
account was published 22 July 1897 and emphasizes shoddy con-
struction as the chief reason for building collapse in Calcutta.
Oldham dispersed his team with instructions that they
measure the fall of objects. He assumed as did others at the
time that the direction of collapse of tombstones, gate posts,
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and obelisks would radiate from the epicenter, then termed
the seismic vertical. La Touche first made his way by rail and
paddle steamer (figure 2) via a number of increasingly damaged
Brahmaputra river towns (see the electronic supplement to this
article) to the region of extensive damage at Dhubri (Intensity
VII). Thirty-three years later Dhubri, near the northwest corner
of the Shillong plateau, was the epicenter of an M 7 earthquake
almost directly beneath the town (Gee 1934).
La Touche’s letters to Nancy describe what he saw on his travels.
Dhubri, 25 June 1897
[The district commissioner] had a very narrow escape
from his own bungalow, which is the worst I have seen
yet. Absolutely nothing but a shapeless heap of bricks.
He was reading at the time when the earthquake came
and had only just enough time to run out when the
whole thing came down. He is living now, camp fash-
ion, in a bungalow with nothing but mat walls and a
timber roof belonging to the local board. Nearly every
house in the place is a wreck. The doctor, an old friend
of mine, is living in his stable, with a few sticks of fur-
niture he has saved… There are two or three interest-
ing results of the earthquake here which I shall have
to investigate critically tomorrow and make plans &
measurements of them [reproduced in Oldham 1899,
260]. The bungalows don’t help one much they are
so utterly smashed up. They still have slight shocks
here—there was one 5 minutes ago which shook the
house quite distinctly—but the people are getting
quite used to them and only say—Oh here’s another
(!) when they come. It is most extraordinary to see the
way the ground has cracked and opened about here.
All along the river banks and on the roads in every
direction there are huge fissures and generally mud
and water has been thrown out from them.
Dhubri 26 June 1897
I did a great deal of work here this morning and made
some measurements but most things are so entirely
broken up that we cannot make much out of them. I
shall most likely go up the river tomorrow to the next
station, Goalpara. Every house they say is wrecked
there and I must take a tent with me.
Goalpara, 28 June 1897
I am now really seeing here what the effects of the
earthquake have been, it is even worse than Dhubri. I
came ashore early this morning when the steamer left
and walked through the bazaar. Nearly all the houses
in it are half buried, up to the eaves in sand and mud
which was thrown out from cracks in the ground, and
it is a wonder that most of the people were not buried.
Only two of the European houses are standing at all:
the steamer’s agent, who is putting me up, and the mis-
sion bungalow, which was built entirely of timber. The
May/June 2008
 ▲▲ Figure 2. (left) La Touche’s epicentral route superimposed on an isoseismal map of the 1897 earthquake (Ambraseys and Bilham
2003). His “earthquaking” investigations from Gaolhindo to Sylhet traversed MSK Intensity VI–IX and were comparable to inspect-
ing damage along the entire length of the 1906 San Francisco rupture (477 km). He returned from Sylhet along a path that had been
inspected in detail by one of his colleagues (Grimes). The inferred 1897 rupture is shown by the dashed rectangle beneath Shillong,
and right, as a line representing the upper edge of the inferred causal “Oldham fault” (Bilham and England 2001). The double-
headed arrows (right) indicate the locations where La Touche reported coseismic surface deformation (west of Maoflong) and
electrotelluric potentials induced by aftershocks (between Shillong and Nongpo).

walls of this are of cutcha and plaster and are gaping
everywhere, but the roof is sound. I have counted 15
distinct shocks since 3 o’clock this morning and they
seem to be getting more frequent as the evening comes
on, but they are all very mild and just shake the house.
One generally knows they are coming from the rum-
bling noise one hears just before them.
Goalpara lies on the northwest promontory of rocks of
the Shillong plateau and was damaged by a surge from the
Brahmaputra river. It is judged to have experienced intensity
VIII shaking, which destroyed the bazaar and well-built houses.
