O Abismo de Fogo — O Grande Terramoto de Lisboa

by Mark Molesky, Maria Luísa Jacquinet (Tradução)

Winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

The captivating and definitive account of the Great Lisbon Earthquake--the most consequential natural disaster of modern times.

On All Saints' Day 1755, tremors from an earthquake measuring approximately 9.0 or perhaps higher on the magnitude scale swept furiously toward Lisbon, then one of the wealthiest cities in the world and the capital of a vast global empire. Within minutes, much of the city lay in ruins. A half hour later, a giant tsunami unleashed by the quake smashed into Portugal's coastline and barreled up the Tagus River, carrying countless thousands out to sea. To complete Lisbon's destruction, a hellacious firestorm then engulfed the city's shattered remains, killing thousands more and incinerating much of what the earthquake and tsunami had spared.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, the latest scientific research, and a sophisticated grasp of European history, Mark Molesky gives us the gripping, authoritative account of the Great Lisbon Earthquake disaster and its impact on the Western world--including descriptions of the world's first international relief effort, the rise of a brutal, yet modernizing, dictatorship in Portugal, and the effect of the catastrophe on the spirit and direction of the European Enlightenment.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Portugal, 18th Century, Science, European History, Historical

544 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2015

Reviews

[Célia Loureiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li atentamente cerca de 70% do livro, as partes que se referiam aos vários rostos do desastre e da reconstrução, surpreendida pela horda de novidades sobre esta época tão complexa que o livro oferece.

O terramoto, os seus meandros e implicações, o sol a nascer Às 06h02 desse dia fatídico, e a pôr-se às 17h47, para lá de nuvens de fumo e cinzas, fogo e gritos de desalento. Esses são os detalhes que me interessam. O livro explora e complementa muitas outras fontes. É uma obra descomunal de pesquisa e interpretação de um momento complexo que perdurou no tempo, que marcou a civilização europeia, que permitiu a ascensão de um déspota ao governo de Portugal, e que trouxe Portugal, do modo mais violento possível, para a era das luzes.

(Passei por cima das explicações científicas, isto é: daquilo que hoje se sabe sobre a possível origem deste terramoto, e também da parte do processo dos Távoras e de outras medidas do Marquês, no Douro, Coimbra, além-fronteiras, etc.).

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is good, solid, popular-level history, written in an engaging and page-turning style, I read all 300ish pages in two days. It’s a bit emotionally heavy, but I feel the author’s emotional investment in the history is sincere, and he wasn’t writing emotionally just to peddle schmaltz, so I was accepting of my heart-strings being constantly tugged with first-person narratives of death and injury. The author also makes a good argument for why this particular natural disaster was both a transformative event to religion and philosophy in Europe, and yet, why it has also been almost completely forgotten outside of Portugal. Recommended especially if you’re into environmental history.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

This history of the Great Lisbon earthquake, fire, and tsunami of 1755 shines with meticulous research, good judgment, and consistently excellent writing. Molesky begins with a capsule history of Lisbon (from prehistory through the resurgence of the Portuguese empire), traces the experience of the three-part disaster in Lisbon and in the Atlantic world, describes the way word filtered across Europe, traces the relief efforts and political fallout, and explores the philosophic impact of the event on Western culture (especially on Kant, Voltaire, and Rousseau). Improbably, it never bogs down, and I never had to read a sentence twice to have a clear sense of what the author meant. Although the book doesn't assume any technical knowledge, it may be of most interest to readers who already have a rough sense of European history and would like to fill in details about Portugal, the decade of the 1750s in Europe, or social and political responses to disaster in this era.

[Victor Sonkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My previous set of notes was inadequate, so I need to re-read some of the books I need for work. This is one example, and it's a very good, very well researched book, even with some discoveries (or something close to it) made by the author himself, for example about the firestorm that engulfed Lisbon after the earthquake/tsunami. As a first look at the problem, not recommended; for someone who's deeply involved in the thing, excellent.

[Dan]

Mark Molesky’s This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason recounts the Great Lisbon Earthquake of All Saints’ Day, 1755, which was immediately followed by the Great Lisbon Tsunami of 1755 and then by the Great Lisbon Fire of 1755. Molesky strives to present an overview of the earthquake, tsunami, and fire themselves, as well as their political and social ramifications for Portuguese society and governance. It’s a fascinating and well told popular history, although occasionally a bit baggy.

[Cropredy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For starters, let me disclaim that I have never been to Portugal, let alone Lisbon.

