Time of Trembles

THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE (255 pp.)--T. D. Kendrick--Lippincott ($4).

DISASTER AT DUNDEE (240 pp.)--John Prebble--Harcourf, Brace ($4).

John Wesley, a specialist in bringing the wicked to their senses, conceded that for work of this kind, nothing was handier than an earthquake. "There is no divine visitation." he wrote with a connoisseur's relish, "which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners." Methodism's Founder Wesley thus neatly expressed the theme of a curious and scholarly account of the great Lisbon earthquake, in which Sir Thomas D. (for Downing) Kendrick now traces the long-forgotten relation between sin and seismology.

Kendrick's book is one of two new case studies of catastrophe; the second concerns the collapse of Scotland's famed Tay Bridge, more than 100 years after the Lisbon quake. The two books make a fascinating contrast in the changing moral fashions surrounding disaster.

Fish & Chips. The Lisbon quake began at 9:30 a.m. on All Saints' Day, Saturday. Nov. 1, 1755. As modern earthquakes go (100,000 perished in the Tokyo-Yokohama area in 1923), it was no great shakes: it killed probably no more than 15,000 people out of a population of about 275,000. But to its contemporaries all over Europe, it was the greatest disaster since the flood.

The first shock was a "rumbling noise"; the second "brought down roofs, walls, and facc,ades of churches, palaces and houses and shops in a dreadful, deafening roar of destruction." About an hour later, "the waters of the Tagus rocked and rose menacingly, and then poured in three great towering waves over its banks." King Josee moved into an encampment under canvas outside the city. There were penitential processions and prayers. A few looters (including five Irishmen) were executed. The quake destroyed a great many of the city's 40-odd churches and 90 convents, as well as the "best fish market in the world." London and Hamburg sent food, building materials and money, but the principal aftereffect of the Lisbon shock was sermonizing.

Author Kendrick, director of the British Museum, shows how the earthquake set a generation of robust optimists to muttering of doomsday. Most people in Europe believed that the earthquake was a divine visitation like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Portugal, the church was convinced that the people of Lisbon had been punished for not being good Roman Catholics; in Protestant England, the pulpits had it that Lisbon had been leveled because of the vices of Portuguese popery (although Preacher Thomas Alcock asked: "If popish superstition and cruelty made Lisbon fall, how came Rome to stand?"). It was widely expected that London too would be shaken for its sins. Coachloads of gentry left for the country. Others, in the spirit of Mrs. Miniver, carried on. and ladies stitched "earthquake gowns" (a preview of World War II's "siren suits").

In Candide. Voltaire used the Lisbon affair to demolish the fashionable interpretation of the Leibnitz philosophy by which every happening was necessary and therefore good. Candide and Dr. Pangloss had a terrible time in the earthquake, despite their good characters; only a "brutal sailor" did well out of the disaster, happy in the ruins with loot, wine and women. Thus Voltaire derided the notion that those who have bad luck must deserve it. Some men as sensible as Voltaire, and more charitable, recalled what Jesus said on the occasion of a mishap in the Holy Land: "Those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay."

Scotch on the Rocks. Natural disasters seemed few'and far between in the long solstice of Queen Victoria's reign, but man could always make his own. and give his own reasons. The "rainbow bridge" (1 mile, 1.705 yds.) across the Tay estuary, with its curving, spidery iron girders, was the wonder of an age of railways and engineering. European princes and the Emperor of Brazil visited the marvel. Queen Victoria in her widow's weeds trundled safely across. The railway company that built it (between 1871 and 1877) said it was "a structure worthy of this enlightened age." General Ulysses S. Grant, who on a ceremonial visit was obliged to walk halfway across, said more soberly that it was "a very long bridge."

On Sunday. Dec. 28. 1879. the 13 central spans (the "High Girders") of the Tay Bridge broke under a wind of hurricane force and fell into the stormy estuary; with them fell a train carrying 75 men, women and children. There were no survivors. For weeks afterwards divers groped about the muddy estuary recovering pieces of railway hardware and bodies. Tay fishermen dragged the river bed for more bodies. The victims were neatly laid out in the station waiting room, and dour Dundee turned out eagerly to watch the funereal spectacle. British Novelist-Newspaperman John Prebble has told the story of the disaster rivet by rivet--from the initial soundings, haphazard design and botched ironwork down to the penny pencil found on the body of a survivor and the last shilling compensation paid to relatives of the victims.

Scottish clergymen saw the hand of God in the collapse of the bridge--because the train had traveled on a Sunday. But most people simply blamed the designer, Sir Thomas Bouch (already knighted for his achievement), who in his plans had made no allowance for the wind. Bouch, with his schoolboy mathematics, cut a grim and pitiable figure at the inevitable court of inquiry. His design for the girders, it seems, had just come to him in conversation. Holes in the castings had been plugged with "Beaumont Egg," a sort of crude metal paste. For once the public had found the right scapegoat. Bouch died soon afterwards, a ruined, bitter, ostracized man; his widow took to drink and married a sea captain. Authors Prebble and Kendrick both flatter the modern reader with their implicit assumption that this is a more enlightened age--but there is room for doubt. When Lisbon's walls came tumbling down, 18th century man sought a theological explanation. When a gale destroyed the Tay Bridge. Victorian England found a mechanical cause. Yet each found it natural to make a vast fuss about the loss of human lives. The enlightened 20th century may seem considerably more fatalistic about its own disasters.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.