A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk: Imagining the Future 9780367361853, 9780429344404

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: The Mediterranean origin of risk
Etymology of “risk”: Latin or Arabic?
The Arab conquest of the empty spaces
Navigation “ad risicum” and marine insurance in the Mediterranean
The risk in Spanish
The narratives of risk and their origin
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: The conquest of the ocean
The Atlantic expansion
The ocean conquest
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: When the risk navigated to the Americas: The great adventure of Christopher Columbus
Juan Escalante’s Itinerario de navegación
The metonymical context of risk
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: When risk set foot in the Americas
Columbus meets the world again
Natural disasters and the narrative expansion of risk
The narrative expansion of risk in the Spanish literature in the Americas
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: From narrative to the probability calculus
From divination to “risk”
Games of chance and the calculation of probability
The invention of the probability calculus
The epistemology of probability
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Daniel Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year
The extension of the word “risk” to French and English
The calamitous seventeenth century
Daniel Defoe and the narrative of adventure and misfortune
A Journal of the Plague Year
The context of risk and the narrative matrix
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, or the first modern catastrophe
Earthquakes and evil, geologists and philosophers
Historical precedents: the Sicilian earthquake of 1693 and the Lima earthquake of 1746
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755
Apocalyptic believers and enlightened thinkers
“Bury the dead and feed the living”
Public catastrophe and the problem of evil
Risk in the modern “complex of evil”
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Risk in its historical context
Notes
Index

Citation preview

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk

This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources. Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of “managing the future” by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law and navigation in Medieval Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, to Columbus’ arrival to the Indies and the Spanish exploration and colonization in the Americas. It considers the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance, the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk – time, knowledge, relationship and probability – and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical time frame. A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management. Gaspar Mairal is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Earthscan Risk in Society series Edited by Ragnar E. Löfstedt King’s College London, UK

Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters From Hazards and Vulnerability to Prevention and Resilience Michael R. Greenberg Anthropology and Risk Åsa Boholm Explaining Risk Analysis Protecting health and the environment Michael R. Greenberg Risk Conundrums Solving Unsolvable Problems Edited by Roger E. Kasperson Siting Noxious Facilities Integrating Location Economics and Risk Analysis to Protect Environmental Health and Investments Michael R. Greenberg Moral Responsibility and Risk in Society Examples from Emerging Technologies, Public Health and Environment Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society Edited by Sander van der Linden and Ragnar E. Lofstëdt A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk Imagining the Future Gaspar Mairal For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Earthscan-Risk-in-Society/book-series/ERSS

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk Imagining the Future

Gaspar Mairal

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Gaspar Mairal The right of Gaspar Mairal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-36185-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34440-4 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Para Concha y Juan

Contents

Prefaceviii 1  The Mediterranean origin of risk

1

2  The conquest of the ocean

22

3  When risk navigated to the Americas: the great adventure of Christopher Columbus

42

4  When risk set foot in the Americas

58

5  From narrative to the probability calculus

82

6  Daniel Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year105 7  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, or the first modern catastrophe

142

8  Conclusion: risk in its historical context

235

Index242

Preface

Within current risk scholarship, there has yet to be a widely accepted consideration of risk as historical. Niklaus Luhmann, an influential risk studies scholar, missed a “historical-conceptual” study on risk. Similarly, in his ­frequently cited book, Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein does not use the word “history”, and instead describes his work as “a remarkable story of risk”. This book traces risk as a cultural-historical concept owning a genealogy. It seeks to establish, with some accuracy, when the concept was born more than recognizing ancient examples of a human experience which could be interpreted as something resembling what nowadays we usually call risk. This requires precise conceptualization of terms that distinguish risk from related older and current terms such as “fortune”, “hazard”, “danger”, “peril”, “fate”, and so on. In light of a long-term review of historical examples, we may ask whether it is possible to frame a coherent conceptualization of risk capable of spanning a whole range of possibilities. This is my intention. After years of research, I believe the historical approach to be the best, because risk is an expert concept and its genesis can be traced, though with difficulty. In doing this, we shall see that the concept emerged in singular historical contexts, gradually taking on new meanings over time in response to new situations and needs. Any concept is an idea that refers to something, and it exists only to inform our understanding of that “something”. I propose, then, that risk conceptualizes time in the form of a future that does not yet exist. For human beings, time is not a single, universal dimension but a mental construct that is both plural and diverse, and it is a cultural creation. Looking back over the whole of our existence, we may observe that the ability to foresee the future has been one of mankind’s great challenges. What comes after death? What will happen in the course the voyage on which I am about to embark? What will be the outcome of a war? Will I succeed in my business ventures? People have repeated these and other such questions throughout human history, finding answers of all kinds about events that have not yet happened. By providing an account of the future that assures life after death, religion offers a future, as do magic, divination and fate or

Preface  ix destiny. In all of these cases, something that does not exist, because it has not yet happened, is formulated, foretold, predicted, shown or anticipated. When I set out, I wonder whether I will have a safe journey, and if I am going to make an investment, I want to know whether it will be successful. Obviously, the future exists only in our imagination and it is therefore nothing but a representation of a reality waiting to exist. Risk is time, and especially future time and as a concept it lies in language and in the grammatical structures that allow us to create and describe the future. The narrative is a condition for its very existence, which leads me to the general proposition that risk is, and was created as, a narrative act. In this light, it seems to me that a theory of risk must meet two requirements: it must address narrative and it must be historical. I started working in this project in 2010 while researching at the University of Arizona. Thanks to Carla and Richard Stoffles’ support I carried out an intense bibliographical revision on ancient and modern texts in Arizona’s excellent university library. I stayed at Cornell University in the 2012–2013 academic year. Cornell’s Society for the Humanities granted me a fellow to research on the history of risk. This period was crucial for my work and the good atmosphere of this prestigious Society which had selected risk as its 2012–2013 research issue, helped to advance my writing. My special gratitude to Davydd Greenwood, Pilar Fernández-Cañadas and Gail HolstWarhaft for their friendship and help. I must thank Professor Federico Corriente for his advice in the field of the Arabic language. Mikel Azurmendi and Agustín Malón read parts of the manuscript and made very good observations and Daniel Duffield was of great help for my English writing.

1 The Mediterranean origin of risk

Diving into the historical origins of risk is hard work that leads to unexpected spaces and prior times to what I presumed at first. I have had to go to the sands of the Arabian Desert to find people who travelled across long distances and put their fortune in the hands of God. They were using categories of time to confront the future, theirs and their properties. They did not use divination but a religious belief that rationalized the uncertainty. They called rizq to the fruit, both spiritual and material, of their trust in God and this concept was crucial for the expansion of the Arabs, first in the deserts and then in their voyages across the Indian and Mediterranean Seas. This is the first historical context in which a valid notion to identify the genesis of the modern concept of risk can be found. Doing so, two fundamental considerations for the production of a historical-narrative theory of risk arise and they will be widely discussed throughout the pages of this book. First, we should acknowledge that risk, in this original version as rizq, was part of a community’s religious beliefs whose source was a written narrative and an oral tradition. The Koran contains a large number of references to the rizq and provides this term with a large semantic field. Now I only intend to highlight how this original notion, which I attribute to the risk, would not be mathematical – the first rudimentary notion of a mathematical probability did not appear until  the sixteenth century – but narrative, thus already being a part in the grand story of the Islam foundation, the Koran. A second consideration derives for the first one since the nature of this original notion of rizq can be related both to the good and to the bad. Moreover, it refers to the future. So, the risk would be another version of time creation except that this time is not past but future. The first notion of risk emerged to provide a background of knowledge to cope with the uncertainty of future and as an alternative to divination and oracles. The ability of a religious belief to rationalize human experiences has been often underestimated in the history of science forgetting that all our ­scientific knowledge was at first religion. Emile Durkheim already mentioned this historical fact in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves

2  The Mediterranean origin of risk were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.1 In the following chapters, I will track stories and expressions that refer explicitly or implicitly to the risk. This persecution of risk has led me to trace a path that proceeding across the deserts of the Middle East, comes to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to take account of the trade flows that resulted in navigation in the Mare Nostrum under the influence exerted in the Middle Age by the Arab-Islamic civilization on Southern Europe. The first transoceanic voyage that led Columbus to the Americas in 1492 was in terms of the use of the techniques of navigation and the geographical knowledge, a continuation of the Mediterranean sailing and of the fifteenth century experiences of Portuguese and Castilian navigators in the Atlantic Ocean. The risk was already there.

Etymology of “risk”: Latin or Arabic? The English word risk also exists in all the European languages with a similar meaning. From Spanish riesgo, French risque, Italian rischio, Portuguese risco, Catalan risc, so it makes the most important languages derived from Latin or to the German Risiko, for the Germanic ones with great Latin lexical influence or the Greek rhizikon, which derives also from Latin. All these variations indicate a common origin, but we could not argue that one of them is the source of all others. Nevertheless, we have to arrive to a Latin word risicum for identifying an original word. This term was used in Italian thirteenth century maritime documents. So, the Latin language, but a notarial Latin that coexisted with Romance, was the first European language to use the notion of risk. However, this notarial term, risicum, came from a non-European language which was in close contact with Southern Europe, the Arabic. The expression “ad meum risicum” appears in a 1248 Genoese document that commends a ship cargo. This circumstance shows us a singular course to find the source of the risk: the sea and the navigation transporting goods. The risk is, we might say, a Mediterranean creation Some of the books written on risk with a theoretical perspective point out that the origin of this word should be found in the Latin voice resecare, which means “cut”. Luhmann also states that the etymology of risk is however obscure. “The etymology of the word is unknown. Some suspect it to be Arabic in origin”, writes Luhmann, who then recognizes that “there are no comprehensive studies on the etymology and conceptual history of the word”.2 Joan Coromines,3 who is always an authorized voice in the field of etymology, was the most prominent defender of the Latin origin for this term and he established its relationship with the Latin verb resecare. The Spanish word risco4 would clearly come from this voice, which shows also a

The Mediterranean origin of risk  3 semantic continuity with this Latin verb that means “cut”. However, the Spanish riesgo, as well as the various versions of this term in other European languages, could not be a Latin voice. Some leading philologists, most of them Arabists, do not coincide with Coromines’ affirmation and they mention the Arabic language as the origin of the voice risk or riesgo in Spanish. The most interesting point is that following their explanations, one notices that they not only argue reasonably about the etymology of this term but also on the origin of the concept and that means going further than Coromines. For example, Federico Corriente who is the author of a very well-known Arabic-Spanish dictionary, dissents Coromines arguing the following: Risk: it deserves more consideration based on the Arabic etymology/ rizq phonetically because the /i/ on the closed syllable often/e/... and semantically because this voice refers to everything that is provided by the Providence which can be good or bad for the orthodox Muslim....5 I have found other references in a great work published by Mikel de Epalza, a Spanish arabist, Origines du concept de risque: de l’ Islam a l’Occident, a paper presented in 1988 at the international conference Le Risque et the Crise that was held in Amiens (France) and whose results were later published.6 I will take several Epalza’s suggestions about the risk and its etymology and semantics into consideration. Corriente’s and Epalza’s proposals have allowed me to open some research lines which with some result are present in this book. The meaning of the Arabic rizq, already mentioned by Corriente in terms of “what is provided by the Providence which can be good or bad for the Orthodox Muslim”, has a semantic denseness which connects very well with our modern understanding of risk as a contingency. This semantics gives etymological credibility to the Arabic origin that I am postulating, for in a sense the rizq would mean something quite similar to what we call risk today. Certainly, that there are significant differences which, however, can be understood quite well in the context of a genealogy of the concept of risk as we will see further on. Mikel de Epalza locates the Arabic rizq in the Koran and asserts that about 120 verses with words derived from the root r-z-q can be found there. On this lexical basis Epalza interprets the texts to draw a large semantic field. First of all, and according to its initial Koranic sense rizq is a provision or gift from God. Rizq is a gift that God – its Supreme source – gives to men, who are its specific addressees.   It is both a fruit of heaven and Earth, a production of earth and heaven, which God produces or brings out (akhraja) or down the heaven (anzala).7

4  The Mediterranean origin of risk Later on, Epalza writes that rizq relates with chance as it is the good luck or baraka given by the grace of God. The rizq of God involves in addition a spiritual blessing (baraka), because of the material nature of rizq.8 The rizq has always been a central concept in Islamic theology and is a key reference in many “hadices” or comments to the sacred Islamic texts. It is usually translated as the set of provisions for sustenance that are received by someone who is subjected to the will of God. They are goods that God gives and are received without having offered anything in return. The rizq comes from God, who gives it to the believer when he possesses five ­spiritual, ritual and behavioural conditions: taqwa or fear of God, namaz or the five daily prayers, istighfaar or remorse, tawakkul or trust in God and infaaq fiabilillah or good deed. These are some examples taken from the Koran in which the term rizq has been translated as a “provision” or “sustenance”: Is there any creator other than Allah who provides for you from the sky and the earth? [Q Fatir 35:3] Indeed it is Allah who is the All-provider, Powerful, All-strong. [Q Tur 51:58] There is no animal on earth, but that its sustenance lies with Allah. [Q Hud 11:6] 9 Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), the great poet and philosopher from Murcia, whom this hikam or epigram is usually attributed, puts the term rizq in relation with that of tawakkul or trust in God: I’ve seen glory (‘izz) in asceticism (zuhd) Wealth (ghina) in poverty (faqr) Happiness (qanāKato) in moderation (war’) Relief (faraj) in patience The provision (rizq) in happy trust (tawakkul) The truth (h.aqq) in sincerity (s.idq)) Religion (dīn) in a conscious fear (taqwa)10 The rizq was both material and spiritual, something which did not fit well with a Christian11 theology which tended to separate both things. Epalza also mentions this material condition of rizq because the “travel by land and sea” is one of the main contexts in which the Koran locates the rizq.

The Mediterranean origin of risk  5 (Rizq) is at the same time spiritual, because of its divine origin – in many Koranic verses God gives his rizq and forgiveness at the same time, – and material because of its manifestations: eating, drinking and trading, assistance in marriage and in travel by land and by sea.12 From the beginning of the Islamic expansion after the preaching of Muhammad, the concept of rizq incorporated a commercial and economic sense that was related to the booty and the redistribution of taxes among the combatants. Mikel de Epalza refers to Al-Basra, one of the first cities-camp founded by Arab armies in its first expansion in Mesopotamia, to indicate that its “central market” of trading was called “The House of Rizq”.13

The Arab conquest of the empty spaces The routes of caravans across the desert are the first context to locate the rizq. Those who were going to start a long journey across a huge and empty space like the deserts of Arabia, Middle East or North Africa, put their trust in God to get the rizq both for themselves and for the goods they transported. So this original risk, in its Islamic-Arabic version, relates to navigation. Navigating the desert or the sea were quite similar activities for the Arabs who finally, and in addition to their caravans, crossed the Mediterranean with their ships: When the first Muslims reached the shores surrounding them, some of them developed a tendency to venture across the sea. This was not, but an extension of the immemorial pre-Islamic practice of the “ghazw” in the desert; one “rode a boat” (rakiba markab) that was like riding a camel, either for trade or to obtain a swag.14 The raise of Islam in the seventh century was the major event in the history of the Arabs. With prophet Muhammad’ s preaching written in the Koran, a new religion but also the first Arabic prose, were born and a people, the Arabs, spread through conquests, long expeditions and travels for trading. At the same time, they developed fields of knowledge so relevant as Astronomy, Geography and History. In a way, they anticipated the European Renaissance and this is not a simple rhetorical analogy, but a connection with plenty of cause and effect. In fact, this is the case of risk because, if it was created by the Arabs in the context of their terrestrial and maritime expansion, then it played a key role in the first transoceanic voyages to the Americas. We know that Christopher Columbus used the concept of risk in a quite similar way to the Arabs. The Arab people came from the interior deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and for centuries, before the preaching of Muhammad, they traded with the caravans that went from East to West. However, they were not maritime people and they did not have ships and techniques of the same level as

6  The Mediterranean origin of risk other nations who at that time were dominating the Mediterranean, ­particularly the Byzantines. Hence, and at the beginning of its expansion, the first Caliphs feared the sea and they refrained from undertaking large maritime incursions. Nevertheless, and though the Arabs were not maritime people, they were navigators and they used to be guided by the stars when they followed their routes in such a vast space as the desert. So, they did not take long to adopt from instruments and techniques from the far East for maritime navigation, in order to compete with the Byzantines. The desert, the sea, the ice and the sky are the largest empty extensions that humankind has conquered throughout its history. All these historical achievements gave impetus to human creativity, since new knowledge, techniques, products or objects, though also the war and domination, expanded thanks to them. Risk played a part in one of these prominent historical episodes: the expansion of Islam. After three centuries, the Arabic-Islamic expansion had created a world of its own including the sea, another empty extension now travelled across the new routes. Towards the Islamic third and fourth centuries (ad 9th and 10th), something that could be identified as the “Islamic world” had been formed. The traveller who travelled the world could say, thanks to what he saw, whether a country was ruled and populated by Muslims. These external forms had been disseminated by the movements of peoples: the dynasties and their armies, by merchants that traversed lands and waters of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, by attracted artisans of a city to another by the patronage of the rulers or the rich. Other vehicles were exported and imported, objects that reflected some style: books, pieces of metal, ceramic objects and particularly textiles, the most common goods in long distance trading.15 By the second millennium, and having overcome the challenge of navigating the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Arabs had extended a wide market from East to West. At this point we should keep our attention on a crucial fact, as it is the conquest of the empty spaces and the meaning that they have for humankind’s history. The vacuum has been the object of philosophical reflection since at least Aristotle, and has been investigated since the ancient times through Physics. For centuries, Geography also alluded to the “horror vacui” of the blank maps and this fear of the vacuum has been attributed both to the nature and the human mind. The empty space has historically been a major challenge for humanity who has overcome it many times. The Arabs, without going further, challenged throughout its history two empty spaces and ended up conquering them. In  the course of this conquest they created the notion of rizq, which helped them to navigate over long distances and across empty spaces without being captive of divination and absolute uncertainty. The vacuum is both a spatial and a temporary entity. In the case of space, it is a homogeneous, unlimited extension that has

The Mediterranean origin of risk  7 no discontinuities, fractures or references such as the huge sands of the desert. The sea was well defined by Omar the second Caliph when he expressed his reluctance to order maritime incursions: The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; When calm, the sailor’s heart is broken; When the tempestuous, his senses reel. “Trust is little, fear it much”.16 A “boundless expanse” just covered by the sky; this is a good characterization of the sea as an empty space that has frightened humanity so much. As time, the empty extension, does not provide references to create accounts or stories because nothing came to happen there. The past, as a connection of memories that make up a story, cannot exist in an empty space. So, another time is required and it is the future. An empty space does not provide either geography or history. This is the nature of “emptiness” from a human point of view. The new geographical and historical knowledge that the Arabs developed thanks to the Greek legacy and the influence of Persia, India and China, acted to support new concepts – risk was no doubt one of them – in a context of multiple technical advances. My arguments will go to the historical process developed to conquer empty extensions and when the route was used to cross the space and the risk to handle the time. I pretend to analyse how the Arabs carried out this conquest, although it is true that they did not invent many of those devices that served as the compass, to trace the routes of navigation, though on the other hand they created the notion of rizq, which seems to have been the first historical precedent for the modern concept of risk. The pre-Islamic Arabs, as we know, were worshippers of stars and already possessed some knowledge of astronomy. The Koran alludes to a “knowledge” that God gives to interpret the stars. In this way God grants men in the divine book of astronomical knowledge: “He is who pointed you out those stars that will guide you as well in the darkness of the land and the sea”; “we have made the signs are unmistakable to those people who have knowledge”.17 This Koranic passage that I have taken from George F. Hourani’s Arab Seafaring is very revealing since it alludes to an “expert” knowledge that comes from God. To be able to “read” the stars one needs to “know” and not everyone can do it. The astronomical knowledge of the Arabs grew a lot throughout centuries, as we know that from the time of the first Caliphs many works of Persian and Indian astronomy were translated into Arabic and later the Greek books, as in the case of the Almagest, written by Claudio Ptolomeo in the second century. Already in the year 830, a good number of Arab Astronomy treaties had been written and soon this astronomical

8  The Mediterranean origin of risk science made a great advance thanks to the works of Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Battani, Abū Al-rayhān, Al- Bīrūnī and Al-Khayyam.18 It seems necessary to emphasize the link between God and the knowledge, or what we would today call science. In the Arabic-Islamic world, and at that time, the emerging science was not dissociated from religion, but it was part of it. The navigation or following a route in an empty space, had usually a divine character. The instruments and techniques of navigation that the Arabs used in their expansion had, until the introduction of the compass, an astronomical basis. According to George Hourani the Arab compass rose contained thirty-two courses whose names came from the rise and set of fifteen stars in addition to the North and the South. They also calculated the latitude by the elevation of the sun or the polar star, which they measured in a ­rudimental way with the fingers. The astrolabes, of Greek origin, were used to set the latitude of ports and capes that were registered in the books of navigation or “rahmanis”. We have proof about the use of some of these “rahmanis” in the tenth century. The magnetic needle originated in China, but the Persian and Arab merchants who traded with the far East already used it as a compass in the eleventh century. According to Hourani, the first mention to the compass in Europe is found in a poem written in French by Guyot de Provins in 1190. He also locates this passage of compass from Arabs to Christians in the time of the Crusades. With these methods and artifacts, the selection of courses allowed the crossing of the empty space of the sea, setting one or more arrival points and thus tracing the route that should be followed. The routes then, though being quite imprecise still, have also a known period of time, since a point of arrival was established. The merchants or the warships did not sail just for adventure; they always had a point to be reached. However, if we have two known points, we can trace a route and conceive a time, not a mythical one, and this time would represent what could happen during the navigation. This conceptualization is the future. On the other hand, the navigators acquired from their trips experience that passed from port to port and from one generation to the next. What the prevailing winds were, the stormy seasons, the best harbors and havens, the currents to avoid or take advantage of and where the pirates usually attacked. All these experiences and knowledge were included in the books of navigation and added to rudimentary maps in order to identify the most significant circumstances of a route. In this way, every route was traced with some indications, more or less precise and abundant, to give content to the time that was going to be deployed from the point of departure to the arrival. So, the absolute uncertainty was mitigated by a little knowledge that allowed the establishment of something similar to what centuries later would be called probability. The possibility of sailing from a place of departure to another of arrival will become a probability, or in other words, an uncertain future will become less uncertain. The invention of risk was a part of this historic process.

The Mediterranean origin of risk  9 We must highlight this special combination between knowledge and new techniques and artifacts of navigation and the invention of a future that will be increasingly based in astronomy, the calculation of latitude, the use of the lateen, the compass and the compass rose, the writing of books of navigation and cartography. So, this new conceptualization of future had the support of an expert knowledge and some new technological advances but still in a historical context in which religion was the prevalent way of thinking. The rizq refers both to the spiritual blessing that all believers and their properties can receive from God before starting a long and uncertain journey. The rizq or “provision of God” is then a relational quality that links God with a person and the goods which he transports. This relational process, coming from God and passing through faith and good actions to the believer and his possessions, would be the first version of risk since it allowed to start a long journey by land or sea, trusting its outcome in this gift or God’s provision. As Mikel de Epalza writes: The risk in business is part of the trust in God, who would complement the insufficiencies of human calculations in the insurances, because he is the best of all suppliers, in all and always, Ar-Razz par excellence.19 The semantic field of the Arabic word rizq shows clearly its relational nature, because nothing and nobody owns the rizq, which in any case comes from the relationship between God and the individual, and that is transferred also to his properties. The future, conceived exclusively as uncertainty, is relativized by this belief in God’s provision that covers both people and their belongings. Here we can see the semantic core of the rizq, and it is the idea that someone, God at the beginning, guarantees something, be objects or persons, which is carried out or participates in a long and uncertain travel. When maritime voyages became increasingly common in the Arab world thanks to the technical advances in navigation, the rizq was developed as a conceptual tool to manage the human and commercial exchange across the new routes in the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean was an Arab sea from the ninth century until at least the twelfth century, when the Crusades burst into it and following them, when the maritime cities of South Europe such as Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Marseille or Barcelona, established their commercial routes.

Navigation “ad risicum” and marine insurance in the Mediterranean Navigation and maritime trade in the Mediterranean Sea since the Arabs plied its waters20 produced an intense exchange between its ports and shores, and the maritime contracts were used as its legal support. The first

10  The Mediterranean origin of risk maritime insurance policy we know was issued in 1347. Before that period of time the Greeks, Jews and Romans had their maritime contracts such as the “chreokoinomia”, the “‘isqa” and the “societas”. The Arabs in turn had already developed the “qirad”21 or loan, which applied to caravans’ trades across the Arabian Peninsula. By the eleventh century, the merchants and seafarers in the ports of southern Europe developed a kind of contract called “commenda”, which was going to govern the commercial relations in the Mediterranean Sea for several centuries. So, and in this encounter between two legal traditions, the Arab and the European, there was a transfer of words and concepts and one of them was the Arabic rizq whose transposition into Latin as risicum can be detected at the beginning of the thirteenth century in notarial documents in which “commenda” contracts were formalized. This hypothesis is the most plausible explanation of how the concept of risk arose and it was applied for the first time in Europe. A great commercial revolution took place in Europe throughout the ­thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth when new kinds of trade organization emerged. For a long time, it was customary that the merchants travelled with their goods and properties, but from the thirteenth century, they became sedentary and settled in the main ports and fair cities. Consequently, they have to manage the movement of their goods by legal and commercial instruments such as sea contracts, bills of exchange, banking, accountability and insurance policies. This new situation, that an owner did not accompany his goods during their transport, required a good amount of trust between the parties and then a contract should be the instrument to formalize such a trust. The Llibre del Consolat del Mar22 is one of the most important documents for the history of medieval navigation in the Mediterranean Sea. It was composed in Valencia between 1320 and 1330 and makes express mention of the trust that the contracts should warrant: When someone gives his property in commenda to another, he has faith in him; since if he did not have faith in him, he would not give nor have given in commenda his property to him; wherefore it is right and equitable that those who make commenda should have faith in those to whom they make the commenda.... Wherefore everyone must take care as to whom and whom not, and how and how not, he gives his property in commenda.23 Trust in someone, however, was preceded by the trust in God, a fundamental part of the original meaning of the Arabic rizq. On the other hand, the notion of risk, appearing in the first “commenda” contracts which we have historical evidence of, contains a reference to God as a warranty against adversity. Now this document from Marseilles is particularly important for the early date, 1207, and because we can find here one of the earliest references to the risk, though not still the term, “risicum” but the synonym “fortuna”.

The Mediterranean origin of risk  11 Quas portabo, ad fortunam Dei et ad usum maris, in terra Sicilie.24 This expression, “ad fortunam Dei”, suggests an important reflection on the transition of concepts such as “risk” or “fortune” from the sacred to  the profane in a process that seems to separate maritime trading from God’s intervention. The “commenda” contracts came to be the place in which the rizq secularized since they affirmed the trust in other people, in fact those who were ready to take the risk of goods being transported by sea. Now the “faith”, as shown in the Llibre del Consolat de Mar, refers to other people and so it replaces the faith in God. This other document is even older because is dated in Thebas in 1170 and uses a more negative term. In this case the goods should go at someone’s “periculo”. Verumtamen istut abere debet esse in tuo periculo.25 These documents show a plurality of terms such as “fortune” or “periculo” to express that any damage or loss suffered by the goods or ships will be charged to those who assume their guarantee. This conceptual transit from rizq to risicum was part of a very important semantic shift since this concept applied in maritime trading would progressively become a negative one. This process seems quite logical in a contract that had to deal both with advantages or benefits and losses or misfortune. The necessity of compensating someone for the losses gave content to a new word that was finally risicum. The rizq or provision that, in an Arabic context, could be good or bad, became a new concept referred to the contingency of a loss or damage in the Mediterranean medieval sea contracts. From now on the notion of risk will basically connote the negative in the Western world. The earliest occurrence of the term risicum or in other words of a European version of the Arabic rizq, comes from a maritime contract dated in Genoa in 1248: debet dicta navis in mari varari ad meum risicum et fortunam de omni casu.26 This short sentence has a great historical value since it certifies the birth of the risk in Europe. This term appeared in the context of maritime navigation and sea contracts and was charged with context from its origin. This context is narrative as a short story is told: in case of a ship or its cargo suffer some damage from any event happened at the sea, who “commends” will take charge of this damage. Risk is the fact to be identified but always in context. We can also emphasize how the possessive “meum” determines that the risk or fortune depends on someone, and therefore, it is not a thing in itself, but rather a relationship between people and objects, ideas or ­situations. Then what provokes the risk is an “object of risk” – here is the sea – and what is affected by this risk is the “object at risk” and a ship in

12  The Mediterranean origin of risk this case. The risk is always the relationship between the two “objects”, and this relationship is expressed narratively in the following terms: “debet dicta navis in mare varari ad meum risicum et fortunam de omni casu” or “the said ship shall sail the sea at my own risk and fortune in all events”. Hence and in this very early form the risk is contextual and relational as a narrative. In 1264, a “commenda” contract is formalized in Zagreb with this expression: ad omne suum rischium et fortunam atque periculum.27 The formula here is more complete for utilizing three terms such as “rischium”, a variant of “risicum”, “fortunam” and “periculum” to be attributed to someone. So, the whole expression would be: “to all your risk and fortune and peril”. It seems interesting to realize that by this time, terms such as risk, fortune and peril though different were synonymous.28 Even today, the semantic fields of these three terms tend to produce multiple misunderstandings.29 Moving forward in the chronology of the formulas that are introduced in “commenda” contracts or maritime laws, as it is the case of the aforementioned Llibre del Consolat de Mar (1320–1330), a brief paragraph excerpted from this medieval legal text gives us the first mention of risk in a romance language, the Catalan: sino va solament que aquell qui la commanda reb, que la reb à us é costum de mar é a risch de mar é de males gents.30 This document also has a peculiarity because it mentions not only the sea as an “object of risk”, but also the “bad people”. Piracy was a permanent reference for describing the risks that ships incurred when sailing the ­Mediterranean Sea. These contractual formulae that mentioned the risk will introduce increasingly more “objects of risk” related to maritime navigation such as wreck, theft, violence and “any other occurrence and danger”, so prefiguring what will shortly thereafter be marine insurance. This is an example from 1310 that Boiteaux quotes in his book La fortune de mer (1968): Omnem risicum, casum et periculum ... tanquam Dei, maris, gentium, interdii, naufragii, raurie, robarie, violence in quondam alteriur et periculi casus cujuscumque.31 In this book, Boiteaux transcribes a phrase, taken from a document dating in Siena on 1329, which accounts how a ship with a cargo of wheat valued at 100 florins of gold “vengeno a suo rischio e costa”. Here we have for the first time an Italian equivalent term for the Latin “risicum”. Boiteaux

The Mediterranean origin of risk  13 himself mentions another document issued in 1466 by the Consulate of Bruges in which the risk is likely mentioned for the first time in French: “resicq ou aventure de perte et de gain” or “risk and venture of lose and gain”. This expression should be highlighted since it contains a definition of risk both in terms of its positive or negative outcomes. The risk is in this way a “venture” of loss and gain and it remained with this sense in some activities such as gambling and finance, but not in maritime insurances and navigation. The concept of risk will experience historically a dual semantic development, as we can already see here. I am going to examine this issue later on with a certain display of historical data. There are several authors32 that have attributed the first policy of maritime insurance, whose text has been preserved, to a ship called Santa Clara sailing from Genoa to Majorca in 1347. Georgius Lecavellum claims to have received from Bartholomeus Bassus 107 pounds of silver as a free and friendly loan that he committed to return. He also made the commitment to undertake the risks of the navigation by direct route between Genoa and Mallorca in the following manner and by the stipulated amount: I assume personally all risk and responsibility for the stipulated amount until the boat reached Mallorca, sailing direct route in the aforementioned form (...) in the way and mentioned conditions promise to make such compensation and also promise to pay you and incur a penalty of double the amount previously provided in addition to the restitution of damages and expenses that may arise of the invoice or of the dispute, remaining the aforesaid insurance under the responsibility and security of my estate, property and possessions.33 A previous formula for the insurance of ships and cargoes was the so-called “bottomry loan”,34 used by the Greeks and Romans in the antiquity, and according to it, the loan, used to finance the trip, was not returned if the ship sank or the cargo was lost. It is a contract whereby a creditor lends money to a ship owner in the hope, if successful in the expedition, to be reimbursed and receive a significant benefit, a bottomry premium.35 If we compare this “bottomry loan” and the insurance policy found in this Genoese document from 1347, there are some differences in the transaction. Now we have an insurer that receives an amount of money from a ship owner and he will deduct this amount of money for him if the ship and its cargo arrive at port not suffering damage within a period of six months. Otherwise, he will have to pay double the amount received together with a compensation for the damage and putting all his properties as a guarantee. Thus, insurance was born as a commercial activity specialized in the exchanging of risk and becoming a commodity valued by a stipulated

14  The Mediterranean origin of risk amount. This fact put the risk in objective terms since it was not only an “adventure” but also an amount of money, which corresponded. A first religious and quite rational notion about the future was transformed into an intangible commodity.

The risk in Spanish The word risk, whose evolution I have been tracking in the Mediterranean Sea, was etymologically related to Arabic. We have seen its later appearance in the notarial Latin used in the thirteenth century and in some Romances such as Catalan, Italian and French. There is also evidence of its use in Provençal, but it does not seem to have existed then in Spanish or Portuguese. Historically, both kingdoms of Portugal and Castile did not have its main ports in the Mediterranean, but in the Atlantic, and there is no evidence that the voice “risk” was used in medieval Castilian in the world of navigation until the end of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, the words “riesco”, “risco”, “riesgo” or “riesgos” were already used in Spanish in the thirteenth century. So, we can document someone who signed in 1222 in Valladolid as “Petro Riesco” and “Juan Riesco” doing the same in 1256 in León or going to the Libro del buen amor written by the Archpriest of Hita in 1230 where he refers to a flute “más alta que un risco”36. Today “risco” means “cliff” or “ slit in the rock” in Spanish and this word comes from Latin and most probably from the term “resecare” or “cut”. The Spanish word “riesgo” with the meaning of content or struggle, could be etymologically connected with the Latin root “resecare”. This term appears in numerous Spanish documents, and so we can read in 1348 in the Gran Crónica de Alfonso of anonymous author: And when they realized that could not attract the Queen to their plans, they change their minds. And the Queen hid it so that the king did not know about it and this avoiding any quarrel (riesgo).37 Here risk means “discord”, “fight” or “conflict” and it is quite abundant in many documents with this meaning until the end of the fifteenth century. Antonio de Nebrija in the Vocabulario Español-Latino of 1498 offers for the Spanish “riesgo” the Latin equivalent of “conflictus” or “certamen”. This Latin etymology intertwines in Spanish with the Arabic one in such a way that it is not surprising to find references to it in the risk literature which is so abundant now. My interest has been to clarify this ambiguity and to state that “risco” and “riesgo”, with the meaning of “strife”, both come from the Latin “resecare” and “risichum” or “riesgo”, also in Spanish, and first used in the context of navigation, come, as in other Romances, from the Arabic “rizq”. This term, which I have been describing from its Arabic origins, does not appear in Spanish until the end of the fifteenth century and interestingly not in a maritime contract, but in chronicles and novels.

The Mediterranean origin of risk  15 The Discurso de los embajadores de María de Borgoña is an anonymous chronicle written in 1477, and we can read there: Then Jaco Galeote who among the other captains could speak to our Duke more freely, recommended him to reach safety and to them who were not at so much danger, to take the risk. The magnanimous Duke answered that he would not barter such an honorable death.38 El baladro del sabio Merlín con sus profecías is an Arthurian novel published in Burgos in 1498 where we find this account: And when they left Camelot, they walked until at length they came to the sea and boarded ship, and God gave them fair winds so that in but a few days they came to Brittany and entered the lands of King Ban de Venuit. And had not Merlin been with them, they would have been at great risk, because there was a great war at that time between King Ban de Venuit and King Claudes de la Desierta, and none might pass in safety.39 We have that the expression “take the risk” or “have risk” on the one hand, and the contextual proximity of the word “danger” on the other, are showing in both documents a semantic connection between risk and damage. The context in which the word “risk” appears in this Arthurian novel, is related to navigation and a journey by land, nevertheless we also find a narrative and descriptive language that remembers the style of the medieval chronicles, not the legal language of the contracts in which the pre-established formulas were so frequently used. Thus, we can appreciate a certain change in the way the notion of risk was being used beyond a contractual formula and with a strong inclination to the loss or the damage. This fact might suggest that this notion had already gone through the limits of a first semantic field rooted in the world of the Mediterranean Sea navigation and expressed in legal documents. Instead, it was being transformed into an increasingly widespread concept used in other contexts. Joan Coromines tells us how risk became a fashionable word in the ­sixteenth-century Spanish. The word risk did not appear in English until 1660 being a loan from the French “risque”.40

The narratives of risk and their origin After this journey from the Koranic text to the European late Middle Ages in pursue of risk, we should launch a retrospective gaze to understand its true nature. How has this notion evolved and in which contexts? We have noticed how in its Koranic origin the risk was religious in nature since it came from God. So, a person could have the rizq only if he trusted in God and then He granted. This divine concession had an essential feature, that

16  The Mediterranean origin of risk the risk covered the people and their goods. Such a symbiosis was then inconceivable for a Christian theology which had a lot of trouble to harmonize God and trading. For a devout Muslim instead, the rizq provided a high degree of security for a trip carrying goods and commodities. This one was a kind of relational trilogy, which went from God to the properties across the people who owned them. So, this Koranic risk would be constituted by the relationship between three things: God, people and their properties. The expansion of the Islam from the seventh century constitutes the historical context for the invention of risk. Soon the Arabs acquired the best knowledge of navigation and after the domination of the deserts, they could also dominate the Indian and Mediterranean Seas. This is a historical fact that we should retain because it will repeat later when other voyages and discoveries, such as Columbus’ voyages to the Americas, will expand the notion of risk to new territories, uses and meanings. The opening of routes in empty and unknown spaces like the sea raises an old problem: how we can give some content to the future? The rizq as an alternative to the myth or the divination for representing the future and with the support of new technical resources of navigation as the rose of the winds, the calculation of latitude, the compass and the books of navigation, projected the person with their properties towards the events to come. Thus, a merchant could go from a starting point to an arrival and across route thanks to this “provision” of God. We know that from the thirteenth century beyond the merchants and travelling traders settled in the ports and fair cities, and they stopped going from place to place with their goods. The caravans or the travelling trade gave way to a kind of business in which a sedentary merchant played the key role and managed their affairs from an office by means of correspondents, agents and partners to represent him in other places and countries. This change was part of a wider process such as the birth of mercantile capitalism, which included, among other things, the invention of the bill of exchange, the double-entry accounting and banking. New kinds of maritime contracts such as the Arab “quirad” or the Christian “commenda” appeared in the Mediterranean Sea so that all kinds of goods could be moved easily across the sea. On the other hand, this process brought a new separation between people and their goods and in such a way the triple relationship with God was broken. Here we can identify a first secularization of risk, something crucial in the history of this concept. All these circumstances caused a new relationship including a party replacing God so the risk became a matter of parties and was based on the trust in this new party. This virtue will remain for a long time in trade ­governed by the Islamic tradition. Whereas the transport of goods by sea was agreed on a contract, the risk could be distributed or be compensated, but in any case, both parties took care of losses or gains.41 Under this formula the risk involved the good and the bad, since the future could bring us both. A major change will occur with the invention of maritime insurances since now the risk specialized in the damage. The insurance

The Mediterranean origin of risk  17 policy, whose first documentary sample already preserved I mentioned earlier, is not ­governed by a formula of co-responsibility, but by payment of an amount of assurance that is lost whether there is any accident, loss or damage during transportation. The risk, now conceived as a contingency of damage, refers only to the accident or the loss, which implies that it is increasingly a negative concept. At the same time the insurance’s invention will make the risk more and more precise now in terms of a monetary calculation. Finally, the risk leaves definitively the realm of religion in which it was born to become a significant part of other activities that will be essential in the subsequent historical development of Europe: navigation and trade. In the same way that I have referred before to the future as the raw material of the Islamic rizq, now I do the same in the case of the risk as it appears in maritime contracts and insurance policies since its protection always extended to those events that were going to happen. This fact obviously means that the risk is an idea about the future and not a thing, object, or something factual. Unlike Luhmann who, when mentioning risk, claimed that “the history of the word itself does not give us alone any secure information thereon”,42 from my point of view is the history of the word itself which gives us a better interpretation of the concept. This is a line of research that seems to be more consistent and that also allows us to formulate conjectures, as I  have been doing until now, with a support on historical data. In all the examples, from the Koranic texts to a novel written at the end of the ­fifteenth century, that I have been describing, the risk always refers to something to happen or in other words, to something which does not exist yet, but it might exist. The existential problem that is faced by the concept of risk means to give entity to the non-existent and this is a task for culture thanks to narrative artifices conceived by experts be them theologians, sailors, merchants, financier and later on scientists, journalists, writers, film makers, activists or politicians, but this important issue will have to be raised gradually throughout the pages of this book.

