Later reports of the hurricane which occurred at Havana on
Wednesday, October 20th, show how severe it was. In the poor quarters of the town many of the houses are flimsily built, and it is said that more than 800 of them collapsed. The lower part of the town was flooded by an extraordinarily high tide. Several steam- ships in the harbour were sunk as well as most of the smaller boats. According to the latest figures 868 persons were killed, one hundred are missing, and more than three thousand were injured. This season of exceptional hurricanes has caused a terrible loss to the Royal Navy in the foundering of the ' Valerian,' twenty miles south of Bermuda on Friday, October 22nd. Two officers and eighteen men were rescued in a state of collapse after clinging to rafts for more than twenty hours, but the rest of the ship's complement—she carried between eighty and a hundred men in all—have been lost. When she was caught in the hurricane the ' Valerian was going to the relief of islanders who had suffered from the same hurricane, in its earlier stages.
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