Despite liquefaction near the river, a few brick houses were left
standing (Ambraseys and Bilham 2003). An analysis of geodetic
data obtained in 1869, 1897, and 1939 suggests that subsurface
reverse slip (≈ 15 m) in the earthquake occurred between ≈ 35
km and 9 km depth, on a 110-km-long south-dipping fault with
a surface projection approximately in line with the city but termi-
nating to its ESE (Bilham and England 2001). Oldham (1899)
recorded more than 10 m of surface slip on the Chedrang nor-
mal fault above the northwest end of this main rupture, a region
of local ponding and abandoned river channels.
Leaving Goalpara, La Touche steamed 100 km eastward
along the swollen Brahmaputra with the northern edge of the
Shillong plateau to the south. In his 3 July letter Oldham sug-
gested that the river at his destination, Gauhati, was higher than
usual as a result of downstream bank collapse. The geodetic
solution indicates that the bed of the Brahmaputra and the
valley to the south were tilted down to the south in the earth-
quake with a maximum of ≈ 25 cm of subsidence along much of
the Brahmaputra. This would have further deepened the river
between Goalpara and Gauhati.
Arriving at Gauhati La Touche encountered Intensity VII dam-
age, as noted in the following excerpt from a letter to Nancy.
Gauhauti, 1–3 July 1897
I went round this morning and saw a lot of the dam-
age and found some interesting falls of gate posts etc.
The District Commisioner’s head clerk has just been
here showing me the reports received from outlying
places in the district . . . a temple not far from here,
at least 300 years old, is destroyed. I have asked Mr.
Oldham if I may not go back to Calcutta through
Shillong and Cherrapunji. I believe the road is open
nearly the whole way now and I should like very much
to see what damage has really been done.

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 Oldham welcomed La Touche’s suggestion to return south from
Gauhati, crossing the Shillong plateau and through the hill sta-
tions of Shillong and Cherrapunji (figure 2), which they knew
had been severely damaged. Neither knew that this would take
La Touche across the inferred surface projection of the subsur-
face 1897 rupture zone.
Oldham wrote the following to La Touche:
Calcutta, 3 July 1897
My Dear La Touche, I just got your telegram and am
glad to hear that you were willing to go to Shillong
and Cherrapunji. I got a letter from Watts, the engi-
neer, enclosing a record of the gauge readings of the
Brahmaputra at Gauhati, which show a sudden rise of
8 feet immediately after the earthquake and gradual
fall afterwards. This is partially due to falling-in of the
banks. I would be glad if you would enquire about it.
When in Shillong get a set of photos. There are
two babus who have been photographing. Order a
complete set, or leave out such as you think has noth-
ing to do with the earthquake, to be sent to me. Very
likely I will order more copies of some but that can
be done afterwards. Also try to get photos of the
monuments and buildings as they were before the
earthquake. I have some other evidence, in letters, of
Barisal guns occurring with the earthquake shocks but
they also are said to occur without, and to have been
frequent before the big earthquake. The evidence will
want careful sifting, however.
La Touche was familiar with Barisal guns, audible micro-earth-
quakes that were reported near the town of Barisal, Bengal,
because he had published an article, and given a talk in England,
about them (La Touche, 1889; 1890).
He wrote the following to Nancy:
Gauhati, 4 July 1897
I have pretty much finished the earthquake work here
and this morning took it easy, but tomorrow I want
to ride some distance up the Shillong road and to see
what the bridges are like.
Gauhati, 6 July 1897
I had a 60 mile ride yesterday up into the hills along the
Shillong Road. I went as far as Mungpo [Nongpo], 30
miles from here, and back again in the evening. [See
figure 2.]
Tezpur, 8 July 1897
The east end of the church has been knocked out and
some buildings are badly cracked, but none have come
down entirely.