Notes   1 Durkheim, E. – 1915 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. p. 21   2 Luhmann, N. – 1993 Risk: A Sociological Theory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. p. 9   3 Coromines, J. – 1961 Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos. pp. 481  4 “Cliff”   5 Corriente, F. – 1985 “Apostillas de lexicografía hispano-árabe”. Actas de las II Jornadas de Cultura Árabe e Islámica. Madrid. pp. 147–148 (Translated from Spanish)   6 Faugeres, L., Vasarhelyi, P., y Villain-Gandossi, C. – 1990 Le Risque et la Crise. European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences

18  The Mediterranean origin of risk   7 Epalza, M. – Ibid. (Translated from French)   8 Epalza, M. – Ibid. (Translated from French)  9 The Qur’an, With a Phrase-by-Phrase English Translation. (Translated by ‘Ali Quli Qara’i. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2006) 10 Ibn Arabi – 2007. The Book of Extinction in Contemplation. Translation and introduction of Andrés Guijarro. Malaga: Syrian Editorial. (Translated from Spanish) 11 Ambrose (340–397), Bishop of Milan, mentor of St. Augustine and one of the founding fathers of Christian orthodoxy, condemned maritime trading, as Paul Johnson writes in the History of Christianity: “the merchant who was shipwrecked it was deserved, because he had gone out to sea the greed-driven”. See Johnson, P. – 2004 History of Christianity. Barcelona: Vergara. pp. 1500 12 Epalza, M. 13 Epalza, M. 14 Hourani, G.F. – 1995 Arab Seafaring. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p.53. The voice “ghazw” originally referred to the battle that could extend the limits of Islam. The word “razzia” or raid is derived from this term, which was first used by the French who colonized North Africa 15 Hourani, A. – 1991 A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Beknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 84 16 Hourani, G.F. – 1995 Arab Seafaring. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 55 17 Hourani, G.F. Arab Seafaring 18 Hourani G.F. Arab Seafaring 19 De Epalza, M. – (ibid.) p. 68 20 Dhat al-Sawari was the first major naval battle in which the Arabs defeated the Byzantines and it took place in the year 655. Nevertheless, and though the Arabs were the warriors, the ships were moved and steered by Copts whose maritime tradition came from the Greeks and Byzantines 21 The qirad is: “Lend money to carry out a business and share the gains” 22 The Book of Sea Consulate. The Sea Consulates were the maritime courts that the Mediterranean commercial cities established to legislate about navigation and commerce. The first one was created in Trani (Italy) in 1063 and Barcelona’s in 1347 23 Transcript of: Pryor, J.H. – 1987 Commerce, Shipping and Naval Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean.Various Reprints. p. 136 Com algu comana lo seu a altre, que fe ha en ell, que si ell fe no havia en ell, no li comanaria o no li haguera comanat lo seu; per que es rao e egualtat que aquells, qui fan les comandes, hagen fe en aquells a qui fan les comandes ... Perque quascu s’ guart a qui comanara lo seu e aquí no, e com e com no (Catalan original) 24 Transcript of Pryor, J.H. – 1987 Commerce, Shipping and Naval Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean.Various Reprints. p. 148 To it take them [goods] the land of Sicily to Fortune [risk] of God and in accordance with the customs of the sea 25 Transcribed from Pryor, J. H. (ibid) pp. 148 However these goods must be at your peril 26 “The said ship shall sail the sea at my own risk and fortune in all events” 27 “At all your risk and fortune and peril” 28 Both words “periculum” and “fortunam” have an undeniable Latin etymology

The Mediterranean origin of risk  19 29 This issue will have to be discussed later in more detail 30 “But it is only worth what who commends receives, since he receives at use and custom of the sea and at risk of sea and bad people” 31 Boiteaux 32 Villain-Gandossi, C. – 1990; Golding, L.L. – 1927 33 This is an English version of the original document in Latin. Golding, L.L. – 1927 A History of Reinsurance with Sidelights on Insurance. London: Waterlow & Sons 34 The contract signed by Columbus and Queen Isabella of Castille in the so-called Capitulaciones de Santa Fé included a bottomry loan to finance his first voyage to the Americas 35 Villain-Gandossi, C. – Origines du concept of risque in Occident. Les risques maritimes ou mer et leur compensation fortune: les debuts of maritime l’assurance. 36 “Higher than a cliff”. 37 Real Academia Española: Banco de datos (CORDE) [en línea]. Corpus diacrónico del español. www.rae.es E ellos, desque bieron que no podian atraer a la reyna a su proposito, mudaron la rraçon. E la reyna encubriolo mucho al rey que lo non supiese, por guardar que no ubiese mayor riesgo entre ellos 38 “Y Jaco Galeote, que entre los otros capitanes más libremente a nuestro Duque osava fablar, le consejava se pusiese en salvo y a ellos, en cuya muerte no avía tanto peligro, dexase tomar el riesgo. Al cual el magnánimo Duque respondió que no trocaría tan onesta muerte” Real Academia Española: Banco de datos (CORDE) [en línea]. Corpus diacrónico del español. www.rae.es It is worth mentioning here how this document makes a difference between “peligro” or “danger” and “riesgo” or “risk”. We find out how the intensity makes the difference here 39 “E quando se partieron de Camalot, anduvieron tanto por sus jornadas que ­llegaron al mar e entraron en una nave; e dioles Dios tal tienpo tan próspero, que en pocos días entraron en la Pequeña Bretaña; e pasaron por la tierra del rey Ban de Venuit. E si non fuera Merlín con ellos, ovieran grand riesgo, ca entonces era la guerra tan grande entre el rey Ban de Venuit e el rey Claudes de la Desierta, que ninguno no osava por aı pasar seguro” Real Academia Española: Banco de datos (CORDE) [en línea]. Corpus diacrónico del español. www.rae.es 40 Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper 2001–2010 41 See the earlier mentioned document issued in Bruges in 1466: “resicq ou aventure de perte et de gain” 42 Luhmann, N. – 2006 Risk: A Sociological Theory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. p. 9

Bibliography Abulafia, D. 2011 The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press. Allama Syed Sulaiman Nadvi. 2007 The Arab Navigation. New Delhi: Adam ­Publishers and Distributors. Arabí, I. 2007 El libro de la extinción en la contemplación. Málaga: Editorial Sirio. (Traducción e introducción de Andrés Guijarro). Bernstein, P.L. 1996 Against the Gods: A Veritable Story of Risk. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Boiteaux, L.A. 1968 Le Fortune de mer, le besoin de Securité et les debuts de l’assurance maritime. Paris: École practique des Hautes Études.

20  The Mediterranean origin of risk Bork, R. & Kahn, A. (eds.) 1998 The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Trade. London: Ashgate. Braudel, F. 1996 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 Volumes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Braudel, F. 2002 The Mediterranean in the Ancient World. London: Penguin Books. Burkhardt, T. 1997 Moorish Culture in Spain. Lahore: Suhail Academy. Coromines, J. 1993 Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano-Hispánico (6 volumes) Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Corriente Córdoba, F. 1995 Diccionario árabe-español. Barcelona: Herder. Cruz Hernández, D. 1981 Historia del pensamiento árabe. Desde sus orígenes hasta el siglo XII. Madrid: Alianza Universidad. Durkheim, É. 1965 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Epalza, M. de. 1990 “Origines du concept de risqué: de l’ Islam à l’ Occident”. In Le risque et la crisis. European Coordination Centre for Reserch and Documentation in Social Sciences. pp. 73–70. Escohotado, A. 2008 Los enemigos del comercio. Historia de las ideas sobre la propiedad privada. Madrid: Espasa. Esteva, J. 2006 Los árabes del mar. Barcelona: Península. Faber-Kaiser, M. 1976 Historia de la navegación. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. Faugeres, L., Vasarhelyi, P. y Villain-Gandossi, C. 1990 Le Risque et la Crise. European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences. Fernandez-Armesto, F. Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Golding, C.E. 1927 A History of Reinsurance and Sidelights on Insurance. London: Waterlow and Sons Ltd. Hourani, A. 1991. A History of the Arab peoples. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hourani, G.F. 1995 Arab Seafaring: In the Indian Ocean in Ancient Times and Early Medieval Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, P. 2004 Historia del Cristianismo. Barcelona: Vergara. Lewis, A.R. 1985 European Naval and Maritime History, 300–1500. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lyons, J. 2009 The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. London: Bloomsbury Press. Makrypoulias, C.G. 1998 Sailing ships of the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Athens: KUWAIT – F.A.S. Mubarak, Z.M.A. 2005 Compendio del Tafsir del Corán “Al-Qurtubi”. Granada: Comunidad Musulmana de la mezquita del Temor de Allah. Parry, J.H. 1974 The Discovery of the Sea. New York: The Dial Press. Pryor, J.H. 1988 Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Pryor, J.H. 1987 Commerce, Shipping and Naval Warfare in Medieval Mediterranean. London: Variorum Reprints. Pujades, R.J. 2007 Les cartes portololanes. La representació medieval d’una mar solcada. Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya. Ringgreen, H. 1955 Studies in Arabian Fatalism. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift. Rooverler, D. (ed.) 1945 “Early examples of marine insurances”. The Journal of Economic History. Vol. 5. No. 2 (November 1945) pp. 172–200.

The Mediterranean origin of risk  21 Tibbets G.R. 1971 Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the ­Portuguese. London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Udovitch, A. 1970 Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Villain-Gandossi, C. 1990 “Risques maritimes et leur compensantion: les debuts de l’assurance maritime”. In Le risque et la crisis. European Coordination Centre for Reserch and Documentation in Social Sciences. pp. 71–85.

2 The conquest of the ocean

At the end of the fifteenth century, when risk had become a term in fairly widespread use in Mediterranean navigation, it experienced a new expansion. We should see this new development – the voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to a new continent – as a continuation of earlier historical episodes such as the Arab-Islamic expansion and the activities of the commercial cities of the Mediterranean Sea. The concept of risk was a common thread throughout these new advances. Again, some who were eager to go beyond what then was considered the “known world” launched onto the open sea. We will go first to the fifteenth-century Portuguese and Castilians’ maritime activities in the Atlantic, particularly the discovery, conquest and occupation of the Canary, Madeira and Azores Islands. This was a new sea; but even in this scenario, the knowledge, skills and tools to navigate – though not the ships – were similar to those used in the Mediterranean, again meeting the challenge of travel across a large, unknown and empty space. Portugal and Spain were the first European kingdoms to expand thanks to oceanic navigation. Castile began its conquest and occupation of the Canary Islands in 1402; Portugal conquered the city of Ceuta in 1415 and continued with the colonization of Madeira in 1418 and the Azores in 1427. In 1434, the Portuguese shipped out of Cape Bojador to surpass what until then had been the southern Atlantic route. In 1441 the Portuguese first used the “caravel” – a type of vessel developed from those already used in northern Europe – giving rise to the capture of slaves on the African coast. In 1475, the Portuguese discovered a new route to return from the Gulf of Guinea to the Iberian Peninsula, which they called “Volta da Mina”. This route, Céspedes1 argues, foreshadowed the crossing to the Americas, since it penetrated so far into the Atlantic Ocean that any ship that sailed off course could easily be swept by winds and streams to arrive at the coast of Brazil. In fact, Céspedes suggests that a Portuguese or Andalusian ship made this trip back and forth, possibly providing Columbus with some information from its travels. Christopher Columbus is no doubt the most outstanding figure in the episode that takes us from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Very much an interstitial character in the discovery of a new world and also

The conquest of the ocean  23 in the definition of a new era, he still kept his own world firmly rooted in medieval Europe. This is a perspective admirably developed by Valerie Flint in her Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus,2 where she inquires less into the new world that Columbus discovered and more about the old world to which he belonged and which, at least mentally, he never left. Nevertheless, he had also adopted some positive ideas that set him apart from a common medieval fatalism. In that Columbus was born and educated in the second half of the fifteenth century, obviously his mental world was medieval, or late medieval at least. Yet some of his ideas break across such arbitrary frontiers. Columbus’ fierce belief in the providence of God, for instance, and his insistence upon looking only at the positive sides of apparent disasters, have many modern echoes, political, religious, psychiatric – and economic.3 My interest is to highlight this confluence of ideas on which Valerie Flint reflects and, above all, this positive view of disasters. Columbus’ life and projects were directly related to the risk inherent in the great enterprises to which he was committed, and in which the probability of major disasters was very high. A “fierce belief in the providence of God” – as Valerie Flint writes – was the seventh-century Arabs’ way of facing up to a long journey. As mentioned previously, they called it rizq. Therefore, we can interpret that Colon’s mind or even his culture included such concepts. In the seventh century, the travellers who crossed the Arabian or North African deserts ventured into the unknown, considering themselves protected by God: as they were good believers, God gave them good fortune for themselves and their property. Columbus saw the positive aspect of the disasters because of his faith in God. We can say that for centuries religion moved travellers, traders and medieval sailors to open new routes, as long as we recognize that this religion, Islamic, Jewish or Christian, included a good deal of rationality, science and commerce. Religion and science had not yet reached a rupture, and the final breaking-off point would not take place in Europe until the seventeenth century. Columbus was a faithful man, but at the same time, he sailed ships as innovative as the caravel and the “nao”; he was skilled in the art of sailing and the calculation of courses using the compass and the astrolabe; he had extensive knowledge of cosmography that allowed him to use maps like Toscanelli’s; and he understood the principles of Ptolemaic geography. Columbus exemplified extraordinarily this combination of faith and knowledge in a similar way to the Arabs when they expanded Islam. The very notion of risk and the oceanic navigation, the closest context in which it was used at this time, must be related to other, wider contexts. I will now describe the most relevant of these contexts.

The Atlantic expansion The Mediterranean Sea is like a huge lake in which the distances are, by today’s standards, relatively short. It was not exactly like that for ancient peoples.

24  The conquest of the ocean Since their capabilities for navigation were limited, they often practiced coastal shipping. Nevertheless, some historians tell us of Phoenician and Greek incursions beyond the Strait of Gibraltar in search of the gold of the African coast or the tin of Britain. The Roman Empire came to occupy almost the entire Mediterranean shore and could call it “mare nostrum” – although this domain was more terrestrial than maritime, since the Romans could never stop piracy. In the late Middle Ages, the need emerged to leave this “lake”. The southern Europe that dominated trade with the east required new connections with Northern Europe and its great fairs, ­ commercial cities such as those making up the Hanseatic League and rich territories such as Flanders or Burgundy. In the fourteenth century, some Genoese, Catalan and Majorcan navigators adventured beyond the Mediterranean. There is evidence of a first expedition in 1291, but little more is known until 1312 when a trading post was temporarily established on the island of Lanzarote. On one of these trips, in 1330, the islands of Madeira were sighted for the first time. These maritime activities ceased in 1389, when the Genoese and Catalan navigators found the new commercial activities unprofitable, as they were accruing more losses than benefits and had established that their ships were unsuitable for sailing the Atlantic. In fact, their galleys were appropriate only for short trips and irregular winds. In northern Europe, the typical ship was provided with a rounded hull, which was more resistant to a rough sea and able to transport heavier cargoes. The “Reconquista” of the Iberian Peninsula culminated with the capture of Granada in 1492, the same year in which Columbus completed his first voyage to America. This long reconquest had divided the Peninsula territory in such a way that most of its Mediterranean coast belonged to the crown of Aragon, which had become a powerful Mediterranean maritime kingdom, while the Atlantic coasts were under the control of Portugal and Castile. Thus, it is not surprising that the first Romance version surviving from the medieval Latin risicum was the Catalan risc dating back to 1323, and that in Spanish or Castilian the term “risk”, in the sense of contingency or damage, does not appear until the end of the fifteenth century. Castile and Portugal barely participated in Mediterranean navigation, and they did not undertake great maritime expeditions until the early fifteenth century. All of them were bound to the Atlantic, as this was their sea. There was no continuity of actors in the transition from Mediterranean to Atlantic navigation, since neither the Arabs, Byzantines, Venetians, Genoese or Catalans, who at one time or another had dominated the Mediterranean Sea, participated in it. However, the maritime, geographic and commercial knowledge and even some of the main figures in this great adventure such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) or Verranzano came from the Mediterranean. The year 1415 is usually recognized as a starting point for Portugal’s Atlantic expansion; it corresponds to the capture of Ceuta, a city on the North African coast, just opposite Gibraltar and now belonging to Spain.

The conquest of the ocean  25 Fifty thousand soldiers and 200 ships participated in this conquest. These numbers, although they may be a little exaggerated, allow us to realize its importance. The expansive ambition of the Portuguese monarchy must be understood in the context of the Iberian Peninsula “Reconquista”, which Portugal had concluded in 1249 with the occupation of the Algarve. Both the king and the Portuguese nobility desired to acquire wealth thanks to this territorial expansion, which had its justification in the spirit of a new crusade against the Moors of North Africa. The city of Ceuta was a very strategic point for the control of the Mediterranean and, on the other hand, a good base for the Atlantic southern navigation following the African coast. The Portuguese thus surpassed Cape Bojador in 1432 and reached the Gulf of Guinea in Sao Tome in 1475. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, and Vasco de Gama arrived in India in 1497 in the first voyage that connected the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Portuguese found in their Atlantic routes trade winds and streams like the Gulf’s, which would later be so decisive for the voyage to America. During these voyages, the ­Portuguese occupied the already inhabited islands of Madeira in 1418 and Azores in 1427, thus establishing their first Atlantic possessions. In the fifteenth century, the kingdom of Castile was immersed in the final part of the “reconquista”. A long struggle resulted in the conquest of the last remaining Arab territory in the Peninsula, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. However, this military activity did not delay Castile’s own Atlantic expansion, which began with a 1402 occupation and subsequent conquest of the Canary Islands. This archipelago was at that time inhabited by an indigenous population, the Guanche, which had emigrated from Africa. A bloody war of several decades ended with the submission of the original peoples of the seven islands, who either mixed with Castilian and Andalusian immigrants or were exterminated. Some historians, like Céspedes, have pointed out that the conquest of the Canary Islands was a foretaste of later events in America. Under all these circumstances, intense competition began between the two Atlantic kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, both committed to controlling new trade routes and dominating newly discovered remote territories. The first scenario in this confrontation between Portugal and Castile was the west coast of Africa. Although the Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to arrive there, the Castilian ships soon joined in the capture and trade of slaves. Portugal claimed before the Pope, a traditional mediator for the Christian kingdoms, who in 1455 decided in favor of the Portuguese dominion over all territories South of Cape Bojador. Nevertheless, the Castilians continued sailing to the Gulf of Guinea in search of slaves. This maritime struggle was but a new chapter in the secular dispute that both kingdoms had maintained since the eleventh century. Thus, the three most powerful peninsular kingdoms were engaged in great adventures: Portugal in the Atlantic, Castile was fighting against the moors of Granada and Aragon in the Mediterranean, but at the same time,

26  The conquest of the ocean they shared a common interest in the unification of Spain. Castile, due to its geographical situation, had to be a part of any possible unification; but whether its partner would be Portugal or Aragon would be solved by inheritance – the three dynasties were closely related by kinship – or marriage. In the end, the marriage between Isabella, heiress of Castile, and ­Ferdinand, future king of Aragon, determined the final solution with a dynastic union in which the Spanish monarchy was born. The proclamation of Queen Isabella of Castile in 1473 triggered a war. King Alfonso V of Portugal invaded Castile to claim the throne for Juana (called “Beltraneja”), daughter of Isabella’s brother, King Enrique IV of Castile. The two armies clashed in 1476 at the battle of Toro, and the Portuguese army was defeated. Thus, the maritime competition between the two kingdoms paradoxically resolved in a great ground battle. Ultimately, the resulting treaty of Alcáçovas (1479) sealed an agreement. The Portuguese king waived any claim to the crown of Castile, and Castile recognized the Portuguese’s exclusive domain of the Atlantic, with the sole exception of the Canary Islands. Thereafter, Castilian navigators could no longer sail the south Atlantic Ocean and would be excluded from the route to the Indies. The consequences of this treaty were decisive in 1492, making possible Columbus’s first voyage to America. By the fifteenth century Portugal and Castile fought for control of an ocean that seemed a highway leading to new lands and great wealth. What kinds of interests drove these innovative and sometimes risky activities? Prince Enrique of Portugal, the so-called Navigator, is a good example. The third son of King Juan II of Portugal, he was the true architect of the first ­Portuguese discoveries. John R. Hale’s Age of Exploration tells of the capture of Ceuta in 1415 as the starting point for this great expansion. Prince Enrique then communicated with its merchants, who provided him with valuable information about the gold routes crossing the Sahara Desert. In his imagination – similar to that of other learned people at the time – these routes led to a distant country of legend ruled by a prince who maintained a Christian kingdom surrounded by infidels and pagans. This was the legend of Prester John and this legendary kingdom was often identified with Ethiopia. Prince Enrique the Navigator, as John R. Hale explains, proposed the following: to trace the source of the trade in gold, ivory, slaves and pepper, and to get in touch with Prester John, with whom he hoped to plan a crusade that would clear the Moslems from North Africa and the Holy Land once and for all. To achieve these ends, Henry established at Sagres, on the Portuguese coast, a community of scholars dedicated to geographical studies. The knowledge they accumulated was to be transmitted to the captains of his expedition.4 The figure of this Prince is paradigmatic if we want to understand the geostrategic, if we may call them so, interests supported by the two Peninsular

The conquest of the ocean  27 kingdoms. For both Portugal and Castile, the appropriation of wealth was essential to maintain their expansion after the victories obtained in their wars with the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. They needed new enterprises to strengthen their monarchies against the ambitions of the nobility. The gold in Europe was a scarce commodity that came mostly from Africa; ivory was a precious material for the manufacture of religious objects; the slave markets, as those of Seville and Lisbon, had already gained some importance; and spices were a very valued commodity for the flavoring and preservation of food. By the fifteenth century, wealth was identified in Europe with these products that came from distant places beyond the sea in caravan routes crossing territories that were not part of Christianity. The access to these riches across the sea became a primary objective for the new Atlantic maritime powers. For Portugal, the first round of Africa and the arrival in India had to be the main goal, supported by some religious motivations as well; they met this objective in 1497 thanks to Vasco de Gama’s expedition. The ideal of the Crusades was still alive, and these expeditions were also conceived to take possession of new territories where Christianity could be implanted. The existence of Prester John’s Kingdom was then beyond doubt, and it had become an ideal of a crusade combining the eagerness of conquest and enrichment. A sense of Portuguese geography is also essential to understanding Atlantic expansion. Portugal is something like an Atlantic screen whose southern coast looks towards the entrance of the Mediterranean. This feature historically allowed Portugal to connect the Mediterranean and Atlantic maritime traditions, taking advantage of all their benefits. This very strategic location, on the edge of what was then considered as the “known world”, also held another huge advantage for Portugal: its relative proximity to areas for discovery, such as the African coast or the Atlantic archipelagos. Therefore, enormous resources, which Portugal lacked, were not required to fund the progressive expansion that led the Lusitanian ships from Ceuta in North Africa to the Cape of Good Hope in the South in less than a century. As Isabel Soler writes in his book El nudo y la esfera: These early departures from known space, using the rudimentary elements available then, were appropriate for the exploration of the African coast. At the same time, the design of small and light ships was improved allowing the navigators to learn from the very experience of the voyage.5 (Translated from the Spanish) The Portuguese, as we have already seen through the figure of Enrique the  Navigator, oriented their Renaissance towards maritime science and ­technology, developing astronomical observation, cartography, techniques of navigation and naval engineering. All of these factors ultimately contributed

28  The conquest of the ocean to a distinctly Portuguese period of Atlantic expansion in which most of the necessary elements were developed, including some information about Atlantic navigation to the West. The fact that Columbus’ voyages were carried out on behalf of Castile instead of Portugal was due, as it is well known, to circumstantial causes and the treaty of Alcaçovas, which allowed the Castilians to sail westward from the Canary Islands. I have mentioned that the Canary Islands’ conquest by the Kingdom of Castile anticipated what would happen later on the American continent, providing something like a model. It is also worth mentioning that this archipelago became the great platform for the Spanish transoceanic navigation that would be called “Carrera de las Indias”. The trade winds that blow from the Canary Islands easily carried Columbus to the Caribbean in his first voyage; since then, Spanish vessels have used them like a highway to traverse the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, another fact that is seldom mentioned refers to the encounter between a few navigators and conquerors, the Castilians, and the native Guanche population. In The Discovery of Mankind, David Abulafia stresses that this was the first encounter between Europeans and a population that was practicing a Neolithic way of life. Such encounters would be replicated in many other places all around the world, for example in the Caribbean, the first American region in which this kind of encounter took place again. Just as in the Canary Islands, this conquest ultimately resulted in the absorption and extermination of the native population.

The ocean conquest If the treaty of Alcáçovas signed by Portugal and Castile in 1479 would have great significance in shaping the modern world, another seemingly inconsequential fact, which had taken place some decades earlier, would not be far behind. In 1397, Manuel Chrysorolas arrived in Florence from Constantinople, bringing a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia. Ptolemy lived in Alexandria in the second century; some of his astronomical works such as the Almagesto had already been translated by the Arabs and were known in their Latin version in Europe. Nevertheless, the Geographia was, except for some very old references, all but unknown. Chrysorolas’ Geographia was written in Greek, and its Latin translation was not completed until 1409. This copy included a world map and twenty-six regional maps, with crucial importance for the future of navigation. The interest in geography goes back to the early humanists like Petrarch (1304–1374), whose aim was mainly the correct location of classical place names. The works available, including Pliny’s Natural History and Pomponio Mela’s Cosmographia, were not provided with maps. The “mappaemundi”, some of them as old as the Hispanic Beatus of Girona from the tenth century, and the maritime charts were more historical accounts or theological illustrations than real maps. The oldest maritime chart known today,

The conquest of the ocean  29 the chart of Pisa (1275), has a grid; but its function and utility are far from clear. The geography of the classical world reached its highest level with Ptolemy’s Geographia, applying science – mainly Euclidean geometry – to mapping and solving a problem of such importance as the projection of a spherical body onto a plane surface. This was a real novelty for the European medieval cartography, since although the maps and sea charts at that time could detail small regions fairly well, they were unable to represent the huge extensions that commercial or exploration vessels were navigating, or the long voyage to the Indies that would be completed by Vasco de Gama in 1497. In The World Map, 1300–1492, Evelyn Edson places this new cartographic challenge in the Atlantic navigation that the Portuguese and Castilian were initiating at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The sea charts of the late Middle Charts (sic) were “projectionless”, that is, the chart makers did not consciously take into account the earth’s curve, though plotting courses by the compass naturally led meridians to converge at the magnetic pole. While such a method was good enough for smaller areas, it had already begun to result in inaccuracies in a body the length of the Mediterranean Sea. Once the Europeans began to move south along the African coast, it became clear that a new method was required, particularly if a world map was to be constructed using a single system.6 Ptolemy proposed three solutions to implement the idea that the sphere provided a much better representation of the earth’s surface: a conical projection, another called pseudo-conical and a third, rarely used, that was based on the armillary sphere. Ptolemy’s solutions were the foundation of cartography for centuries, and the differences between medieval “mappaemundi”, and the maps of the new cartographic science were enormous. Unlike the mappaemundi, Ptolemy’s maps were just maps, not histories, and were devoted to depicting space, not the idiosyncrasies of place.7 It is worth reflecting on this fact, which confronts us with the same challenge that mankind has faced throughout history when new empty spaces must be dominated. Previously, I have stopped to consider the Arabs’ expansion in the Mediterranean Sea and the commercial traffic of the maritime cities of southern Europe. I have situated the invention of risk in this historical context, and I have considered it a concept related to the future, based on some knowledge that was first theological but then legal and maritime. This knowledge was structured in terms of a relationship between “objects of” and “objects at” risk, and it always expressed a probability. So, all these properties of future, knowledge, relationship and probability

30  The conquest of the ocean were revealed in the narrative. It is at this point where the assertion of Evelyn Edson that I have just mentioned turns out to be very revealing. The Medieval maps were mostly stories, later reflected in the outline of the coast and the images that identified the places according to the narratives that corresponded with them. Using this basic knowledge, the cartographic workshops working with great success in Venice, Pisa or Mallorca, among other places, provided sailors with portolans or detailed maps at an affordable price. They also performed much more elaborate works, with many illustrations and at higher prices, for elites and sometimes even for kings. A well-known example is that of the Cresques, a family of Jews from Majorca. Abraham Cresques was the author of the famous Atlas Catalán in 1375, a present from the King of Aragon to the King of France that is now in the National Library of France. The late medieval maritime trade in the Mediterranean Sea used the concept of risk and its monetary calculation for the formalization of marine insurances, but as it was increasing its volume and impact, it needed a base of knowledge that was less actuarial, and more geographical. The experiential knowledge transmitted by many sailors inspired the narratives and, finally, all this accumulated information served to depict the cartographic representations of the coast that these medieval maps ­contained. Middle Age cartographers could capture and represent details with a richness of information that was of great value for Mediterranean navigation. This first narrative of risk was already experiencing a transformation, acquiring more standardized forms of representation such that the maps could be commercialized and distributed widely. In fact, they were not scarce or extremely valuable – as was the case for the luxurious ones – but rather common objects circulating all around the Mediterranean ports. By the fifteenth century, a renewed interest in cosmography was developing among erudite ecclesiastics, for whom the arrival of Ptolemy’s Geographia to Florence was a very important event. That was quite evident to the Council of Constanza, which met in 1414 at the behest of Emperor Sigismund. The exchange of information and manuscripts was particularly significant in these meetings in which all of Christianity congregated. Geographia was the first such manuscript, followed by Pomponius Mela’s Corographia. Cardinal Gillaume Fillastre, Archbishop of Reims, attended this Council and would soon order two copies of the Geographia and another of the Corographia. Fillastre added his own notes, updating place names and writing an introductory essay that is of great help for understanding the enthusiastic reception of these works among the scholars of fifteenth century Europe. These works showed the critical perspective taken by an increasingly abstract and complex cosmographic thinking – a type of thinking exemplified by Christopher Columbus. Looking at Fillastre’s commentary, we can see that the initial reception of classical geography among the humanists was enthusiastic but not

The conquest of the ocean  31 without a critical sense. For one thing, the two ancient authors did not agree. While Ptolemy showed a landlocked Indian Ocean, Mela argued that it was a gulf of the world ocean and that one could enter by sailing around Africa. Similarly, Mela asserted that the Caspian Sea was a bay of northern ocean, while in Ptolemy’s description it was landlocked. Fillastre used the Bible as the deciding authority, for Genesis I:9–10 says that all the waters of the earth were congregated into one. He felt this proved that all large bodies of water were connected, and so both the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean had to be gulfs of the great world ocean.8 This synthesis by Evelyn Edson illustrates an argument that would later emerge as one of Columbus’ main ideas: the confluence of science and religion. For Cardinal Fillastre, the Bible was still a vital source of geographic knowledge. In addition, two other principles that would be crucial to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ geographical discoveries were critically compared by Fillastre. First, the principle of the continuity of the seas and the belief that they could serve as routes of exploration towards distant horizons was an idea that nurtured Columbus’ project to sail to India across the Atlantic Ocean. Second, Fillastre argued that the entire earth was inhabitable: if God had created it for mankind, no part could exist without a human presence. The Bishop of Cambrai, Pierre d’Ailly – author of Imago Mundi, a compendium of the geographic knowledge accumulated in the West before the emergence of Ptolemy’s Geographia – was also present in the Council of Constanze. D’Ailly completed this cosmographic treatise in 1410; we know that Columbus possessed an annotated copy in which the reference to the narrowness of the sea that separated the western end of the habitable world from its eastern limit was particularly emphasized. Certainly, Pierre D’Ailly’s cosmographic treatise contained numerous errors; but nevertheless, it offered more global and abstract principles, something that would be essential for the progress of cartography and navigation. A new Council gathered in Florence in 1439, where the humanistic geographers such as Paolo Toscanelli, Leonardo Bruni and Giorgio Vespucci (uncle of Amerigo Vespucci) met periodically. The connections between this group and the Medici family, large traders and Florentine bankers, were very close. Cosme Medici himself contributed to finance new editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia. Thus, the theoretical knowledge of the new ­cosmographers was closely related to the interests of great merchants who expected to exploit new routes and obtain more wealth. This Council gathered under very special circumstances. The Turkish threat to Byzantium was enormous, and Emperor John Paleologo was in need of the Catholic kingdoms’ military support. A rapprochement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches was necessary, with a view to their reunification. It was with this objective that the Council met in Florence,

32  The conquest of the ocean attended by representatives of almost all the Christian churches around the world; among them was the Coptic Church of Ethiopia. These Ethiopians were considered a sensational novelty, since Ethiopia was well outside of what the Europeans then considered the known world. Sometimes, Ethiopia was identified with the legend of Prester John’s kingdom. The papal delegates not only conversed with this Ethiopian representation about theological issues, they also inquired about geography or climate – asking them about the visible stars in their homeland, the length of days and nights and even the sources of the Nile River. At the same time, the recent news of the ­Portuguese discoveries along the African Atlantic coast arrived quickly at the Council, which also knew that the Portuguese had surpassed Cape Bojador in 1434. This new atmosphere of erudite cosmographers had an enormous influence as the fifteenth century Renaissance humanism spread throughout Italy, showing a significant change in the understanding of the ocean as a huge empty space. This intellectual movement took mapping from a situation in which a coastline could be depicted in detail thanks to the stories of sailors who knew it, to a representation of the known world as a total space contained on a map. This fundamental shift was based in a new conception of the open extension, something abstract and endless, as a space in which the land and a ship could be situated. Ptolemy’s contribution was decisive to introducing the principles of the astronomic navigation, which permitted one to establish a position by observing the latitude though not yet the longitude. Thus, astronomical navigation, although it did not entirely replace traditional navigation, began to be used at the end of the fifteenth century. Ptolemy’s influence was also significant in changing the prevalent ideas about the shape of the Earth. The spherical theory was rooted in antiquity; Aristotle himself had proven it by observing the Earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse. In the third century bc, Erastotenes had already proposed determining the Earth’s circumference by measuring a degree of latitude; Hipparchus, in the second century bc, was the first to fix a position. Later, the fathers of the Church condemned severely the spherical idea, insisting that the Earth had a flat surface. The idea of the antipodes was then ­considered as nonsense. However, the introduction of Ptolemy’s ideas in Europe beginning in 1410 returned some influence to the spherical ideas, if only among the restricted circles of scholars with an open mind. In any case, it is not difficult to understand how Columbus himself, thanks to his travels and readings, could participate in this select minority. Evelyn Edson summarizes again the role played by Ptolemy’s ideas on the oceanic navigation that was then at its starting point: Ptolemy’s work was a model of how a universal map based on precise measurement could be made, and he lent his venerable authority to such a project.9

The conquest of the ocean  33 The medieval Mediterranean navigation experienced two advances of ­decisive importance to developing a concept of risk. First, the so-called “portolans” charts codified the accumulated stories of many navigators graphically and narratively. The work of fourteenth-century Mediterranean cartographic workshops made possible the production of early world maps. Such maps already embodied a significant geographical achievement and were quite rich with iconographic representations; but they were limited in their ability to represent large spaces. It was only in the fifteenth century, with the recovery of classical geography thanks to the introduction in Europe of ancient texts such as Ptolemy’s Geographia, that geography could progress in producing more abstract, scientific and global maps. The passage from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic navigation was in need of new ships. For centuries, the galley had been the Mediterranean ship par excellence. It was outwardly characterized by banks of oars supplemented by an auxiliary sail to take advantage of the irregular and sometimes scarce Mediterranean winds. The hull was of a short draught and suitable to circumvent the bottom of a shallow sea as well as coastal navigation requiring brief trips and frequent entrances and exits from ports. In contrast, this galley was not useful for rough seas and prolonged voyages. Its hull did not hold up well to the pressures of an ocean storm, and its small carrying capacity was not profitable for such long voyages. Clearly, the Atlantic adventure required another ship that could offer some advantages over the Mediterranean galley. In the North Sea, the typical ship was the so-called “kogge”, known in Spain as the “coca” and “cog” in England. Used heavily by the Hanseatic League, these vessels were usually represented on the seals of its allied cities, providing us with a history of their characteristics and evolution. The oldest one we know is from 1242, corresponding to the city of Elbing. This kind of ship, as many others in the history of sailing, derived from an older type similar to the Scandinavian “Drakkar” or “Knorr” ships, but with a higher freeboard and a larger draught, being more a merchant vessel than a warship. By the thirteenth century, the Northern cogs had introduced several technical innovations. The rudder was located astern and not aside – or, using marine language, the stern rudder replaced the skull. Later, the Mediterranean ships adopted this change, too. The bowsprit or inclined mast was placed on the bow in a way that is still used in sailing today. Finally, two adorned ­superstructures, or castles, which did not form part of the hull, were attached on both the bow and the stern. Of course, this vessel had no oars, and it navigated by sailing, making it much more maneuverable and allowing more cargo to be carried with a smaller crew. The shape of the hull represented a substantial difference between the navigation in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The clinker-built was the best hull for transoceanic navigation, though Mediterranean sailors continued to use boats with short draught hulls and built by joints with edge against edge. It was obvious that the Oceanic adventure needed a new ship.

