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144 the wrecked vessels being carried, it was said, four miles inland. The loss of life and property was very great. The merchants' storehouses at Coringa and Injaram were ruined; cattle and crops were destroyed; large tracts of land were rendered unfit for cultivation by the salt water; and the tanks and wells were rendered brackish from the same cause. The force of the wind was also most destructive. Very many of the native houses in Samalkot were blown down, all the European houses except two were unroofed, and even in Rajahmundry some of the houses were nearly dismantled by the violence of the storm. Since then no serious inundations from the sea have occurred in this district. The destructive tidal wave which desolated Masulipatam just a quarter of a century later did not affect Gódávari. The inundations just described were usually accompanied (if not caused) by violent storms, and some of these were doubtless cyclonic in nature. In more recent times, four cyclones occurred in the ten years preceding 1878, all in the months between September and December. In November and December 1878, two others arrived which caused the sea to rise dangerously at Cocanada, destroyed a good deal of cultivation there, submerged some of the huts near the creek, blew down a number of mud houses and trees, and killed many cattle. In October 1904 a cyclone swept across the whole country levelling many trees in the Agency and thousands of cocoa and areca palms in the coast taluks. So universal was the damage to plantain gardens that plantains had actually to be imported from Tanjore. Since that year no violent cyclone has visited the district, but the barometer is always carefully watched in the months (September-December) when they are most to be expected.

The fury of the Gódávari in full flood has always excited the wonder of those who have seen it. The irresistible torrent which pours through the deep gorges in the hills through which it forces its way has been referred to on p. 5. Sir Henry Montgomery, when pressing for the construction of an anicut across the river, could not deny that 'the Gódávari, when filled as it was in the early part of the present season (1843-44), is a fearful stream, overflowing the country through which it passes and carrying before it all impediments to its course.' Before the anicut was built and attempts to control the river were begun, destructive floods seem to have been constant, and even now, as has been more than once said, they occur every now and again,