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Tezpur, 9 July 1897
Col. Gray lent me a letter to read written by a man
whom the C.C. [Chief Commissioner] sent out to
Cherra soon after the earthquake to look after the
people. It gives an extraordinary account of the ruin
along the road. For miles and miles the whole of the
road is utterly gone and all the bridges and rest houses
are smashed. The unfortunate clerks (European) at
Shillong who had been investing their savings in
houses have lost everything.
Gauhati, 12 July 1897
I have been out all day on the railway which is really
worth seeing. I went out 40 miles from here in a
train starting at 7 this morning. Every here-and-there
the embankment has sunk down and the rails are all
twisted, but the engine somehow or other gets along.
Of course we went very slowly, only 4 miles an hour or
so over the bad places. It is very interesting to see how
the bridges have been affected by the earthquake.
Oldham wrote the following to La Touche:
Calcutta, 12 July 1897
My Dear La Touche, I got your letters of 8th and
9th yesterday, and sent a telegram to you, directed
to Shillong yesterday. Smith forgot a lot of things at
Shillong, especially to take measures of the overturned
monuments, I also want to know the dimensions of
the seismometer cylinders. I fancy they are the same
as those in the appendix to Mem. XIX, but there is
no record of this. [See Oldham 1882a.] I was inter-
ested to hear of the twisted monuments. I hope you
took the old and present bearings of all. I don’t know
whether you know that with enough observations one
can get a very good direction out of them? Yours sin-
cerely, R. D. Oldham
A letter now in the collection of the Centre of South Asian
Studies at the University of Cambridge provides an eyewitness
account of the earthquake, mentioning many of the same peo-
ple that La Touche encountered during his two-week survey in
Shillong, 13–27 July 1897 (Sweet 1897).
May Sweet wrote to her sister Mrs. Godfrey:
Shillong, 28 June 1897
At 5.30 on Saturday last, the 12th June was as usual,
and 30 seconds afterwards was completely in ruins. I
was riding on the Gauhati Road with Mr. Monaghan,
and suddenly we heard a queer rumbling sound and
then trees swayed every way. Luckily by instinct we
both turned sharply to the left and galloped up the hill
as far as we could and find a place. We had crossed the
bridge which would have gone down under us. [See
figure 3.] I can’t possibly describe the sensation as it
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 ▲▲ Figure 3. This collapsed bridge outside of Shillong was thrown from its abutments by the earthquake shortly after Mr. Monaghan and
Mrs. Sweet had ridden over it on horseback.
was so totally different from anything I had ever expe-
rienced. I did not know whether I was on my horse or
not or on the land or in the air. I could do nothing as
the ground was all in a whirl. I know I looked once at
Mr. M. and he was as pale as death. We neither of us
thought of an earthquake, we thought it was a land-
slip on the Gauhati Road. Of course, when we got up
to the mission we saw something of the terrible ruin,
the poor missionaries, they were all on the road with
their houses flat on the ground and old Miss Jones in
a dying state. We stopped to make her as comfortable
as possible and then rode on towards the station (she
died a day or two afterward). We could not go by the
ordinary way until we got to the ground as it was all
burst open and there were continued shocks the whole
time. It was terrible riding home. Until we got to the
bazaar I never realized what must have happened in
the [hill] Station.
Today we’ve had very few shocks and hope they are
nearly over—but they are always worse at night. A great
many people are in the back sheds, and have two or
three sharing a mattress. Another awful thing was that
the water supply ran out and there was a fear of Cholera
breaking out. Potatoes too were scarce as everything was
buried but they are being dug up by degree and they say
that in a few weeks the road will be made for fresh ones
to be brought up—of course everything was an awful
price. The ponies are fed on 1 seer pack or turned out
to grass. Pearl behaved beautifully all the time. The only
way they kept their feet was that they galloped. I really
am most comfortable now for have got bashas built and
I suppose we’ll have to live in them for months. Every
day we dig a few more things out of the bungalow also;
it is very slow work. Still I have a good many things that
are presentable after being cleaned.