34  The conquest of the ocean The hull is undoubtedly the predominant feature in making a comparison between the prototypes of Mediterranean and Atlantic ships. John Pryor, a specialist in maritime history, writes about both boats: At the same time, the particular technological limitations of galleys encouraged them also to navigate by the coastal routes: particularly their lack of freeboard and susceptibility to being swamped (discussed in greater detail below in relation to war galleys), their inadequate space in hold for stowing provisions and water, necessitating frequent ports of call to resupply, and their own upwind performance limitations.10 However, Pryor also describes the cog, which navigated the Mediterranean Sea from the fourteenth century and would later give way to the nao. A Spanish miniature of c.1350 showed clearly the original form of the cog. Even in this simple form with a single mast and square sail, the cog plainly had some desirable features by comparison to traditional Mediterranean ships. Its hull was remarkably capacious for its size, its sternpost rudder offered some advantages, the cutwater formed by its straight stempost and sternpost should have reduced considerable leeway, and its square sail was undoubtedly easier to handle than the lateen sails of thirteenth-century Mediterranean round ships.11 The nao, successor to the cog, was the ship that would undertake the Atlantic exploration. The Portuguese had employed it in 1432 for their African adventures; together with the caravel and the hulk or carraca, they formed the fleets for the oceanic explorations of the Portuguese and Castilians. As is well known, Columbus sailed to America for the first time with a small fleet of a nao and two caravels; Juan Sebastián Elcano’s nao, the Victoria, completed the first voyage around the world in 1522. Compared with the cog, the nao had a higher freeboard, three masts with square sails, and bow and stern castles; it could displace between 100 and 500 tons. Certainly, its cargo capacity was much larger than those of other ships that sailed the Mediterranean Sea. The caravel had a lower freeboard, lateen sails and no castle on bow. Being smaller than the nao, however, it was more maneuverable. The hulk or carraca had been developed by the Portuguese as a large cargo ship, and it was in fact the largest ship at that time. By the fifteenth century it could displace between 200 and 600 tons, and in the sixteenth up to 2,000. The Portuguese used it in their long voyages to the far East and, especially in the second half of the sixteenth century, to Japan. However, this kind of ship was less maneuverable and more vulnerable to storms. The transoceanic vessel used from the second half of the fifteenth century, and with many improvements in the sixteenth century, was undoubtedly “the most complex machine of the epoch”. So it is called by Pérez-Mallaina when he describes its content:

The conquest of the ocean  35 A multidecked ship in the sixteenth century formed a floating collection of the incredible successes achieved by human ingenuity to that time. Precisely because it had to conquer the immense desolate oceans and be subject to their menacing isolation, it constituted a small universe endowed with the highest possible degree of self-sufficiency. Ships that left Iberian ports tor the East and West Indies were veritable showcases of the technological developments of western Europe.12 Complexity does not refer here to the vessel as such – the design itself was not more advanced than other ships of the time, for example those used by the Chinese – but rather to its content and how all its different parts relate. There is a certain parallel with today’s warships, because of the extreme complexity of their electronic equipment. The sixteenth-century oceanic ship was – as Pérez-Mallaina calls it, a “machine of machines”: and was filled with devices of very diverse type. Hundreds of sets of pulleys served to raise the yards and the sails (...) the capstan served to move great weights (...). Another vital mechanism was the transmission system that allowed the helm to shift the rudder from port to starboard without requiring the helmsman to move out of sight of the compass (...). In the space between decks dozens of cannons were lined up, representing the most powerful war machines of their time (...). In the belly of the ship the bilge pumps worked continually (...). Finally, and not to draw this discussion out excessively, were the precision instruments that the pilot used: the astrolabe, the quadrant, and the cross-staff....13 A ship in the Carrera de las Indias had to carry a large number of products and materials, whose control and operation required a variety of professional skills. A ship was in the first place, a warehouse of merchandise that had to be loaded and unloaded. But it was a mobile warehouse that had to be steered across the ocean. En route, it had to guard against the dangers not only of nature but also of men, and on many occasions the ship had to convert itself into a castle for defense or attack. The men who crewed these warehouse-vehicle-fortresses had to perform very different tasks.14 (Translated from Spanish) This “complexity” of the machine demanded an expansion of the notion of risk or, as indicated in this paragraph, of “dangers”. It was not only the goods transported that were “at risk”, but the ship now conceived as a “complex whole”. If we consider the techniques of shipbuilding, both the Chinese and the Arabs could have dominated long-distance oceanic navigation; but they did

36  The conquest of the ocean not because, as H.J. Parry tells us, none of them “discovered the sea”.15 However, Parry wonders why the Europeans did it if this fact could not be explained by their ships’ quality. A seaman who intends more than a local passage, who proposes to sail to a destination which he cannot see from his point of departure, needs in addition to a reliable vessel, a means of finding his way.16 The sailors were defined by the experiences they amassed; these experiences were related to a littoral, to the reefs and cliffs, to the winds and calms, to the currents and tides, and finally to any relevant feature of navigation. The sailor was a storyteller, and his stories could transcend and be represented in the nautical charts that served as a knowledge-based guide for the pilot. Thus, pilotage is, according to Parry: a matter of constant observation of visible marks, related at every stage of the passage either to the observer’s own memory or to the memory of others recorded.17 Beyond the sailors, there were navigators whose intention was to travel across the open sea, using their imagination to, for instance, travel from one island to another. They knew that their destination was there, since others had reached it before them, but they could not see it and therefore had to rely on navigation which, in accordance with Parry, is “the art of taking ships to one place to another out of sight of land”. We have already seen how this “art” made great advances in the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, thanks to technical improvements brought by the Arabs from the Far East. Nevertheless, the explorer went beyond, since he ought to make a greater effort of imagination. He could bear in mind the idea of an uncertain destiny, suggested by a rumor or a tradition, but he never took to the sea at random or just to see what he could find. Now, navigation was possible thanks to the theoretical nature of a knowledge that preceded the action of navigating. On the other hand, this explorer used instruments of calculation and charting course, which were indispensable. Some books and treatises of navigation of the time show us the differences among various kinds of seamen – for example, the Breve compendio de la sphera y de la Arte de Navegar. Written in 1545 by Martín Cortés, an Aragonese ­cosmographer, this text was published in Seville in 1551. Long considered the best treatise of navigation, it was translated into several languages and, following successive editions, reached a huge dissemination in Europe. For Cortés, navigation meant “walking on water from one place to another”, even if the paths of the sea were “fluid”, “moving” and “unknown”. Cortés defined the sea as an indefinite space and, therefore, the ability to move on as truly an “art”.

The conquest of the ocean  37 What an arduous work to guide a “nao” that has sailed out of sea where you can only see the water and the sky!18 The representation of the sea used here by Cortés calls our attention. It is not a good example of a seaman’s expression, but in fact, he was not much of a seaman. Born in the kingdom of Aragón, far from any coast, Cortés grew up in Bujaraloz, a small village located in the region of Monegros, one of the most arid territories in Europe. It is believed that Cortés never sailed, but nevertheless became a cosmographer and worked for the Casa de Contratación in Seville. His book includes a representation of himself with rich clothing and pointing to the polar star in a clear allegory of astronomical navigation. We can interpret this personal vignette – in which Cortés himself also appears surrounded by objects and instruments such as an armillary sphere, a book of geometry, a drawing compass and a bevel edge – as a direct reference to the scientist, mathematician and cosmographer, rather than to the navigator. In this Cortés image, there is a clear intention to emphasize the theoretical abilities, the importance of abstraction and ultimately, the scientific imagination. Cortés practiced as a ­cosmographer in Seville’s Casa de Contratación, where the pilots of ships who sailed to the Americas had to take an exam under the responsibility of the head pilot of that Casa. Cortés often mentioned these pilots to criticize their ignorance. This kind of contest between pilots and cosmographers is not surprising, since they represented the difference between a traditional navigation, based on experience, and another one, incipiently scientific, which had been imposing itself since the beginning of the fifteenth century. This was a period of transition from pilotage to science or, according to the language of that time, the “art” of navigation. I attempt to describe this historical context in order to understand how oceanic navigation started. The seamen were the essential substrate for the maritime adventure that Columbus started in 1492; to find them, we must go first to the small communities of fishermen on the Andalusian shores of the Atlantic Ocean. These seamen had already ventured towards the African coast, and surely, they had neared the Canary Islands before Bethencourt arrived there in 1402. We can evoke the pilots, captains and ship owners, from Palos or other Andalusian ports, such as the Pinzón brothers, who combined their experience and their geographical and navigational knowledge. Finally, Christopher Columbus, as we know, had a long career of maritime travel that had taken him from Africa to the North Sea, as well as a good knowledge of cosmography. So, we have here a sequence of three types of seamen and maritime traditions that connected themselves in the adventure of oceanic navigation, an endeavor which would not have been possible without the intervention of all of them. This interrelation helps us to understand how the European navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries conquered the open sea and came to dominate long distance ­ oceanic navigation.

38  The conquest of the ocean Oceanic navigation – besides geopolitics, economy, cosmography, ships and their crews – could not be understood without the use of navigation instruments and techniques. It is true that some of them were already in use in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, but they reached a higher level of development during the Atlantic expansion. The navigator’s first problem was measuring time, since the typical clocks of the era were too large to be used aboard ship. Therefore, the main instrument for this task was the half-hour hourglass or “ampolleta”, which required special care due to its fragility. All of the ships had to keep a good number of spares. This was a job for the ship’s boys, who had to watch every half hour. The calculation of course and the fixing of a ship’s position was another fundamental problem and the compass an irreplaceable instrument. This magnetized needle was placed within a circle that marked the eight principal winds with their subdivisions, composing a total of thirty-two courses. The calculation of the courses was made with a board which, placed near the compass, displayed a printed rose of the winds with its thirty-two courses. Every course had eight holes, matching the eight half-hour intervals measured by the hourglass for each guard. The ship’s boy introduced a plug into the corresponding hole to mark the ship’s position at that time. The course was then traced at the end of the guard, linking these eight positions on a blackboard and then leaving the board free for the next guard of four hours. The estimation of the ship’s speed needed some calculation. Floating objects were used as references, and the result was always a rough calculation based primarily on experience. Bourne invented the log in 1577. A piece of wood attached to a knotted rope ran on the water in such a way that the time needed for each knot to pass was measured by a small hourglass. Today, the word “knot” is still used for the measurement of maritime speed. In addition, a lead plumb consisting of a plummet and a sound was used to determine the depth near the coast. The first was a plumb line that dragged the seabed, picking up samples of its composition for identifying it as rocky, sandy, and so on; the second was a long, thin rope that was used to establish the crawl stroke of water from the bottom to the surface. The astronomical form of navigation developed slowly, but it was already used in the oceanic voyages with some skill. The calculation of ­latitude was in the sixteenth century the third piece of data to tell pilots the ship’s position. Course and distance were the other two. Longitude could not be calculated until the eighteenth century, when the boats began to have accurate chronometers of a size that could be shipped. The astrolabe was mainly used to perform this calculation, but it had to be adapted to the  size and use of a ship in motion. The astrolabe was thus adapted to calculate the height of the Pole Star or the Southern Cross depending on the hemisphere. The “ballestilla” was also used to calculate the height of the Sun at midday while passing through the Meridian. It was therefore

The conquest of the ocean  39 necessary to know the angle of the sun, which was possible thanks to the such almanacs as the Portuguese José Vizinho’s Almanach Perpetuum of 1496. The sixteenth-century sailors navigated the open sea with some precision thanks to this set of instruments and techniques. This integrated mode of navigation enabled pilots to establish a new route based on a completed trajectory that had been previously calculated by estimations of the boat’s positions. Let us focus our attention on this operation, which could be seen as the epistemological core of oceanic navigation in the sixteenth century. We have already examined other epistemological cores in which some ­rudimentary ways of calculating and narrating experiences were integrated. Thus, from the first compasses, the calculation of latitude “by hand”, the wind rose, the Arab “rahmanis” or the medieval portolan charts, the epistemology of navigation always involved a mixture of calculation and ­narrative. This was also the case for the transoceanic navigation in the ­sixteenth century in the so-called “Carrera de las Indias”. We should, therefore, estimate the analogous epistemologies found between these styles of navigation and the concept of risk, since both had a historical development around narration and calculation. While some calculations were used under certain conditions, on the other hand, the pilot’s experience – pure narration – played a significant role in establishing the route. Thus, we can appreciate the same shift from the original narration towards calculation in both navigation and risk, as the two approaches combined in sixteenth century transoceanic navigation. The first evaluation of risk by monetary calculation started in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the maritime contracts and insurance policies, but for navigation, a calculated estimation of courses was being applied in the sixteenth century. Therefore, we find support for the idea of a mutual influence between epistemologies of risk and navigation. This appreciation comes directly from the reading of some testimonial writing from the time, and more precisely as it was expressed in 1575. This is the case of Juan de Escalante’s Itinerario de Navegación. Escalante was a pilot and cosmographer who travelled several times from Spain to the Americas; he wrote a book to teach other pilots how to navigate this course. I will discuss this more extensively later in the book, but in the meantime, I include a fragment here. An extraordinary documental value justifies the inclusion of this long passage. Three methods of guiding, Lord, does use the sailor at sea to certify the ship’s path and navigation.   The first is the needle of the sail, which will always show the same point by the level of the horizon, and in the same way will point the direction and path where you must steer and take the height for which to search.   Second guiding is the height which is taken from the Sun or North, so it is known certain which man moves away from the equator to either of the two parts of the North or South and in her own verified failure to walk and browse the path where intends to run

40  The conquest of the ocean   The third is the imagination, fantasy of the good sailor, that always in the same understanding with the experience that the ship and the things of the sea must have, is plotting and matching the course and path that the boat is doing, pointing it every day in your letter or Regiment, comparing it by the height as Jack and defeat and heading for where it goes sailing, and so nobody must navigate if he is not taking advantage of such three guides: defeat, height and fantasy, because being their defeat and some way all three guides are almost together, attend at least the defeat and height; because the fantasy serves instrument that cannot be notable yerro, and height and the defeat served also test enough to certify the man if it is true or false the trace and fantasy of his understanding.19 This expression, “all three guiding principles have to go together”, is a clear statement to describe the kind of knowledge that is demanded by navigation – or in other words, its own epistemology, which surprisingly includes imagination or fantasy. This expression seems to anticipate the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico’s Siencia Nuova (1744). Fantasy – to interpret Escalante – is the instrument that can take us to truth; but calculation, of height and course in this case, will confirm for us how much reality this truth contains. We could say that this paragraph defines a very consistent epistemology that turns imagination into the foundation of knowledge, though it also requires a verification that can be achieved only through a scientific approach. Vico’s “sapienza poetica” is, we might say, something akin to Escalante’s fantasy and imagination. Thus, this fantasy comes to be a “certum factum” which is, following Vico, a fact based on a direct experience of the world. Just as Escalante himself noted, the sciences of nature, cosmography for example, arose from fantasy and the imagination.

Notes   1 Céspedes del Castillo, G. – 1983 América Hispánica. (1492–1898). Barcelona: Editorial Labor. p. 33   2 Flint, V. – 1992 The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. xiii   3 Flint, V. – 1992 The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. xiii   4 Hale, J.R. – 1966 Age of Exploration. New York: Time Incorporated. p. 32   5 Soler, Isabel. – 2008 El nudo y la esfera. Barcelona: Acantilado   6 (Edson, 2007) p. 118   7 (Edson, 2007) p. 119   8 (Edson, E.) p. 121   9 (Edson, E.) p. 140 10 Pryor, H. J. – 1987 Commerce, Shipping and Naval Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean. London: Variorum Collected Studies 11 (Pryor, H. J.) – 1987 12 Pérez-Mallaína, P.E. – 1998 Spain’s Men of the Sea. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. p. 63

The conquest of the ocean  41 13 (Pérez-Mallaína, P.E.) pp. 64–65 14 (Pérez-Mallaína. P.E) p. 65 15 Parry, J.H. – 1974 The Discovery of the Sea. New York: The Dial Press. p. 23 16 (Parry, J.H.) p. 31 17 (Parry, J.H.) pp. 3 18 Cortés, M. 1551 Breve Compendio de la Sphera y de la Arte de Navegar. Sevilla. www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/archivos2/pdfs/MC0042362.pdf 19 Escalante y Mendoza, J. – 1985 (1575). pp. 204

Bibliography Bagrow, L. 1964 History of Cartography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernáldez, A., and Gabriel y Ruíz de Apodaca, Fernando de, 1870. Historia de los reyes católicos D. Fernando y Doña Isabel. Sevilla: Impr. que fue de J.M. Geofrin. Casas, B.D.L. 1974 Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. Barcelona: Fontamara. Céspedes del Castillo, G. 1983 La América Hispánica (1492–1898). Barcelona: Labor. Chaunu, P. 1979. European expansion in the later Middle Ages. Amsterdam and New York: North Holland Pub. Co. Chaunu, P. 1969 Conquête et exploitation des nouveaux mondes (XVIe siècle). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Cortés, M. 1945 Breue compendio de la sphera y de la arte de nauegar con nueuos instrumentos y reglas exemplificado con muy subtiles demonstraciones. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico. Edson, E. 2007 The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Faber-Kaiser, M. 1976 Historia de la navegación. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. Finamore, D. 2004 Maritime History as World History. Salem, MA: Gainesville; Peabody Essex Museum; University Press of Florida. Gautier Dalché, P. 2009 La géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe-XVIe siècle). Turnhout: Brepols. Martínez, J.L. 2004 Cruzar el Atlántico. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Parry, J.H. 1974 The Discovery of the Sea. New York: The Dial Press. Pérez-Mallaína Bueno, P.E. 1992 Los hombres del océano: vida cotidiana de los tripulantes de las flotas de Indias, siglo XVI. Sevilla: Sociedad Estatal para la Exposición Universal Sevilla 92: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Diputación de Sevilla. Sanz, C., 1903–1979, 1959 Geographia de Ptolomeo, ampliada con los primeros mapas impresos de América, desde 1507; estudio bibliográfico y crítico, con el catálogo de l. Madrid: Librería General V. Suárez. Smith, P. & Findlen, P. (eds.) 2002 Merchants and Marvels. Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York: Rouledge. Taub, L.C. 1993 Ptolomy’s Universe. The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Zumthor, P. 1915, 1993 Mesure du monde: représentation de l’espace au Moyen Age. Paris: Seuil.

3 When the risk navigated to the Americas The great adventure of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was the main character in this period of navigations and great voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. He comprised many of the relevant features of an experienced seaman. As a young man, he sailed to the coasts of Africa, the Atlantic archipelagos, and in fact lived and married in the Madeira Islands. Moreover, he knew the North Sea, where he had apparently sailed as well. Columbus owned an annotated copy of Pierre D’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, which indicates that he had some knowledge of ­cosmography. On the other hand, he could also read maps like Toscanelli’s. His origin, though still controversial, is largely accepted as Genoese, connecting him with the best tradition of navigation and maritime trade in the Mediterranean, where the Republic of Genoa was a great power. He visited some European courts and was familiar with their political conflicts, especially with the Castilian and Portuguese rivalry in the Atlantic navigation. It seems, ultimately, as if Columbus had been predestined to the adventures that he finally lived out. But things are not so simple, and Columbus’ ­biography is as unclear as his birthplace. The identification of his grave is still discussed; and we remain unclear about his mother tongue and some of the other vicissitudes of his biography before he travelled to the Americas for the first time. It is difficult to find other historical characters whose lives have been the object of such intense historiographical controversy. The discussions on the topic of why Columbus proposed a westward navigation across the Atlantic Ocean are of particular interest. Did Columbus possess some exclusive or secret information about the lands beyond that ocean? In any case, a contemporary controversy follows the same issues that arose in seamen’s discussions during Columbus’ time. There was a traditional type of navigation, which used the information transmitted by portolan charts and the oral stories of experienced pilots. The well-known story of the “anonymous pilot” attributes to Columbus the possession of some confidential information provided by a pilot whose boat was swept away by the winds to the coast of Brazil, on their return from the Gulf of Guinea. This story would justify Columbus’ exclusive knowledge of this information.1 On the other hand, there was astronomical navigation, which used Geography, Cosmography or Geometry to calculate the distances and

When risk navigated to the Americas  43 routes. Finally, the most significant controversy around Columbus relates to the nature of his art of navigation: whether it was traditional, experiential, and narrative, or modern, theoretical and scientific. By the end of the fifteenth century, the aim of sailing to the West had a background of scientific knowledge, based in the geography and cosmography of that time. The spherical form of the Earth – though opposite to the Church’s doctrine and outside the general beliefs of this epoch – had been demonstrated by the ancient Greeks and then accepted by a minority of scholars, including Columbus himself. The cosmographic works of Ptolemy, Fillastre and Pierre D’Ailly were circulating widely. These treatises contained ideas to justify a voyage such as Columbus’, although they also included significant errors, which would have very important consequences. Pierre d’Ailly argued for the continuity of the seas, but also proposed a miscalculation of the known world extension that led him ­ significantly to underestimate the distance between Europe and Cipango or Japan. With both true and false ideas, Columbus set out to navigate the Atlantic route westward to the Indies. He could not have imagined that this distance was really so long and that there was a whole continent halfway there. Seldom in history has an error proved to be, in geographical terms, so appropriate. Columbus wished to be considered as both an experienced and a theoretical navigator. In 1501, for instance, he wrote a memorial to demonstrate his long experience as a seaman. In the month of February, 1477, I sailed one hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile [Thule], whose southern part is in latitude 73 degrees N, and not 63 degrees as some affirm; nor does it lie upon the meridian where Ptolemy says the West begins, but much farther west.2 Previously, but in the same memorial, Columbus had mentioned the wide learning that he possessed in several disciplines. God, himself – he stated – had favored him with an “abundance of knowledge”: I found Our Lord very favorable to this my desire, and to further it. He granted me the gift of knowledge. He made me skilled in seamanship, equipped me abundantly with the sciences of astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic, and taught my mind and hand to draw this sphere and upon it the cities, rivers, mountains, islands, and ports, each in its proper place. During this time I have made it my business to read all that has been written on geography, history, philosophy and other sciences.3 Fernando de Colón – cosmographer, scholar and great bibliophile – was Columbus’ second son. He wrote the Historia del Almirante, which did not come out until 1571, when an Italian translation was published in Venice

44  When risk navigated to the Americas long after his death in 1539. Historians have always treated this book with caution, questioning some of its parts; but in any case, it offers firsthand materials. Fernando Colón enumerates “the motives that took the Admiral to the discovery of the Indies”, which were three: the natural foundations, the authority of writers, and the navigators’ indications. For the first motive, he recounted some of the most significant cosmographic ideas of the age, as I have mentioned earlier. For the second, he alluded to Ptolemy and Pierre d’Ailly and then to the Florentine physicist and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli. It seems that from Lisbon, Columbus wrote to Toscanelli to tell him his idea for a westward navigation across the Atlantic Ocean, to arrive at the Indies. Toscanelli’s reply included a copy of a letter that he had sent in 1474 to Ferrán Martínez, canon of Lisbon and the King of Portugal’s favourite. Toscanelli intended this letter to reach the King of Portugal himself. This was how Toscanelli expressed his ideas on the same matter: I was glad to hear your intimacy and friendship with your most serene and magnificent King. I have often before spoken of a sea route from here to the Indies, where the spices grow, a route shorter than the one you are pursuing by way of Guinea. You tell me that His Highness desires from me some statement or demonstration that would make it easier to understand and take that route. I could do this by using a sphere shaped like the earth, but I decided that it would be easier and make the point clearer if I showed that route by means of a sea-chart. I therefore send His Majesty a chart drawn by my own hand (...). And do not marvel at my calling ‘west’ the regions where the species grow, although they are called commonly called ‘east’; because whoever sails westward will always find those lands in the west, while one who goes overland to the east will always find those lands in the east.4 Here, Toscanelli was stating clearly that the earth’s spherical shape offered a way to reach the kingdom of species if navigating either to the west or to the east. Nevertheless, the western route had to be shorter. Toscanelli’s letter – Fernando de Colón wrote – “filled the Admiral with even greater zeal for discovery”. In any case, Columbus did not start from scratch in imagining his first voyage to the Americas, as recognized by his own son. The third motive refers to some evidence such as rumors, legends and other various stories, which were spread throughout the Atlantic seafaring world to point out that there were other lands beyond the known seas. I have mentioned the story of the “anonymous pilot”; but Fernando Colón echoes some other indications to justify Columbus’ error in identifying the first islands on which he set foot as the Indies, having estimated the distance from Europe as much shorter than it was. Columbus thus maintained for some time that he had arrived at the extreme point of the Indies – that is, the West Indies. These are Fernando Colón’s arguments:

When risk navigated to the Americas  45 The Admiral’s third and last motive for seeking the Indies was his hope of finding before he arrived there some island or land of great importance whence he might the better pursuit of his main design (...). This being so, he argued that between the end of Spain and the known end of India there must be many other islands and lands, as experience has since shown to be true. He believed this all the more because he was impressed by the many fables and stories which he heard from various persons and sailors who traded to the western islands of the Azores and Madeira.5 Fernando recalled several stories, including one about a Portuguese pilot who, finding himself 450 leagues west of Cape St. Vincent, retrieved from the sea a beautifully carved piece of wood. Since the winds had blown for many days from the west, he concluded that the piece could have come from islands in that direction. In one of the Azores islands, the westernmost territory under European rule, the sea flung ashore two dead bodies, which were different in appearance from Europeans. Some old legends, such as those of the Antilla Isle, the Virgin Islands or the seven cities of Cíbola, provided the names that were later applied to some of the new t­erritories. This kind of legendary narration had also inspired Africa’s circumnavigation; others, such as the search for “El Dorado” and the sources of the Nile, would encourage future exploratory adventures. The basic knowledge that made possible Columbus’ voyages was not only scientific, but also contained a good amount of myth and legend. I have introduced these brief references to his life and personality in an effort to show Columbus’ very intense involvement in the main maritime, commercial, scientific and political events of his age. In a previous chapter I presented the genesis of a series of historical facts and the progress in geographical knowledge, shipbuilding and navigation skills. My purpose has been to place the risk into a historical context. Nevertheless, at this point it is necessary to shift our analysis to the risk itself and to the way in which this notion was expressed in documents. The original sources are the best testimony to how the risk was used in the Atlantic navigation at the end of fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries. There are two different kinds of sources available for researching Columbus’ documents in order to appreciate how he used the Spanish word “riesgo”. On the one hand, we have the sea contracts that he signed, and on the other hand, his diaries. Now I will use an example taken from the first kind of source. In 1498 in Seville, Columbus signed a sea contract with Antón Mariño, who had to supply the so-called “Isles of the Indies”. Furthermore, all such stores as the said Antón Mariño may embark to take to the said isles of the Indies out of the funds received in respect of this contract, shall go at risk of their Majesties, whether of the sea or of corsairs, etc.6 (Translated from Spanish)

46  When risk navigated to the Americas Here, the word “risk” is a pre-established formula in a contract; we already know that these formulas were used in the Mediterranean medieval ­“commendas”. The expression “at risk”7 is equivalent to the Latin “ad meum risichum”, which was documented in Genoa in 1247. Thus, the argument that titles this chapter can be corroborated with an original document signed by Christopher Columbus himself. The notion of risk passed from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and then to a new continent, the Americas. Moreover, we can apply the same conceptual model previously explained to this usage of the word risk. Risk is a probability relationship established between two types of entities: “objects of risk” and “objects at risk”. Here we have a concrete “object at risk” (the “supplies”), and two “objects of risk”, explicitly mentioned (the “sea” and “corsairs”). Risk is the probability that the supplies are lost or damaged in the case of big storms or an attack by corsairs. In those cases, the losses or damages would be covered by the King and Queen. Following the same document, we find that the word risk appears again two paragraphs later. Now, however, it is not used for the sea but in a land context. There is, of course, a logical contiguity of contexts, since all the supplies must be unloaded and stored. It seems quite relevant to confirm here that the risk, like the crews and the merchandise, set foot in the Americas. Furthermore, if it was the case that being in the Indies with the maintenances and supplies for the people in your Highnesses service, the infidels attacked fiercely the Christians who were at that moment in the isle, and not being capable of defending themselves, if those supplies, or a part of them, were burnt or stolen, the risk would be at your Highnesses.8 (Translated from Spanish) Following Columbus, many other voyages made the oceanic crossing from Spain to the Americas a permanent route for the Spanish fleet throughout the sixteenth century. This route, named Carrera de las Indias or Route to the Indies, has been one of the most significant paths in the history of maritime navigation. It was very important for many reasons, but it was essential in the development of the “art of navigation”. The treatises of navigation that were written and published in Spain at this time were numerous and very influential in England and France. One is of particular interest because the author was not only a scientist but also an experienced seaman; he used the Spanish word “riesgo” more than twenty times. I have not found any other text from that time in which the word risk reaches such a complex, wide and precise usage as in this Itinerario de Navegación written by Juan Escalante. I will analyse this book thoroughly.

Juan Escalante’s Itinerario de navegación Juan Escalante de Mendoza was a Spanish navigator who participated actively in the Carrera de las Indias, crossing the Atlantic Ocean several times.

When risk navigated to the Americas  47 In 1595 he was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in the Nueva España’s Fleet.9 He died in 1596 in Panamá at sixty. In 1575, he completed his ­Itinerario de navegación de los mares y tierras occidentales. This is a work of great originality and extraordinary value. First, it is a treatise of navigation that goes beyond the division, very significant at that time, between pilots – people with experience in navigation – and cosmographers, who were scholars with mathematical, astronomical and cartographic learning and who in some cases, such as Martin Cortés, never sailed. After a good number of oceanic voyages, Escalante combined his vast experience and his great knowledge in the art of navigation; we should thus recognize his as the most complete treatise on navigation between Europe and the Americas to be found in the sixteenth century. Escalante creates a character, called “the pilot”, who embarks from Seville together with a young sailor named “Tristán” who is traveling to the Americas for the first time. This “pilot” is a very experienced navigator who answers Tristán’s questions on how to navigate the same voyage. This narrative is very original in its description of all the vicissitudes that a seaman may find in his Atlantic Ocean crossing. The book is divided into three volumes, corresponding to the three stages of this round trip: from Seville to the Canary Islands, from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, and the return to Seville. In fact, this was the classic itinerary for all Spanish ships: When traveling to the Americas, they took advantage of the trade winds that, blowing from the Canary Islands, led them to the Caribbean; sailing back, the winds from the Bahamas brought them directly to the Atlantic Coast of the Iberian Peninsula near Cape San Vicente in the south of Portugal. From this point they could continue following the coast to enter the Guadalquivir River and then arrive in Seville. This was, more or less, the same itinerary that led Columbus to the Americas on his first voyage. This idea of “itinerary” defines very well the so-called Carrera de las Indias, which, by the second half of the sixteenth century, had become a regular route with its own manual. Escalante’s book could be considered something like the perfect handbook for a good oceanic navigator. However, Escalante’s manuscript was never published. The authorities denied permission for publication, concerned that this book would provide very useful information about the courses followed by the Spanish fleets – information that should not be known to other maritime powers such as England and France or even the corsairs. Therefore, Escalante’s Itinerario de navegación remained unpublished, though other authors copied fragments and parts of its content. The original codex remained in the Spanish royal library until 1791, when it was copied by D. Martín Fernández Navarrete and this copy passed to the library in the Maritime Museum of Madrid. Finally, the book was published for the first time in 1985. Escalante’s narrative is very appropriate for the investigation of risk, since he uses the term abundantly. Furthermore, he places the risk in contexts

48  When risk navigated to the Americas that contain descriptions of the events that this pilot/Escalante had lived in his numerous voyages. This style of narration is much richer than those of contracts or accounts and transmits a certain verisimilitude. Risk is now linked to actions to be taken, to events that can happen and, above all, to futures that can be prevented. This example has an important historical significance for the study of risk, allowing us to examine how it was used by people in their everyday actions. In this case, we will see how the Spanish seamen used the concept of risk when they navigated to the Americas in the sixteenth century. It is not an exaggeration to state that these people were expanding the usage of an old concept, the risk, and thus creating its modern version. This is precisely what I will try to illustrate in the following pages. This book, argues the “pilot”, is intended to inform and train the navigators and to increase their own safety. Thus, the book is an appropriate context for the frequent use of the term “risk”. Let us see the first justification that Escalante uses for his book: From the time of my birth I have been inclined to see the world and so I have travelled around Flanders, Germany and Italy and I sailed their seas and I described their lands and navigations by the time I was there, but now I wish to navigate across these other western seas, because I  have been told that great damages and losses of ships, people and properties usually happen in these ships and to the people who navigate there. These misfortunes are due to ignorance and some of them could be avoided if there was a good itinerary of navigation written on a book.10 (Translated from Spanish) We notice here how the perils of the sea induced Escalante to write this handbook for the safety of the sailors and their vessels. Risk is now a notion that can be applied to any navigation circumstance, not only to merchandise that is commended or insured. There is a first example at the beginning of Escalante’s book where he explains again his reasons: to write a long account with all advice and rules which I understand are necessary, so that any discreet man when navigating could know where he is going to and so he could prevent the shipwrecks and be able to sail with the least possible risk.11 (Translated from Spanish) These two paragraphs follow one another in Escalante’s book, comprising a fragment that comes to express the author’s inspiration. Thanks to this volume, the seamen crossing the Atlantic would navigate “with the lesser risk”. Risk is clearly a central notion in Escalante’s narrative, associating the navigator’s safety with a lesser risk. What is more important is that

When risk navigated to the Americas  49 the risk is now a general concept that makes no distinction between things and people – since the new “object of risk” is the whole of the ship including, of course, its crew. This is a very significant development in the history of risk which, on the other hand, continues to be a matter of navigation as it was for the medieval “risicum” or Columbus’ “a riesgo de”. The implication of risk to human life was not very typical in medieval narratives, when the goods and merchandise were the main issues; whereas we can see in Escalante’s narrative a different use of risk in which human life, rather than an interest, is a priority. Let us hear Escalante himself: If the ship is sunk the captain and sailors on board do not lose or risk any interest, but their souls for not doing well their jobs.12 (Translated from Spanish) It seems that Escalante wished to make clear the priority of life over any other material interest, vindicating the crew who owned neither the ship nor its cargo. To risk or “arriesgar” in the original Spanish – this is the first time that I have registered the use of the verb – is something that corresponds to people and not to things. This is a very significant remark. Prevention is an essential aspect of any modern conceptualization of risk, as Escalante was already aware. To prevent means to anticipate, and thus to have some knowledge about something that has not yet happened but could happen. This idea was a part of the Arabic notion of risk. Prevention also demands some kind of action, and this aspect would become increasingly important with the future development of insurance, navigation, the calculation of probabilities, modern engineering, preventive medicine, and so on. However, a book that was written in the sixteenth century already refers to action as the best way to prevent a risk. We can see it in the words used by Escalante to explain how to steer a ship and manage the sails in a tempest: And if the nao was suffering great storms and fearing of a heavy sea which could sink it, for the prevention of that risk no small sail should be placed across.13 (Translated from Spanish) Escalante, in view of an estimate of risk, carries out his first precise description in a way in which I have analysed in other cases with the same model. There is an “object of risk” that is characterized as a “heavy sea” and an “object at risk” that is “the ship”. Then, in this particular case, the risk is the probability that damage will be sustained from a relationship between the two, resulting in the sinking of the ship. At the same time, we can observe that this is something yet to happen in Escalante’s account: as it does not yet exist, it can be avoided. Risk as a conditional future is a story

50  When risk navigated to the Americas within a story. Nevertheless, the action of managing the risk is a present story. The grammatical construction permits the creation of overlaid times, and the risk is always conditional upon the present. The actions that are proposed by Escalante, such as “navigate with small sail” or “not to place across any small sail”, are expressed in the present tense, while risk is estimated in the conditional “could sink”. The structure of time or narrative that characterizes the risk is perfectly constructed in Escalante’s account in terms of a probability. Risk is a narrative, as I suggest throughout the pages of this book, that tends to a situation – or, in other words, risk is situational. When elaborating notions of risk by means of a narration, we create situations that can be coded. This process was already present in the sea contracts and the insurance policies, but for Escalante, whose narratives of risk are semantically wider and more complex, the situations of risk have more variations and are described more precisely. We notice it in this fragment: Those dangers and problems usually happen and so I do state that a middle nao, neither too big nor too small, is much better and more competent and it has a lesser cause of risk, both for navigating and fighting, for participating less in the so-called four risks which affect all ships.14 (Translated from Spanish) It is worth underlining the two expressions containing the word risk. Risk presents itself as an “occasion”, and these occasions are classified by Escalante according to situations. Escalante estimates that there are four of these occasions in the case of navigation. These are his descriptions: The “naos” sailing the seas are usually lost in four ways: the first one is by sinking with the sails raised and spread; the second is by running aground; the third is a by heavy sea which floods them; the fourth is by the rotten wood which dissolves and sinks to the bottom; and another way is by the fire (...). All “naos” in the world are submitted to sink by one of these four ways.15 (Translated from Spanish) These would be the four situations of risk that Escalante considers frequent, although he adds a fifth one, fire, to be treated afterwards. His conclusion is quite clear: all ships may founder because of any of these “four ways”. Escalante’ s “four risks” constitute the most innovative contribution that we can find in his book, as he is anticipating the manuals and protocols of safety several centuries later. Escalante also considers the amount and intensity of the risk. He uses several expressions such as: “lesser risk”, “less occasion of risk”, “great risk”, “much risk”, “extreme risk”, “huge risk”, “enormous risk”, and so on. Let us have a look at the situations in which

When risk navigated to the Americas  51 two of these expressions appear. The first one is related to the way in which gunpowder must be stored: in that part in which the gunpowder is stored no fire can enter though it is in the hands of the most cautious man because of the extreme risk and damage which could be produced.16 (Translated from Spanish) In the second, he remembers the voyages of the kings of Spain, specifically mentioning Charles I and Philip II to illustrate the higher level of safety that the small ships can offer: And so Charles the Emperor, of glorious memory and King Philip, his son, our Lords, navigated in middle naos, neither too big nor too small, so that their royal highnesses sailed them with the least possible risk.17 (Translated from Spanish) This comparison of two extremes lets us appreciate how the situations can be different and their respective risks varied. Risk calculation, which was so important in the development of mercantile capitalism and finances, is already present in this manuscript written in 1575 in a narrative and situational way. Managing explosives is something that represents high risk. Note here how Escalante is aware that risk is a probability of damage; when he mentions the “extreme risk” he places this expression in coordination with the damage. When there is effective damage, risk vanishes. Nevertheless, when the king is embarked and sailing, the risk must be minimized as much as possible. This circumstance shows us, on the other hand, that the risk affected everybody who voyaged by sea, even the most powerful of all the European monarchs. The positive value of using the notion of risk is another significant variant, not only for its capacity to promote safety, as Escalante emphasizes, but also for its selective character. According to Escalante, there are occasions in which we can choose, from among various risks, the lesser one. Because between two risks which could be represented one must always choose the best and less inconvenient.18 (Translated from Spanish) There is another important point to be emphasized here. It is the expression: “two risks which could be represented”. The symbolic nature of any representation can be appreciated in this text, for it alludes to selecting from two possible representations. So, the risks always come from “something” which, not having a factual existence, demands its representation through language. This “something” is an imagined damage expressed by a

52  When risk navigated to the Americas representation, which is a narrated probability. If the damage occurred, we would then have a fact, and the risk would no longer be a probability. Reality substitutes its representation, but the representation, risk in this case, exists to promote an anticipated action in an attempt to avoid the damage. Risk, with a wider semantic field, encounters other concepts and can collide or mix with them. This situation had already appeared in medieval documents in which the “risicum” coexisted with “periculum” or “fortunam”, sometimes synonymously. It seems to me that Escalante made a clear distinction between risk and danger. Here we have this paragraph again, but now my purpose is to analyse how risk and danger are used in the same context. Those dangers and inconveniences usually happen and so I do state that a middle nao, neither too big nor too small, is much better and more competent and it has a lesser cause of risk, both for navigating and fighting to participate less in the so-called four risks which affect all ships.19 (Translated from Spanish) The dangers referred to by Escalante are the big storms or hurricanes. Then the danger is a part of the fact itself – that is, the storm – whereas the occasion of risk comes from an action that relates the ship with the storm. Danger is an attribute that things and people can have, but risk is always a relationship established by people with other people or things. This substantial difference, which is sometimes forgotten today, was very clear to a sixteenth-century navigator. There is another paragraph in which Escalante combines the terms ­“fortunes” and “perils” for referring to hurricanes: showing spirit and fortitude to encourage his comrades, taking quickly all the preventive actions to conserve the nao, so that many people have escaped, escape and will escape from such fortunes and perils thanks to these diligences.20 (Translated from Spanish) “Fortunam maris” was a quite frequently used term in medieval maritime documents and could sometimes accompany other terms such as “risicum” and “periculum”. We have words such as “hazard” or “fortune” with historically vacillating semantics, because if they sometimes take us to the uncertain, they can also express adversity in cases such as “hazardous”. In this paragraph the hurricanes are “fortunes” and “perils”, but not risks, which means that these terms refer to parts of the thing itself – in this case to a hurricane, which can cause damage. This attribute can be expressed gently in terms of “fortune” and harshly as “perils”.

