Comment on "A New Analysis of the Magnitude of the February 1663 Earthquake at Charlevoix, Quebec" by John E. Ebel

Abstract

Modern seismologists perhaps too easily become enamored of their modern seismographs and instrumental arrays that can do wonders for the analysis of recent events. In the instrumental era, we tend to forget that such recordings are barely 110 years old and that we are trying to understand seismic‐source zones with an activity return period in the order of 300–600 years. Documenting and understanding preinstrumental historic events is still a necessary endeavor and requires the input of our allies in the field of history. I welcomed John E. Ebel’s re‐examination of the 5 February 1663 earthquake (Ebel, 2011). As someone who has worked on the historical seismicity of parts of Atlantic Canada, I appreciate the great difficulty the author had in digging out data from the seventeenth century. Early European settlement in eastern Canada was very sparse at the time, many settlers were not literate, and even fewer could afford the cost of a pen and ink and the paper to keep a journal or diary—or the time that a journal takes away from the task of subsisting in the harsh environment of their New World. The author kindly credited me (p. 1027, col. 1) with information with respect to the 5 February 1663 event being felt and to having rattled cooking utensils and tableware in the village of St. Peters in southeastern Cape Breton Island in Acadia (now the Province of Nova Scotia). The credit for these data rightly should go to Ronnie‐Gilles LeBlanc, a historian at Parcs Canada, Centre de services de l’Atlantique in Halifax, Nova Scotia; I was only a conduit. In fact it is not quite certain where Nicolas Denys was living on 5 February 1663. M. LeBlanc’s exact words of 9 September 2009 to me on this location were, “It is not clear whether Denys was …