La Touche arrived in Shillong late on 12 July, two weeks after
Mrs. Sweet’s letter had been written. He passed the damaged
bridge shown in figure 3 and the land-slide damaged village
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shown in figure 4 and was now surveying a scene that he had first
viewed 14 years earlier (La Touche, 1883). He stayed in a tent
roughly 1 km west of the Public Works Department (PWD)
where he eventually devised and operated a seismoscope (see
the Shillong map in the electronic supplement to this article).
He purchased a set of before-and-after photographs of damage,
and some of these appear in Oldham’s report along with photo-
graphs taken by La Touche himself. I have illustrated this arti-
cle, and its electronic supplement, with a series of images from a
contemporary album purchased from a U.K. bookshop (figures
3–8) that were taken by the same Shillong photographers.
La Touche’s letters to his wife continued, including the follow-
ing excerpts:
Shillong, 13 July 1897
It is only when one gets among what used to be the
houses that one realizes what has happened. The walls
and chimneys of all the houses are simply shapeless
heaps of stone. I am staying with Col. Maxwell, living
in a small tent while he is in one of his servant’s houses.
His bungalow has not fallen as it was built of lathe and
plaster, but the chimney came down and wrecked the
whole of the inside. The whole house is leaning to one
side like a house in a nightmare.
Shillong, 14 July 1897
This side of Mungpo [Nongpo] there had been a great
many landslips especially in the last 8 miles but they
had all been cleared sufficiently to allow carts to pass
so we got here about 5:30 pm. The last big bridge on
the road about 3 miles from here is entirely gone ~
We went to see the Chief Commissioner, Mr. Cotton,
and I had a long talk with him and expounded my
views on the shock. He had been reading the reports
on the Cachar earthquake of ‘69 [Oldham 1882a]
and was full of seismic verticals and other technical
terms. There are a good many interesting things to be
seen in the cemetery where several tombstones, great
 ▲▲ Figure 4. Hillside collapse of a local village near Shillong: before (left), after (center), and in the weeks of post-seismic reconstruction
(right). A masonry structure in the center has entirely collapsed. In many cases walls have pancaked in situ beneath their roofs; in other
locations houses have been swept downhill by local landslides.
▲▲ Figure 5. The Shillong bazaar before and after the earthquake.
heavy blocks of marble or granite have been pushed
sideways or twisted round, and I have seen several
gate pillars which have been thrown over. I expect our
report on this earthquake will be the biggest and best
illustrated on record. It is most extraordinary that so
few people were killed here, for by all accounts the
houses came down with a roar almost at the beginning
of the shock. Of course there were very many narrow
escapes. Colonel Maxwell was hit by a stone from a
falling chimney, and he told me of four children who
were having a tea party who were saved by their nurses
picking them up and rushing out, just as the chimney
fell smash on the table they were sitting at.
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Shillong, 15 July 1897
I spent all the morning and part of this afternoon mea-
suring the monuments in the cemetery; a great many of
them have been thrown down or shifted. There’s a little
shock just gone by—shook the table distinctly. I must
really see if I cannot rig up some kind of seismometer
for observing these little shocks. I am sure one could
learn a lot about the big one from them. This morning
we had two very respectable shocks (there—another
lasting quite a long time) but people take very little
notice of them now, only everyone objects to sleep
under anything like a roof. But I think that everything
in Shillong that can come down, has already fallen.
May/June 2008
 ▲▲ Figure 6. The bridge across the almost empty Ward Lake in Shillong after the 1897 earthquake. The dam holding the waters of the arti-
ficial lake burst in the earthquake, killing Mr. J. W. Rosenrode, a retired geodetic surveyor, and a child. The 2003 image (right) shows the
bridge reconstructed with lateral stays.

▲▲ Figure 7. The European Quarters in Shillong after the earthquake.

▲▲ Figure 8. All Saints’ Church before and after the earthquake. The image on the left is identical to that shown by Oldham (1899), but the
image on the right was taken a few feet away and permits a stereographic view of the damage.