When risk navigated to the Americas  53 A final idea that is present in Escalante’s Itinerario is that the risk demands a conscious action. In this case, there is a clear distinction between risk and a “fortuitous case” or chance, which is always unforeseeable and without blame. In our maritime language we could speak of a fortuitous case when the nao or the merchandise, together or separated, would be lost or damaged by accident of the sea or winds or other event in which the owner, captain, pilot or sailors, neither any other person had responsibility.21 (Translated from Spanish) The “fortuitous case” is the chance and cannot be considered equal to risk, since there is no attribution of will or cause and no possible anticipation. This appreciation, that risk always has agency, is very frequent in Escalante’s book and is a very important contribution to his complete conceptual­ ization of risk in an early historical period – when the word risk was not used at all in English and scarcely in French. As Escalante was an exemplary Oceanic navigator, we can guess that the concept of risk belonged to the knowledge that the most experienced Spanish oceanic navigators shared at that time. On the other hand, we can prove that the concept of risk was already formed in the second half of the sixteenth century and in the context of the Atlantic navigation, and that its scope of meaning could cover all the circumstances of navigation. This development approached this risk to the modern conception that we use today.

The metonymical context of risk To say that risk is situational means that it always has a context of facts and that it constitutes itself in relationship to those facts. This essential feature has activated risk’s historical process. On the other hand, this situational dimension of risk explains why a historical-narrative theory of risk is so necessary. In fact, the only way to describe and understand these historical contexts is to reconstruct them. At the same time, we must interrelate those historiographical reconstructions if we wish to understand the main lines of risk’s conceptual development. These are the basic foundations for a historicalnarrative theory of risk. The risk was born in caravans crossing the deserts, expanding across the seas and oceans and always in long displacements through empty spaces. This has been a great human movement which was initiated by our oldest ancestors when they left their first African dwelling and spread all around the world. We have knowledge of other great displacements like the ­Polynesians in the South Pacific Ocean, where they colonized many islands. The occupation of the Americas by the Asiatic populations who crossed the Bering Strait, or the Viking expeditions to North America before

54  When risk navigated to the Americas Columbus’ first voyage in 1492, are other examples of how humankind in their evolution have conquered the great terrestrial empty spaces and colonized almost the whole planet. I started my historical reconstruction of risk by its etymology, but from that point of departure I dealt with the ­historiographical reconstruction of the first context in which the word risk, in Arabic, appeared. I do not doubt that, together with this historical period that we can locate in the Middle East and in the Indian and Mediterranean Seas, the notion of risk could exist in other times and places. Nevertheless, this historical context that I have studied gives us good information and data which permit the study of this concept in connection with a situation. The first context that defined a situation of risk was, as I have analysed previously, religious, appearing for the first time when the Arabs expanded after Mohammed’s preaching in the seventh century. This first notion helped the Arabs to travel across the empty space of deserts and seas, since they entrusted themselves and their goods to God’s provision or “rizq”. After this historical period, the risk secularized, expressed in the maritime contracts signed from the twelfth century in the Mediterranean commercial cities such as Venice, Genoa, Marseille, Barcelona, and so on. The Mediterranean vessels shipped merchandise “at risk of”, and this contractual condition was formalized in many notarial documents and insurance policies. This was the first time that the risk jumped from one historical context to another. In this case, the risk passed from a religious belief and a relationship with God to a relationship between an owner and his merchandise, or between an insurer and the insured object. Finally, the trust in God was substituted by a contract or an insurance policy. Risk, of course, was still a forecast, and so the original Arabic word rizq has a continuation with the Medieval Latin risicum, although the context of use was completely different. Certainly, this new context of maritime trade and insurance would enrich the notion of risk. I am interested in this metamorphosis and in its configuration. The two notions of risk, the rizq and the risicum, communicated themselves metonymically trough the historical contexts. So, there was a passage from a belief in God’s provision for a long journey and for everything that could happen to affect the good believer and his goods, to a contract that insured the merchandise. Risk commercialized or, in general terms, secularized; this contextual and semantic shift had a very important historical relevance. However, the contiguity of this Mediterranean maritime trading was what made this shift possible. The notion of risk passed from one historical context to the other, crossing, as if it were a bridge, the Mediterranean Sea as an open space to navigate and transport people and goods. This is the metonymy that explains the historical transformation of risk. In this chapter we can observe a new metonymical shift, for now the risk is related not only to the goods but to the whole ship and especially

When risk navigated to the Americas  55 to its crew. This is the meaning of risk in Escalante’s Itinerario de ­Navegación, but it was not the case in Columbus’ contracts, where the use of risk was quite the same as in medieval documents. This temporal comparison leads us to presume that oceanic navigation had evolved significantly between 1492 and 1575, thanks to the extraordinary shift that came with the Carrera de las Indias. Risk, as described by Escalante, is a holistic notion, although it has still to be found in the maritime navigation and thus in a “metonymic context”. But now the concept of risk, though still operating in contiguity, undergoes a new and transcendental semantic shift. If the risk was attributed to someone (originally God) who guaranteed something, whether a thing or a person, now this guarantee is not necessary because risk is just the probability that something, which is estimated to be harmful or undesirable, will happen. So, if the risk was emancipated from God with the contract and the insurance, it is now doing the same with them to adopt a new referential frame which is still the damage, but whose attribution is more global, though still within navigation. Of course, there will be contracts and insurance policies in which the risk will be calculated and valued, but furthermore the risk will become a concept with a wider usage and more extensive ­referential frames. My interpretative argument about risk has been its situational nature. If we apply this proposition to historiographical research, these situations or contexts appear. I have tried to evaluate the usage of the word risk within those historical contexts and then to appreciate in the historical development of this concept both its continuity and change. This might be a genealogy of risk.

Notes   1 The book Colón y su secreto by Juan Manzano provides very interesting information on this subject   2 Colón, F. – 1992 The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son Ferdinand. (Translated, annotated and with a new Introduction by Benjamin Keen). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p. 11   3 Colón, F. – 1992 Ibid. p. 10   4 Colón, F. – 1992 Ibid. p. 20   5 Colón, F. – 1992 Ibid. p. 23   6 Varela, C.- 1982 Cristóbal Colón. Textos y documentos completos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. p. 184   7 “A riesgo” in the Spanish original document   8 Varela, A. – (Ibid.) p. 184   9 This was the fleet that voyaged every year between the Americas and Spain in the charge of the Spanish Crown 10 Escalante y Mendoza, J. 1985 (1575) Itinerario de navegación de los mares y tierras occidentales. Madrid: Museo Naval. p. 25 11 Escalante y Mendoza, J. 1985 (1575) (Ibid.) p. 25 12 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 34 13 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 34

56  When risk navigated to the Americas 14 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 34 15 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 33 16 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 245 17 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 35 18 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 199 19 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 34 20 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 139 21 Escalante y Mendoza, J. Ibid. p. 244

Bibliography Abulafia, D. 2008 The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Casas, B.D.L. and Hanke, L. 1951 Historia de las Indias. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Colón, F., and Arranz Márquez, L. 1984 Historia del Almirante. Madrid: Historia 16. Colon, C. and Arranz Márquez, L. 1985 Diario de a bordo. Madrid: Historia 16. Colon, C. and Varela, C. 1984. Textos y documentos completos: relaciones de viajes, cartas y memoriales. Madrid: Alianza. Columbus, C. and translated by Fuston, Robert, 1987 The Log of Christopher Columbus. Ann Arbor, MI: International Marine Publishing Company. Escalante de Mendoza, J. 1985 (1575). Itinerario de navegación de los mares y tierras occidentales: Madrid: Museo Naval Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo, Pérez de Tudela Bueso, J., and Jay I. Kislak Reference Collection (Library of Congress), 1959. Historia general y natural de las Indias. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. Fernández-Armesto, F. 2003 The Americas. A Hemispheric History. New York: The Modern Library. Flint, V.I.J. 1992 The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hale, J.R. and Time-Life Books. 1966 Age of exploration, New York: Time, Inc. Haring, H.C. 1918 Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies: In time of the Hapsburgs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. López de Mariscal, B. 2004 Relatos y relaciones de Viaje al Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Polifemo Manzano Manzano, J. 1976 Colón y su secreto. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura ­Hispánica. Martínez, J.L. 1984 – last update, Pasajeros de Indias: viajes transatlánticos en el siglo XVII [Homepage of Madrid, España: Alianza], [Online]. Morales Padrón, F., 1986 América Hispana: Hasta la creación de las nuevas naciones. Barcelona: Labor. Salas, A.M. 1959 Tres cronistas de Indias: Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, fray Bartolmé de las Casas. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Silva, M. and Sancho Menjón, M. 1984 Ingenios, máquinas y navegación en el Renacimiento. Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada. Soler, I. 2011 Derrota y viaje de Vasco de Gama. El primer viaje marítimo a la India. Barcelona: Acantilado.

When risk navigated to the Americas  57 Soler, I. 2003 El nudo y la esfera. El navegante como artífice del mundo moderno. Barcelona: Acantilado. Thomas, H. 2003 Rivers of Gold. The Rise of the Spanish Empire. London: Weidelfen & Nicholson. Wey Gómez, N. 2008 Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus sailed south to the Indies. Boston: Massachussetts Institute of Technology.

4 When risk set foot in the Americas

All of my previous narratives have dealt with the oceanic voyages; I have mentioned only very briefly some events that occurred or could have occurred on land. This chapter will in turn be dedicated to the “new world” and to the new experiences encountered by the first Europeans who set foot there, after the Vikings’ ephemeral presence in North America. Here, I am also interested in the written sources, as they may contain allusions to the risk or permit us to reconstruct the context in which it arose. It is therefore worth going back to the first account that was written to report on the new land, then called the “Indias”, and its native inhabitants. On February 15, 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote to Luis de Santángel, the King and Queen’s notary, describing his discoveries. We know that Columbus began his round trip to Spain on January 4, 1493 from the fort of Navidad. Upon arriving in Lisbon, he added a note dated March 14, 1493, meaning that he wrote this letter on the high seas, just before arriving in the Azores. This letter was very important at the time, as proven by its publication just two months after its writing. It was also translated nine times into Latin just during the last decade of the fifteenth century: it was rendered three times into Italian, once into German, and then reprinted in 1497 in Valladolid. This letter could be considered as the first American writing in a European language, which gives it great historical value. Furthermore, it contains an extraordinary number of ideas and images about this new world, anticipating the imagery that Europe would adopt during the sixteenth century. Columbus still believed he had arrived in the Indies, as he asserted at the beginning of his account. According to Consuelo Valera,1 editor of Columbus’ documents, this is the first time in which the word “Indies” was used in a printed document. Sirs: Knowing the pleasure you will receive in hearing of the great victory which our Lord has granted me in my voyage, I hasten to inform you, that after a passage of seventy one days, I arrived at the Indies, with the fleet of the most illustrious King and Queen, our Sovereigns, committed to my charge, where I discovered many islands, inhabited by people without number, and of which I took possession

When risk set foot in the Americas  59 for their Highnesses by proclamation with the royal banner displayed. No one offering any contradiction.2 The action of taking possession of the land in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella is presented here as the starting point for an epic and provided an image used frequently by artists and filmmakers. We see Columbus kneeling down on a beach and planting the Castilian banner – the first time that he had set foot on land. Let us describe some details of this epic.

Columbus meets the world again I have used “the world again” as an expression to transmit the idea that Columbus and the first navigators and colonizers to arrive in the Americas contemplated a world which in a certain way they had seen before, for it was part of a Medieval European imaginary. So, the same world was presenting to them again, though in another way and in another location The Admiral describes his rounds through several islands, which he names San Salvador, Santa María de la Concepción, Fernandina, Isabela, and Juana. In the meantime, he is looking for signs to confirm his arrival in the lands of Cathay or Cipango. He admits, however, that he has not found cities but small settlements, and he realizes that he has reached various islands rather than a continent. Nevertheless, he describes these landscapes in such an enthusiastic way that they appear just like paradise: All these countries are of surpassing excellence, and in particular Juana, which contains abundance of fine harbors, excelling any in Christendom, as also many large and beautiful rivers. The land is high and exhibits chains of tall mountains, which seem to reach the skies, and surpass beyond comparison the isle of Cetrefery (Tenerife). These display themselves in all manner of beautiful shapes. They are accessible in every part, and covered with a vast variety of lofty sees, which it appears to me never lose their foliage as we found them fair and verdant as in May in Spain. Some were covered with blossoms, some with fruit and others in different stages, according to their nature. The nightingale and a thousand other sorts of birds were singing in the month of November wherever I went. There are palm trees in these countries of six or eight sorts, which are surprising to see on account of their diversity from ours, but indeed, this is the case with respect to the other trees, as well as the fruits and weeds. Beautiful forests of pines are likewise found, and fields of vast extent. Here are also honey, and fruits of thousand sorts, and birds of every variety.3 This landscape, as Columbus depicted it, corresponded to the paradisiacal vision that the Europeans applied to the tropics. Nicolás Wey calls this narrative “edenic imaginary”, and it is well represented in Columbus’ account.

60  When risk set foot in the Americas As we know, Columbus’ comparison of the Indies with Eden was to come a head in the course of the third voyage, when inferring that the torrential waters of the Orinoco River flowed from “infinite land that is so to the south”, Columbus suddenly fancied that this was one of the great rivers that flowed from the parayso terrenal.4 These brief transcriptions, together with some books as valuable as Valerie Flint’s The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus and Nicolás Wey’s Tropics of Empire – in which Columbus sought not only the Indies but also the tropics – suggest that Columbus, following the European imaginary, associated wealth with a paradisiacal landscape in which the temperature was warm and the vegetation luxuriant. The Admiral’s diaries include many observations to establish that as their voyage advanced, the temperature increased. He even mentions this circumstance in one of his letters to the Spanish Monarchs. The world is small and six parts of it are land, the seventh part being entirely covered by water. Experience had already shewn this and I have already written other letters with illustrations drawn from Holy Scripture concerning the site of the earthly paradise accepted by Holy Church.5 We find again this sometimes paradoxical combination of faith, even myth, and the search by means of Cosmography, Geography, Cartography and the art of navigation for a landscape imagined in the medieval beliefs – according to Valerie Flint, an orientation held by Columbus. Thus, Columbus described in his third and southern voyage all of the observations that supported his fantasy. Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies I found that when I reached a point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed. I very carefully verified these observations, and found that, on passing this line from north to south, the compass needle, which had previously pointed north-east, turned a whole quarter of the wind to the north west. It was as if the seas sloped upwards on this line. I also observed that they were full of vegetation like pine branches loaded with a fruit similar to that of the mastic ... I noticed that we had passed it the sea was calm and smooth, never becoming rough even in a strong wind. I found also that westwards of this line the temperature of the air was very mild and did not change from winter to summer. Here the Pole Star describes a circle of five degrees in diameter, and when it is at his lowest the Guard points towards the right. It then rises continuously until they point to the left. It then stands at five degrees, and from there it sinks until they are again on the right.6

When risk set foot in the Americas  61 In his first voyage, Columbus thought that he would find the Indies; instead, he disembarked onto several islands. This may have confirmed his previous idea that he would encounter some islands before reaching Cathay or China. In the following voyages, he persisted until reaching a continent; he did so in his third voyage when he arrived at the mouth of the Orinoco river, and in the fourth, the most eventful, which took him to the coasts of Central America. By then he was already considering that he might really have found a new continent. However, Columbus was also looking for a tropical landscape, imagining it as the paradise it was supposed to be. This is what he actually encountered. Following this letter to Luis de Santángel, we can identify another essential aspect of the discovery. As I wrote before, the Canary Islands occupation, which started in 1405, for the first time connected Europeans – the Castilians – with a native population maintaining a Neolithic way of life. David Abulafia7 locates this meeting at the start of a continuous series of encounters that would induce transcendental questions about human nature. Abulafia’s analysis situates in the context of this epoch prevailing ideas about the human condition. Therefore, the amazement before the “other” that Columbus and his fellow travellers may have felt was really a cultural shock, which they had to interpret according to the mental categories available to them. Their main source was the Bible and especially the fact that, after the Flood and Noah’s Ark, there was no historical place for these people. Then, some questions seemed logical: who were these people? and where did they come from? Afterwards,8 a more theological and philosophical discussion was held to establish their human condition. Were they human? and if so, which kind of human? Before Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, the dominant idea about the existence of unknown living creatures was that they could be “monsters”, or individuals with two heads or a dog’s head. Columbus immediately refutes any such monstrous characterization. Let us read what Columbus himself wrote, as the first European to encounter these Caribbean people: In none of the islands hitherto visited have I found any people of monstrous appearance, according to the expectation of some, but the inhabitants are all of very pleasing aspect, not resembling the blacks of Guinea, as their hair is straight, and their color lighter. The rays of the sun are here very powerful (...). An island situated in the second strait at the entrance of the Indies, is peopled with inhabitants who eat live flesh, and are esteemed very ferocious in all the other parts (...). One of these islands is peopled solely by women, who practice no feminine occupation, but exercise the bow and the arrow, and cover themselves with plates of copper, which metal they have in abundance.9 It is amazing how Columbus alludes in just a few paragraphs to the main myths, legends, and representations that would have been popular in

62  When risk set foot in the Americas Europe to describe and categorize the native American populations. They were peaceful and naïve savages living in tropical milieus, or fierce warriors eating human flesh. Moreover, he briefly depicts the Amazons, who resided there as well. My principal argument is an attempt to illustrate the formation of a European imaginary about the Americas, and how this imaginary was sustained by writing and even by Columbus’ own documents. I use the concept of metonymy to characterize the development of a narrative in which the risk was evolving; it is even more interesting to jump from one historical context to another thanks to the contiguity of spaces and activities. We saw earlier that the notion of risk developed in the oceanic navigation in the sixteenth century; something similar happened when those navigators set foot on land and, in many cases, remained there forever. They would not have an immense sea before them, and they would not need good ships or the best art of navigation. Instead, they encountered another amazing and luxuriant space to stimulate their imaginations, with new riches to be taken – something like a paradise. However, this new experience also included the presence of human beings, as Columbus himself told Santángel and, after the publication of his letter, described to all the learned and erudite Europeans anxious for news of this enormous adventure. They would long be asking themselves about these indigenous people and would respond with many contradictory ideas and prejudices. Columbus’ documents show us several versions; among them, my interest lies with the one that is directly related to the risk. The native populations were also an “object of risk”: Columbus wrote to the Catholic kings, telling them about his incursions into the Caribbean islands in search of gold and other riches. He also alluded to the perils of that expedition for its wounded or ill members who might fall behind and risk being attacked by the Indians. and it was also a great disadvantage to leave here the ill people in an open place and inside the huts, and the supplies and maintenances which are ashore and given that these Indians seem simple and without malice because they come every day to visit us, it seemed not a good idea to put the people and the supplies on risk and fortune of being lost, something that an Indian could do by night burning down the huts with a firebrand....10 (Translated from Spanish) Here we have the expression “meter a riesgo” or “putting at risk”, attributed to people rather than to merchandise or ships. Nevertheless, the probabilistic usage of the term risk is similar to previous cases: the context changes, but not the meaning. A shortened version of this narrative can be analysed in the following terms. If an ill person suffers the fate of falling behind in an “open place and huts”, there is a probability of being attacked

When risk set foot in the Americas  63 by the Indians. The same account refers to the Indians’ pacific character, which permits us to evaluate them more as a risk than as a peril, and thus their attack more as a probability than as a certitude. Following these considerations, we can estimate that here we have a notion of risk with wider semantic implications. This is another paragraph from the same letter in which the terms “danger” and “risk” are used in the same context, giving us a good opportunity to compare them: Furthermore, as you have seen a majority of those who went by land to discover became ill after coming back and even others had to return having already departed, so it was reasonable to fear that it would happen the same to those who, in good health, were about to go. Then there were two dangers, one to fall ill in the same place where no refuge and rest could be found because the cacique called Caonabó – who is, according to everybody, a very bad and daring man – seeing us so spoiled and ill, he could undertake what he never dare to do if we were healthy; and if we had to bring the gold here we run into other difficulty, because either we only took a small amount and then go and come every day and so the people would be put at risk of illness or it should be sent with a group of people with the danger of losing it.11 (Translated from Spanish) The word “danger” appears twice. The quality of danger is attributed first to an indigenous chieftain called Caonabó, and second to the loss of the gold. However, the risk is related to health: “to put at risk of illness” expresses the probability of falling ill. Danger is attributed first to someone, Caonabó – a person recognized as having the ability to produce harm. Columbus, as we can see here, understood well the difference between danger and risk, since the former is a property of someone or something and the risk is a relationship of probability with someone or something. The second usage of the word “danger” is more ambiguous, as it refers also to a probability; the term “risk” could also be used in this case. We could then interpret that Columbus gave the term “danger” a stronger meaning than he did to “risk”; he chose to use this stronger sense when referring to the gold, the most valuable thing for Columbus and his crew. Many other navigators, adventurers, and “conquistadores” arrived in the Indies after Columbus, carrying the word “riesgo” with them. Thus, the risk passed from the Mediterranean to the Americas as part of the usual Spanish vocabulary of the time.12 In Spanish, the word “riesgo” or risk expanded its semantic field beyond the sea, and even there, beyond the ­contracts and maritime insurances, since it was displaced from its earlier attribution only to goods and merchandise towards people. In 1540 F ­ rancisco de Pizarro, one of these “conquistadores”, nominated Juan Pérez de Guevara

64  When risk set foot in the Americas captain of a troop sent to pacify his dominions. Let us see how he used the concept of risk: And on behalf of his Majesty I give power to you in order to go with as much people as you need since I will provide them as long as they are about one hundred infantry men and horsemen. Then you must go to the said land of Moyobamba coming into the inland and towards the Cascaycingas from the land of Moyobamba. So you had to pacify all the Caciques and Indians with war but in the lesser possible risky way.13 (Translated from Spanish) There is again a reference to people’s lives, and risk is quantified such that it may be great or small depending on the actions of those using it. Risk is then considered as a relationship that can to some extent be controlled and minimized. This was Pizarro’s demand when he asked his captain to make war with the least possible risk to his men. We have a new example from a Crónica de Nueva España, written in 1560 by Francisco Cervantes. The captain of a Spanish troop gives a speech to his soldiers: Sirs and my friends; you can see the great need of fresh water that we have, and that we are on land where its inhabitants are numerous and enemies, as they demonstrated with the so bad treatment that they gave to Captain Alonso Hernández de Córcoba, as it was seen by Alaminos, the pilot, who is here with us. I see risk and danger, back and forth, but it seems to me, unless you offer a better advice, that we should try first to kill our enemies to save our lives, rather that let us die of thirst.14 (Translated from Spanish) We can interpret the notions of risk and danger used here as two different concepts relating to two options given to the troop by the captain: the risk of dying of thirst, or of confronting the danger of a skirmish with the natives. In this discourse, taking the risk is almost dishonorable, while facing the danger is an expression of bravery. On the other hand, the risk seems to derive from a probable situation – the depletion of drinking water – whereas danger is a property of reality, the enemy who is a direct threat.

Natural disasters and the narrative expansion of risk My interest has been to show how this “world again” found by Europeans was conceived simultaneously as a space of risks, dangers, and threats. The narratives arising from exploration and colonization let us appreciate this characterization, together with a second one related to the acquisition of

When risk set foot in the Americas  65 wealth, power, and prestige thanks to adventure and war. The first descriptions to shape the new world writing were the so-called “relaciones”, or accounts, which gave details of all these conquests. I have already used some of them. Certainly, after decades of violence and the extermination of some native populations, the Spanish Empire consolidated and constituted itself as an extension of sixteenth-century European society. This new society needed printing and literature. So, I wish to consider the creation of a new world narrative and its close connection with the wild nature and natural disasters. The Caribbean hurricanes15 were the primary of all disasters, a challenge immediately experienced by all Spanish navigators. The numerous descriptions of shipwrecks would transform the maritime tragedy into a distinctive literary topic. Columbus himself survived a terrible hurricane in his fourth and last voyage, which was the most difficult and also the most extraordinary of all his journeys. He arrived at the coast of what is today Venezuela, the first European to reach South America. He was accompanied by Fernando, his youngest son, who was thirteen years old, and Bartolomé, his brother, who had assisted him in his unfortunate government of Hispaniola. Columbus wrote to the Catholic Kings of Spain to recount the vicissitudes of this fourth voyage, including the first description of a Caribbean tropical storm. The dreadful storm lasted for eighty-eight days, and I did not see the sun neither stars over the sea; the ships had water leaks, the sails were broken, the anchors and riggings, cables and boats all of them lost, most of the people were ill and all sad and praying and taking religious vows. They often confessed one each other. We have seen other storms, but no other lasted so much and was so awful.16 (Translated from Spanish) This paragraph reveals how Columbus used religion to describe, in some detail, the natural disaster that damaged his ships. Columbus’ crew appealed to their beliefs when they were in such danger; Columbus depicts this quite logical reaction in faithful men. We have another extraordinary account written by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Náufragos or Castaways is the account of a terrible hurricane that surged into the port of Trinidad in 1527. Cabeza de Vaca had arrived there to take a cargo onto his ship, and part of the crew had disembarked when the hurricane released its fury. At that hour the rain and wind began to increase so much that the storm was no less severe in the town that upon the sea, for all the houses and churches were blown down, and seven or eight of us had to walk with arms linked to prevent the wind from carrying us away; and as we walked among trees were no less frightened, fearing that, as they were falling to, we would be killed underneath them.17

66  When risk set foot in the Americas Cabeza de Vaca and his companions experienced the inland effects of a hurricane; his later account in Naúfragos gives us an early description of a hurricane lashing the coast. Those affected by the storm included both the disembarked sailors and the natives living there. As these natives captured Cabeza de Vaca’s interest, he described their activities as the hurricane blew: And meanwhile we heard a night long, especially after midnight, a mighty crashing and sound of voices, and loud sounds of bells and flutes and tambourines and other instruments, which lasted until morning when the storm abated. Nothing so fearful had ever been seen in these parts.18 These actions – such as dancing and sounding bells or playing flutes as the hurricane raged – would not be so different from the behaviour of Columbus’ crew. The natives and seamen alike truly believed that a natural disaster was something more supernatural than natural. This is not a ­ ­phenomenological comprehension of natural disasters. My interest will be to illustrate a certain evolution in the new world narratives, such that the description of nature gradually played a more significant role. While I considered earlier the secularization of risk thanks to maritime trade, I now wish to show a progressive secularization of nature as it turned dangerous. These new narratives corresponded to the first accounts, diaries, literary chronicles and even an incipient journalism, which together gave birth to a Spanish American literature. If this epistemological genealogy was produced in the Americas, it was due to the discovery of natural disasters, since hurricanes, volcanos, and earthquakes were quite unusual in Europe.19 The first Europeans to settle in the Americas had discovered20 not only a new continent, but also its natural disasters. I attempt to explain how they created the first narratives of risk as a consequence of their discovery. I have presented a brief explanation of my storyline for this chapter, as Cabeza de Vaca’s account already presents some detail that is useful to understanding this kind of epistemological turn from the supernatural to the natural. After the hurricane, Cabeza de Vaca returned to the port to evaluate the damage suffered by the ships, as well as the situation of the crew who had been left on board. The view was bleak, with no trace of ships or crews. The description of this view is the most interesting part of this narrative. On Monday morning we went down to the port and did not find the ships; we saw their buoys in the water, whence we realized that they were lost; and we went along the coast to see whether we could find any trace of them. And as we found none we moved inland and, searching there, a quarter of a league from the water, we found a ship’s boat in some trees, and the leagues along the coast we found two crewmen

When risk set foot in the Americas  67 from my ship and a few tops of boxes; and the bodies were so disfigured by being dashed against the rocks that they were unrecognizable. We also found a cape and a shredded coverlet, and nothing else appeared. Sixty men and twenty horses were lost in the ships. Those who had gone ashore on the day that they arrived, some thirty, were all that were left of those who had been in both ships. Thus we suffered great trials and hunger for several days, because the supplies and subsistences that the town possessed has been lost, and some livestock, and the land was in such a state that it was pitiful to see: trees fallen, forests stripped bare, all without foliage or grass. In this plight we spent five days in the month of November, when the governor arrived with his four ships, which had also passed through a great storm and had escaped by taking timely refuge in a safe place. The crews that came in them, as well as those already there, were so terrified by what had happened that they greatly feared taking ship in winter and implored the governor to spend the season there. And he, perceiving that they and the residents of the town wished it, decided to winter there. He placed me in charge of the ships and crews, to go with them to winter in the port of Jagua, which is twelve leagues distant from there, and where I stayed until the twentieth day of February. After a catastrophe, the subsequent evaluation of damage becomes an exercise in objectivity since it is necessary to calculate the loss of human lives, material resources, buildings, livestock, crops, trees, and so on. On the other hand, as Cabeza de Vacas’ account shows, a minimum analysis of the survivors and the remaining resources is needed. Finally, some decisions must be made from these evaluations and analysis. In this paragraph, we note that the governor decided not to sail again until the winter was over. The whole process has a narrative reconstruction in which all events adopt a calculated representation, requiring distance from reality in order to evaluate it. We could appreciate that this principle of calculation or estimation approaches epistemologically a new rationalization21 of the natural disaster. Blanca López de Mariscal22 refers to a very peculiar man who in 1556 embarked on a Spanish ship that could not berth in Florida due to the very strong winds. He was Robert Tomson, servant of an English merchant named John Field. Two Englishmen voyaging in a Spanish ship was quite unusual at a time when both countries were almost permanently at war; but this situation was also morally unusual since Robert Tomson was a Lutheran. This aspect of Tomson’s personality became very revealing when a big storm damaged the vessel. López de Mariscal quotes some passages from Tomson’s diary, which I will use as well. Her interpretation is very suggestive. The fleet’s ships fleet fought against the tempest for ten days. In the midst of this nightmare, the Spanish seamen made out the so-called Saint Elmo’s fire23; Tomson describes this event from the distance of his no providential and no miraculous religious beliefs.

68  When risk set foot in the Americas I doe remember that in the great and boisterous storme of this foule weather, in the night, there came upon the toppe of our main yarde and maine maste, a certaine little light, much like onto the light of a little candle, which the Spaniards called the Corpos Sancto, and saide it was saint Elmo, whome they take to be the advocate of Sailers. At the which light the Spaniards fell downe upon their knees and worshipped it, and praying God and saint Elmo to cease the torment, and save them from the peril they were in (…) The friers cast reliques into the sea, to cause the sea to be stil and likewise saide Gospels, with other crossings and ceremonies upon the sea to make the storm to cease.24 These religious beliefs clashed Tomson’s description of a storm as nothing but a natural phenomenon: This light continued, aborde our shippe about 3 houres, flying from maste to maste and from toppe to toppe: and sometime it moulde bee in two or three places at once: I informed my selfe of learned men ­afterward what that light should be and they saide, that it was but a congelation of the wind and vapors of the sea congelated with the extremitie of the weather.25 Tomson’s account showed us, according to López de Mariscal, how “a medieval heritage and a Renaissance spirit” coexisted in the early voyages to the Americas. We could also see this as a good example of a certain secularization of the natural disaster that was emerging little by little in the first New World settlements. The impetus for this early secularization was writing, though it was a type of writing in which a certain observation from a distance was present. This is undoubtedly a rudimentary scientific principle. The early Spanish American writing tended to be quite objectivist, even realistic, and it was dominated, quite logically, by the overwhelming presence of nature. It is true that this realism was accompanied by fantasy, myth, belief, superstition, and other variants of an unbounded imagination. Later, in twentieth century, a modern Latin American narrative written in Spanish would be called “magic realism”. Thus, the Spanish American ­narrative has always been aware of the strong presence of nature, impressive as the source of both great danger and enormous wonder. I would like to show the narrative character of this early Spanish American literature. The formation of this early Spanish American narrative should be understood as the linkage of American issues with writers born and raised in the Americas. Nobody represents this confluence as well as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Moreover, he was the original creator of a character that would become the first American cultural archetype: the castaway. The shipwreck after a terrible storm has been a very popular story in the history of literature, with its masterpiece represented by Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe himself, as I will explain in a following

When risk set foot in the Americas  69 chapter, was perhaps the creator of the modern narratives of risk, but we cannot attribute to him the invention of the “Robinsonian” character. Pedro Serrano, a Spaniard, was the first Robinson – not only in reality but also in fiction, as Garcilaso de la Vega wrote his story. I will tell and analyse this story because it is essential to understanding how the first narratives of risk emerged in the Americas. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539, the son of Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish captain, and Isabel Chimpu Olloc, an Incan princess. He was raised and educated in Cuzco, where he learnt the Incan language and traditions. He finished his training in Spain, where he became both a  military man and a humanist. In fact, he was the first example of the “mestizaje”; he also wrote works as notable as the Comentarios Reales de los Incas, a history of the Incan empire. He died in Córdoba (Spain) in 1616. Chapter VIII of this great work is titled The Description of Peru and includes a kind of digression that helps Garcilaso to enlarge a chapter that was, as he admitted, too short. Thus, Garcilaso mentions the Serrana isle and explains the origin of its name – the story of a shipwreck and a Spaniard, Pedro Serrano, who survived. We can presume that Garcilaso used the information provided by a man named Garci Sánchez de Figueroa, who heard the tale from Pedro Serrano himself. It is true that after several years on that very small isle – a key, in fact – Pedro Serrano returned to Spain. What is really interesting is that we also have an account in Serrano’s own handwriting in Seville’s Archivo de Indias. It is not difficult to understand why Serrano wrote this account if we consider how important it was for him to tell his story in Spain. It was then quite common to write a “relación” or account in order to prove one’s exploits, achievements, or other memorable action to obtain some recompense from the Crown. Serrano’s manuscript was written long before Inca Garcilaso wrote his Comentarios Reales de los Incas. Inca Garcilaso’s story gives birth to the literary narration of America’s nature, not as a wonderful paradise of abundance, but as an uninhabitable and terrible place: Pedro Serrano swam to hitherto unamend desert island, which, as he said, would be about two leagues in circumference. The chart shows this to be so: it gives three small islets with a great many banks in all these parts, and ships avoid them as not to fall into danger.   It was Pedro Serrano’s fate to be wrecked among them and to reach the islands swimming. He was in a state of despair, for he found nor water nor fuel nor even grass he could graze on, nor anything else to maintain life till some ship might pass to rescue him before he perished from hunger and thirst; this seemed to him a harder fate than death by drowning, which is quicker. So he spent the first night bewailing his misfortune, and was as cast down as one would suppose a man to be in such a plight.26

70  When risk set foot in the Americas This is the other face of the “New World” and, rather than the fertility and abundance of the tropics, Garcilaso describes an extremely small space of solitude without vegetation where a man, absolutely alone, has ended up. The castaway, now an antihero, weeps for his misfortune.27 The Indies imaginary has two different sides to its narratives. If the natives can be noble and pacific or bloodthirsty cannibals, the land to be occupied and colonized can be either a paradisiac garden or an inhospitable place from which it is very difficult to escape. From this perspective, the new American continent will produce narratives to show danger, misfortune, or catastrophe. The myth of the “castaway”, inaugurated by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, was born here to become a literary archetype or a cultural hero able to inspire novels, films, or even TV series. This transition, from antihero to hero, is possible thanks to the story that develops in successive episodes of a wonderful survival. The castaway can collect food, build shelter, defend himself from all kind of danger, and finally emerge alive after several years in this terrible situation. This is the narrative process that leads to the ­creation of a new hero; none has done it so perfectly as Defoe with The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Inca Garcilaso presents a short account of Pedro Serrano’s adventures, which follow one another very quickly. Thus, being aware of his misfortune, he resolves to act in order to satisfy urgent needs such as hunger and thirst. Nevertheless, with this brief account, Garcilaso is able to establish the castaway’s basic character profile. As soon as dawn carne, he again walked round the island, and found some shellfish from the sea, crabs, shrimps, and other creatures. He caught what he could and ate them raw, having no flame to roast or boil them with. Thus he kept himself going until he saw turtles come forth. Seeing them some distance from the sea, he seized one and turned it over, and did the same to as many as he could, for they are clumsy in righting themselves when on their backs. Drawing a knife he used to wear in his belt, and which saved his life, he beheaded one and drank its blood instead of water. He did the same with the rest, and laid out their flesh in the sun to make dried meat and cleaned out the shells to catch rainwater, for the whole region is, of course, very rainy. (...)28   Finding himself adequately supplied with food and drink, Pedro Serrano thought that if he could make fire so as to be able to roast his food and produce smoke in case a ship should pass, he could lack nothing. With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task), he looked for a pair of pebbles that he could use as flint, hoping to use his knife to strike fire from them. But not finding any such stones on the island, which was covered with bare sand, he swam into the sea and dived, carefully searching the sea bottom in all directions, and persisting in his labors until he found pebbles.

