The Great Lisbon Earthquake, November 1, 1755.

9-11 vs. 11-1

by Elinor Hoefs

11-1: Ten Minutes That Changed the World--Maybe
At about 9:30 a.m. on November 11, 1755, southwestern Europe experienced one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. For ten minutes the earth shook with a ferocity that geophysicists now estimate was around 9.0 on the Richter scale.

Centered in the Atlantic a hundred miles west of Portugal, the earthquake was felt as far away as Finland, Italy, and England. Lisbon was decimated, as were other cities in Portugal and North Africa.

Minutes after the quake, a tsunami hit. At Lisbon the height of the wave was 30 to 50 feet. Farther south it was closer to 100 feet. By afternoon the wave had traveled across the Atlantic and reached the Caribbean where the sea was observed to rise three feet.

Best estimates place the number of dead in Lisbon at thirty to sixty thousand out of a population of 250,000. Unknown thousands died elsewhere in Portugal and North Africa.

The Great Lisbon Earthquake, as it came to be known, got everybody’s attention, partly because of its magnitude but also for several other reasons:

The earthquake imprinted deeply on European consciousness. While fairly accurate renderings of the ruins of Lisbon circulated (above), some publications gave their illustrators free rein, as in this imaginative picture from a Czech publication:

Even 130 years later the catastrophe was still sufficiently vivid in memory to produce this picture in a British encyclopedia of 1887:

Culturally, the effects are harder to document. Though some representatives of the church trotted out the old Sodom-and-Gomorrah arguments, times were changing fast. The quake was generally viewed as the natural—if disastrous—phenomenon that it was.

Famously, Voltaire used the event in Candide to write fini to Leibnitz’s view of this as the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s initial reaction, upon first hearing of the quake, on November 25, 1755, just three weeks after it happened:

This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath debris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say—especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike.

Four years later, in Candide, Voltaire put his naïve young hero in the hands of Pangloss, a philosopher of boundless optimism (modeled on Leibnitz). After some chapters of exposure to the miseries of this best of all possible worlds—including the Lisbon quake, Candide is asked to define "optimism." Optimism, he says, is "a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell."

Natural philosophers—as scientists were then known—studied the widespread and fairly well documented behavior and effects of the quake and were for the most part baffled. Orthodox theory of the time held that earthquakes resulted from the collapse of large caverns, but no one had experienced a cataclysm of such magnitude.

In a larger cultural sense, the Great Lisbon Earthquake became an unforgettable, perhaps a traumatic, reminder of the fragility of the planet and of our place on it, the first such reminder of "modern" Europe. Did it add impetus to the already growing movement to understand and control nature? Of course, but no one can say how much impetus.