If you had asked me on the street if I knew that Lisbon had been wiped out by an enormous earthquake + tsunami + fire in 1755, I would have said "I had no idea". Well, such a disaster did occur and this book is the telling of that story.

So what made the book interesting?

* I had no idea that Portugal was quite wealthy at that time (due to gold mining in Brazil). Of course, by wealthy, I mean the aristocracy and merchant class. Fine palaces, elaborate collections of books and paintings, hoards of jewels and gold, and all the trappings we associate with the 18th century upper crust. And this mostly turned to ash or molten slag ( or was carted off by scavengers)
* I had no idea that Lisbon was rebuilt by a tyrannical, yet broadly competent dictator (Pompal) who was granted wide latitude by the king.
* And, I had no idea that the earthquake itself sparked furious debate among European intellectuals and scientists as to how much could be attributed to God's wrath versus some natural, yet unprovable, phenomena. The earthquake featured in Voltaire's Candide.

At its core, it is a colorful history of Lisbon in the years leading up to the cataclysm. What follows is a detailed account drawn from first hand sources of the tremors, tsunami, and fire. Tens of thousands died with many more made homeless. Finally, the aftermath - how the world learned of the disaster, the responses of various nations, and how Portugal rebuilt.

Why only 3 stars?

Well, it gets a bit exhausting reading an exhaustive account. Numerous correspondences are excerpted. There are endless lists of destroyed churches. The topology of Lisbon and its 18th century personages are completely unknown to me (a Portuguese reader might have a different reaction). The reactions of various other countries got tedious, probably because the court correspondence is known to researchers and the author felt compelled to include it. And, to be fair, it is hard to make events this epic, that affected so many people, come alive to a modern reader.

Read the book if you are generally curious about a significant, yet generally unknown event in 18th century European history or you are planning a trip to Lisbon

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

27

A slog. Molesky's cardinal sin is mistaking comprehensiveness for comprehension. Long passages of this are devoted to lists of near-contextless figures and statistics, for example citing every single available source listing an estimate for the total number of fatalities. But why? It is plainly not compelling to read tens and tens of pages stating that one person thought this many, this person thought this many, and so on. That does not offer insight or tell a story--and Molesky can't really tell a story either. The book has a few recurring milieus and characters that qualify as interesting. Pombal's despotic rise, the late dive into how the quake was discussed in philosophical circles through the activities of Voltaire and Kant and Rousseau. Generally, however, the book lists off stories the same way it does facts. In an effort to describe the tsunami there are dozens of pages of repetitive stories from people who aren't given any depth all describing the waves in a similar manner. It is the epitome of redundant and deadening, particularly delivered in Molesky's drab prose. Perhaps most disappointing is that this offered little fresh perspective for my trip to Lisbon. Ah well.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molesky deftly captures the zeitgeist of Lisbon in 1755 and how it was turned on its head by the cascading disasters of earthquake/aftershocks, tsunami, and fires. Meticulously researched, the author takes us through the events on November 1 and the following days, then explores how the news traveled to other countries and what their reactions were. We learn how some countries were motivated to quickly aid the stricken nation, while others gave lip service to sending assistance but did not find it in their best interests to follow through. There is a lesson here about the variability in disaster response during today's tumultuous times.

I also enjoyed reading about the various theories then in existence about the origins of earthquakes and tsunamis. To top things off, Molesky goes to great lengths to accurately estimate the number of people who died during and after the cluster of disasters -- a challenge with which we are still grappling today, e.g., in Puerto Rico following Maria.

[Jo Walton]

Deeply disappointing. It should have been great, the earthquake that pulled down a city and shook a civilization, but it entirely lacked focus. It's odd, it's solidly researched and I'd trust it on the facts, but it somehow loses sight of the point and gets bogged down in detail, and reading it became a slog.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Earthquake. Kicks off a tsunami. Then comes the fire. A colossal disaster. I knew nothing of this quagmire until Portugese metal band Moonspell did a dark concept album about it. Piqued my interest. A good read with a number of accounts from back in the times.

[Ryan Fohl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to learn more about this earthquake after reading Candide. All of my questions were answered and my misconceptions dispelled. But this book is too thorough to be a widely enjoyable read. (I don’t want to know the NAMES of the captain’s of the six relief ships sent from Hannover) As a history it pushes back on Pombal as hero, but the writing also seems biased towards clergy. I read this while in Lisbon which heightened the sense of tragedy to me. A city full of beautiful art, lovely people, and history yet much of all three were lost. There are many compelling first hand accounts of survival and destruction included, and the introduction to the book is griping.