When risk set foot in the Americas  71   Having got it, he counted himself fortunate and sustained it by collecting the jetsam thrown up by the sea. He spent hours collecting weeds called sea-pods, timber from ships lost at sea, shells, fish bones, and other material to feed his fire. So that the showers should not extinguish it, he made a hut with the biggest shells from the turtles he had killed, and tended the fire with great diligence lest it should slip from his hands.29 Having satisfied his hunger with crabs and vermin, and having even drunk the turtles’ blood, the castaway is ready to undertake the creation of his “new world”. First, he needs shelter; he builds a shack with the turtles’ shells, which he also uses as containers to collect the abundant rainwater. He has been eating raw items, but he feels the cultural need for cooked food. He then struggles to make a fire and, without vegetation or stones nearby, plunges into the sea looking for pebbles to spark. Now he can make a good fire with the wood from shipwrecks, feeding it to signal his position to any ship that might glimpse the smoke. The castaway is a “homo habilis” who confirms his human condition, dominating nature and taking from it all the resources he needs to survive. He survived for three years, until the day when he met another castaway: After three years, one afternoon when he was no expecting anything, he saw a man on the island. This man had been wrecked on the shoals the night before and had saved himself on a ship’s plank. As soon as dawn appeared, he saw the smoke of Pedro Serrano’s fire, and guessing what it was, made for it, aided by the plank and his good swimming. When they saw one another, it would be hard to say which was the more surprised. Serrano thought it was the Devil come in human form to tempt him to some desperate act. His guest thought Serrano was the Devil in his true form, he was so coated with hair, beard and hide. Each fled from the other, and Pedro Serrano went off crying: “Jesus! Jesus! Oh Lord, deliver me from the demon!”   Hearing this, the other was reassured, and turned towards him saying: “Flee me not, brother, for I am a Christian too”, and to prove it, as he still ran away, shouted the Credo. Pedro Serrano heard it, turned back, and they advanced with the greatest tenderness and many tears and groans, seeing that they were both in the same plight with no hope of escape.30 This passage in Garcilaso’s account is crucial for the construction of the “Robinsonian” hero. While in Garcilaso’s book Pedro Serrano meets another Spanish castaway, in Defoe’s novel it is a native who becomes ­Robinson Crusoe’s servant. Here, Defoe incorporates the colonial world into the story, thus giving his narrative a wider meaning. Nevertheless, in Garcilaso’s time, when the Spanish Empire was expanding so much, this

72  When risk set foot in the Americas would have been inconceivable. The unequal contrast between two human categories, the lord and the servant, would become Defoe’s most relevant contribution to this literary archetype. But this was not the case in the ­Caribbean key, where the two castaways lived together as “Christians”, though they also had some disputes. They lived on this isle for another four years until being rescued by a Spanish vessel in 1534. Someone on this ship was able to perceive the smoke from the fire, which the two men had been feeding constantly. They both embarked, but only Pedro Serrano arrived in Spain, his companion in misfortune having died during the return voyage. He had been living on the key for eight years. The account of Serrano’s adventures was very well received everywhere, and he was able to tell it to the Emperor Charles himself, who granted him an annuity. Unfortunately, Pedro Serrano died in Panama on his return voyage to Peru. In the last passage of Garcilaso’s book, which I have transcribed, he expresses, by means of the two castaways’ encounter, the social linkage between human beings and the impossibility of conceiving any natural space without a human presence. This linkage, in this epoch, cannot be but religious; thus, two people who do not recognize themselves as human at first, identifying as animals or devils, discovered their shared human ­condition as “Christians”. At this point it is very interesting to note how meaningful was the shift that Defoe introduced to his story. The character of Friday, the native who is rescued by Crusoe, completely changes the intentionality of Defoe’s narrative. In this way, the equality of two Christians in Garcilaso becomes the inequality between the colonizer and the colonized, the civilized and the savage in Defoe. I have previously mentioned that Pedro Serrano himself wrote an account of his adventure on the Serrana isle. This is really an extraordinary case in which we have a literary piece and a narration written by the main figure in these events years before. We do not know if Garcilaso read this manuscript, but he admits at the end of his account that someone told him the story. A comparison between both texts illustrates the birth of a Spanish American literature, with a strong presence of a wild nature. On the other hand, it is very interesting to appreciate the emergence of a less supernatural understanding of nature in this literature. This is one of the main differences that we may observe between the account of Pedro Serrano (or Juan Maestro – the pseudonym he adopted) and that of Garcilaso. Let us see how Serrano tells of his shipwreck: In mid ocean, Saturday night, at midnight, a big storm broke and pull down both masts with all sails and the ship opened so that a huge amount of water came into it; we ran astern, where the winds and sea were taken us and after six days, Wednesday night, we arrive to the Serrana shoal.31 (Translated from Spanish)

When risk set foot in the Americas  73 The texts are, of course, different in their styles. Pedro Serrano writes in a very bureaucratic way, using the clerks’ jargon of the time. Garcilaso’s writing clearly has a literary quality that is not present in Serrano’s. However, a more significant difference separates this first account of Serrano’s from all the castaway literature written afterwards. In fact, ­ Serrano was not the only crew member to survive the shipwreck, and for a time six survivors formed a group. Three of them eventually made a raft and set sail, while a fourth died of desperation. Thus, Pedro Serrano and a young man remained on the key. Later, two Spanish castaways, who were on a small island not far away, saw the smoke from the big fire and joined them. They remained in this situation for five years until they all set sail upon a small and precarious boat. Pedro Serrano was aware at once that this boat would not last for long, and he decided to return to the key together with another man. There was never any word of those who had dared to navigate. The differences between these two stories are very revealing. Garcilaso makes Serrano the only survivor living on the small isle, until he meets a companion; in doing so, he proposes a very literary theme: the castaway’s solitude against a wild nature. This is the starting point to creating the castaway as a cultural hero. We can appreciate in both Garcilaso and Defoe how the castaway fable must change some aspects from Pedro Serrano’s original account, since Serrano was never alone. As I see that my companions had gone away and the other one was dead and that just the boy stayed with me, I decided to look for some resource which could feed me and started to eating the turtles eggs digging in the island in some different places; looking for water, and in this small engulfed land, In any place I found it, it t was so salty as if it were sea water, nevertheless I drunk it sometimes mixed with seals blood.32 (Translated from Spanish) There is another clear difference between the actions undertaken by Serrano in order to survive, as they were, by his account, much slower and less productive than in Garcilaso’s story. The search for water is a good example. The encounter with another castaway did not exist either: When I had fire, every night I lighted bonfires in case some ship could sight us thanks to those fires, and in a very small island, where I was, two men, who were located two leagues towards windward from me and were lost, saw the fires and came rafting to me and they stayed five years with me.33 (Translated from Spanish) This encounter does not stand out in Serrano’ story, but in Garcilaso’s and Defoe’s it becomes a central episode representing the confrontation

74  When risk set foot in the Americas between two different entities, the human and the non-human – which in this case becomes the encounter between Christian equality and the civilized, and the savage, which establishes a benevolent domination. Three years after the other mates went away, we were eight people living there and God permited that his mercy helped us and one day, on the eve of Saint Matthew, at midday, we saw a vessel sailing and then we burnt a fire with big smoke in one of our turrets and as people on ship could sight us they threw a skiff and the captain and sailors leaped ashore and his clerk took for testimony what he saw. (Translated from Spanish) After eight years, a ship caught sight of the smoke and removed them from the isle. The first part of Serrano’s account essentially ends here. Pedro ­Serrano’s account includes a final epilogue in which he tells of an oneiric experience that was, for him, the most relevant event of everything that happened there. In his desperation, he had complained bitterly about his bad luck and invoked the devil to take him off the isle, since God had not done it. That night, according to his testimony, a horrible creature, breathing smoke from the nose and fire from the eyes, appeared to him. It had the wings of a bat, the legs of a man, and horns. This was, of course, a typical image of the devil as it was frequently represented in the altarpieces or on the frescoes of many Spanish churches. After this vision, Serrano and his companion made a cross and went around the isle to liberate it from this evil presence in something like an exorcism. We can identify a certain echo of this vision in that episode narrated by Garcilaso when the two castaways meet. They look at each other as if they were beasts or devils, only recognizing themselves as Christians after praying. It is possible that Garcilaso was inspired by this story but stripped it of its supernatural dimension to give it a narrative entity able to express the castaways’ common human condition against the wilderness. I have described the tropical storms and the hurricanes, together with the experience of being a castaway from a shipwreck – events and situations that the Spaniards suffered immediately in their navigations and explorations throughout the new continent. At the same time, all these phenomena were conceived and represented as something that clearly distinguished this “new world” in contrast to the “old world” of Europe.

The narrative expansion of risk in the Spanish literature in the Americas The volcano as a natural disaster was unknown in Spain and even in Western Europe, where powerful eruptions in South Italy (Vesuvio) and Sicily (Etna) had not occurred since antiquity.34 Thus, volcanic activity became a very powerful object of risk to identify the new world in the

When risk set foot in the Americas  75 European imaginary. In 1541, a volcanic disaster destroyed the city of ­Guatemala; a description of this catastrophe was published almost immediately in Mexico City. This description is usually considered as the first example of a primitive journalism. In addition, this publication was one of the first writings to be printed in the Americas. The introduction of the press in the Americas took place in Mexico thanks to the Crombergers, a family of German printers who had settled in Seville at the end of the fifteenth century. They were, after the conquest of Mexico, the most important book dealers for the first Mexican libraries. This trade was so productive that they soon began printing books, such as the Cartilla y doctrina en lengua de indios de Michoacán35 (1538), just for the New Spain. In light of this new and promising market, the Crombergers sent a press to Mexico in 1539 under the management of the printer Juan Pablos. Soon after, in 1541, this press published the Relación del espantable terremoto que agora nuevamente ha acontecido en la ciudad de Guatemala,36 a very important document to confirm that a new narrative of risk, with some journalistic features, was conveying news about the natural disasters. The “hojas volantes”, or flyers, were the first antecedent of journalism in the Americas until the publication of the “gacetas” or gazettes in the eighteenth century. Those flyers narrated important events whose knowledge had to be disseminated promptly. This would obviously have been impossible without the press. The texts were relatively brief and circulated as ­leaflets. Their narrative structure was quite similar to the news, and they became – with some limitations if we consider the high proportion of illiterate people – a kind of substitute for the traditional announcements of town criers. This flyer printed and distributed in 1541 is the earliest known, and it is in fact the first example of journalism on the new continent. This natural disaster – the consequence of a big storm that demolished one of the Agua volcano walls, releasing a lake within the crater – devastated the city of Guatemala in 1541. In fact, this was not a volcanic eruption but a huge inundation. So, it is surprising that this document refers to an earthquake in its title. This might be a mistake or an example of how the word “earthquake” acquired a general usage to describe any natural disaster of great proportion. The author of this news was someone called Juan Rodríguez, who signed as “escribano” or clerk. Account of what happened in Guatemala Saturday, 10th of September 1541 at two o’clock in the morning. It had rained on Thursday and Friday, though not long or heavily, and the Saturday was as described. But at two o’clock in the morning there came a great deluge of water from the top of the volcano that rises above Guatemala, so suddenly that there was no chance to avoid the deaths and damage caused. The mud slide, which drove water, rocks

76  When risk set foot in the Americas and trees before it, was so large that those who saw it were most astonished. This narration of the “frightening earthquake” demands very special attention, as López de Mariscal proposes: The “story of the frightening earthquake” becomes an edifying n ­ arrative which tries to move its readers to the contrition of their sins. As the story goes mouth-to-mouth or it is being remade by different emitters, other fantastic elements which reinforce its exemplariness are attached.37 Later on, this tragedy became a narrated fact in many other books, which adopted it as a transcendental event with a great significance. According to López de Mariscal, this natural disaster was included in several “relaciones” such as Memoriales by Fray Toribio de Benavente, the Historia General y Natural de las Indias by Fernández de Oviedo, the Anales de los cakchiqueles, Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and the Monarquía indiana by Torquemada. Here again we find a story, more or less firsthand, followed by other narrations that remake it in their own way. In all cases, these authors are following the exemplarity of the original flyer in 1542 and trying to strengthen it. The flyer already ­mentioned in its title that this event was a “great example for we all to emend our sins and be prepared for the time when God calls us”. This appreciation, clearly documented by López de Mariscal, has great value in unveiling a kind of “matrix” narration. Then we have a narration with a pattern able to inspire a number of future stories whose main intention, in echoing this first one, would be to face the probability that this disaster would be repeated. Through the pages of this book I will try to demonstrate that this is one of the main features of risk narratives. At the beginning of seventeenth century many Hispanic texts were already using the term “riesgo” and they were not only legal documents or concise accounts, but also extensive memorials. Pedro Fernández de Quirós, a Portuguese seaman in the service of the Spanish Crown, wrote an extensive memorial, Descubrimiento de las regiones australes, to report in detail the vicissitudes of a very long voyage. He set sail with three ships from El Callao (Perú) on December 21, 1605 steering to the South Pacific Ocean. On April 7, they arrived in the isle of Taumaco, one of the Solomon Islands. On April 21, they reached the Tikopia isle and the next 30 the “Espíritu Santo”, named today Vanuatu, of which on May 1, Fernández de Quirós took possession in the name of the king of Spain Philippe III. Fernández de Quirós believed that they had arrived to a southern continent which he named “Australia del Espíritu Santo”. Finally, he returned to Acapulco (Mexico) in November 1606. In this narrative, which describes a long series of adventures, the risk is widely contextualized, much more than in the preceding examples. A

When risk set foot in the Americas  77 memorial was not a novel since it pretended to tell events which happened bearing witness to them in order to get a benefit, a post or some kind of recognition. This memorial, written by Fernández de Quirós, offers a narrative development with a significant extension, divided in eighty chapters following not just a simple chronological order but a thematic one so that each chapter has a title to indicate its content. So, it is almost a novel. The Descubrimiento de las regiones australes (The Discovering of the Southern Regions) might have been written in Madrid between 1607and 1617 when Fernández de Quirós was lobbying the Spanish court to obtain financial resources to prosecute his expeditions. He had to wait until 1614 though unfortunately he died in 1615 in Panama during his return to Peru. I have selected two passages from this book in which the Spanish word “riesgo” is used in connection to a set of facts, considerations, arguments and circumstances which would justify my proposition about the narrative expansion of risk in the Hispanic literature at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is clear that we suffer the same wind that it came with us and what was favorable before is unfavorable now, and so our return to Peru seems impossible without navigating much more to the north. The naos are unrigged and we are unable to careen them; there were no ropes and the rigging was rotten. Ours supplies consisted in a small amount of flour and we had only a few water cruces because some of them crashed and the barrels broken and no one could repair them (...) All these accounts were true, therefore it had no sense to undertake things with risks for own and other lives.38 The pilot enumerates a set of circumstances that altogether describe a very serious situation such as the headwind, the damage of the ships and a great scarcity of supplies, among other things, that justify the fundamental consideration which this first mate announces to the soldiers, that they cannot take the risk of sailing so unfavorably. The next paragraph is quite similar though it has a more literary quality since we find here more imagination and some home nostalgia. Seeing himself so ill and deeply involved in many kinds of obligations, and that there were some duties which like a woodworm were consuming the lifetime and represented great mistrusts which recalled that abundance of the Royal court, cold snow, fresh fruits and other memories which weakened the passionate wills; and that up to the present he had not found isles with harbour or water, so necessary and the amount which they had in the ships was scarce and it was not fair to put on risk such an important matter without it, with time being so insecure and the part where they had to look for mainland so uncertain.39

78  When risk set foot in the Americas This “not putting on risk” comes from the captain’s doubts being himself homesick and insecure by the water scarcity and no land in sight. All these experiences and sentiments recommended him not taking risk. We notice again that the risk, whether it is confronted or avoided, demands something more than a word, because it only gets a meaning after a more extensive narrative development. To reveal that the captain should not “put himself on risk” a narration was necessary. This is a good example of the narrative expansion of risk which appears progressively along the sixteenth century and was usual in seventeenth century Spanish literature. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose first part was published in 1605 and the second in 1615, is a good example. The word riesgo or risk appears there in numerous occasions what means that its use was already common in the Spanish language at that time. This time is Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s squire, who refers to risk when he is rambling about the recompense which his master has offered him Sancho I was born and Sancho I mean to die. But for all that, if heaven were to make me a fair offer of an island or something else of the kind, without much trouble and without much risk, I am not such a fool as to refuse it; for they say, too, ‘when they offer thee a heifer, run with a halter; and ‘when good luck comes to thee, take it in.40 There is no better way to conclude than with a true American-themed novel showing the narrative expansion of risk. Navigation, exploration, natural disasters, and the encounter with native peoples and pirates, are the various circumstances which contribute to form the diverse situations of risk that put this story into literary form. The Historia del huérfano was written in 1621 by Andrés de León, Martín de León y Cárdenas’ pseudonym. He was, really, an Austin friar but he never could publish this manuscript which belongs today to the Hispanic Society of New York. Finally, it has been published in 2017. This novel is apparently a man’s called “Huérfano” or “Orphan” biography, with episodes that happen in American scenarios such as the Caribbean sea, Nueva Granada, Perú and the cities of Potosí and Guayaquil together with Spanish and Italian places. So, the thematic variety that we find in this novel gives it a narrative complexity that the prior American textuality had not, for what the narrative expansion of risk can be appreciate clearly with multiple examples. In fact, and after a careful revision of the Historia del Huérfano, the Spanish word “riesgo” was identified twenty times. This paragraph is a good example to show a more sophisticated situation of risk in an elaborated narrative context. After many adventures in Spain and Italy the “Huérfano” embarked again to sail to the Indies and arrived to Cartagena de Indias and finally to Lima. In this overland journey he had an opportunity to visit the mercury mines of Guancavelica which he describes vividly as: “a vignette of hellor the fabulous forges of Vulcan’s cyclops”.

When risk set foot in the Americas  79 The “Huérfano” entered to visit the mine with him and was amazed at the big dangers, risks, darks, precipices, galleries, excavations, gorges, ladders, humidities, heat, nasty smell, rudeness, bad passes that were found before reaching the center, all of them with the risk of life, where I saw more than eight hundred Indians working in different jobs inside those cavernous holes.41 Here the word “risk” is used two times, though both references have different meanings. In first case the author reifies the risk situating it together with other material “things” such as precipices, galleries, gorges and son on. In second, we have an appropriate construction in terms of a relationship between life as an “object at” risk and all the other “things” already mentioned, which are really “objects of “risk”. Thus, he presents a kind of tautology since then one could be “at” risk of “risk”. Indeed, and in the first case what we can discover is an anticipation of risk modern reification, so frequent nowadays when the risk is used as an object but not as a relationship between objects “at” and “of”. In all the examples that have been previously presented here, the narrative expansion of risk was characterized by the elaboration, thanks to a story, of situations in which the risk operated in connection to many more objects “at” and “of” risk. There was not a simple relation of a harm probability caused to a single object but to a certain number of them and besides in much more diverse circumstances which in turn demanded more complex narrative descriptions. I have tried to show how the Spanish Empire expansion in the Americas produced new situations, which were quite different to those which had been familiar in Europe. This narration contributed to expand the semantic field of risk which from being a single word became progressively a kind of narrative devoted to the conceptualization of harm probabilities in situations such as navigation, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos, natives’ encounters, mining or piracy, among others. This is how this new narrative development of risk resulted in a fundamental cause to the birth of the Spanish American literature.

Notes   1 Varela, C. – 1983 Cristóbal Colón. Textos y documentos completos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial  2 Columbus, C. 1892 Writings of Columbus. Edited by Paul L. Ford. New York Charles Webster & Co. p. 52   3 Columbus, C. (Ibid.) p. 52   4 Wey Gómez, N. – 2008 Tropics of Empire. Boston: MIT Press. p. 398   5 Flint, V. – The Imaginative Landscape of Cristopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 150   6 Flint, V. – Op. Cit, pp. 151–152   7 Abulafia, D. – 2009 The Discovery of Mankind. Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

80  When risk set foot in the Americas   8 In the so famous Controversy of Valladolid which Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas held in 1551, they discussed the human condition of native American people and if – as Sepúlveda argued – they belonged to an inferior category of human beings or if they shared the same and equal human condition as the Christian Europeans and thus could not be enslaved, as it was sustained by De las Casas. The Pope’s legate ruled in favor of De las Casas’ arguments. However, this controversy had a relevant background with a notable future influence of which De las Casas was unaware. It was the slavery of African people in the Americas, and this was not considered at all   9 Columbus, C. 1892 Op. cit. p. 62 10 Biblioteca digital Miguel de Cervantes www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ cristobal-colon-cartas-que-escribio-sobre-el-descubrimiento-de-america-y-testamentoque-hizo-a-su-muerte–0/html/0108d902–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_116.html 11 Biblioteca digital Miguel de Cervantes www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/cris tobal-colon-cartas-que-escribio-sobre-el-descubrimiento-de-america-y-testamentoque-hizo-a-su-muerte–0/html/0108d902–82b2–11df-acc7–002185ce6064_116.html 12 This was not the case for English and French. In fact, we do not have written evidence of a general use of the words “risk” or “risque” at that time in either language. 13 Lohmann Villena, G. – 1986 Documentos Notariales. Madrid: CSIC 14 Cervantes de Salazar, F. – 1560 Crónica de Nueva España (1560). Edición de Manuel Magallón. 1971. Madrid: Atlas 15 According to Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias (Sevilla, 1535), the word “huracán” was used by the natives of Hispaniola to refer to a “very hard storm or tempest”. The word was then appropriated in Spanish 16 López de Mariscal, B. – 2007 Terremotos, tormentas y catástrofes en las crónicas y los relatos de viaje al Nuevo Mundo. Biblioteca digital Miguel de Cervantes. p. 2 17 Pupo-Walker, E. (ed.). – 1993 Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press p. 8 18 Pupo-Walker, E. (ed.) (Ibid.) p. 9 19 There was an ongoing similar process in Europe, related to the understanding and treatment of epidemics. 20 I am aware that the application of the word “discovery” for the occupation and dominion of the Americas by some European monarchies is frequently criticized. Nevertheless, what I am considering is that these European navigators and colonizers were the first to share the idea that the Americas were a continent 21 This new rationalization would take on a strong role after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 22 López de Mariscal, B. – 2007 (Ibid.) p. 4 23 Saint Elmo’s fire is an electric shock that appears in the ship’s masts during an electrical storm. This phenomenon was well known from antiquity and was associated with Saint Elmo, the patron of all seamen. It was considered as an omen, of both good and bad luck 24 Hakluyt, R. 1589 The PrincipalNnavigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or Over Land. London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie. p. 582 25 Hakluyt, R. 1589 (Ibid.) p. 583 26 Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1966 Royal Commentaries of the Incas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. p. 27 27 There are numerous details revealing how Defoe was inspired by Pedro Serrano’s story. Robinson Crusoe cries inconsolably at his misfortune when he is finally aware of being alone. This passage and the whole story have certainly an extensive narrative development and more literary quality in Defoe’s work 28 Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1966 Ibid. p. 27 29 Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1966 Ibid. pp. 27–28

When risk set foot in the Americas  81 30 Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1966 Ibid.. p. 29 31 Serrano y Sanz, M. (ed.) 1916 Relaciones históricas de América. Primera mitad del siglo XVI. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos españoles. p. 17 The three keys of “Serrana” are located between Jamaica and the coast of Nicaragua, 14° latitude North. 32 Serrano y Sanz, M. (ed.) 1916 Ibid. p. 18 33 Serrano y Sanz, M. (ed.) 1916 Ibid. p. 20 34 Mount Vesuvius had been dormant from 1036 until the 1631 eruption in which some 3000 people died. Mount Etna had been inactive from the second century ad until 1669, when it returned to activity with several eruptions in the following years. The Canary Islands volcanos, as the big Teide, were extinct 35 “Primer and Doctrine in the Language of Michoacán Indians” 36 “Account of the Frightening Earthquake that Happened Newly in the Indies in a City Called Guatemala” 37 López de Mariscal 38 Fernández de Quirós, P.- 1876–1882 Historia del descubrimiento de las regiones Australes. [Justo Zaragoza ed.], 3 vols., Madrid: Manuel G. Hernández 39 Fernández de Quirós, P. – (1876–1882) Ibid. Chapter. XVIII 40 Cervantes, M.- 2004 Don Quixote (Translated by John Ormsby). Vol. II, p. 35. Project Gutenberg 41 De León, A. – 2018 Historia del Huérfano. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. p. 156

Bibliography de León, Andres 2018 Historia del Huérfano. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. Fernández de Quirós, P. 1876–1882 Historia del descubrimiento de las regiones Australes. [ed. Dir. por Justo Zaragoza], 3 vols., Madrid: Manuel G. Hernández. Flint, v The Imaginative Landscape of Cristopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Wey. Garcilaso de la Vega, I. 1966 Royal Commentaries of the Incas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lohmann Villena, G. 1986 Documentos Notariales. Madrid: CSIC. López de Mariscal, B. 2007 Terremotos, tormentas y catástrofes en las crónicas y los relatos de viaje al Nuevo Mundo. Biblioteca digital Miguel de Cervantes. Pupo-Walker, E. (ed.). 1993 Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Serrano Y Sanz, M. 1916 Relaciones históricas de América. Primera mitad del siglo XVI. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles. Wey Gómez, N. 2008 Tropics of Empire. Boston: MIT Press. p. 398.

5 From narrative to the probability calculus

Neither Fermat nor Pascal used the term “probability” in their correspondence of the 1660s, discussing rather the number of “hazards”.1 In fact, the term “probability” was used for the first time with reference to a general mathematical calculus applicable to games of chance by James Bernoulli in his Ars ­Conjectandi of 1713. Be this as it may, the history of mathematical probability will take us back to a time when mathematicians were acutely interested in problems associated with gambling. However, there is also a kind of prehistory of uncertainty, chance and divination, where we may begin. The time structure which allowed the invention of risk was bound up with probability, and it eventually evolved from narrative to number, becoming arithmetic. Let me illustrate this argument by means of a comparison which will show that the narrative concept of probability, as used by the seafaring traders of the mediaeval Mediterranean and the Atlantic mariners of the sixteenth century, aptly defined by the Spanish Royal Academy as “fundada apariencia de verdad” [“well founded appearance of truth”],2 is substantially the same in its epistemology as the mathematical version formulated by Laplace in his Théorie analytique des probabilités published in 1812 and in his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités of 1819. Let us begin with Laplace’s rule of succession, according to which the probability of an event A is equal to the ratio of successful outcomes to the total possible outcomes of the experiment. In this light, the epistemological core of risk is relational, whether as narrative or as probabilistic calculus. Narrative links an object of risk to an object at risk, while calculation establishes a quantitative ratio between the number of actual occurrences of an event and the number of possible outcomes in a given set of circumstances. In both cases, knowledge is brought to bear to lessen uncertainty. In the case of navigation, the uncertainty associated with sea voyages in the past was limited by an estimate of the value of cargo contractually assumed by a given party using the formula “ad meum risicum” based on narratives of shipwreck and piracy. In games of chance, the main subject of the studies of probability made by Cardano, Huygens, Pascal, Fermat and others, uncertainty about the outcome is limited by the odds of winning calculated as a probabilistic ratio either way. In both cases, what is possible (e.g. shipwreck or winning a bet)3

From narrative to the probability case  83 is transformed into something that is probable. The new thought process or technology underlying the invention of mathematical probability is thus a matter of moment in both historical and scientific terms.

From divination to “risk” Anything is possible in a situation in uncertainty, and there is no tale like the Odyssey to make this clear. The voyage of Ulysses and his crew lacks any future projection or route. Their vessel moves at the whim of the gods, and the hero and his men are their playthings. Literally anything could happen to the long-suffering mariners. Their destiny is out of their hands and nothing they can do will influence it. This is the world of the ancients, who could turn only to divination. One of the great “modern” adventure stories paints a very different story, however. I refer once again to Daniel Defoe’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, unquestionably the classic modern tale of misfortune at sea, as embodying the combination of navigation, adversity and uncertainty. Robinson is a modern hero, who acts to construct a future and seeks to reduce the uncertainty inherent in his own actions. By making fire and keeping it going, he is able to imagine a future return home, thereby transforming a remote possibility into a probability. Both Ulysses and Robinson survive their fate and make it home. However, Ulysses owes his return to the goddess Athena, his protectress, while ­Robinson survives by his own actions. This is a crucial difference, because it specifically embodies the idea of the autonomy of mankind, which will henceforth decide its own fate through its actions. Robinson uses knowledge and action to combat the terrible uncertainty of the castaway and survive completely alone on an uninhabited island for years before saving Friday, who becomes his servant. Between the seventh century bc and the eighteenth century ad, humanity made great strides in the management of uncertainty. In all its forms and expressions, risk is a way of lessening uncertainty and so it takes its place among the key ideas which forged modernity.4 Risk allowed the transition from a future imaged as possibility to one imagined as probability, and this proved the inspiration for many leading figures of different ages facing widely varying situations of need. The Muslim theologians and caravans of the seventeenth century, the Mediterranean jurists, notaries and mariners of the fourteenth century, and the conquistadors, chroniclers and writers who first described the New World in the seventeenth century could all be said to have been moved by the urge to master the unknown, and all did so within a specific chronotope. Thus, they opened up and maintained routes that crossed the wastes of desert and sea. It is no accident, then, that the deserts of the Near East and the Mediterranean Sea provided the stage for the emergence of the new context. When the Portuguese and Spanish first embarked upon their transoceanic voyages of discovery, they made a giant leap by projecting an incipient and fairly sketchy understanding

84  From narrative to the probability case forward in their timeframe so that it became possible to imagine future events in space. This understanding was originally religious in nature, but it later developed into the kind of commercial knowledge that could be written down in a contract. These voyages of discovery were in turn related to other contexts formed by new knowledge, skills and experiences like the spread of new navigation instruments in the Mediterranean, new ship designs and shipbuilding techniques, and advances in the classical science of cartography. History teaches that men have always striven to control time, and to do this they have imagined it in different ways. Looking back, people have used recollection to form memories, which then acquired their own independent being as stories passed down the generations as oral tradition. Such stories were in turn represented in the form of the images reflected in prehistoric paintings and carvings. Eventually, the invention of writing, at first on stone stelae or clay tablets, then on papyrus and parchment, and finally on paper lent an extraordinary perdurability to the events of the past. The written word meant that accounts of the past could be documented, then carefully sifted and finally submitted to increasingly scientific scrutiny. In this way, the ancient knowledge of the past recounted in chronicles and sagas gradually gave way to the modern science of historiography. However, the accounts of the past expressed in personal and collective memory, in legends, folk tales and traditions still form a part of our culture. Furthermore, imagined tales exist outside of any chronology referring to a primeval age before the beginning of time. These are the myths that tell of the birth of a city, a nation or a religion, which present as occurring in a no-time. In any event, it could be said that the construction of time placed upon past events usually involves certainty, but this certainty is relative and may fade, for example, as we move farther away from the time at which the narrative occurred. In addition to this experience of past time, we are also aware of future time, of that which is yet to come. The first and most basic characteristic of this timeframe is that we cannot in principle know what the future holds in store, for we have no experience of what has yet to be. This is, then, a state of uncertainty, and any event we may imagine in the future will by its very nature be merely a possibility. Anything is possible in the future. Throughout history this has presented a great challenge to humankind, as we have always sought to see ahead through this shroud of uncertainty. The first response was magical – with the aid of supernatural forces, men could see what had yet to occur, curing uncertainty with foresight. The magic of divination, sooth-saying and oracles was that the person vested with prophetic powers could “see”. Magic was, then, mankind’s first bid to conquer the uncertainty of the future. Believers could not see for themselves, but they could receive messages from those who had the magic or supernatural power to see. As explained in Chapter 1, Islamic theology changed divination by introducing the idea of divine reason to foresee the outcome of

From narrative to the probability case  85 future events. This new idea replaced visions with faith in one God: seeing was no longer believing.5 I believe this was a crucial step, which was taken by both Christianity and Islam, and we must consider it in both its temporal and epistemological dimensions. A vision opens up an existential truth, and for the visionary it makes the unreal real. In this way, it annuls the effects of time, because there is no mediation between uncertainty and certainty and the vision transports the visionary from one time and place to another with complete immediacy. Faith, however, is a kind of belief that does not require visions, because it is derived from the rational theological principle that only God can know what will happen. Faith is, then, more rational than the pure belief expressed by the visionary. This epistemological shift in the nature of belief was rooted in the replacement of magic by true knowledge, which came directly from God. The rejection of visions, though still within the framework of religion, allowed believers to imagine or represent a reality that was still only dimly known, namely the space to be crossed on their journeys and voyages, and the events that might occur during the crossing. The uncertainty of the future was, then, a test of faith, and it is logical that the Arabs, themselves nomads in their original homeland of the Arabian Peninsula, should have become a people on the move in quest of a great empire on land and sea. The knowledge of the future which came from faith and was expressed in the concept of rizq was gradually permeated and secularized by technical and practical knowledge of a more secular nature, like the science of astronomy, the invention of the compass and the compass rose, the calculation of latitude, the design of the lateen sail, the astrolabe and the techniques of cartography. It could be said that the allembracing experience encapsulated in visions6 of the future gave way to a more or less limited access to the future and a more relative understanding. This transition occurred as a kind of shift from absolute belief in an allencompassing vision revealing what will happen to the opening of a window through which the future can be more or less clearly made out in terms of what could happen. Time now takes centre stage as “sight” yields to the recognition that nothing has yet occurred. Foresight is in some sense ontological, because it tells the believer what his future was, for it has been seen. Faith, however, recognizes that only God can know what will happen, and in doing so it assumes that there is still time in hand before the event occurs, or to put this another way that the future exists but is unknown to man. The only way to cover the gap is to build a construct of time, which is none other than probability. Knowledge of probability allows us to glimpse the unknown, achieving a relative understanding of what has not yet happened. It was not, then, the underlying concept of probability that evolved in the modern world but the techniques applied to gain probabilistic knowledge. It is no accident that the word rizq should have emerged in Arabic, to denote the primitive notion of risk. Arabic can develop broad semantics in

86  From narrative to the probability case a single term, so that its words have an extraordinary facility to embrace meanings ranging from the particular to the general. This is not just a highly poetic facet of the language, but also explains why risk should be, in origin, an Arabic concept. In his book Moorish Culture in Spain, Titus Burkhardt brilliantly describes the qualities of Arabic, a poetic and abstract language nonpareil. Languages tend to become poorer over time rather than being enriched, and the original riches of the Arabic language, which have not been worn down by time, are revealed precisely in its immense wealth of words and expressive possibilities It can both designate a single object by various words, focusing on it from different sides, and embrace various meanings, each linked to the others by their internal significance, in a single term without ever becoming illogical. It is probably this multiple interpretability, in the positive sense, which is the foundation of its aptitude to serve as a sacred language.7 Islam drove the progress of rational and scientific thought between the seventh century and its eventual decadence just as the Renaissance was beginning in Europe. Islam and Europe maintained close trade and maritime links in the Mediterranean, resulting in an intense exchange of technologies and knowledge. As a part of this general traffic, the Arabic notion of rizq passed into Latin sometime in the thirteenth century, and from there into the Romance languages in the fourteenth century. There was, however, another exchange involving a significant Arab influence as a result of which the notions of probability and risk would take on a mathematical cast as well as their original narrative form. This influence came, of course, from games of chance, especially dice.

