Shaking Earth, Raging Sea
The worst of all possible worlds...
“Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, ‘All's well,’
And contemplate this ruin of a world.”
~ Voltaire, "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne" (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster), 1756
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Óbidos, Portugal...
It’s quiet in the house. Dear daughter is having a golf lesson with some little friends down the road. Wifey is working away at the other end of the dining table, ensconced in the wonders of the ancient world, the gentle tapping on her keyboard a kind of meditative metronome for our own melancholy mood.
Outside, a slate gray sky hangs over the pines. A few hundred meters down the hill, the timeless tide surges and crashes in fierce waves against the silver shores. Tonight, the moon will be full.
We are visiting friends here on the Continent; friends from the other End of the World. Our children play together in the pool and by the beach during the day. Yesterday, we took them to the aquarium in Lisbon, an hour or so drive south. Watching their faces, listening to their games and hearing their laughter, we wonder what kind of world awaits them, what tales they will tell their own children, about the olden days...
The Worst of All Possible Worlds
It was the morning of the Feast of All Saints, 270 years ago, when the ground beneath the capital began to quiver and shake. For five eternal minutes, time stood still while the great city trembled, the towering pillars of the indomitable Portuguese Empire thundering to the ground as fissures ten, fifteen, twenty feet-wide cracked and cleaved under the city center. Voltaire described the scene...
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
When at last, amidst the cries and helpless screams, the earth did settle once again, the astonished survivors rushed to the docks and open shores for safety, only to find the darkened sea receding beyond a mudplain of carnage, shipwreck and ruin. Lulling the bedraggled and bewildered into the downtown and harbor areas, the savage sea turned back, in the form of a monstrous tsunami which rushed up the Tagus banks and engulfed the city. So fast was the surge that, according to one account, “several people riding on horseback ... were forced to gallop as fast as possible to the upper grounds for fear of being carried away."
The sea delivered two further giants, lashing the shattered marketplaces and carrying off the injured and infirm, young and old. In the pandemonium, candles were swept from church altars and windowsills, igniting a blaze that grew to a firestorm which burned through what little remained of the city.
Wrenched Asunder
Mark Molesky, associate professor at Seton Hall University, about his book, This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, described the scene in an interview with NPR:
It was the middle of the 9 o'clock mass. And hundreds of little fires started across the city. Within a few hours, they coalesced in what I believe to be a firestorm, which is a fire that becomes so hot and so intense that it produces its own wind system. It actually pulls oxygen into itself, becoming hotter and asphyxiating people who were perhaps a hundred feet away. And this killed thousands more who were trapped or couldn't escape from the rubble and, in fact, did more physical damage to Lisbon than the earthquake had. It essentially gutted the heart of this great world empire.
Molesky estimates that the disaster claimed some 40,000 souls, one-fifth of the entire population of Lisbon. And that just here. The quake reverberated across the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco, with the resulting tsunami crossing the equator to claim its victims as far away as Northeastern Brazil, half a world away.
According to Molesky, the energy released by the megaquake was “perhaps a thousand times more energy that came out of the 2010 Haitian earthquake - 475 megatons of energy - the equivalent of 32,000 Hiroshima bombs.
“It was one of the largest earthquakes in history, estimated measurement between 8.5 and perhaps 9.2 on the Richter scale. It was the largest earthquake to affect Europe in the last 10,000 years, and its tremors and reverberations were felt as far away as Sweden, Northern Italy and the Azores in the Central Atlantic.”
Shaking Earth, Raging Sea
Sifting through the rubble of universities and churches alike, philosophers and clergymen sought an explanation for such a calamitous event, unprecedented in modern times.
What inspired heaven’s wrath so, wondered those in collar and cassock, such that we may avert His ire henceforth? Was the worship of mammon to blame, Lisbon being the capital of the Portuguese Empire, the earthly power of which stretched around the globe? Or was it punishment for the Inquisition, in which heretics and apostates were being burned at the stake in ritualized autos-da-fé.
Meanwhile, the Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire chief among them, were left to wonder: what kind of deity would allow such suffering and misery, wrought no less upon his own creation? The Frenchman’s musing, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of the Axiom: All is Well,” set off a fiery debate, which raged from Lima to Lisbon to St. Petersburg.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o'er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
”God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother's breast?
Tomorrow we will make the short journey south to Penich, where we will take the children to visit a little church, the Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, and the Praça-forte de Peniche, an historic fort by the seaside. Afterwards, we’ll enjoy a simple lunch of fish and rice and caldo verde. Maybe a nice bottle of local arinto to wash it all down. There will be laughter and tall tales for old and for young.
What did we do to enjoy such good fortune, a veritable spoil of food and friendship and family? How many lifetimes would it take for one to actually earn such a precious bounty?
Then again, who knows? Maybe the earth will shake and the seas will rage... and we’ll all be wrenched asunder.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
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Careful mate, we don't know when an earthquake may strike. I had never heard of this one. The tsunami was felt in Brazil!
"In essence, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake was a pivotal event in Portuguese history, reshaping the capital city, influencing political dynamics, and sparking intellectual discourse. While the direct impact on the empire's global standing was not immediate, the earthquake's consequences laid the groundwork for a period of significant change and eventual decline."
It must have been terrible, first the quake, then the devastating fires and if that wasn't enough, the tsunami finished it off! No wonder they were questioning God haha.
We wonder what kind of world awaits them, what tales they will tell their own children, about the olden days...