I-Spy Cascais: a memorial to four of Portugal's wars

Cascais is a charming historic town along the Tagus estuary from Lisbon. Its war memorial, pictured above, commemorates four of Portugal's wars.

First, the War of Roussillon and Catalonia (1793-5) when, following the French Revolution, they landed troops in Catalonia to join up with Spanish forces and tried to attack France in the Pyrenees. It did not go well.

 The second was the Peninsular War (1808-14) in which British troops joined the Portuguese and Spaniards to drive out the French who had occupied the Iberian Peninsula. The war turned the tide against Napoleon in Western Europe and made the reputation of the Duke of Wellington, who went on to become the victor of Waterloo.

The third commemoration is of a Portuguese auxiliary division that fought in one of Spain's civil wars in 1837.

And the fourth is the First World War, or Great War (1914-18). Portugal had been Britain's ally since 1377, but approached the conflict cautiously. It had been hoping to remain neutral, but there were clashes in Africa where German South-west Africa bordered Portuguese Angola. 

Britain was at the time Portugal's most important overseas market, and when German U-boats tried to impose a blockade, Portugal seized German ships in its ports, so in 1916 Germany declared war. More than 12,000 Portuguese servicemen were killed in the conflict.

Blaming people for earthquakes

I've just been quoted in an interesting article from Newsweek (for link, see below) about the dangers that human activities such as fracking might cause earthquakes.

I talk about two quakes - the first hit Antioch in what is now Turkey, but was then one of the biggest cities in the Roman empire, in AD 115. It nearly killed the emperor Trajan and the future emperor, Hadrian, commissioner of the famous wall.

Trajan believed it had happened because the spread of Christianity had made the old Roman gods angry, so he had the local bishop thrown to wild animals at the Colosseum in Rome. An estimated 300,000 people died in another earthquake in Antioch in 526, after which the city never recovered its former greatness.

The other earthquake I mention is the one that hit Lisbon, then the centre of a great global empire, on November 1 - All Saints' Day - 1755 (pictured). After the quake, fires burned for six days, destroying 85 per cent of the city including scores of convents, 30 monasteries, many churches and the headquarters of the Inquisition. The red light district emerged unscathed, to the amusement of many in Protestant countries.

For more details on both, see A Disastrous History of the World.

This is the Newsweek story - http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/man-made-earthquakes-are-proliferating-we-wont-admit-fault-266531.html

Quakes in capital cities

The Haiti earthquake may be the deadliest ever to hit a capital city if the estimate of up to 200,000 killed is accurate. The Tokyo quake of 1923 killed about 150,000 in the Japanese capital and its port Yokohama, and about 1.9 million were made homeless, as up to 360,000 buildings were destroyed.

Within days, though, businesses and shops left standing had begun trading again, and seven years later, it was said that Tokyo had been restored with scarcely a single visible scar from the disaster. A plan to rebuild the capital at a new site, less vulnerable to earthquakes, was rejected.

The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints' Day 1755 struck a city that was then not just the capital of Portugal, but the hub of a great empire. As many as 90,000 people were killed, while thousands of buildings were flattened - much of the damage being done by the fires that broke out after the quake. The king put his prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, in charge of reconstruction, and Pombal turned his coach into an improvised office among the ruins, living on soup brought in by his wife as he got to grips with the crisis.

He posted guards at exits from the city to stop any able-bodied men from leaving, then pressed them into work on the clean-up, while he sent ships to all corners of the empire with the message that the capital was still open for business. Some, like the Jesuits, argued that the city should not be rebuilt as the quake was a punishment from God, but within a year the Marquis was constructing a new Lisbon with the big squares and long avenues that form the elegant heart of the city we see today, and which his statue surveys from the top of a tall column.

Disasters and disorder

Haiti could be a pretty lawless place at the best of times. The aftermath of the earthquake is not the best of times. At first it seemed survivors were helping themselves to food and water wherever they could find them, and you couldn’t blame them.

Now, though, looting has become much more widespread with organised criminal gangs beginning to take charge. Following the quake, an estimated 4,500 prisoners escaped from the country’s main gaol – among them drug barons and gang bosses.

Disorder, of course, is not unusual after a major disaster. During the Sicily earthquake of 1908 (see my blog of January 16), the walls of Messina prison collapsed and those inmates who were not killed or injured just walked out. Normally law-abiding folk grabbed what they needed to survive wherever they could, but others pillaged shops and warehouses or rifled corpses, while two men were shot dead trying to rob a bank.

After the Lisbon quake of 1755, the authorities hanged thirty looters in prominent places around the city. And following America’s Johnstown flood of 1885, a number of “marauders” were summarily executed, because “the people in the solemn earnestness of their work of succour and rescue [had] not the patience to wait the tedious process of law.”