Games of chance and the calculation of probability The Arabic etymology of the English word “hazard” via the French “hazard” and Spanish “azar” is commonly accepted. However, the meaning of the term narrowed in English from the original seventeenth century senses of both “chance” and “risk” or “danger” as borrowed from French, so that eventually it came to mean only “risk” or “danger”, sometimes indistinguishably. Meanwhile, the word “risque” also appeared in French sometime in the seventeenth century, probably as a borrowing from Spanish, so that the word “hazard” came to refer especially to “chance”, the preferred term in English for luck or fortune. The French word “chance” of course also means “luck”, but not in any sense applicable to gaming, as implied by the Spanish “azar” or Arabic “az-zahr”. It is interesting to compare the expressions used in these three languages to refer to games of chance, an activity in which random luck was first challenged in Renaissance Italy in the sixteenth century. In Spanish such games are

From narrative to the probability case  87 referred to as “juegos de azar” and in French as “jeux de hazard”, but in English we have “games of chance”. The etymology of the Spanish term “azar” (and therefore of its French and English derivations) is described in detail by the Catalan lexicographer Joan Coromines in his Diccionario Etimológico de la Lengua Española, which gives its origin as the Arabic az-zahr. The first meaning assigned to this term is “the losing side of a die”, whence “losing throw in a game of dice” “a game played with dice”, “bad luck, ill fortune, risk” and “chance or random event”.8 Coromines thus defines a total of five possible meanings of “azar” in Spanish, the first two of which are mediaeval uses. The third would last until the time of Cervantes and the fourth, which includes “risk” as a meaning of the word, also belongs to the classical period. Finally, the fifth meaning has been current since the eighteenth century according to Coromines. The sense of “azar” as “risk” or “bad luck” began to disappear from Spanish, and almost certainly also from French, under the influence of the new term “riesgo”, which would eventually replace it. However, this was not the case in English, which maintained the meaning of “hazard” as “risk, bad luck, misfortune” and even “harm or danger”. Coromines also goes a step further, providing a succinct account of the probable context in which the meaning developed its meaning: It is not unlikely that zahr originally denoted one side of a die in Arabic, because the same word in classical Arabic means “flower” (See. AZAHAR) and a flower may have been painted on that side. This explanation suggests, then, that the true origin of the words “azar”, “hasard” and “hazard” lies in the classical Arabic “zahr”9 meaning “flower”. The dice brought to Europe by the Arabs had flowers painted on the sides, and the Arabic word for flower, “zahr”, thus became the name for a game of dice, and from there it came to designate the uncertainty or randomness characteristic of the game in Spanish “azar” and French “hasard”, and originally in the English “hazard”, though this use has since become obsolete. The origins of the game of chance go back millennia, and it is certainly one of the oldest games still played by mankind. Objects like plum and peach stones, pebbles and knucklebones were thrown for divination in antiquity, as well as for play. Throwing the talus or astragalus bone of an ox or sheep, commonly known as the “knucklebone”, was without doubt the commonest method of dealing with chance. In the same way that the concept of risk developed as a more rational alternative to soothsaying, the calculus of probability developed from dice, which was historically both a game of chance and a means of foretelling the future.10 Dice must have been first made thousands of years ago by progressively shaping and smoothing the rounded side of knucklebones to obtain a more or less flat surface, according to F.N. David.11

88  From narrative to the probability case In Games, Gods and Gambling, David raises the historical problem of why it took so long for the notion of probability to emerge. We may speculate as we please about number, about the rules of the various games of chance about the use and misuse of the religious auguries, but there is no denying that the real problem which confronts the historian of the calculus of probabilities is its extremely tardy conceptual growth – in fact one might almost say, its late birth as an offspring of the mathematical sciences. Much of this book, and this chapter in particular, is an attempt to answer this question, although it differs from the partial answers offered by F.N. David in his otherwise excellent book. According to David, it took a very long time to formulate the idea that the odds of winning or losing are the same when the dice are thrown, even in the highly specific and material context of games of chance. The random nature of reality has been recognized since the remote past, but the notion of equiprobability took far longer to emerge.12 The random element was introduced before recorded time, and there are enough references in the literature before the birth of Christ to indicate that this random element surely the goddess Fortuna herself [...] – was pursued with assiduous fanaticism. Why then was the concept of the equally-likely possibilities in die-throwing so long delayed? It is a question which one must, perhaps, try to answer in terms of the emotions rather than the intellect. This seems to me a problem which merits some reflection. Until now I have argued that narrative probability emerged before the invention of its mathematical calculation, and in doing so I have assumed that the use of the Arabic term rizq from the seventh century onward allowed an initial assessment of likely outcomes before setting out on a long journey or voyage. Today we may consider this a very simple problem, one which can indeed be solved merely by the application of common sense, but this is to ignore the abstract quality of the concept in question. The history of science tells us that there was always a religious dimension to humanities early forays into abstract thought, for example in ancient cosmologies. Hence, the context in which we should place our problem is that of religion, and we need to recognize moreover the capacity of certain religions for rationalization at certain period in their development. Durkheim argued that science itself has its origins in religion, because this was for centuries the only school of thought capable of addressing key existential problems like the nature of death, the passage of time, the origin of life, the meaning of existence, the formation of the cosmos, or our place in nature. Another of these questions was the future and its meaning. A first part of the answer may be deduced

From narrative to the probability case  89 from the arguments described earlier: the problem raised by F.N. David is both theological and rational, and to understand this we must recognize the compatibilities existing between the two. At a time when science was not yet an independent branch of knowledge, the problems of existence could take on a pre-scientific quality and this is what happened in the Islam of the seventh century. By asserting that the future was in the hands of God alone, the theologians made a break with divination, returning humanity to a condition of uncertainty. However, in the face of this renewed uncertainty and the random nature of future events such as the roll of the dice, religion provided the individual with a way out, though it called upon and required faith. God offered the faithful a “providence” or rizq before they set out on any journey with an uncertain end. Hence, the Muslim traveller, whether as part of a caravan or aboard ship, could enjoy a relative certainty, which came from God, with regard to the success of his venture. Probability expressed via rizq thus had a certain abstract dimension, being a manifestation of faith in God. In this way, the divine providence granted to the believer and his possessions determined the likelihood of a successful conclusion to the journey. The probability thus had a well-founded appearance of truth about the future. However, this abstraction took shape in a material context, namely the conquest of vast open spaces like the desert and the sea in order to create routes for exploration, war and trade. From a theological abstraction which lacked any strictly scientific context, the probability of rizq was gradually transformed into an increasingly secularized expert concept thanks to cartography, astronomy, navigation and improved shipbuilding and design, and later to law and economics. This step was made most clearly in the trading cities of the Mediterranean, a sea that was dominated by the great ports like Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Marseille and Barcelona between the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Turks. It was there that maritime contracts and insurance policies were made, documenting the existence of narratives of risk based on a notion of probability, though probability was still essentially a descriptive notion at this time. As it became more secular, the notion of risk took on a more concrete form in the formula “ad meum risicum” included in contractual instruments, and later as a specific sum of money in the early insurance policies made in the fourteenth century. If risk was at first inherent in the person, it had now come to be inherent in goods. Naturally, the concept still expressed the likelihood that “something”, by now exclusively something bad, might happen to a vessel and its cargo. This is in itself a narrative, and by taking on this form the concept anticipated by several centuries the first glimmerings of mathematical probability developed in the sixteenth century by thinkers like Pacioli, Tartaglia and, above all, Cardano. Probability is a “time structure”, or to put this another way a means of narrating what could happen, and before it could be couched in mathematical terms such narratives existed in the form of travellers’ tales and belief in a God who offered the faithful a degree of certainty with regard to the future.

90  From narrative to the probability case In concluding his argument, F.N. David offers a revealing argument to explain why it took so long to arrive at the mathematical formulation of probability. In other words I suggest that the step did not come at that time because the philosophic development which opened so many doors for the human intellect engendered a habit of mind which made impossible the construction of theoretical hypotheses from empirical data.13 Before probability found its way into the observable realm through the game of dice, allowing the formulation of theories based on recorded data, it had already trodden the opposite path, for its incipient formulation inherent in certain abstract, theoretical concepts became mixed with certain practices associated with long journeys and navigation. It was out of this mix or practical application that the first narratives of risk expressing a probability of adverse outcomes or loss emerged. In this light, probability was not discovered inductively, as F.N. David believed, but deductively, as historical analysis shows. In the same way that narrative probability emerged out of a recognition of uncertainty linked to a theological belief system and an account which allowed a rational glimpse of the future, mathematical probability arose out of the recognition of the random fall of the dice and the understanding of equiprobability. Let me demonstrate this development through a numerical calculation.

The invention of the probability calculus In its primitive Arabic version, risk developed in the wake of the numerous innovations arriving from the east, especially China and India, which were adopted by the Arabs and included the compass, chess and astronomy. This is, in fact, even the case with what we in the West call “Arabic numerals”, though they in fact came from India. Around ad 800, Muhammed Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose name was Latinized as Algoritmi or Algaurizin, started using a system for writing numbers consisting of nine digits and zero.14 The next step was taken with the exchange of knowledge driven by the intense maritime trade of the Mediterranean, particularly between the city states of Italy and the Arab lands on the southern shore of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was Leonardo de Pisa (1170–1250), the son of a merchant who had made his fortune representing the city of Pisa in Barbary, who would write the first mathematical treatise in Europe to use Indian-Arabic numerals. The Liber Abaci or “Book of Calculation” was basically concerned with arithmetic and accounting, and its considerably expanded second edition was finally completed in 1228. Close to 300 years would pass, however, before the mathematical knowledge built up in Italy after Leonardo de Pisa published his Liber Abaci would be compiled as a

From narrative to the probability case  91 book. This was Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni e  proportionalita,15 which was printed in Venice in 1497. In this work, Pacioli provides an example which would prove to be the starting point for the subsequent invention of the probability calculus. We may state the problem as follows: A and B are betting on a game of bowls and decide to continue playing until one of them has won six rounds. However, the game ends when A has won five rounds and B three. How should the stakes be split between them? Pacioli’s solution is to divide the pot into eight parts, of which A should receive five and B three. However, his answer was questioned by later authors, who missed something which Pacioli could not have known – probability. Let us pause for a moment to consider Pacioli’s problem from a narrative rather than a mathematical standpoint. The story contained in the problem can be told in the following terms: two men are playing bowls and they agree that the first to win six throws will take the pot. In doing so, they have imagined a future in which one of them will be the first to make six rounds and will walk off with the stakes. It would be another matter entirely, if A and B had simply started playing without agreeing any particular outcome and had then split the pot after eight throws in proportion to the rounds won by each one, five to three. In this case, Pacioli’s solution would have been correct. However, the game between A and B contained a future aspect of which Pacioli was necessarily ignorant. Pacioli’s critics saw that the split should take account of this dimension, because it too formed part of the event. The problem, however, was how to do so, and it was here that the principle of probability began to emerge. Let us look at the problem in a little more detail. The event described in the statement of the problem contains a time structure which can, in principle, only be known and expressed by narrative. This structure has three parts. In the first place, there is the event itself, in which the two players stop the game. Second, we have the agreement made between them to decide who would win the bet, which is to say what might happen. And third, there is what had actually happened before the game stopped. This narrative unquestionably embraces the present, the future and the past of the event described. In my opinion, the challenge presented by problems of this nature for the mathematicians of the Renaissance was the transformation of a narrative or story into a mathematical operation or calculus. The problem was exactly the paradox faced by the early Islamic theologians and later by the lawyers, mariners and merchants of the Mediterranean – the future is real but it can only be imagined. As we have seen in the mediaeval formula “ad meum risicum”, the narrative probability of an event, be it shipwreck or piracy, is a construct that is imagined in light of known cases in the past, in which ships actually were lost or taken by corsairs. Hence, the content assigned to the future as probable is based on what happened in the past. This mental operation was unknown to Pacioli, but the need for it was afterwards perceived by thinkers like Cardano. By stopping the game, then, A and B could not ignore that the agreement they

92  From narrative to the probability case had made created a future, and that the reality of this future had to be taken into account to split the stakes wagered. In order to calculate the correct proportion for the split, we need to consider that A was beating B in the eight rounds played until the game was stopped, so that we would nowadays say that he had a better chance (in the probabilistic sense) of winning the bet. The proportion of five to three should in fact be seven to one. Pacioli’s critics guessed this in their objections and this was in itself a fundamental insight, which allowed them to begin imagining the future as a calculation of probability. Nevertheless, it was Pacioli, through his error, who sparked the mathematical reflection on the future that became the theory of probability. This conundrum would eventually come to be known as the “problem of points”, and it was addressed by numerous mathematicians, who offered a wealth of solutions opening the way for the calculus of probability. This was the case of Tartaglia in his Trattato Generale de Numeri e Misuri published in 1556. He proposes the following problem. In a game of dice in which the first player to reach sixty points wins, A has won ten points and B has won none. How, then, should the pot be split if each player staked twenty-two ducats? Tartaglia answer was that A, who has obtained 1/6 of the points needed to win, should receive 22/6 of B’s stake. Hence, player A would receive 22 + 22 / 6 or 25.6 ducats. According to Tartaglia’s reasoning, A should be considered the winner and should therefore keep the whole of his own stake, but because he has not yet made the sixty points needed to take the pot, he should only receive one sixth of B’s stake, equal to the proportion of the sixty points he has actually won so far (10/60). Pacioli, in contrast, would have awarded the proportional amount in respect of the ten points already won, which is to say one-sixth of fortyfour ducats, apportioning this sum in proportion to the results obtained by the two players. Hence, A would keep 44/8 ducats. The comparison between the two methods shows the similarity between their authors’ thinking, given that both treat the problem as being essentially one of proportionality. Meanwhile, we may observe that the difference in Tartaglia’s approach comes from the nod he gives to the future, insofar as his solution requires splitting the total stakes. Thus, where he decides on the winner, he does so not only in view of the throws actually made but also the part of the game which could have been but was not played, and it is in this calculation that he introduces proportionality, so that A will receive a sixth of B’s stake. However, this proportionality refers only to what has already been won without touching on what could be won, and in this the two mathematicians concur. Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) is a more widely known figure, because he wrote an autobiography16 describing a life that was not a little eventful. Very much the Renaissance man for the breadth of his knowledge and interests, he did not publish what would become his most famous work, the Liber de Ludo Aleae or “On Casting the Die”, which was written in the 1560s but did not see the finally see the light until 1663, almost 100 years

From narrative to the probability case  93 after Cardano’s death. The key part of this work for our purposes is contained in Chapter IX “On Casting a Single Die”.17 According to ­ Cardano, all games of chance must be based on “equal conditions” in all circumstances of play, whether betting, results or the situation of the players,18 and it was precisely in Chapter IX that he specifically formulated this principle. When a single die is cast, any number of the six appearing on each face has the same odds of coming up. Hence, we may say that each of the six possible results are “equiprobable”. This statement reveals the dawning of probability, because it refers to a calculation performed on the set of possible results. I can throw 1, 3 or 5 the same as 2, 4 or 6. Therefore, the odds will fall according to this equality if the die be true.19 Let us consider the narrative content of Cardano’s proposition. The possibility of an event is a discrete whole and, therefore, any of the six possible faces could come up when the die is cast. This possibility is a complete uncertainty. The step that Cardano takes is to dissect this possibility, which ceases to be a whole and is split up into its constituent parts – the six equally probable possibilities. This division of a possibility, in itself a mathematical operation, creates or entails a chink in the curtain of uncertainty, because it succeeds in establishing that rather than any outcome, the cast of a die will produce one of six equally probable results. This is Cardano’s key contribution, which does not change the event in itself (the casting of a die), but rather the statement of the event. Where the notion of risk had since antiquity provided a way of conceiving the future in terms rather of the probable than the possible, for example before setting out on a long journey, this new view of the casting of a die had the effect of transforming the possible outcomes into a numerical probability. Mathematical probability was thus already present in Cardano’s reasoning where he conceived the concept of probability as referring to a calculus of the possible outcomes of a game. Cardano not only splits the discrete whole represented by the possibility of an event’s occurring numerically, he also defines its bounds by establishing six as the maximum number of equally probable outcomes of the roll of the dice. My interest here lies in the conversion of a narrative event, the casting of a die, into a series of numbers. Cardano made this transformation by dissecting and delimiting the possibility of an event’s happening, an exercise for which the die is admirably well suited. We need to place ourselves here in the context of the history of games of chance and the development of six-sided dice from knucklebones. We may conjecture that the invention of mathematical probability was intimately bound up with the use of dice, and that it was this randomizing artefact which made it possible. A six-sided object marked with numbers on each face allowed the imagination of abstract ideas like Cardano’s “equiprobability”. In a historical

94  From narrative to the probability case period in which science was still in its infancy, it was not easy to draw such abstractions from the observation of concrete day-to-day tasks involving the manipulation of objects.20 The inductive invention of probability thus took longer than its imaginative deduction in the context first of Islamic theology and then in maritime contracts. It was this gap which drew the attention of F.N. David and Hacking, who wondered why it was that such a long time had to pass before anyone succeeded in stating even a rudimentary theory of probability. The early intuition of risk in the seventh century and the emergence of the probability calculus in the sixteenth century at the hands of Pacioli, Tartaglia and Cardano share a way of looking at the future, and in both cases we find that the approach begins by limiting possibility, in one case by describing God’s providence as an assurance of success and a source of confidence in the outcome, and in the other by setting bounds on the event and then splitting it up to allow calculation. The methodological comparison I have drawn here is key to understanding how the two ways of conceiving probability, and ultimately risk, were constructed and related historically, first as narrative and then as calculus. Ian Hacking describes the limitations of these early arithmetical calculations of chance: It is true that we first find European calculations on chances in work like that of Pacioli [1494], a book famous as the origin of double-entry book-keeping. But what is notable is not that problems on chance occur in early works of arithmetic chiefly aimed at new commerce, but that these books were quite unable to solve the problems. No one could solve them until about 1660, and then everyone could.21 What was needed was the right atmosphere for new mathematical ideas to shape a theory of probability, and this became possible after 1660 and the famous correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. In 1654 Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat began to exchange letters on certain problems of calculation in games of chance. However, it was Pierre-Simon de Laplace who described the full significant of their correspondence in his Essai philosophique sur les probabilities: For some time now, calculations have been made of the relationships between the favourable and contrary chances of the players in games of chance, and such relationships have been applied to regulate wagers and bets. Before Pascal and Fermat, however, nobody had established the principles and method of submitting this problem to calculation, or solved any even slightly complicated questions of this nature. It is, then, to these two great geometers to whom we must attribute the first elements of the science of probabilities.... (Translated from Spanish)22

From narrative to the probability case  95 Laplace then goes on to describe the “problem of points” as the great challenge addressed by both of his illustrious predecessors, from which they drew the principles of mathematical probability. The main problem solved by both, though by different methods, was, as we saw above, to distribute fairly the stakes wagered by two players of equal skill who agree to stop a game before it ends, its being a condition of the game that a certain number of points is needed to win the match.23 (Translated from Spanish) As may be observed, the problem is stated in much the same terms as ­ roposed by Pacioli at the end of the fifteenth century. The central premise p of the interruption of the game before its conclusion remains, and the epistemological challenge is still to determine the future in terms of a mathematical calculation. This could also be seen as an Aristotelian question, at least insofar as Aristotle drew a distinction between history and poetry, because the ultimate aim is to24 integrate what “happened” (i.e. the division of the stakes) with what “might have happened” (i.e. the probability of each player’s winning the game when it was interrupted). This is what Laplace goes on immediately to explain: Evidently, the stakes must be shared proportionally to the players’ respective chances of winning the match, which depend on the number of points they still have to make.25 (Translated from Spanish) The classical Aristotelian position forbids conflating what has happened with what might happen in the same text, because these constitute different narratives, one historical and the other poetical. Probability challenges this discursive restriction, however, by providing a solution to the problem of how to split the stakes taking into account something which has not happened but could have happened. In doing so, the past is projected into the future, exactly in the way narratives of risk had long done. Hence, probability must be calculated on the basis of a proportion that is somehow equal to the outcomes already obtained in earlier rounds of the game. This is the “first principle” of the calculation of probability according to Laplace: The first of these principles is the definition of probability itself, which as we have seen is the ratio of favourable cases to all possible cases.26 (Translated from Spanish) These “favourable cases” are none other than the actual outcomes obtained, while the “possible cases” are all of the outcomes that could arise. The ratio so calculated thus provides a probable outcome. We can never know for certain how the future will turn out, but we can imagine it. At best, the “raw”

96  From narrative to the probability case future which is the possible can be distilled to arrive at a “probable” future, which is something else entirely. In historical terms, this is an idea that has been crucial to the development of scientific thought. Counter to the Aristotelian notion of the narrative incompatibility between the past and a conditional future, it was proposed to imagine the future, either by means of a narrative of past events or, somewhat later, by means of a mathematical calculus. This was an enormous step forward in human thinking, representing the invention of a new way to manage time using a novel classification of events, for though anything is possible, not everything is probable. For there are many things which are uncertain to men, and some of these are more or less likely. In view of the impossibility of knowing them all, I have sought to compensate by determining differing degrees of appearance, so that we owe to the very weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories – the science of chance or probability.27 (Translated from Spanish) The way in which Laplace defines probability here is most interesting. Let us pause briefly to consider it. In an uncertain world, the only thing we can do is to “determine differing degrees of appearance” about things, and this is task of the “science of chance or probability”. This affirmation is strikingly similar to the definition of probability as “a well founded appearance of truth” given in the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy. In both cases, probability is referred to as “appearance”. The assertion that narrative probability and mathematical probability share the same epis­ temology is the premise for the argument that the origin of risk lies in a narrative based on a probabilistic time structure, and that it existed centuries before the first numerical calculus of probability was invented. Let us look at how this question has been addressed by modern theoreticians of probability, and most especially by Ian Hacking in his outstanding work The Emergence of Probability. Like F.N. David, Hacking wonders about the tardy arrival of a notion of “equiprobable possibilities”: Why was there no probability theory in the West before Pascal? Answers: a necessitarian view of the world, piety, lack of a place system of numeration and of economic incentive. Corollary: impiety, arithmetic, plenty of trading and different concepts of causality should be conducive to the formation of probability mathematics. Confirmation: two millennia ago India had an advanced merchant system, it had handy numerals and both its piety and its theories of causation were not at all in the European mould. In that society, we find hints of a hitherto unknown theory of probability.28

From narrative to the probability case  97 Hacking also refers to religion and the limitations of mathematics to explain why there was no theory of probability in Europe until Pascal. At the same time, however, he recognizes that there were other places, like India, where religion and other cultural norms or ideas did not clash with the notion of probability.

The epistemology of probability The duality29 of calculus and narrative which I have pursued, and will continue to pursue, in the pages of this book is similar to the two faces of probability described by Ian Hacking, which is both statistical and epistemological: It is notable that the probability that emerged so suddenly is Janus-faced. On the one side it is statistical, concerning itself with stochastic laws of chance processes. On the other side it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical background.30 It is no easy matter to interpret the meaning of this duality in the terms proposed by Hacking, although it is possible that they would lead us to the numerical on one hand and belief on the other. Be this as it may, this duality has been continuously present in some form in the theory of probability, which at its extremes have created opposing forces, each of which claims the exclusive right of mathematics or subjectivity. Hacking cites Carnap31 among other authors who referred to “inductive” and “statistical” probability, going back in time to Condorcet, who used the term facilité for the “aleatory” concept, and motif de croire for the epistemological.32 The need to differentiate terminologically between the two options, or the uselessness of doing so, has long been a bone of contention between those who have dedicated themselves to the theoretical development of probability. Carnap, and Cournot before him, notoriously failed to bring tranquillity out of controversy by their judicious mixture of conceptual ­analysis and linguistic distinction. Philosophers seem singularly unable to put asunder the aleatory and the epistemological side of probability. This suggests that we are in the grip of darker powers than are admitted into the positivist ontology. Something about the concept of probability precludes the separation which, Carnap thought, was essential to further progress. What?33 There is, then, something in the very concept of probability that sustains its unity according to Hacking, and it is therefore only logical that he should ask what that something is. Any reflection on this question is outside the sphere of the numerical, of what Hacking calls the “positivist model”. He argues that there must be a kind of prehistory of probability. I would say that what exists and is actually traceable is a genealogy of probability. To

98  From narrative to the probability case put this another way, one might say that the notion of probability has undergone a long, concentrated historical development, of which its numerical version is merely a part. Interestingly, this genealogy, which is at the very least dual in nature, has continued to develop since probability was conquered by the numerical calculus around 1660. There are presently three variants34 of probability in the conceptual ring. In the first place, there is probability as “frequency”, the model based on calculation of the relative frequency with which an event occurred in the past. Then there is probability considered as a “logical possibility”, which can be obtained by delimiting a set of possibilities. As we saw in the earlier analysis of the different approaches taken to solving the problem of points, this was the variant that contributed the most to the emergence of the calculus of probability, because it was the first model to set numerical bounds on possibility thanks to the game of dice. Finally, we have probability as “degree of belief”. This model is characterized above all by the assumption of subjectivity in relation to the possibility that something might happen. In this case, the probability of an event is assessed on the basis of beliefs, which may include both frequency and logical possibility, and indeed knowledge of any other kind. Applying this broad conceptual sweep to probability, we may draw some interesting comparisons. It seems clear that mathematical or numerical probability could be identified above all with “logical possibility” and with “frequency”, but rather less so with “degree of belief”. Narrative probability, meanwhile, could be identified with “degree of belief” and “frequency”, but less so with “logical possibility”. As I see it, the three variants can be ranged in two options in the terms of this comparison, allowing us to continue applying a dual approach to probability from the historic and cultural perspective. The first notion of probability is theological, and it arrives with the Islamic concept of rizq in the seventeenth century, offering an answer to uncertainty that is free of the appeal to divination. This probability would fall into the category of “degree of belief”. As explained in Chapter 1, rizq was eventually secularized in maritime contracts, becoming a commercial and insurance term in the language of the mediaeval ­merchants and mariners in the Mediterranean. This risichum as used by the traders and seafarers of the port cities of southern Europe in their written documents would also fit the model of probability as “frequency”, because the term alludes to an estimate of the likelihood of a vessel’s being lost to shipwreck, fire or pirates. Without having yet developed any theory of the mathematical frequency of past events, then, the early insurers of the fourteenth century already made a monetary appraisal of risichum or the likelihood of loss, which was reflected in a written document or policy. In this way, risk came to be based above all on a probability of “frequency”, even if it was enshrined only in a narrative rather than a numerical calculus, and we may therefore also consider it a degree-of-belief model. I have been able to confirm this from my research into early ocean voyages and the colonization of America.

From narrative to the probability case  99 Probability as logical possibility emerged from the application of a­ rithmetical tools to the outcome of games of chance, and this was done by delimiting possibility and splitting it up into numbered parts thanks to observation of the game of dice. In this way, possibility became probability not through the action of belief or as part of a narrative, but as a numerical calculation. Furthermore, mathematics allowed the calculation of frequencies. These achievements paved the way for the emergence of mathematical probability in the 1660s following the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. The later development of the theory of probability was not based solely on the numerical calculus, however, but on other variants which have sometimes been called “subjective” or “personalistic” and are most clearly exemplified in the field of cognitive psychology. The duality thus continues. Probability theory was gradually standardized until it became the science of statistics, which proved crucial to the genesis of modern society. As a result, probability came to be confined largely within the institutional framework of science and politics developed by the modern state with the aim of streamlining the production of knowledge and the action of government. In this way, the calculation of probability has spread to every corner of demographics, epidemiology, economics, war and defence, engineering, industry, public works, navigation, mining, urban development, healthcare, social welfare and environmental policy. Probability thus became a scientific concept underlying people’s perception and understanding of their own actions. Around 1970, however, cognitive psychologists began to claim that the probabilistic calculations made by ordinary people did not fit the existing theories. In 1983 Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky published their seminal paper Judgment and Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, in which they argued that our estimates of probability are not based on statistical rules but on psychological rules which they call “heuristics”. These are mental operations which we use spontaneously to assess the likelihood of a given event. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. These judgments are based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules.35 The authors identify three “heuristics”, namely “representativeness”, “availability” and “anchoring and adjustment”. The representativeness heuristic establishes a relationship between A and B to allow assessment of the likelihood than an event B is the cause of A based on the degree to which A is representative of B. As the authors themselves put it, representativeness operates when: (the) probabilities are evaluated by the degree to which A is representative of B, that is, by the degree to which A resembles B.36

100  From narrative to the probability case The “heuristic of availability”, meanwhile, is defined in the following terms: There are situations in which people assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances of occurrences can be brought to mind.37 We use past cases or examples to estimate the likelihood that an event will recur. As I have argued in the pages of this book, we turn to narrative to state or describe such cases, thereby making them available as instances.38 The “heuristic of anchoring and adjustment” is essentially quantitative and refers to intuitive calculation or estimation. Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky define it as follows: In many computation situations, people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer. The initial value, or starting point, may be suggested by the formulation of the problem, or it may be the result of a partial computation. In either case, adjustments are typically insufficient (Slovic & Lichtenstein, 1971). That is, different starting points yield different estimates, which are biased toward the initial values. We call this phenomenon anchoring.39 This can be clarified by an example. Two groups are asked to estimate the product of two numerical expressions, one ascending and the other descending (e.g. 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 and 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1) in five seconds. The hypothesis is that the product of the first multiplications performed from left to right is much higher in the descending order expression than it is in the ascending order, and the estimate will therefore be higher in the former case than in the latter. In the actual test run by the authors, the group assigned the descending expression averaged a score of 2,250, compared to just 512 for the ascending order. The correct answer is in fact 40,320.40 The participants in this experiment could not perform the full calculation in the very short time allowed them, so they were forced to make a probable estimate (anchor) based only on the initial multiplications (adjustment). What the experiment shows is the bias produced by this heuristic, because the group which obtained the higher result in the adjustment process proposed a higher anchor, although the actual product of the two numerical expressions is of course the same. I have presented a number of examples pointing to the persistence of the narrative-calculus duality in the development and application of theories of probability from the moment they first appeared in the 1660s right down to the present day. The kind of probability that is not strictly mathematical has been dubbed with a number of names, to wit “personalism”, “subjectivism”, “Bayesianism” and “heuristic probability”. In general,

From narrative to the probability case  101 we could say such characterizations of probability stress the psychological perspective, in recent years drawing on cognitive psychology. My own interest is cultural, however, and because of this I style probability fundamentally from a narrative perspective, arguing that it has also been managed historically in the form of accounts or tales shared by communities who imagined their future socially and created cultural tools, some of them highly codified, within a framework of expert knowledge, which might be theological, legalistic or navigational, among other possibilities. It is true that such expert knowledge or know-how could be ­considered pre-scientific, but it is no less so that probability in any of its manifestations has always been an expert concept. Nevertheless, the development of the science of probability as an independent branch of knowledge subject to precise rules and ever more specialized conditions in a clean break with religion will determine the continued existence of this probabilistic dualism. This already happened once in the seventeenth century, and the event which best represents the process was Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, the impact of Cartesian rationalism would produce an ever-widening gap between numbers and words. It is at this moment where we may place the birth of mathematical probability in the correspondence between Fermat and Pascal in the 1660s. Obviously, science and culture are branches of the same tree of knowledge, but they have grown apart over time as science has become increasingly identified as autonomous knowledge, being first regulated and codified and then institutionalized and specialized. In this light, I see the probabilistic duality as an expression of this historical separation and the widening gap between science as “expert” knowledge and culture as “ordinary” or “common sense” knowledge. This process of separation has occurred in many societies even in the remote past, and the emergence of the concept of risk in the early Islamic world is a good example, for the kind of theological learning which produced it could well be classed as expert knowledge. A kind of pre-science was, then, in the process of formation at this time, but it still lacked autonomy from religion. As we have already seen, it was in the Europe of the seventeenth century when certain forms of expert knowledge like cosmology, cosmography and mathematics began to gain a certain autonomy, eventually developing into the foundations of modern science. Since then, science and culture have grown apart, especially institutionally, as forms of expert and common knowledge, but what is still more important is that both remain intimately linked, despite their differences. We cannot today recognize our own cultures, those proper to the advanced societies which rub along so closely in the global village, without recognizing the extent to which they are permeated by science. At the same time, we have become increasingly aware of the amount of culture which permeates scientific processes and practice. The cultural biases inherent in modern science are now clear, and the “heuristics” of probability provide a fine example.

102  From narrative to the probability case

Notes   1 Hald, A. – 2003 A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons. p. 42  2 Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua. The full entry reads: “1. f. Verosimilitud o fundada apariencia de verdad”   3 Though it may seem contradictory to take something negative (a shipwreck) as the object of risk in one case and something positive (winning a bet) in the other, this is not actually so considering the semantic shift which “risk” has undergone: where the term referred historically to the likelihood of both good and bad outcomes, it has since come to be much more closely associated with the probability of misfortune or loss due to the influence of marine insurance and catastrophes. Games of chance are, however, a case in which risk is associated more with the probability of winning, although players are in fact always more likely to lose   4 Though narrative and mathematical probability are the two fundamental expressions, in my opinion  5 The same theological principal is also Christian, appearing in the New Testament story of Saint Thomas’ doubts about the resurrection of Christ “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou has believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Gospel of Saint John, 20. 29   6 Visions have always been and remain a cornerstone of charismatic leadership. Moses is perhaps the prototype of a leader who directs the nation following a prophetic vision. This prototype is common to all three of the great monotheistic religions   7 Burkhardt, T. – 1997 La civilización hispano-árabe. Madrid: Ediciones Altaya, p. 99   8 Coromines, J. – Diccionario Etimológico de la Lengua Española, p. 431   9 The term “flor de azahar” still exists in modern Spanish, meaning “orange blossom” 10 Reith, G. – 1999 The Age of Chance. Gambling and Western Culture. London: Routledge 11 David, F.N. – 1962 Games, Gods and Gambling, The Origin and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, p. 5 12 In fact, it was not until 1560 that Girolamo Cardano would state this principle for the first time 13 David, F.N. – 1962, p. 26 14 David, F.N. p. 29 15 This work is the origin of double-entry bookkeeping 16 Cardano, G. – De propia vita, Paris, 1643. Translated into Spanish by Francisco Socas as Mi vida, Madrid, Alianza, 1991, versión de Francisco Socas. Cardano, G. 2002 The Book of my Life (DE VITA PROPRIA LIBER) Translation from Latin – Jean Stoner. New York: New York Review Books 17 Cardano, G. 1998 Llibre del jocs d’atzar. Antologia mínima. Santa Coloma de Gramanet: Grup de Filosofía 18 At this time, gambling had not been professionalized and there was no bank 19 Cardano, G. – 1953 Liber de Ludo Alea, trans. S.H. Gould, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 193 20 Indeed, it was more logical to state such ideas in the transcendent realms of religion and philosophy, whence they could be handed down into the more quotidian contexts of law, trade and geography 21 Hacking, I. – 2006 The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition. First published in 1975. p. 18

From narrative to the probability case  103 22 Laplace, P.-S. de. – 1985 Ensayo filosófico sobre las probabilidades. Madrid. Alianza Editorial. p. 131. 23 Laplace, P.-S. de (Ibid.) p. 132 24 Laplace, P.-S. de (Ibid.) p. 132 25 Laplace, P.-S. de (Ibid.) p. 132 26 Laplace, P.-S. de (Ibid.) p. 31 27 Laplace, P.-S. de (Ibid.) p. 33 28 Hacking, I. Ibid., p. 22 29 I have borrowed this term from Hacking, who uses it as the title for the second chapter of his book The Emergence of Probability 30 Hacking, I. Ibid., p. 25 31 Carnap, R. – 1950 Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 32 Hacking, I. Ibid., p. 26 33 Hacking, I. Ibid., p. 28 34 Baron, H. – 1998. Thinking and Deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 35 Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. – 1983 Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 3 36 Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A., Ibid., p. 4 37 Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A., Ibid., p. 11 38 I discuss this process, which I call the “narrative matrix”, in the next chapter 39 Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A., Ibid., p. 14 40 Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A., Ibid., p. 15

Bibliography Baron, J. 1994 Thinking and Deciding. 2nd edn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Basulto Santos, J. y Camúñez Ruis, J.A. 2007 La geometría del azar. La correspondencia entre Pierre de Fermat y Blas Pascal. Madrid: Nivola Carnap, R. 1950. Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. David, F.N. 1969. Games,Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era. London: Griffin. Desrosières, A. 2004 La política de los grandes números. Historia de la razón estadística. Barcelona: Melusina. Guillaumont, F. 2006 Le “De divinatione” de Cicerón et les théories antiques de la ­divination. Bruxelles: Éditions Latomus. Hacking, I. 2001 An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. 1990 The Taming of Chance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. 1975 The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Haigh, J. 2003 Matemáticas y juegos de azar. Jugar con la probabilidad. Barcelona: ­Tusquets. Hald, A. 1990 A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications Before 1750. New York: Wiley. Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. 1982 Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

104  From narrative to the probability case Krüger, L., Daston, L.J. and Heidelberger, M. 1990 The Probabilistic Revolution. Volume 1: Ideas and History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Krüger, L., Gigerenzerg, G. and Morgan, M.S. 1990 The Probabilistic Revolution. Volume 2: Ideas in the Sciences. Cambdrige, MA: MIT Press. Laplace, P.-S. de 1985 Ensayo filosófico sobre las probabilidades. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Laplace, P.S. de and Dale, A.I. 1995 Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. New York: Springer-Verlag. Reith G. 1999 The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture. London: Routledge.