What I learned: Lisbon was the wealthiest city in the world and it had way too many clergy and way too many homeless. Voltaire was romantic with his niece, he couldn’t have had tomatoes, but he did have a pet monkey. Fire storms burn for days and create their own weather. It was generally believed that earthquakes cause more destruction in places with concentrated human excreta. London has had earthquakes.

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very well researched and written account of the cataclysmic destruction of Lisbon, Portugal from a severe earthquake on All Saints Day, 1 November 1755. It accounts the horrific earthquake, tsunami, and firestorm that nearly completely destroyed the city (as well as parts of southern Portugal, Spain and northern Morocco). Portugal, one of the first European empires, never fully recovered after the devastation. It also accounts the tyrannical rule of the prime minister Pombal after the disaster as well as the theological, philosophical and scientific questioning of the cause of such a disaster. A very interesting account of a near forgotten 263 year old tragedy.

[Sb21044 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing destruction of what was a world superpower city - Lisbon - by an off the chart earthquake, followed by a tsunami - with the destruction most tragically completed by a conflagration that destroyed everything that was left. All of this history is mostly unknown, and yet it influenced everything as far as trade and colonization in succeeding centuries.

The description was very vivid - wealthy families living next to poor families in tent cities for months after the tremors subsided.

I thought it was a fascinating account.

[Mariavv · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first few chapters of this book, which set the scene for the earthquake and the tsunami and fire that followed. Once the author gets to the disaster itself, though, he spends way too many pages going over every single mention of it in historical texts. He writes like an undergrad student who has been to an archive for the first time and feels like he has to somehow include every single snippet of evidence he's found. Especially the chapter about the tsunami gets tiring, as it includes every mention of big waves connected to this tsunami everywhere in Europe, Africa and the Americas. For me, a sentence like "Many unusually big waves were noticed in Northern Europe" would have been fine, I don't need to know in exactly which Dutch, Belgian, British and Norwegian towns these waves were noticed and by whom and what exactly those people wrote about them. The entire book is very indulgent like this, as if the author's main aim was to show off how good he is at going through archives rather than write a book people will enjoy reading.
By the time the author is done describing all the different mentions of the earthquake, then the tsunami, then the fire, and then every mention of either of the three in foreign newspapers (that's another 40 pages), he doesn't have much of the book left to discuss the aftermath and how the event changed the politics of Portugal and the way people thought about disasters. I'd have enjoyed this book more if it had been 200 pages shorter.

[Tocotin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive history of one of the greatest earthquakes in human history, which is also probably one of the most quickly forgotten. The book paints a sweeping picture of an absolute hell in which the poor inhabitants of Lisbon found themselves, together with quite a few foreigners, notably English, whose fates are described with the biggest accuracy and frequency, as the author is English as well.

But there are countless details, names, anecdotes and stories of nearly miraculous rescues and tragically bad luck, all of them equally fascinating – at least to me, because I love reading about ordinary people who had no bearing on the course of history (seemingly, because how can we know?).

I liked everything about this book, from the epic descriptions of the uniqueness and opulence of the Portuguese culture pre-earthquake (the country has never recovered from it), through the unfathomable triple horror of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the firestorm, then the controversial contribution of Pombal, to the now forgotten aftermath rippling through most of Europe and some other continents as well. I especially liked the mentions of Voltaire’s reaction to the disaster (being Papa Voltaire’s disciple in my childhood, I did know about the earthquake prior to reading the book); the title of the book itself comes from him.

I wish there were more about the Távora affair, but that’s a minor quibble, and I recommend the book highly to anyone with interest in history.

[Boris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for the many details on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and 2 stars because the book bogs down when the many hundreds of sources cited, including nobility with long names and titles and various churches with the same, are included in the text. This level of detail should have been confined to the appendices and footnotes.

What's striking about the Lisbon quake is that it was apparently the greatest European earthquake in historic times and one or the greatest quakes of all time. The destruction was massive, from largely leveling the city to the tsunamis that followed shortly after to the fires that burned for weeks.

It's interesting how Voltaire in his great novel Candide happened to place Candide and Dr. Pangloss in Lisbon on the day of the earthquake. He like most scientists, theologians and philosophers of the time devoted much thought and writings on the subject.