Shillong, 16 July 1897 Shillong, 18 July 1897

I have been pretty busy today measuring gateposts and
such all the morning and rigging up a seismometer this
afternoon. It is a rough sort of a thing made up of a
lump of stone hung on a wire for a pendulum, a few
pieces of tin cut out of a biscuit box, a slip of bamboo
and a glass bead from a necklace. It is not put up yet as
I am getting a small hut built to put it in, but I hope
it will work.
I have my seismometer put up and am now sitting
waiting for an earthquake to see if it will work prop-
erly . . . here’s a little shock now but I’m afraid it’s too
slight to affect my pendulum. Yes, it did move, but too
slightly to show anything definite.
Shillong, 19 July 1897
This morning I had a long tramp down to the Bishop’s
Falls to photograph the landslips there [see Oldham

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 1899, pl. 3] and did not get back to breakfast till nearly
1 o’c. Then all the afternoon I was making prints of the
earthquake diagrams I got on with my seismograph
which is a great success. This morning we had a real
good shock at 20 minutes to 2 which woke me up, and
I at once got up and went to see if the machine had
acted and found a nice little trace of the shock. There
is a needle in it that makes a trace on a piece of smoked
glass. Then again at 10-minutes-to we had another
pretty severe shock, which also registered itself, and
during the day there have been several of them.
Shillong, 20 July 1897
There was another good shock this morning which
my seismograph duly registered, and then there were
one or two smaller ones at night. I send you one of
my earthquake diagrams [figure 9]. It shows how the
ground moves but is magnified about 6½ times. So
you see these shocks are very small affairs really.
Shillong 22 July 1897
We have only had slight shocks today. Neither of them
any good from my point of view as they have hardly
any effect on the seismograph, but perhaps we shall
get a good one tonight. There—a slight shock at 6:26
pm.
Shillong, 23 July 1897
I have had a pretty tiring day. I have finished the new
seismograph, but the hut for it is not entirely ready
yet.
Shillong, 24 July 1897
I have been working all the afternoon at my earth-
quake report, drawing out the plans of the gateposts
all to scale.
Shillong, 25 July 1897
I have just been down to my seismograph to see if
it registered any quakes during the night, but there
was only a very small one. I think it came about 2
o’clock. I have been very busy all day at these plans and
have a good number of them finished so I am feeling
good! They take rather a long time to do but it is not
difficult work. I only hope that Mr. O will appreciate
it. There was a fairly strong earthquake shock about an
hour ago (6 o’clock) but I don’t think it could have had
any effect on my seismograph. However, I must go and
see. No, it has only moved the slightest little bit.
Shillong, 26 July 1897
I have just come back from the PWD office where I
have been to see how my seismograph shed is getting
on. They say it will be finished today so I hope to get
away tomorrow.
Maoflong, 27 July 1897
After breakfast I went to the PWD office and set up
the seismograph. The hut was barely finished and
indeed, while I was setting it up, the Chinaman who
built it was putting on the door. As now it was up and
I had explained the working of it to the people who
will have charge of it, I started for Maoflong. The dak

▲▲ Figure 9. La Touche omitted a schematic of his seismoscope, and his wife in a responding letter complained about its omission. The
figure left shows how it may have been assembled from La Touche’s parts list, guided by Ewing pendulum geometries summarized by Milne
(1898, 320). The pendulum is depicted experiencing an acceleration to the north: friction in its several pivots and sliding parts provided
damping. (Right) La Touche sent a postage-stamp-sized print of two Shillong aftershocks with his letter to Nancy on 20 July indicating a
scale amplification of about 6.5, hence the maximum ground displacement was about 2 mm. Two aftershock traces are recorded on the
same glass plate, which he offset between events. Three days later in a letter to his father, La Touche included a third seismogram from
a 06:50 aftershock on 19 July (Rev. J. D. La Touche 1897). In this letter La Touche mentions the resemblance of his seismoscope to one
designed by Ewing and indicates an amplification factor of 6.7.