6 Daniel Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year

As I have argued earlier, the genealogy of risk is woven across time and space and I have so far sought to describe the historical context of the key developments in the concept. I have also endeavoured to throw light on the transfer of knowledge and experience linking these contexts together. It was through such links that a new idea gradually developed, which was to play a key role in the historical development of modernity. The dynamic of risk was expansive, and because of this it appears in a broad historical context embracing the emergence and spread of Islam, maritime trade in the Mediterranean, the discovering of the New World, early transoceanic voyages, and the conquest and colonization of America. All of these historical scenarios are important, showing that the expansionary movement which in recent decades has come to be called “globalization” is in fact a historical process of enormous magnitude and paramount importance. The term “globalization” can be applied to epochs in which great empires spread by war and conquest, but at the same time by creating overarching systems which brought together languages, religions and civilizations, and established major trade routes forming lasting circuits for commercial and cultural exchange. China, Rome, the Caliphates of the Arabs and then of the ­Ottomans, the Spanish empire and the British are all examples of historical globalization processes In studying the concept of risk, we may observe how historical events set in train connections, borrowings, influences and often mere coincidences, some so apparently logical that they might have been preordained and others so seemingly random that they could be set down to chance. The figure of Christopher Columbus and the story of his first transoceanic voyage provide a synthesis of these factors and of the historical forces existing between the two poles of destiny and serendipity. This may be one of the reasons why his voyages have so long been the subject of historical scrutiny and controversy. I do not wish to argue that history unfolds in a series of events arranged according to some kind of scheme or programme. Let me then eschew any kind of determinism and explain that my aim is to unpick the threads of argument associated with certain historical events in order to select those which are most significant to my own project. Both memory and history are

106  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year selective reconstructions of the past – versions of the events that actually happened. However, some substantial differences exist between the two. It is the job of the historian to make his criteria explicit and to justify them in terms of what I have called a project. In this way, the selection he makes is explained by his project, which can be verified and replicated. Memory, in contrast, makes its selection according to implicit criteria which are ­normally inscrutable even to the subject himself, or which can only be teased out by historical, sociological, anthropological or psychological investigation. In the specific case of this cultural history, the verisimilitude of a historical account is derived in the first place from comparison with the project on which it is based. In my own case, risk is the core of a project which rests on the twin pillars of history and narrative. Hence, my methodology has been to seek different narrative epochs in history providing descriptions, accounts, chronicles, allusions and other references which can be identified as or assimilated with risk on the assumption that the four properties inherent in the concept are future, knowledge, relationship and probability. A historical scenario is a spatial and temporal context in which diverse convergent or contesting forces meet to produce alliances, cooperation and communication but also war, pillage and exploitation. Such scenarios are not found on the margins but are played out centre stage in the form of events which subsequently influence the course of history in wide regions of the world. Each of these historical scenarios has, then, helped to make the history of humankind increasingly global and interconnected. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the expansion of religions, the conquest of the deserts and oceans, the development of shipbuilding and navigation technologies, cartography, trade, banking, accounting, maritime insurance, geography, mathematics, printing, and literature and journalism have all played their own crucial roles in expanding the world, or to put it another way in the globalization of history. Risk did not emerge on the margins but in historical scenarios marked by their capacity to construct an expansionary centrality. This was the case of the Arab and Turkish conquests, but also of cities like Venice and Genoa and monarchies like the Crown of Aragon in the Middle Ages. In all of these cases, the Mediterranean provided the geostrategic space. Later, the Spanish and Portuguese would open up the Atlantic Ocean, embarking on a great maritime adventure which would afterwards be continued by the British, French and Dutch. It was in this way that America became another great historic scenario. From then on, risk would take on an increasingly relevant role in a new historical scenario marked by the emergence of the great colonial metropolises in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and singularly in two of them – London and Lisbon. These two cities were ports, an attribute which differentiated them from Madrid and Paris, the inland capitals of Spain and France, the other colonial empires. Their status as imperial capitals and their thriving maritime trade created a special reality

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  107 London and Lisbon, which would soon form the backdrop for momentous events. In both cases, these were catastrophes of signal magnitude. No other European cities of the time suffered devastation on a comparable scale. The Great Fire raged through London between 2 and 5 September 1666, reducing 13,200 houses and eighty-seven churches to ashes. Scarcely a year earlier, in 1665 and 1666, the city had been visited by the Great Plague, which carried off a fifth of its population. In 1703, meanwhile, a hurricane devastated the South Coast of England causing over 8,000 deaths. This was the Great Storm. Just a few decades later in 1755 Lisbon was all but destroyed by a violent earthquake with its epicentre some 100 miles offshore, followed by a tsunami which wreaked havoc among the stunned survivors. The disasters that struck London happened at a time when journalism was just beginning to take root in Great Britain after years of bitter struggle to achieve freedom of the press. Furthermore, the actions of the Whigs and the Tories, the two parties which emerged with the new system of parliamentary government and would dominate political life in Britain almost for the next two centuries, were gradually making public affairs more open so that new ideas could be ever more freely expressed, even if writers who went too far in the exercise of their newly won rights were often in danger of jail or worse. The critical writings and political satire of authors like Swift and Defoe epitomize these developments. The Lisbon earthquake occurred while Portugal was undergoing a period of change driven by its enlightened prime minister, Sebastião José Carvalho de Melo, Marquis of Pombal, who was keen to modernize the kingdom. It  was the first seismic event to occur on such a scale in Europe in centuries. It is hardly surprising, then, that such a dramatic event should have attracted widespread notice, becoming the subject of numerous writings which addressed the disaster from different angles. At the heart of the debate between the apocalyptic faction and the Enlightenment rationalists was the notion of disaster as divine punishment, and it was at this time that the new concept of “calamity” or “catastrophe” first appeared in opposition to the “wrath of God”. I shall discuss this event and its repercussions in the next chapter. These natural disasters, catastrophes and epidemics in two colonial cities of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had far-reaching repercussions in such key contexts as the struggle for freedom of the press and the emergence of critical journalism, political satire and the new genre of the novel in the English language in the seventeenth century, and on the Enlightenment reforms of the Marquis of Pombal and the propagation of rationalist ideas by Voltaire and other leading thinkers of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, the links and interaction of these intellectual movements reveal the resurgence in Europe of the same kind of narratives of risk as had contributed to the discovery of the New World, especially in Spain. The principle of contiguity and the metaphor of communicating vessels

108  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year thus continue to offer an effective explanation of the continuity of risk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the concept returned to Europe from its transatlantic sojourn. These will be the main lines of the argument presented in this and the next chapter.

The extension of the word “risk” to French and English In cultural terms, risk emerged and developed as a narrative built up around a term – rizq, risicum, risc, rischio, riesgo, resicq, riscq, risk – linking two or more entities in such a way that one would activate the likelihood of something happening to the other. For example, the likelihood of storms would endanger a ship. As we have already seen, this narrative concept spread around the Mediterranean in the late medieval period until it eventually entered Spanish, the language of the discoverers and conquistadors of America. The English and French hardly engaged in transoceanic voyages in the first half of the sixteenth century, when they had not yet begun to establish overseas colonies, and this in itself explains the absence of the term in those languages. In France, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1580, would become the founding work of modern French prose and a key text for the development both of the essay and of the subjective genre. Despite searching all three volumes of  the Essais, however, I have not been able to find the word risque even once, though the noun hasard occurs countless times, along with the adjectives hasardeux and hasardeuse, the adverb hasardeusement and the reflexive verb se hasarder. Je tiens moins hasardeux d’ecrire les choses passées que presentes; d’autant que le ecrivain n’a à rendre compte que d’ une verité empruntée.1 I find the semantics of the French term hasard ambiguous here and, indeed, the English loanword hazard has a somewhat different meaning, as we have already seen in an earlier passage of this book. The matter is similar to that of the term fortune or fortuna, and even more so in the case of the medieval term fortune de mer. All of these ideas express the idea of chance. Thus, the term hasardeux as used in the lines transcribed earlier could reasonably be considered synonymous with “risky” or “risqué” in French, though Montaigne never uses the word. However, he does use the words “danger” and “dangereux”: C’est pourtant pour réformer nos consciences et nos créances: Le prétexte est honnête.’ Mais le meilleur prétexte de nouvelleté est très dangereux.2 We may conclude on comparison of the terms “hasardeux” and “dangereux” that the latter is stronger than the former, reinforcing the idea that “hasardeux”

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  109 can correctly be translated as “risky”. In this light, we may suppose that the term “risque” had not yet entered ordinary or cultured French at that time, and that it would only make its way into the language in the seventeenth century via Spanish maritime terminology. The seafaring world of the Mediterranean, and later of the Atlantic, was a complex amalgam of people from many different lands and a linguistic crucible, insofar as the sailors’ jargon employed words from numerous tongues. Be this as it may, the term “resicq” occurs in mediaeval French documents, and “risicum” is used in the mediaeval Latin of Marseille. In this light, we may conclude that it was only in the seventeenth century that the term “risque” entered cultured French, while the historical traces I have followed suggest that it would not be overly adventurous to suppose that it did so through the influence of the voluminous Spanish writings about the New World. In a discussion of the  origin of the word “risque” in French and other languages, Laurent Magne argues that it acquired its modern form around 1650 at the same time noting that: The meaning of the word would evolve, undergoing numerous transformations from its original twelfth century sense as it spread around the Mediterranean until it finally took root in numerous languages in the sixteenth century, when its morphology began to stabilize, before it was reinterpreted in modern times.3 It appears that the term “riesgo” first took root and spread in Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century. In Portuguese, the expression “corrao grande risquo” appears in the fifteenth century Livros de Falcoaria.4 It would not be until the seventeenth century, however, that an equivalent would appear in French and English. The transfer between these two languages can be traced through dictionaries. In 1611 the English lexicographer Randle Cotgrave published his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues,5 which included the French term “risque”, defining a succession of English equivalents like “peril”, jeopardie”, “danger”, “hazard”, “change” and “adventure”. Though very broad, this semantic understanding of “risque” reveals that the meaning of the word was still very imprecise even in French. Furthermore, Cotgrave’s Dictionarie shows that the term “risk” was not yet in use in English. Curiously, a bilingual Italian dictionary had already been published in England in 1598 before the publication of the first monolingual dictionary of the Italian language. John Florio’s A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English was first published in 1598, and it included the Italian verb “riscare” with the English equivalents “to hazard”, “to adventure”, “to jeopard” and “to endanger”. Once again, however, “to risk” does not appear as an alternative.6 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “risque” appears for the first time in English as a French loanword in 1621, and the Anglicized version “risk” makes its debut in 1655. The verb “to risk” came into use in 1687, but the

110  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year adjective “risky” would not appear until 1826. The Oxford English Dictionary of 1665 defines “risk” as follows: The Covenant of preventing Danger (commonly called Insurance) frequent among Merchants, added a Shadow of Law; whereby the Uncertainty of the Event is usually transferred to another with some certain Reward.7 This definition of “risk” as a means of forestalling a danger hits the nail on the head. The inclusion of uncertainty and the idea that risk entails its transfer to another in consideration of a payment or premium is also an accurate depiction of the role of risk in insurance contracts. Daniel Defoe, the most important English writer at the beginning of eighteenth century, used the word “risque” in The Storm (1709): “by taking upon himself the Risque”, but the more English “risk” in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719): “you should trust God with the chance or risk of losing your trade”.

The calamitous seventeenth century The seventeenth century has never enjoyed a good reputation among historians. To begin with, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) casts a long and dismal shadow over most accounts of events in Europe in this period. Its very length, its religious roots (and the fanaticism it engendered), the involvement all of the European powers, and the widespread deployment of bloodthirsty mercenaries bent on rape, pillage and slaughter made it a byword for the cruelty of war. Meanwhile, rebellions and civil war spread throughout the Continent, in Habsburg Spain (Portuguese insurrection of 1640 and Catalan revolt of 1642), in Great Britain under both the Stuarts and Cromwell (who faced widespread unrest in Scotland and Ireland), culminating in the Civil War of 1642–1648 and eventually the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Recent historiography has linked the calamities of the seventeenth century with the effects of global climate change. This period of falling average temperatures and shifting weather patterns has come to be called the “Little Ice Age”, and it brought in its train cooler summers and freezing winters, flooding and drought. Global climate change would explain many of the anomalies apparent in the historical data and in contemporary accounts and testimonies. The historian Geoffrey Parker has written about these phenomena, providing a history of the world in what he describes as a century of “global crisis”.8 In 1620, Robert Burton, a scholar of Christ Church College, Oxford, published his celebrated work The Anatomy of Melancholy. This malady had already attracted the attention of learned men during the Renaissance period, and it is the subject of one of Albrecht Dürer’s most famous and enigmatic engravings, the eponymous Melencolia. Ancient medicine had diagnosed melancholy as being caused by an excess of black bile, one of the

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  111 four constituent humours of the body. Following the example set by ­Montaigne, whom Burton sometimes cites, the work contains numerous digressions from the main theme, which offer magnificent descriptions and sharp observations of contemporary society. At one point, the author paints an extraordinary canvas of the early decades of the seventeenth century. I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantos, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves; I rub on privus privatus; as I have still lived, so I now ­continue, statu quo prius, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestic discontents: saving that sometimes, ne quid mentiar as Diogenes went into the city, and Democritus to the haven to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, non tam sagax observator ac simplex recitator, not as they did, to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.9 Burton presents himself in this passage as merely bearing witness after the manner of Montaigne, recounting the doings of the world from a position of retired solitude. The picture he paints is quite terrifying, although it is also filled with new wonders and events filled with promise. And all the

112  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year while, he claims to live his life “amid the splendour and the misery of the world”. The seventeenth century was a time of contradictions and bitter conflict in Europe – the Thirty Years’ War began just two years before Burton’s work was published. Natural disasters and phenomena like ­ “floods”, “meteors” and “comets” are evoked in his description in the same breath as catastrophes like “fires” and “plague”, and the frenetic intensity of trade, and naval conflict. In addition to all this, Burton mentions the novel spread of the written word a little over a century after the invention of the printing press, a development which had created a growing number of lettered people, as European society greedily consumed New books every day, pamphlets, currantos, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c10 The spread of “currantos”, as Burton calls the early broadsheets, journals and pamphlets marked the prelude for the birth of journalism, which finally arrived in Great Britain with the appearance of the Oxford Gazette in 1665. The dizzying succession of events contained in this fragment of ­Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy recounts in the voice of a contemporary observer the threads I shall weave into a context for the appearance of a narrative of risk in the work of Daniel Defoe. Though Defoe produced his writings in the early part of the eighteenth century, he was born in 1660 and lived astride the two centuries. His key work for my present purpose, A Journal of the Plague Year, describes the Great Plague which wracked London in 1665. By the seventeenth century, it had already become common in the Spanish possessions in America to write realistic descriptions of natural disasters and their effects in “chronicles” and “accounts”, which for the first time provided eye-witness reports of the effects of hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Meanwhile, the figure of the castaway as a cultural icon began with the adventure of Pedro Serrano and was later picked up again in the work of Garcilaso de la Vega. This literary contribution from the New World spread around Europe, taking root especially in countries like England which were only beginning their great colonial expansion into America in the seventeenth century. Much of the knowledge and experience acquired by the Spanish in their imperial endeavour in the sixteenth century would be absorbed by the developing British Empire, despite the differences between the two. The confluence of subject matter and approach between early Spanish American narratives and Defoe’s writings are a striking example of this transference. In 1654, a contemporary historian, Jean-Nicholas de Parival, published a book in Leyden under the title Abrege de l’Histoire de ce siècle de fer11 or The Historie of this Iron Age, a work that is of interest here primarily for its striking title referring to the first five decades of the seventeenth century literally as

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  113 12

a “century of iron”. At the beginning of this work, Parival argues that the sixteenth century ended with an unprecedented moment of peace in Europe, which he attributes to the Peace of Vervins made in 1598 between Philip II of Spain and Henry IV of France after almost 100 years of constant warring between the two kingdoms. The Holy Roman Empire enjoys profound peace; France, Italy, Spain, Lorraine and the French-speaking provinces of the Low Countries begin to breathe again thanks to the Peace of Vervins.13 (Translated from French) In the new century, however, everything has changed for the worse according to Parival: I have called this century an age of iron because all of its evils and misfortunes have arrived together, where in former times they came one by one. Where once there may have been great disorder in one part, now there is everywhere.14 (Translated from French) It is interesting to observe how a learned man like Parival perceives the events unfolding around him as the confluence of a multiplicity of related happenings, showing that the historical context as I have described it here was already present in the mind of a contemporary historian. The nations of Europe were indeed beset by many misfortunes over the course of the seventeenth century. Like Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Parival lists them all: This is, then, that abominable century of which Scripture so clearly speaks; this is the Kingdom of iron that ruins and dominates all. The seven Angels have poured out their vials over the earth, which has become filled with blasphemies, calamities, massacres, injustices (...) We have seen, and still we see, the struggle of Kingdom against Kingdom, Nation against Nation, pestilence, earthquakes, terrible floods; signs on the Sun, on the Moon and on the Starts; the anguish of Nations for storm and the roaring of the sea (…). We have no difficulty believing that the end of the world is nigh, and that the Son of Man will come seated on a cloud in his Power and Majesty.15 (Translated from French) It would seem, however, that this “abominable” century did not last for exactly 100 years, and the chronology of those who see it as such varies considerably. To a learned man of the seventeenth century like Parival, the siècle de fer means the years before 1634 when he wrote his book. On the other, the modern historian Henry Kamen refers to the period 1550–1660

114  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year in The Iron Century. In any case, let us now focus on London in the period between the mid seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, when the three great catastrophes we are interested in occurred. The first was the Great Plague of 1655, followed by the Great Fire of 1656 and finally the  Great Storm of 1703. I believe it is quite exceptional for three such cataclysms to follow one upon the other in the same place in the space of just forty-eight years, and this concatenation of disaster certainly left its mark on the city’s inhabitants. Numerous moralizing and sometimes apocalyptic discourses were penned at this time, describing the city of London as a sink of vice and sin, and explaining the disasters and catastrophes with which it was afflicted as divine punishment for its depravity.

Daniel Defoe and the narrative of adventure and misfortune It was in this historical context that Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) lived and wrote, and none of his contemporaries could match him in describing its different facets. Defoe was well known in his own time as a “pamphleteer”,16 and he was also a frequent inmate of London’s Newgate prison both for his opinions and for his debts. It may have been this experience that spurred him to write stories of adventure and misfortune like the novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but also accounts of natural disasters and catastrophes in works like the Storm and A Journal of the Plague Year. In my opinion, Defoe contributed more than anybody else to the creation and development of the modern narrative of risk which has so deeply influenced journalism. Let us dedicate the rest of this chapter to his writings. Defoe’s best-known work is unquestionably Robinson Crusoe (1719), which some have seen as the first novel written in English. I have already mentioned this novel elsewhere, as it cannot be understood outside one of the historical contexts within which I have described and analysed risk, namely navigation, especially oceanic voyages and shipwreck, leading on to the lives of castaways, discovery and colonial relations with the “other” on desert islands, adventure and misfortune as the result of human activity in a savage environment. Defoe transformed such facts and situations into literary and journalistic themes. All of them, of course, take place within the general historical setting of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European colonialism. My argument is, then, that narratives of risk once again come to the fore in these scenarios, but they can only be properly studied if they are placed in the right context. The virtues of Robinson Crusoe as a book are such as to make it a masterpiece, including the extraordinary wealth of meaning to be found in the text and the creation of two great literary figures, one of whom, Robinson Crusoe, rises to the stature of cultural archetype and hero. This is one of those few books which is capable of standing for a whole era, in this case the rise of mercantilism and colonial expansion in the Americas. Another great writer in English, the Irishman James Joyce, appraised the novel in

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  115 extraordinarily apposite terms at a conference on Defoe given in the Italian city of Trieste in March 1912: The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knife grinder, an astronomer, a backer, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet ­efficient intelligence … the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity. Whoever rereads this simple, moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot help but fall under its prophetic spell.17 I have no doubt that Defoe’s sources for Robinson Crusoe would have included the story of Pedro Serrano, to which I referred in Chapter 4. It would probably have been Inca Garcilaso’s version that he knew, for it is hardly likely that he could have read the written account left by the castaway himself, which lay gathering dust for centuries in the Archive of the Indies in Seville. We know that Defoe visited Porto, Lisbon and Cadiz as a wine merchant between 1685 and 1688.18 It may have been at this time that  he learned of Pedro Serrano’s adventures, as the great ports of the ­seventeenth century were hotbeds of news, ideas and tales of adventure. Defoe was well-versed in the circumstances of oceanic voyages, the activities of merchants at the ports, the policies of the great colonial powers, and even the geography of the different continents. He displayed this knowledge in his classic book on piracy which, with the passage of time, became a fundamental work of reference for anyone interested in the era of the great buccaneers, from historians to novelists and screenwriters. A General History of the Pyrates was published in 1724, though a second volume appeared in 1728 following the success of the first. The period covered by this work starts in 1693, and it ends with the decline of piracy in the eighteenth century.19 As he often did, Defoe published this work under a pseudonym,20 in this case “Captain Charles Johnson”. I mention this book because it documents the wealth of facts and information on which Defoe was able to draw, obtained from the vast and varied store of tales and accounts already produced in and about the New World. Let us pause a moment to consider a matter that shows that Defoe was well informed about the specific geography and setting of Pedro Serrano’s adventure. Explaining the activities of the pirates in his book, Defoe mentions that they sought refuge in the “cays”, describing their geography in some detail: It may here perhaps be no unnecessary Digression to explain upon what they call Keys in the West-Indies: There are small sandy Islands,

116  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year appearing a little above the Surf of the Water, with only a few Bushes or Weeds upon them, but abound (those most any Distance from the Main) with Turtle, amphibious Animals, that always chuse the quietest and most unfrequented Place.21 Serrana Bank, the same Caribbean cay as described in the fragments cited in Chapter 4 from both Garcilaso de la Vega’s account and Pedro Serrano’s own tale, lies near the Colombian island of Providencia or Old Providence. It is strikingly similar to the islets and reefs described by Defoe in his General History of the Pyrates. It is clear, then, that he knew something of the isolated cay far from the mainland on which Pedro Serrano was cast away. The narrative threads which the geographical and cultural intersection of the colonial powers helped develop could easily run from Garcilaso de la Vega through to Daniel Defoe, bringing with some of the ideas and ­concepts found in early Spanish colonial narratives, in which natural disasters figure strongly in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, causing among other calamities the shipwrecks which became a key theme of this literature. The Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk is often cited as one of the inspirations for Robinson Crusoe. In 1703, Selkirk was marooned by the captain of the privateer Cinque Ports on an island in the Juan Fernández archipelago off the coast of Chile. After four years and four months alone on his desert island, he was rescued on February 2, 1709 by another ship, the Duke, which brought him back to England. As they were contemporaries, it appears possible that Defoe may even have had the opportunity to meet Selkirk. However, the events of Robinson Crusoe’s adventure fit better with Inca Garcilaso’s account – in both cases the protagonist was shipwrecked and, crucially, in both he eventually found a companion. It is more than likely that Defoe drew on multiple accounts of maritime adventures, which spread swiftly from port to port. It is not my intention to rehash the observations and criticisms of a book like The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which have succeeded each other over time ever since it was written. This story has sparked the imaginations of countless generations of readers and engendered numerous interpretations. The action is placed in a natural setting which had an enormous influence on the colonial imagination, first in Spain and then in Great Britain. This is confirmed by the links it reveals between the colonial literature of Spain contained in the accounts and chronicles of the New World in the seventeenth century, and that of Great Britain, in which Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe stands as a towering monument. Both of these literatures share the same astonishment at the overwhelming display offered by nature, at times generous in its abundance of resources and at times fraught with dangers like hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and even savage, ­cannibalistic tribes who remained practically unknown even to those who ventured into the remote wilds of the American continent. It could be said

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  117 that the presence of a prolific yet mysterious Nature and the colonists’ ­relationship with their new environment is the great discovery revealed by this narrative. There are certainly major differences between the perceptions of the Spanish and of the British, especially the gulf that separates the religious imperialism practiced by the former in the sixteenth century and the practical mercantilism of the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The savage exuberance of nature in the tropical regions of the Americas, described in fact in very similar terms in the letters and diaries of Christopher Columbus, also had a kind of ideological utility in Defoe’s mind. Bio­ graphers and critics of Defoe like M. Novak22 and C. Kay23 have remarked on the influence of Thomas Hobbes’24 philosophy on his work. His representation of an elemental world of nature would have been influenced by Hobbes’ key idea of the state of nature existing before the emergence of any human society and the prevalence of natural law in this primal epoch. The appeal to natural law, a political theory which Hobbes did much to launch in its modern form, inspired Defoe to seek an appropriate backdrop for an adventure that would demonstrate the moral elevation of the individual, of society and of the state from the savagery of their natural condition to a position of advanced civilization. The key personae of Defoe’s greatest works of literature, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, live in a hostile world which subjects them to the misfortunes of poverty, prison and shipwreck. Their lives are driven by uncertainty, both at sea and in the far-off lands beyond. This is adventure – in its origin a maritime concept defined in the contracts made in the mediaeval seaports of the Mediterranean using formulas like “venture”, fortuna maris or fortune de mer. The notions of “adventure” and “fortune” anticipated “risk”, lending the new concept a certain future content. Both notions thus point towards a time in which either good or ill (in Defoe’s novels mishap and adversity) could ensue, although always with the hope of reward in the end. Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders appear in the novels The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Fortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722).25 Let us compare risk with these two anticipations of the concept. Narratives of risk seek to visualize the likelihood of an unwelcome, unfortunate or disastrous event. Such narratives, and adventure stories like Defoe’s, assume that anything can happen and that adversity will outweigh good fortune throughout most of the tale. An adventure narrative, however, must have a happy ending, and so Robinson is rescued from his island and finally returns home, while Moll Flanders rises to wealth and rank as a plantation owner in Virginia, eventually winning her husband back and returning with him to England. Adventure stories have since taken centre stage in literature, film and television, but their origin is the sea and seafaring. The oldest models for such tales are in fact Homer’s Odyssey and the myth of the Argonauts,26 in which Ulysses finally comes home to Ithaca and Jason finds the golden fleece.

118  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year It could be said, then, that the narrative of adventure is prior to the narrative of risk, because it is imagined drawing on a classical mentality rooted in uncertainty where anything is possible. Defoe’s writing, however, remoulds the Greco-Latin worldview, introducing a key change proper to the era of mercantilist colonialism – like their classical counterparts, his heroes face the trials of misadventure, but they survive and triumph by their own actions rather than the intervention of the gods. It is the power of individual action and ingenuity which makes Defoe’s two great novels truly modern. In the end, Daniel Defoe appears to me a towering historical figure because his work bridges the gap between narratives of adventure and narratives of risk. This becomes clear if we compare the two kinds of story which make up the most creative and least political part of his extensive writings. To begin with, Defoe engaged in journalism, writing stories based on a version of the facts. Next, he makes use of incipiently scientific tools like archival documentation and statistics. An example of the first case is The Storm published in 1704, and of the second A Journal of the Plague Year published in 1722. Natural disasters are ever present in Defoe’s work – Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked by a tempest, and a real hurricane, which had formed somewhere in the Caribbean,27 was the subject of his journalistic piece The Storm. It struck the English coast on the night of November 26, 1703, when winds of 70 miles per hour and more wrought havoc, causing the deaths of some 8,000 people. The storm lashed southern England from around midnight until the early hours of the following day. Defoe published his account of the catastrophe just a few months later in the summer of 1704. The preface to The Storm is a paean to literature and its power to last, so that the written word becomes truth over time. The Sermon is a Sound of Words spoken to the Ear, and prepar’d only for present Meditation, and extends no farther than the strength of Memory can convey it; a Book Printed is a Record; remaining in every Man’s Possessions, always ready to renew its Acquaintance with his Memory.28 The preface also contains a reflection on truth and its role in any account of a historical event. Defoe was aware of the distance which should exist between a “mere romance” or work of fiction and a “true account”, and of the confusions, inaccuracies and legends with which History is plagued precisely because writers have failed to observe proper principles. I make all these preliminary Observations, partly to inform the Reader, that I have not undertaken this Work without the serious Consideration of what I owe to Truth, and to Posterity; nor without Sense of the extraordinary Variety and Novelty of the Relation.

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  119   I am sensible, that the want of this Caution in the Foundation of the great Misfortune we have in matters of ancient History; in which the Impudence, the Ribaldry, the empty Flourishes, the little Regard to Truth and the Fondness of telling a strange Story, has dwindled a great many valuable Pieces of ancient History into mere Romance.29 As Defoe himself remarks, the “looseness of the pen has confounded history with fable from the beginning of both”. The truthfulness of the written account is the principle on which a text like The Storm is founded. The author witnessed the historical events and tells his tale as they actually happened.30 This was without doubt Defoe’s intention, and his essay epitomizes early journalistic reporting. Let us now consider how he set about his work. The first task to be addressed in writing any eye-witness account is to find direct sources and testimony, and Defoe not only turned to the press but did something unheard of at the time. Just a few days after the storm, he published announcements in two newspapers, The London Courant and the London Gazette, in which he asked for the help of anybody who could produce written testimony of the destruction caused by hurricane: To preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest, an exact and faithful Collection is preparing of the most remarkable Disasters which happened on that Occasion, with the Places where, and Persons concern’d, whether at Sea or on Shore. For the perfecting so good a Work, ‘tis humbly recommended by the Author to all Gentlemen of the Clergy, or others, who have made any Observations of this Calamity, that they would transmit as distinct an Account as possible, of what they have observed, to the Undertakers....31 “Exact”, “faithful” and “distinct” are just some of the adjectives used by Defoe. However, he was also concerned about the breadth of his sources’ observations, and he expressly asked for testimony of events both on land and at sea. The long Chapter 7: Of the Effects of the Storm contains many of the answers he received to his announcement in the newspapers. The ­following is an example sent in from the county of Berkshire the advertisement on December 12, 1703, not long after the advertisement was published: SIR Meeting with an Advertisement of yours in the Gazette of Monday last, I very much approved of the Design, thinking it might be a great Motive towards making People, when they hear the Fate of others, return Thanks to Almighty God for his Providence in preserving them. I accordingly was resolved to send you all I knew.32 Defoe doubtless received numerous such responses, enabling him to write his book, which would have been impossible otherwise because his own

120  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year personal observations of the vast swathe of destruction wrought by the hurricane must necessarily have been very local. By seeking eyewitness reports, Defoe was proposing something absolutely new, which was to create a socialized account written up by the author using shared information obtained from multiple sources. Journalistic reportage and ethnography are the two forms of narrative which have always made the greatest use of both personal observation by the author and eye-witness accounts. Writing in the early years of the eighteenth century, Defoe made use of both techniques to write his account of the Great Storm. His reaction to this natural disaster may be considered a milestone in the history of literature and journalism. On the very day of the hurricane, November 27, 1703, Defoe left his house to walk the streets of London and see its effects with his own eyes. A century and a half earlier, the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had taken refuge from a hurricane somewhere on the south coast of what is now the United States by moving inland with his men. Upon returning to their anchorage after the storm was over, they found a scene of utter desolation, which he would later describe in his chronicles. Defoe went further, however, minutely examining the aftermath in situ, noting down what he saw and interviewing survivors. His aim was to bear witness to the facts and to describe the experience of those who were caught up in the calamity through their own testimony. His account was published only a few months after the events. Keeping the time­ span between the publication of an account and the events themselves short is at the heart of journalism, and Defoe was supremely successful in this, adopting the role of reporter while journalism was still in its infancy. His account is, indeed, a model of what we would now call “reportage”. The closer in time, the greater the credibility of the description. This was the maxim that allowed Defoe to produce a realistic descriptive narrative based on eyewitness testimony. Moreover, some of his principles would later become necessary conditions for the development of narratives of risk. The narrative of The Storm is prefaced by some general remarks of the author on the nature of wind and the climate of the British Isles, including references to Horace and Juvenal. There is a certain erudite determination in the content of Chapters I and II, which Defoe himself confesses are actually something of a “digression”. In the third chapter, however, he addresses his subject directly. Before we come to examine the Damage suffer’d by this terrible Night, and give a particular Relation of its dismal Effects; ‘tis necessary to give a summary Account of the thing itself, with all its affrightning Circumstances.33 The expression “a summary account of the thing itself” is a declaration of narrative intent by Defoe, but it also brings the narrator into direct contact with the events he is reporting. This lies at the heart of a new form of narrative

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  121 which had begun to develop in writings like those of Defoe. His goal is to lay bare the core of the “reality”, which he hopes to reach by narrating the experience of “someone who was actually there” and can tell what happened. At this point, the writing becomes much more precise, and great attention is devoted to every detail as a mark of verisimilitude. Journalism emerged in the seventeenth century as a means of recounting events as they occurred from day to day, in contrast to the genre’s precursors, which had never appeared with such regularity. The style employed by Defoe in his account is that of a day-by-day or even hour-by-hour chronicle of events as they happened. The onset of the storm was first felt in the increasing violence of the wind, presaging the devastation and ruin to come. In Defoe’s own words: On the Wednesday Morning before, being 24th of November, it was fair Weather, and blew hard; but not so as to give any Apprehensions, till about 4 o’Clock in the Afternoon the Wind increased, and with Squalls of Rain and terrible Gusts blew very furiously. (...) On Friday Morning it continued to blow exceeding hard, but not so as that it gave any Apprehensions of Danger within Doors; toward Night it increased: and about 10 o’Clock, our Barometers inform’d us that the Night would be very tempestuous; the Mercury sunk lower than ever I had observ’d it on any Occasion whatsoever, which made me suppose the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children.34 In order to dramatize his account and engage the interest of his readers, Defoe used a very literary time structure in which something terrible begins, then occurs, and finally ends in death and destruction. In this we may identify a seed of sensationalism and, though only in part, of narratives of risk. This way of describing events has marked the history of journalism, which developed through a narrative time structure based on these same elements, applying a purportedly experiential methodology of immediate involvement and seeking at all times to achieve the maximum verisimilitude and credibility to convince the reader of the story’s truth. As time would show, however, not every account presented as following these principles actually does so. The narrative style employed by Defoe in The Storm embraces the qualities of eye-witness testimony, documentary sources and realism intrinsic in any narrative of risk, but it still lacks the necessary future projection. Defoe would add this final ingredient in his Journal of the Plague Year. The second part of the Penguin edition contains the Layman’s Sermon upon the late Storm, a work bearing the rhetorical hallmarks of a sermon, in which Defoe addresses what was a crucial question in his time and would once again be widely discussed after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – were natural disasters the consequence of divine intent to punish humanity for its sins? This issue would be widely discussed and debated in the Enlightenment

122  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year period, which began shortly after Defoe’s time. The Bible continued to be the Book, and biblical stories were often used as examples to help in the interpretation of contemporary events affecting society, especially in Protestant countries. The wrath of God had been the cause of the Great Flood, which was the central myth of pre-scientific explanations of nature and natural phenomena. All life on Earth was preceded by a great cataclysm survived only by Noah and his family, which God had used to punish mankind for his vice and sinfulness. Like many of his contemporaries, Defoe identifies London as a sink of vice. This Text is not chosen more for the Suitableness to the present Calamity, which has been the Portion of this Place, than for the aptness of the Circumstances, ’twas spoken of God going to Chastise, a Powerful, Populous, Wealthy and most reprobate City.35 Defoe’s discourse is not directly or roundly that of a prophet of doom, as he prefers to focus the argument on great natural disasters as proof against the incredulous of divine power and even of the existence of God. Every expression of nature is thus a vehicle of the divine will, and God speaks through it. We ought diligently to observe the extraordinary actings of Providence, in order to discover and Deprecate the displeasure of Almighty God, Providences are never Dumb, and if we cannot discern the signals of this Anger, we must be very blind. The voice of his Judgments is heard in the Voice of Nature and if we make ourselves Deaf, he is pleas’d to make them speak the Louder, to awaken the stupefied senses, and startle the World, with the common Course of things. This I take to be some of the true meaning of the way of God, in the Whirlwind, and in the Storm.36 One of the key arguments advanced in this book concerns the secularization of risk as a concept via its application in trade and, eventually, in the development and spread of maritime insurance sometime in the fifteenth century. As we have just seen, however, even an author as important as Defoe associates risk with God in addressing the catastrophic outcomes of natural disasters, whose destructiveness had not yet been secularized at this time, because he felt that causation, in this case divine, was the more important issue. One of the processes which might allow the construction of risk is the association of outcomes not with their causes but with the likelihood of a repeat event. The narrative examined here had not yet assigned any role to the possibility of recurrence. However, this is precisely what Defoe does in his Journal of the Plague Year, and this text is therefore key to understanding the genealogy of risk. In any event, let us underline the historical importance of the secularization of knowledge, a process that

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  123 was driven by the application of discoveries to the practicalities of trade and navigation, and this in turn encouraged the development of the concept and narrative of risk. When the cause of a disaster was no longer attributed to God, it became possible to describe in words and calculate numerically the likelihood of its recurrence and this, of course, is exactly what risk is.