[Sandra Strange · Rating 2 out of 5]

This history details a fascinating part of history: a devastating earthquake, accompanied by tsunami and fires that leveled much of Lisbon, along with many towns and villages along the Portuguese, Moroccan and Southern Spanish coasts, killing hundreds of thousands. The ultimate outcome for Portugal was a nasty dictatorship by a vengeful government functionary. Now the book itself should have been fascinating. It does give the fascinating details, but unfortunately also contains pages and pages of less fascinating details, with exhaustive lists that mean little to most readers, and pages of details and quotations of only tangential importance. The author was enthralled with every little bit of information he ferreted out that connected to the traumatic events, but needed an editor to prune out the information that might be important to cloistered scholars, but not to most readers.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although well researched and comprehensive, Molesky becomes bogged down in providing unnecessary details that make the book a bit of a slog. The 'story' of the pre-calamity Lisbon court, destruction of Lisbon, and Pombal's reconstruction of the city and nation should be gripping but lists of dead in a specific parish, and exhaustive recounting of the reactions of foreign nations, and many other things that would have been better served as footnotes take away from it.

For someone interested in Lisbon and Portugal this is one of the few books I am aware of that covers one of (if not the) most pivotal events in their history. I would recommend wholeheartedly to someone who has the same interests. For the casual reader, not so much.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the chapters felt long and tedious. For example, after a few pages of specific accounts of homes, businesses and other structures being destroyed by the quake, 10 more pages of similar accounts feels repetitive. I found myself skimming the second half of several chapters.
The final chapter was by far the most interesting chapter for me. It was about the broader effects of the event on political and philosophical happenings and thinkers who have had profound influence on how we understand the world today, such as Voltaire, Kant, and Rousseau.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to Lisbon's history and the series of 1755 disasters - earthquake, tsunami, fire. Details show how harsh it was to experience this nightmare, survive in the battered landscape and then to suffer through the harsh reconstruction directed by Pombal. It was also fascinating to see how the destruction of Lisbon impacted the European Enlightenment. I will be reading Voltaire next.

[JW · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, from the geologic, historic and cultural point of view. The best part of the book is the account of the earthquake, flood and fire that destroyed the Portuguese capitol. The disaster made an immediate impression on Europe’s intelligentsia, but how long lasting was that? As the author writes, the pressure of other events, such as the Seven Years War, caused the quake to be soon forgotten. The 18th century news cycle in action.

[Victoria Laskowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, if you are reading this on a Kindle, don't be dismayed at your slow progress; the book ends at about 55%. Although I though it was occasionally a slog, this was a really good read. Yes, it was very detailed, but the story the author lays out is fascinating, and some of the real-life characters come across like the best heroes and worst villains in fiction. Definitely worth reading.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It occasionally crosses over the too-much-minutiae line...but in the end, I find it hard not to call this the current definitive account of the Lisbon earthquake of the 18th century, and its historical/philosophical ripples. It is also exceptionally easy to read, and aside from the occasional lapse into lists, it tries hard to stay focused and not be distracted by tangents.

[Paul Moloney · Rating 3 out of 5]

As noted by others , even if you are interested in the topic (and having been to Lisbon and see the still extant aftermath of the earthquake), this is a bit of a slog and the prose is quite dull. Lengthy excerpts from seemingly every European figure who wrote to another about the earthquake are included.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do like this kind of nonfiction, where a thing or event is analyzed from every possible angle. And of course, living in Portugal, I was fascinated by the subject matter. There were parts of it that were more interesting than others (the list of every country in the world and its reaction to the earthquake was a low point). But overall, I found it fascinating.

[Chris Bartholomew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. Earthquake, tsunami, and a devastating fire essentially wipe out the city of Lisbon in an afternoon. The book was a bit overlong, but it does cover the reactions from across Europe and Lisbon attempts to grasp what has happened.

[Rick B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously researched and detailed account of the multiple tragedies that struck Lisbon, Portugal on November 1, 1755. A tremendous resource though it reads a bit too much like a scholarly work at times. Having recently traveled to Lisbon, I found much of the book to be compelling.

[CARLOS NEVES · Rating 5 out of 5]

O pormenor baseado em documentos da época é espantoso. Por vezes um pouco fastidioso mas muito sério, este livro revela as causas e consequências do terramoto de Lisboa em 1755, seguido da reconstrução levada a cabo pelo comando do Marquês de Pombal.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to read this book. I knew nothing about this 3-disaster hit to Lisbon in the mid-18th century, so I feel more educated now. What a tragedy! I missed more information about the rebuilding of Lisbon, but otherwise there were more details than I really needed.

[Jesse Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic look at the Great Lisbon Earthquake. Molesky takes this little known event and shows the importance of it very quickly, hooking you into the story as he gives personal first-hand accounts collected with excellent research. Definity worth a read!