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 bungalow is wrecked, of course, only the roof stand-
ing, but a grass hut has been built.
Cherrapunji, 30 July 1897
Mr. Arbuthnot, the Deputy Commissioner, is going
about to the different villages to find out how many
people have been killed. The first accounts were very
much exaggerated, and it is doubtful whether more
than 500 or 600 were killed in the whole of the hills.
Most of them were killed out of doors by landslips.
In Cherra the people who stayed in their houses were
all right, as the walls are very low, and the roof held
together, but those who ran out were killed by the high
walls they had built along the village streets falling on
them. Dr. Griffiths . . . says that what the Khasias [the
indigenous peoples who inhabited the Khasia Hills
of the Shillong Plateau (La Touche 1883)] feel most
is that the stone boxes in which the ashes of the dead
are kept have been shaken to pieces. They consider it a
great disgrace that the ashes should be exposed to view.
The cemetery (English) here is in a woeful state. Most
of the tombs have fallen over and sunk down into the
ground, which has all become a loose sand.
La Touche descended the southern edge of the Shillong pla-
teau in heavy rain just before the 2 August M = 6 aftershock
(Ambraseys and Bilham 2003), but it is not known whether his
seismoscope recorded it. He visited two more villages (Chhatak
and Sonamganj) before catching the steamer from Sylhet to
Goalhindo and the train to Calcutta. His photograph of the
damaged Inglis monument at Chhatak forms the frontispiece
to Oldham’s 1899 memoir. On the paddle steamer he recounted
losing, and (fortunately for us) finding, his notes on the earth-
quake, which he continued to transcribe en route.
La Touche’s letters to Nancy continued and included the fol-
lowing:
Steamship Manipur, 6 August 1897
I have done a good bit of my earthquake report and
hope to get it nearly finished by tomorrow, at least all
the drawings done. I finished the plans and sketches
today, at least all except one or two at Cherrapunji
which won’t take long. They cover about 30 sheets of
foolscap. I hope Mr. O will be pleased with them.
Calcutta, 9 August 1897
I have been hard at work writing all day long and have
really got a whole lot of my earthquake report finished.
I wish the plaguey thing was quite done. I have got as
far as the Shillong cemetery.
Calcutta, 11 August 1897
The report is finished at last, Hooray! and in Mr. O’s
hands. He seemed to appreciate it very much.
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La Touche’s report appeared as 20 pages in Oldham’s 1899
memoir (appendix A, 257–277). His meticulous observations
of thrown and overturned monuments were used by Oldham to
calculate local velocities and accelerations. La Touche’s report
of deformation of the plateau at Maoflong may have been
crucial to Oldham’s decision to request that the geodesists of
the Survey of India remeasure the triangulation points on the
plateau. Oldham was impressed with two other aspects of La
Touche’s report: evidence for electro-telluric potentials asso-
ciated with aftershocks (figure 10), and La Touche’s inqui-
ries about the telegraph arrival times of aftershocks at Sylhet,
Gauhati, and Shillong, which he used to infer their consider-
able depth (> 10 km).
La Touche describes the activities of the telegraph officers
in Shillong in his official report as follows:
Since the first shock occurred the signallers have
amused themselves by telegraphing a certain signal
[meaning an agreed “alert” code] to Gauhati or Sylhet
whenever they happened to be at the instrument
and felt a shock, at the same time receiving a signal
from either of those places if the shock was felt there.
The Telegraph Master assures me that in all cases the
shocks are felt absolutely simultaneously at these
places. I asked him to note the exact second at which a
shock was felt in Shillong, and to ask the signallers at
Gauhati and Sylhet to do the same, but he assured me
afterwards that no difference could be detected.
He also informed me that an assistant was sent
down to Nongpo, on the Gauhati road, as soon as
possible after the shock of the 12th June, to restore
communication with Gauhati. On attempting to sig-
nal through a single wire, with return circuit through
the ground, it was found that as each earthquake
shock occurred the current was interrupted, or even
reversed, when what is called a “closed circuit” was
being used, that is, the current was kept continuously
flowing through the wire, and interrupted by the key
only at the moment of sending a signal. [See figure 10]
Apparently the earthquake shocks set up currents in
the earth, for, when a second wire was used instead of
the earth as a return circuit, no effect of the kind was
observed. [Oldham 1899, appendix A, 267–268].
It is not known what happened to the seismoscope records from
La Touche’s improved instrument, or why Oldham failed to
mention them in his seismometer Appendix E (Oldham 1899,
appendix E, 358–359), which describes the selective overthrow
of the set of Mallet-designed vertical cylinders at Shillong both
in the mainshock and aftershocks. It is possible that Oldham
was skeptical of the accuracy of La Touche’s seismoscope, suspi-
cious of its amplification factor, or uncertain about the effects
of resonance and friction. If this were the case, Oldham must
have subsequently changed his opinion, for somewhat surpris-
ingly (three years after Oldham’s 1902 retirement and return
to England) we learn in a letter to Nancy that La Touche has
 ▲▲ Figure 10. Erratic telegraph communications occurred between Shillong and Nongpo (figure 2) at the time of Shillong plateau after-
shocks when using circuit A and not when using circuit B. The switches were normally closed (nc) and opened only to transmit a pulse.
Induced earth-potentials during strong aftershocks reduced or reversed the current induced by the battery in the earth-return circuit A,
producing unintentional telegraphic signals. The inferred rupture plane of the Oldham fault projects to the surface between Shillong and
Nongpo.
dispatched a copy of his seismoscope, duplicated by Oldham
himself, to Simla to monitor aftershocks of the Mw 7.8 Kangra
1905 earthquake.
Calcutta, 16 May 1905
An interruption came this morning in the shape of a
letter from Mr. Holland asking me to see whether I
could rig up a seismograph to be set up at Simla to reg-
ister the earthquakes, and I have been at that all day. I
have sent him one that was made by Mr. Oldham on
the same principle as the one I set up in Shillong in
‘97, which is still at work, but I am afraid it is too small
to be of much use.
La Touche joined Nancy in Simla for the remainder of August
1897. La Touche, like Oldham, never became director of the
GSI, but he was appointed acting director for two years prior
to retiring 21 October 1910. A retirement poem dedicated to
La Touche by geologist K. A. Knight Hallowes appeared in the
Calcutta Englishman for that week. La Touche in previous let-
ters to Nancy characterized Hallowes’ writing as pedantic to
the point of stupor; La Touche described Hallowes as “a very
flabby individual with a terrible conceit of himself and cannot
put his ideas into a concise form on paper.” The final four lines
of Hallowes’ tribute read:
Leader and friend, great is our loss of thee.
Mayst thou a well-earned rest in England find.
Rest in this recollection of thy mind,
That thou hast widened Science’s boundary.
In his letter to Nancy that day, La Touche remarks that Hallowes
was fortunate to have been on leave from Calcutta, or he would
have had “a piece of my mind. Did you ever see such stuff !!”
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La Touche published more than 50 articles on the geology
of India, completing his last article in Cambridge at age 81, a
576-page geographical index of Indian geology. It was pub-
lished just after his death on 30 March 1938 (La Touche 1938;
Middlemiss 1939).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the British Library and the Centre of South Asian
Studies, Cambridge University, for permission to publish the
handwritten letters transcribed here, and the Director General
of the GSI for permission to publish the photograph of La
Touche. I am especially indebted to Dr. Sujit Dasgupta, Deputy
Director of the GSI, for his kindness during my visits to the
GSI archives in Calcutta. I thank Geoffrey King, L’Institut de
Physique du Globe, Paris, and the National Science Foundation
for their support during this study.
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University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Geological Sciences
Campus Box 399
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0399 USA
roger.bilham@colorado.edu