A Journal of the Plague Year Beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century and continuing on into the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch fleets plied the Atlantic in both directions carrying cargoes of immense value. Meanwhile, conflicts between the great European powers soon moved across the ocean to the New World. Heavily armed galleons were the new ship design which dominated the seas until well into the eighteenth century.37 War at sea became the norm, and the European navies sought both to protect their own maritime traffic and to attack enemy vessels and sack their ports under letters of marque. All of them, however, shared a common enemy – pirates. We know, according to the very reliable data passed down to us in the strict records kept by the Spanish fleets, that the period of the greatest growth in maritime transport between Spain and its American empire occurred between 1540 and 1650, when some 11,000 vessels made the Atlantic crossing, of which 519 were lost to storms, hurricanes and accident. Only 110 fell prey to pirates.38 Despite the legend, then, the figures show that this maritime traffic was actually very safe, among other reasons thanks to the protection afforded by the powerful galleons sailing in convoys. The same tactic would be used in the North Atlantic in both World Wars, providing an effective defence against attack by German submarines. Meanwhile, the London of this time can only be understood in terms of its maritime connections as a great metropolis and entrepôt for goods and people of all kinds, each with his own story, who brought with them new ideas and discoveries, exotic new products, fashions, plants and animals and, of course, the plague, which had first piggy-backed maritime trade to spread in the early thirteenth century, when the Black Death decimated the population of Europe. By the end of the seventeenth century, London had become a vast emporium. London, the great city of fashion and politics, of trade and finance, expanding all the while as it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, lay at the centre of the new developments (…) London, says Chamberlayne, was the fairest and most opulent city in Europe, perhaps the whole world.39 According to Jack Lindsey, Defoe was the first to call London the “Monster City”, and he put its population at this time at around a million

124  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year and a half inhabitants. Modern estimates suggest a figure of between 575,000 and 674,000 people, however, though this would have made it easily the biggest city in Europe. Paradoxically, the fastest growth in the population of London coincided with the period of disasters including the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. In 1600, London had some 200,000 inhabitants, a figure which had doubled by 1650. In 1750, the city had 675,000 people and by 1800 it had 900,000, compared to 550,000 in Paris according to the census of 1801. Some 7 per cent of the total population of England lived in London in 1650, but by 1750 the proportion had risen to 11 per cent. This percentage was only matched in Europe by Amsterdam. These data give some idea of London’s capacity to attract newcomers as a great metropolis and the capital of a fast-expanding colonial empire. In the century between 1650 and 1750, more people died in London than were born, but some 8,000 migrants from other parts of the British Isles arrived in the city each year, easily making up for negative natural population growth.40 At the same time as London’s population was growing at breakneck speed, despite the high mortality rate caused by disasters, dreadful conditions of public health and violence, a new kind of science appeared in the form of demographic measurement. Statistical methods had been used in Italy and other countries since the sixteenth century as a means of gathering numerical data about the population and the economy (in fact the word “statistics” is derived from the Italian terms stato (state) and statista (one who manages affairs of state). It was John Graunt of London, however, who made the first descriptive statistical analysis of mortality, publishing his Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality in 1662, in which he examined the weekly figures for deaths reported in the city of London, which had been recorded since 1604. Defoe certainly drew on Graunt’s work for his Diary of the Plague Year. England suffered a dreadful year in 1623, which saw flooding, famine, epidemics of dysentery, smallpox and typhus, and the plague alone carried off around 20 per cent of London’s inhabitants. In the spring of 1637, the plague killed around 3,000 people in London, and on this occasion John Graunt himself estimated mortality at some 10,400 people over the year as a whole, the victims of bad air and the fetid exhalations of corpses.41 In her book World Epidemics, Mary Ellen Snodgrass offers a key snippet of information about London life from the time of this epidemic: “Citizens bought copies of bills of mortality, an official census listed by disease. They scanned each issue for data on contagion and commented on the predations of plague in their letters and journals”.42 This detail of Londoners’ behaviour upon this fresh outbreak of the plague in 1637 reveals four interrelated facts. To begin with, the public had developed an interest in statistical data, in this case an official census. Second, what most drew their attention was statistical accounts of the plague. Third, they used these data to learn about existing cases, and fourth they discussed their conclusions and estimates

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  125 through the familiar narrative vehicles of letters and journals. The people of London, seeing the utility of numerical knowledge for the prevention of the plague, had thus already made the connection which Defoe would later use to create a narrative of risk that would become a historic milestone. Risk was beginning to take shape now not only as a conceptual term but also as a form of textual construction. This is the issue we shall address in the following pages. In 1661, typhus, or “spotted fever” as it was commonly known, broke out in London, remaining active for a further five years and causing the deaths of 15,700 people. This epidemic meant that the situation of public health in the city was already very precarious when the Great Plague made its appearance in 1665. The diaries of Samuel Pepys provide a closely observed eyewitness account. Pepys (1633–1703) was a politician, who kept a diary between 1660 and 1669, which describes contemporary London life in marvellous detail. Pepys’ diaries cover both the Great Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666), which makes them indispensable as a source of information. Even so, Defoe was not able to draw on them for his Journal of the Plague Year, which was written around 1720, as the diaries were not published until 1825, and then only partially. On June 7, 1665, when the plague was first beginning to show itself, Pepys wrote: This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” written there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension.43 By June 30, the tally of the deceased had risen to 300 per day, making a monthly total of some 9,000. Pepys describes a heartrending scene of empty streets and terrible stories, like that of a group of sailors held in quarantine aboard their ships slowly dying of starvation. As Pepys himself puts it, “The plague [has made] us cruel, as dogs, one to another”. In mid-July, the wealthier classes began to abandon the city, and the following week King Charles II and the royal family removed to Hampton Court until early 1666. The number of deaths reached the horrifying figure of 238,700 in August 1665, and the people of the city lived shut up in quarantine in their houses.44 The virulence of the plague reached its zenith in the month of September: As the London plague epidemic reached its height in the hot weeks of September, enforcers of health regulations began fumigating streets, disinfecting ditches and public latrines, and killing stray animals. Parishes were sealed and ships’ crews confined on board in the harbour.45

126  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year Samuel Pepys describes many such events in his diary, occurring in the months while the plague raged, but he also describes personal experiences, allowing him to include revealing facts and details. Up by 5 o’clock, mighty full of fear of an ague, but was obliged to go, and so by water, wrapping myself up warm, to the Tower, and there sent for the Weekly Bill, and find 8,252 dead in all, and of them 6,878 of the plague; which is a most dreadful number and shows reason to fear that the plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us.46 By mid-November, however, the plague began to abate and Pepys would jubilantly write in his diary: The plague, blessed be God! Is decreased 400; making the whole this week but 1300 and odd; for which the Lord be praised!47 The Great Plague finally ended as the year 1665 drew to its close, and it became possible to take stock of its victims. The Bills of Mortality, instituted in 1604, provided detailed statistics on deaths and their causes. While the number of baptisms held in all the parishes of London totalled 9,967 in 1665, the city saw 97,306 burials, including those of 68,596 who had died of the plague. In addition to the diaries penned by eyewitnesses like Samuel Pepys, physicians and historians were also drawn to write accounts of the plague of 1665. Among these, Dr Nathaniel Hodges (1620–1688) published his ­Loimologia, sive Pestis nuperæ apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica, which appeared in translation in English in 1720 as Loimologia, or an historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665. Interestingly, the title page of the book mentions after the author’s name both that he is a physician and that he was resident in London during the time of the plague, lending it value both as a scientific work and as an eyewitness account, two narrative approaches which are central to the thesis I have sought to develop in these pages. The Plague which we are now to give an Account of, discovered the Beginnings of its future Cruelties, about the Close of the Year 1664; for at that Season two or three Persons died suddenly in one Family at Westminster, attended with like Symptoms, that manifestly declared their Origin: Hereupon some timorous Neighbours, under Apprehensions of a Contagion, removed into the City of London, who unfortunately carried along with them the pestilential Taint; whereby that Disease, which was before in its Infancy, in a Family or two, suddenly got Strength, and spread Abroad its fatal Poisons; and merely for Want of confining the Persons first seized with it, the whole City was in a little Time irrecoverably infected.48

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  127 The opening words of Hodges’ account thus describe the first outbreak of the plague and its swift spread, which he attributes to the failure to take the necessary measures to isolate early victims. Fear plays a key role from the outset, appearing as an immediate reaction to the awareness of peril felt by the neighbours of death. Fear and danger are not the same thing as risk, because they arise from the proximity of the agent of harm, in this case the plague. A few lines further into Hodges’ account, however, we come across a first glimpse of a narrative discourse. BUT as soon as it was rumoured amongst the common People, who are always enough astonished at any Thing new, that the Plague was in the City, it is impossible to relate what Accounts were spread of its Fatality, and well were it, had not the Presages been so ominous; every one predicted its future Devastations, and they terrified each other with Remembrances of a former Pestilence; for it was a received Notion amongst the common People, that the Plague visited England once in Twenty Years; as if after a certain Interval, by some inevitable Necessity, it must return again. But although this Conceit, how well so ever justify’d by past Experiences, did not so much obtain with Persons of more Judgment, yet this may be affirmed, that it greatly contributed, amongst the Populace, both to propagate and inflame the Contagion, by the strong Impressions it made upon their Minds.49 Let us pause to consider this paragraph, which is enormously significant to the present enquiry. To my mind, the proximity of evil must have been felt with peculiar intensity in a city as populous, stimulating and implacable as seventeenth century London and in such a time of catastrophe,50 especially in the face of a tragedy like the outbreak of the plague among its inhabitants. Hodges himself suggests this where he describes the reaction of Londoners, and especially the common people, as the plague took hold to deadly effect. He seeks in his account to echo the fatalism he was able to observe in the responses of his fellow citizens, whom he identifies as the “common People” or the “Populace”. Was this the general mood in the streets of London? It certainly seems to have been based on the testimony of both Pepys and Hodges, and later historical research confirms it. As imagined by these people, the future was dominated by misfortune. However, Hodges’ text contains a significant counterpoint, insofar as people “of more Judgment” gave no credence to such presentiments. Let us remember that the writer was a doctor of medicine observing the course of events in his own city, and that he was keenly aware of the ravages of the plague among his neighbours not only in itself as a pathogen but also as a representation or story. So, Hodges introduces a narrative discourse into his account of the plague, watching events unfold more in the role of anthropologist than physician. The plague became a symbol, and this in turn made it possible to imagine the future by representing it through story. The succinct narrative

128  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year which Hodges presents has a kind of magical, vatic air about it, making the plague into an entity possessed of a kind of intentionality which returns to London every twenty years. The scientific scepticism of a doctor like Hodges would not, however, allow him to see that past outbreaks of the plague in London might in part explain this superstition. For people of sound judgment like himself, there could be no such explanation. These observations drawn from Hodges’ Loimologia seem to me of enormous import, and their appearance in a text written by an eyewitness only a few years after the event lends them extraordinary documentary value for our understanding of the historical development of narratives of risk. Moreover, I would highlight Hodges’ use of the word “presages” to describe the view held by the citizens of London of the disaster of the plague. A presage is a “foreboding” and in this sense we cannot classify it as an assessment of risk, because it is intuitive or visionary rather than probabilistic, but it does have the quality of imagining the future based on a narrative which links past examples or cases as part of a pattern. This effect is similar to what I have called the “narrative matrix”. Hodges’ himself understood that past data would engender a belief in some kind of intentionality associated with the plague, although as a doctor he could not but reject such notions. However, Defoe would later create a “narrative matrix of risk” by means of the testimonial, historical and quasi-scientific credibility of the account given in A Diary of the Plague Year. To conclude, it is beyond doubt that the nature of the plague was singularly suited to the rapid spread of narratives among the people, according to Hodges with disastrous effect for the epidemiological battle because they only contributed to propagating the disease.51 A Journal of the Plague Year was first published in London in 1722, only two years after an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the port of Marseille in France. The Yersinia pestis bacillus had arrived from the Levant, causing around 100,000 deaths in the city and outlying areas. This was the last great epidemic of bubonic plague to occur in Europe. News of events in Marseille was not long in reaching London, where memories of the Great Plague of 1655 were still strong. It was in this context that the physician Dr Richard Mead wrote his Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion52 by royal order. According to Nicholson, concern over the plague and the belief that a new epidemic could break out spread rapidly through the city. Fifty-five years had passed since the Great Plague, and there were still a few survivors who had lived through it in their youth or as children. This helped to keep the memory of its ravages alive. Daniel Defoe himself was sixty years old when he set about writing A Journal of the Plague Year, and he was five when the plague occurred. In both of these periods of his life he lived in London, and his own memory therefore stretched back to the plague of 1665 and its aftermath. All of this goes to show that there was unquestionably an audience for a text like Defoe’s in the London of 1720. Much has been written about Defoe’s intentions in writing this book, but there can be little doubt that they cannot be divorced from the lowering

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  129 threat of events in Marseille, which was widely felt by his fellow citizens in the English capital. Some authors like Nicholson attribute an awareness of a “humanitarian duty” to Defoe.53 If we pause to consider his character and actions, however, we might also suppose that Defoe, as a good journalist, social critic and political activist, was always alive to public interest and the central debates of the moment. Given his reforming ideas as a dissenter,54 and certainly also because of his determination to achieve literary and financial success, it may well be that his motives were at least partly personal. We now know that Defoe was not the only writer to look back on the Great Plague of 1655, and that he also used material written by others on the same tragic events, including the works of Graunt and Hodges. However, A Journal of the Plague Year is quite special and different. The construction of this work, which is at once fiction and history, long disconcerted the critics, who considered it improper to mix two kinds of writing, history and poetry, which Aristotle himself defined as distinct in the Poetics because one recounts what actually happened while the other tells us what might happen. Is it possible to write a tale which describes the real events of the past in order to anticipate a possible future? I believe that probability in both its narrative and mathematical forms shows that it is, as I have argued in the preceding chapter. Once again, the time structure here is one in which the events of the past could, in principle, happen again, and this possible outcome is at the root of narrative probability. This is what I have called the “narrative matrix of risk”, and it is the central concept of this chapter. Instead of comparing it with other writings of Defoe’s on the same theme, such as Due Preparations for the Plague or The Dreadful Visitation,55 let us rather juxtapose A Diary of the Plague Year with The Storm in order to examine the time structures the author employs in the two works, regardless of their differing subject matter. As explained earlier, The Storm stands out for having been written and published almost immediately after the events it described, in contrast to A Journal of the Plague Year, which was written some fifty-five years later. Both books, however, share the aim of winning credibility through the vehicle of “thereness”56 if I may employ a nonce word to describe the verisimilitude that Defoe sought. The journalistic and ethnographic force of The Storm is derived in particular from this quality. The genesis of this work was Defoe’s own direct experience of the Great Storm of 1704, but A Diary of the Plague Year was not written until fifty years afterwards. When he wrote The Storm, Defoe was able to obtain first-hand reports from others whom he contacted through advertisements published in the newspapers just a few days after the calamity. This was, of course, impossible when he set to writing A Journal of the Plague Year, although he did draw on available documentary sources which enabled him to come fairly close his subject. However, the work owes its originality to Defoe’s fictionalization of a first-hand account, which obviously could not be quite true but was certainly realistic.

130  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year In Defoe’s book, a fictional character described as a London merchant who lived through the Great Plague of 1665 recounts its origins, course and aftermath. The enormously prolix title page of the first edition published in 1722, a common feature of books published at this time, provides all kinds of interesting details. The work claims to consist of “Observations” and “Memorials” of what are described as “the most Remarkable Occurrences as well Publick as Private” which happened to a “Citizen who continued all the while in London”. These are the terms in which the author and his publishers saw fit to synopsize the work. It consisted of an eyewitness’ observations and recollections of public and private events. The associations between all of these claims directly suggest a memoir, in which a first person narrator describes personal experiences as facts in the form of observations. There is in this a pretension to “objectivity” which is used to spell out the new literary style or genre journalism to the public. Journalism was just beginning to come of age in early eighteenth century Europe, especially in Great Britain, where political life was intense. The circulation of printed daily newspapers in the whole of England in 1712 was around 7,000. By 1724, however, London alone had three dailies and a dozen weekly newspapers. According to Peter Burke in his Social History of Knowledge, the word “journalist” first appeared to refer to the writers who worked for the newspapers around 1700, distinguishing them from the “gazettiers”, who were mere news reporters. Burke then goes on to explain: Over the whole course of the eighteenth century, journalists exercised an increasing influence as newspapers proliferated (...). In any event, what is remarkable from a comparative standpoint is that a group of more or less independent gentlemen of letters holding their own political views should have emerged in Europe in the mid eighteenth century, specifically in the great cities of Paris, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, and that they should have remained in regular contact with each other.57 Daniel Defoe was certainly one of the leading gentlemen of letters to whom Burke refers, standing in the company of others like Jonathan Swift, Dr Johnson, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. Journalism meant that a writer could earn a living with his pen through the newspapers, and even among the greats Defoe was arguably the master of literary journalism and his Journal of the Plague Year the model. Writer and journalist are inseparable epithets in any description we might make of Defoe, and he combined the qualities of imagination and documentation proper to these professions to an astonishing degree. In terms of documentation, we know that his main sources were Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality and Hodges’ Loimologia.58 Consultation of these works was a key part of Defoe’s documentary effort, and as Anthony Burgess remarks in his introduction to the 2006 translation of the Journal published in Spain:

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  131 Defoe was a professional writer, and we know that he collected a whole library of reference works to prepare the Journal. He wanted to write a popular novel, but he was determined to do his homework beforehand.59 Like all memoirs, the book starts by presenting the narrator, a London merchant, who sets out to relate his experience: It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought (some said from Italy, others from the Levant) among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others, from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.60 Defoe’s account is highly descriptive and he clearly marks the nature of his narrative tempos. Having situated the nearest outbreak in Holland in 1663, he goes on to depict an ensuing period of “rumour”, a highly significant word. In closing this episode, however, Defoe points the finger at the authorities for having kept the reports they had received secret so as not to spread alarm, with the result that the general public remained ignorant of the threat posed by the plague, which had not yet reached London. We cannot know to what extent this was actually so, but Defoe’s account, which let us recall was written retrospectively, certainly presents this official concealment as fact, because he is actually thinking of the rumours arriving at his time of writing from Marseille, and of the reports which the government did order from experts like Dr Richard Mead in 1720. In this way, he uses an account of the past to warn of the future by means of a masterly simulation of an eyewitness memoir to lend verisimilitude to his story. We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days, to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practiced since. But such things as those were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the government had a true account of it, and several counsels were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again; and people began to forget it, as a thing we were very little concerned in and that we hoped was not true, till the latter end of November or the beginning of December, 1664, when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Longacre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.61

132  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year The mention of the lack of newspapers “in those days” reveals Defoe’s interest in attributing an apparently journalistic dimension to his work by doing “today” what nobody had done “back then”, although the truth is that the Oxford Gazette was founded in that city precisely in 1665 after the London elite had removed there to escape the plague. A Journal of the Plague Year is written in the elaborate or “polished” tone to be expected rather of a “journalist” than “gazetteer”. Defoe immediately shifts to the new time of the plague, which has by now arrived in London, offering a fact which also appears in Pepys’ diary, as mentioned earlier—the first confirmed cases occurred in or around Drury Lane. This coincidence was only made possible by Defoe’s excellent documentary work: he could not have taken it from Pepys’ diaries because they were not published until many years later. Even when it is passed on exclusively by word of mouth, rumour is the forerunner of written narrative. This fundamental transition in the history of public communication is reflected in this part of Defoe’s tale, anticipating the birth of the press as mass media. Though no more than an aside placed by Defoe’s pen in the mouth of his fictional London merchant, it is important enough to warrant a brief pause for reflection. Defoe is telling us that his own writing harks back to a time when there was no press, but he assumes that his narrator is writing at a time after the press had in fact appeared and even “improves” the news. What lies between these two eras is the devastating plague of 1655. Hence, we may pick up on the suggestion implicit in the text that the press is the child of the plague, especially in view of his other great journalistic work on natural disaster, The Storm. This is borne out by the reportage of The Storm and the journalistic account presented in A Diary of the Plague Year. In the latter case, this consideration could last only until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was discovered that HF, a London shoemaker and the purported author of the work, was none other than Daniel Defoe, and that what had until then been read as a memoir was in fact a work of fiction, if a rather peculiar one. At this point, we find ourselves faced with a knot of threads. In the first place, this is the historical moment at which we may situate the birth of what Defoe himself calls the “printed newspaper” containing a widely circulated written account of daily events, which first emerged in fledgling form immediately after 1665, the year of the plague. This innovation of the newspaper “improved” on rumour and private reports, so that Defoe points to the emergence of a new literary style, which was much more demanding to produce, among other reasons because it required documentation, a knowledge of historical events, background, first-hand information and skilful writing. To “improve” the news was precisely what Defoe sought to do in his own writing, and it this which makes him, as Anthony Burgess has said, into the first historical example of a modern journalist. In this light, let me posit that the foundation for the modern journalistic account constructed by Daniel Defoe was none other than the concept of

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  133 risk. The “improvement” of the news, or to put it another way the new ­narrative style invented by Defoe, involves a clearly probabilistic time structure. The account creates a past time which is proposed as real, even though it is fictitious. Indeed, it was so real that it took years before it was realized that it was a fiction and not a memoir, and then only when the true authorship of the work was discovered.62 Hence, the time structure which Defoe employed in A Journal of the Plague Year clearly runs from the past to the future, from what happened to what could happen in the specific time and space described in the work, to wit between 1665 and the future London of 1720. Certain other initial conclusions may be drawn from this analysis, which I shall consider in more detail at the end of this chapter, but which cannot be ignored here. The textual construction of risk is clearly observable in A Journal of the Plague Year. Thus, what has so far appeared as a concept, or even a theological term, related with trade and navigation may now be viewed as a style of writing or narrative type, which can be detected as an incipient presence in some of the texts produced by the Spanish chroniclers, conquistadors and colonists of America in the sixteenth century, but which appears fully fledged in Defoe’s early journalism. It could be claimed that journalism allowed the development of a new narrative of risk, but by the same token the treatment of risk as the likelihood of harm could also be said to have driven the emergence of sensationalism, one of modern journalism’s basic styles. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries would see this new narrative grow to unimaginable proportions. The main reason for viewing Defoe’s work as a narrative of risk (and certainly the first of such length and polish) lies not so much in the text itself as in the context, and indeed critical appraisals of A Journal of the Plague Year are as much concerned with what we know about Defoe himself, his activity, the time of writing and his other writings on the plague. The plague was once again a matter of huge concern in Great Britain in the early eighteenth century, and Defoe wrote much about it in the newspapers. He also published one pamphlet and two books on the subject. The Dreadful Visitation published in 1712 was a pamphlet of a mere twelve pages in length which anticipates something of the eventual form of the Journal and was based on the Bill of Mortality for 1655. Meanwhile, Due Preparations for the Plague, as well for the Soul as Body appeared in 1722. It presents facts and provides advice on prevention. It was followed only a few weeks later by A Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe began writing about the plague around 1709, having become concerned about the threat of infection from the continent. The geographical reality of the British Isles has helped shape their history, and the identification of the “Continent” as the source of evils of all kinds has often strengthened feelings of insularity and suspicion of Europe among its peoples. In 1709, British troops were fighting alongside the Swedes against Russia. Meanwhile, the armies of Prussia and Poland, allies of the Tsar, were stricken with plague, and Defoe wrote about it in the press to warn of the possibility of contagion. In 1712 further outbreaks

134  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year appeared in Europe. Despite his custom of using pseudonyms, various articles published in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal have been attributed to Defoe,63 and in one of these dated October 1, 1720 he refers to reports from Marseille under the ominous by-line “Quarantine” in the following terms: piles of unburied corpses in the streets the stench of which was insupportable (...) people eating leather, starch, soap (...) bands of thieves and murderers who roam the infected streets.64 With its description of the situation in Marseille, this text was a foretaste of A Journal of the Plague Year. Meanwhile, the atmosphere in London was contagious, if not for the plague itself then at least for the idea of its approach. In 1721, the government of Prime Minister Horace Walpole passed the Act of Quarantine to prevent foreign ships suspected of carrying the plague from entering British ports. In the press, Defoe was one of the most fervent defenders of the Act, which finally entered the statute book on February 12, 1722. London in 1722 was, then, a city on the alert against the plague and it is in this context that we must place A Journal of the Plague Year. It is the context of a narrative of risk created by multiple interrelated sources including the press, the government, experts, the people and other agents, each feeding back into the others. Thus, a contextual account was gradually woven and spread by all of them: the plague which had broken out in Marseille was coming. It was against this backdrop that Defoe wrote his Journal, and this is the context in which it should be understood. Meanwhile, the intentions of the writer are revealed by numerous pieces of evidence. Aside from the personal goal of winning fame and fortune, his primary purpose was to help prevent any new outbreak of the plague by writing an original, powerful and novel narrative – a narrative of risk. This was my fundamental thesis in beginning work on this book, combined with the idea that his action was key to the genesis of risk as narrative.

The context of risk and the narrative matrix Daniel Defoe cannot have been fully aware of the significance which his simultaneously factual and fictional reconstruction of the Great Plague of 1665 would eventually attain. Indeed, this significance is only fully visible to us today, because we have the benefit of hindsight and can look back on the subsequent development of some of Defoe’s novel ideas and stylistic innovations over the intervening centuries. We may begin with the scientific application of statistics to the description and quantification of the epidemic, to epidemiology and to demographics in general. In this area, Defoe drew on the work of John Graunt, who is today revered as one of the founding fathers of descriptive statistics. He also made use of contemporary medical treatises, like those of Mead and Hodges mentioned earlier. Historically,

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  135 these scientific fields proved decisive in the subsequent development of risk as a form of specialist knowledge. Journalism and what we would today call the mass media are indissolubly linked to the very essence of Defoe’s work. Defoe has been called the “first journalist” and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe the “first novel in the English language”, which should in itself alert us to his originality as an author. However, I would add that he was also the inventor of narratives of risk. The link between risk and journalism was fundamental to the development of the latter over the course of the nineteenth century. Sensationalistic journalism is rooted in the narratives of risk produced in the eighteenth century, which over the decades gradually produced offshoots like narratives of fear and terror, and these in turn evolved into key genres of journalism, literature and cinema ranging from the nineteenth century penny dreadful to horror films. Though risk management is currently a key area of public policy and has certainly always existed in some form, it had never been considered a matter of general public concern before Defoe but seems rather to developed in a modern sense in England in the eighteenth century. It was, then, one of the great innovations of the historical context or milieu in which we may place Defoe. In the first place, it was his Majesty’s government which implemented measures like the Quarantine Act of 1721 designed to protect public order. Experts like Graunt, Hodges and Mead were also engaged by the authorities, or assisted privately by addressing the phenomenon of the plague scientifically, applying disciplines like statistics, epidemiology and medicine. The public also took part, writing and exchanging letters, journals, memoirs and warnings in a correspondence exemplified by the Diaries of Samuel Pepys, creating a private literature that has since proved enormously useful to historians. Through it, we can in fact recognize the existence of an authentic public opinion. Finally, the fast-expanding daily press of early eighteenth-century London had already developed the capacity to influence Parliament, government and public opinion. The writer, journalist and activist who was Daniel Defoe could almost be said to be the distilled spirit of this heady brew of political action and cultural ebullition, and his work certainly encapsulates a whole era and the struggle against its calamities and evils. The invention of narratives of  risk as a preventive journalistic and literary recourse proved to be of immense political value in furthering the public good. It was a triumph of its time achieved by numerous different agents, but the figure of Defoe seems to personify them all. A narrative context of risk may be defined as a social discourse that emerges when various different agents recount experiences or stories about a probable threat to society as whole. Initially, it is something that is “in the air”, like the letters and warnings people exchanged before the outbreak of the plague in 1665 according to Pepys, or the “rumours” mentioned by Defoe at the beginning of the Journal. In time, however, this nebulous

136  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year “atmosphere” becomes increasingly precise, as we have seen in the description of the years before 1722, when Defoe wrote his book. Stable, formal communication channels develop, especially in the press, conveying information and eventually configuring a latent account of events. Such latent accounts receive regular feedback from ever more politicized groups among the population (especially in the context of British-style parliamentarianism), who place the issues at the centre of public debate. A narrative context of risk is created when various latent accounts are reactivated by new events, shaping beliefs about what is likely to happen next. Looking back on the historical events and the numerous narratives I have mentioned (especially those penned by Defoe), we may begin to understand what was happening in London around 1720. There existed both a historical account and numerous personal memories of the Great Plague of 1655 as a catastrophe without equal. Meanwhile, in 1729, news began to arrive of a new outbreak of the plague in Marseilles, an event which reactivated the latent account but in a different historical context, which had probably not existed previously, shaping the preventive approach taken towards the threat thanks to a new way of understanding and managing risk. Daniel Defoe was the great exponent of this new ­narrative of risk. A narrative context of this kind will have a probabilistic time structure and will contain a clear message, to wit “what has happened in the past could happen again”. In earlier chapters, I described this time structure as the narrative key to the invention of probability as a concept before it took on mathematical form. In Defoe’s case, however, we may add a further property to complete this explanation of how he conceived his narrative of risk. A Journal of the Plague Year takes on the form of a “matrix” seeking to create a narrative capable of moulding the representation of what might happen next. This matrix principle is what links the book’s account of the calamitous events of 1655 with the narrative context activated in London around 1720 when Defoe was writing. A narrative matrix of risk is an account of a loss or injury already sustained, but presented at a moment when a similar event could occur. The story is told, then, with the implicit intention (in Defoe’s case) or explicit goal (in the case of today’s mass media) of generating awareness of a risk by reporting similar events which happened in the past. If the model so created takes firm hold, it can become the paradigm for the type of risk in question for many years to come. The modern media still use the basic narrative structure invented by Defoe in the early eighteenth century to communicate risk today. I have investigated numerous contemporary uses of narrative matrices of risk, but the systematic appearance of the “Spanish” flu epidemic of 1918 in media stories about the risk of first bird flu and then swine flu in the first decade of the twenty-first century65 appears to me a textbook case. The rapid development of the press has fostered, expanded and intensified narratives of risk, enormously broadening their scope and ability to reach

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  137 an ever greater audience through new media like theatre, cinema, radio, television and, today, the internet. What began in early eighteenth-century London was thus the wellspring of the modern history of risk, which is indissolubly bound up with the development of increasingly powerful news media. We shall deal with this new anthropological phase in the history of risk in the coming chapters of this book.

Notes   1 Montaigne, M. De, Essais. Chapter XXI. Book I. For my part, I think it less hazardous to write of things past, than present, by how much the writer is only to give an account of things every one knows he must of necessity borrow upon trust. [Translation from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0021]   2 Montaigne, M. de, Ibid. Chapter XXII. Book I. which must be done, forsooth, to reform our conscience and belief: “Honesta oratio est” but the best pretense for innovation is of very dangerous consequence. [Translation from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0021]   3 Magne, L. Histoire sémantique du risque et de ses corrélats. Journées d’histoire de la comptabilité et du management, 2010, France. halshs-00465954   4 Machado, J.P. – 1967 Diccionario Etimológico da Língua Portuguesa. Lisbon. Editorial Conflência. Vol. III, p. 2017  5 Cotgrave, R. – 1611 A Dictionaire of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip   6 The reference is from: Cline, P.B. – 2004 The Etymology of Risk. http://citeseerx. ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.112.3920&rep=rep1&type=pdf  7 The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 7, p. 1059  8 Parker, G. – 2012 Global Crisis. War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press  9 Burton, R. – The Anatomy of Melancholy, London 1621. Gutenberg Project: www.gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm 10 Burton, R. Ibid. 11 The full title is Abrege de l’Histoire de ce siecle de fer contenant les miseres & calamitez des derniers temps, avex leurs causes & pretextes jusques au Couronnement du Roy des Romains Ferdinand IV, fait vers la fin de l’ Esté de l’An mil six cens cinquante-trois. 12 The British historian Henry Kamen published his own work The Iron Century. Social Change in Europe, 1550–1660 in 1971. Kamen, H. – 1976 The Iron Century. Social Change in Europe, 1550–1660. London: Cardinal Books 13 Parival, J.-N. – 1634 Abrege de l’Histoire de ce siecle de fer. Leyden, p. 1 Le Saint Empire jouyssoit d’une profonde paix, la France, l’Italie, l’Espagne, le Lorraine et les Provinces Gallicanes des Pays Bas, commençoient de respirer para celle de Vervins. 14 Parival, J.N. – (1634) Au Lecteur J’ appelle ce siecle, le siecle de fer, à cause que tous le maux et prodiges son arrivez en gros, qui n’ ont eté auz siecles precedentes, qu’en detail. Si los ­desordres furent grand en quelque coin, ils le sont en celuy-cy para tout.

138  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year 15 Parival, J.N. – (1634) p. 23 C’est donc ce siecle abominable duquel l’Escriture parle si clairment; c’est ce Royaume de fer qui brise & dompte toutes choses. Les sept Anges ont versé leurs Phioles sur la terre, qui est remplie de blasphemes, calamitez, massacres, injustices (...). Nous avons veu & voyons encore Royaume s’eflener contre Royaume, Nation contre Nation, des pestes, famines, tremblements de terre, inondations horribles; des signes au Soleil et la Lune & aus Estoilles; angoisses des Nations pour les tempestes & bruit de la Mer (...) nous ne devons faire dificulté de croire que la fin est proche & que les Fils de l’Homme va venir en une nuée avec Puissance et Majesté. 16 The term “pamphleteer” was used in Defoe’s time to refer to the writers of short publications usually on political themes 17 James Joyce, lecture on Daniel Defoe, Università Popolare, Trieste, Italy, March 1912 18 Sherry wines, at that time greatly appreciated in England, were exported from the Jerez area via the port of Cadiz 19 Defoe, D. – 1972 A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn. London: Dent 20 The use of pseudonyms has greatly complicated the subsequent identification of Defoe’s extensive oeuvre 21 Johnson, C. Capt. 1724 A General History of Pirates. London: T. Warner. p. 25 22 Novak, M.E. – 1965 Defoe and the Nature of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press 23 Kay, Carol. – 1988 Political Constructions. Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume and Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 24 Hobbes, T. – 1998 Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press 25 Nowadays normally referred to eponymously as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders 26 I cannot consider the chivalric romances or the picaresque novel, to cite two of the key literary genres from before Defoe’s time, or indeed Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as examples of adventure novels. These stories do not necessarily lead to a happy or triumphant conclusion, and indeed they frequently end with quite the opposite 27 Although they are not normally associated with Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, France and the Iberian Peninsula are occasionally hit by Caribbean hurricanes 28 Defoe, D. – 2005 The Storm. London: Penguin Classics. p. 3 29 Defoe, D. 2005, p. 5 30 Defoe was not the first to do this. The classical writer Pliny the Younger described the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 72, which he personally witnessed. However, nobody before Defoe had embarked on the task with such careful forethought, breadth of purpose and precision 31 Defoe, D. – 1704/2005 The Storm. London. Penguin Books. p. xxiii. This announcement was written by Defoe himself and published by the two most widely read newspapers in the London of his time. It is included in the introductory study by Richard Hamblyn 32 Defoe, D. 2005 p. 67 33 Defoe, D. 1704/2005 p. 25 34 Defoe, D. 1704/2005 p. 26 35 Defoe, D. 1704/2005 p. 183 36 Defoe, D. 1704/2005 p. 185 37 The last galleon built in Spain remained in service until around 1700. These ships were eventually superseded by the frigate or ship of the line, which were lighter than the galleon and much more manoeuvrable

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  139 38 Martínez Laínez, F. – 2006 Los Tercios de España, una infantería legendaria. Madrid: EDAF 39 Lindsay, J. – 1978 The Monster City. Defoe’s London 1688–1730. London: Granada Publishing. p. 7 40 These figures are from The Monster City. Defoe’s London 1688–1730 by J. Lindsay, pp. 7–8 41 These references are from Snodgrass, M.E. – 2003 World Epidemics. A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS. London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers 42 Snodgrass, M.E. (2003) p. 91 43 Pepys, S 44 Snodgrass, M.E. Ibid. p. 92 45 Snodgrass, M.E. Ibid. p. 92 46 Pepys, S. – The Diary of Samuel Pepys. www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/ 47 Pepys, S. – The Diary of Samuel Pepys. www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/ 48 Hodges, N. – 1720 LOIMOLOGIA: or An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665. London: E. Bell. p. 2 49 Hodges, N. 1720 50 We might mention numerous other historical events from this time of religious conflict and fanaticism which, though not the subject of this work, nevertheless reflect the extraordinary force with which the notion of evil took hold in the minds of contemporaries, and particularly in the minds of political and religious leaders, who became observed with driving it out. Religious persecution and especially witch-hunts and burning at the stake are clear ­ symptoms of this 51 Something similar has occurred in modern epidemics such as AIDS, bird flu and Ebola 52 The Historical Sources of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Boston, MA: The Stratford Co., Publishers. p. 5 I have had the opportunity to consult a facsimile edition of this work produced by Kessinger Publishing (2007) 53 Nicholson, W. 1919 p. 5 54 Defoe’s political career was complicated, which is only logical given that he lived through a time of great political upheaval and change in England. However, he always remained a dissenter, which is to say an opponent of the established Church of England. In the struggle for the English throne, he supported the party of William of Orange against James II during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and he seems usually to have been closer to the Whigs than the Tories 55 The full title of this work is The Dreadful Visitation in a Short Account of the Progress and Effects of the Plague the Last Time it Spread in the City of London in the Year 1665 56 By this coining, I mean the quality of eyewitness observation 57 Burke, P. A Social History of Knowledge, p. 47 58 Nicholson, W. – 1919 The Historical Sources of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Boston, MA: The Stratford Co. Publishers 59 Defoe, D. 2006. p. 14 60 Defoe, D. – 2001 A Journal of the Plague Year. New York: The Modern Library. p. 3 61 Defoe, D. (2006) p. 33 62 Under his pseudonym Defoe had succeeded in convincing his readers that he had been “there”. Furthermore, his account lost none of its capacity to convince readers when it became known who was behind the pen name. In this light, it seems that “thereness” depends as much on the skill of the writer as it does on the actual fact of having been “there”

140  Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year 63 Defoe’s authorship has been questioned in some cases, and M. Novak himself expresses various concerns 64 Defoe, D. – 1720 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal. London: Applebee. October 1720 65 Mairal, G. 2011 The history and the narrative of risk in the media. Health, Risk & Society, 13:1, 65–79, DOI: 10.1080/13698575.2010.540313

Bibliography Alkon, P.K. 1979. Defoe and Fictional Time. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Burton, R., Faulkner, T.C., Kiessling, N.K. and Blair, R.L. 1989; 2000 The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. Davis, L.J. 1983 Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. de Parival, J. and Harris, B. 1656 The History of this Iron Age. London: Printed for E. Tyler and are to be sold by J. Crook, S. Miller and T. Davies. Defoe, D. 1968; 1902 The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1 publ, [13 times] reprint edn. London: Oxford University Press. Defoe, D., 1950 A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences as Well Publick as Private Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. London: Falcon Press. Defoe, D., 1908 A Journal of the Plague Year: Written by a Citizen who Continued all the While in London. London and New York: J.M. Dent. Defoe, D. 1722 Moll Flanders. London: Icon Classics. Defoe, D. and Defoe, D. 1860 The History of the Plague of London, Together with ­Religious Courtship. New York: Derby & Jackson. Defoe, D. and Hamblyn, R. 2011 The Lay-man’s Sermon Upon the Late Storm. ­Cambridge: ProQuest LLC. Defoe, D. and Hamblyn, R., 2005; 2003 The Storm. London and New York: Penguin. Defoe, D., Hayward, A.L. and Johnson, C., 1926 A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates from their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence to the Present Year. London: Routledge. Defoe, D., Landa, L. and Roberts, D. 1990 A Journal of the Plague Year. 1, [5th repr edn. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Defoe, D. and Wall, C. 2003; 1723 A Journal of the Plague Year. London and New York: Penguin Books. Dudek, L. 1960 Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and their Relation to Literature. Toronto: Ryerson Press. Hobbes, T., Gaskin, J.C.A. and Netlibrary, I. 1998 Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kamen, H., 1971 The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550–1660. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Kay, C. 1988 Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume and Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Klibansky, R., Panofsky, E. and Saxl, F. 1964 Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London: Nelson. Lindsay, J. 1978 The Monster City: Defoe’s London, 1688–1730. London and New York: Hart-Davis MacGibbon.

Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year  141 Montaigne, M.D. 1991 The Complete Essays (Translated by M.A. Screech). London: Penguin Books. Novak, M.E. 2001 Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. His Life and Ideas. 1 edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Novak, M.E. 1983 Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s fiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Novak, M.E. 1965; 1963 Defoe and the Nature of Man. London: Oxford University Press. Parival, J.N. 1666 Abrege de l’Histoire de ce siecle de fer. Bruxelles: Chez Balthasar Vivien. Sixiéme Êdition. Parker, G. 2013 El siglo maldito. Climas, guerras y catástrofes en el siglo XVII. Barcelona: Planeta. Parker, G., 2013; 2013 Global crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Snodgrass, M.E. 2003 World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from ­Prehistory to the Era of SARS. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

7 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, or the first modern catastrophe

7

Disasters, and most particularly natural disasters, have been understood and explained from the standpoint of religion throughout history. The greatest of all ancient catastrophes was the Flood, and the primary account of it is, of course, to be found in Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch and of the Old Testament. It is a mythical narration of mankind’s salvation after divine punishment, and it was understood in those terms for millennia. All men were descended from Noah through his sons. The tale of the Flood belongs, of course, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, yet more recent research has revealed traces of similar stories in even older sources, including a clay tablet inscribed with a fragment of cuneiform text that was in found in Nineveh and is today known as the “Flood Tablet”. It is dated at between 700 and 600 bc, not long before the Pentateuch was written,1 and it tells the story of a man who was instructed by God to build a great ship and to bring on board his family and animals of all kinds because a great flood would cover the earth and destroy all mankind.2 The parallels between this tale and the Biblical story of Noah are evident. It was this that struck George Smith, a renowned expert on cuneiform writing, who studied the tablet, already in the British Museum, in 1872 His research had a major impact at a time when Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published hardly a dozen years earlier, had already placed the historical veracity of the Bible at the centre of debate.3 Ultimately, the tablet helped form the opinion that the story of a great flood that destroyed all life on Earth but was survived by one man and his family accompanied by a few animals in a great ship they had built to ride out the waters and repopulate the lands was part of an already widespread oral tradition. The region in question reached the limits of the ancient world, stretching from India through Persia and Mesopotamia to the Near East and Egypt. Indeed, traces of the tale are also apparent in the Epic of Gilgamesh,4 the oldest work of literature extant today. In this story, a god of the waters warns the hero, Utnapishtim that there will be a great flood and instructs him to build an ark to save himself, his family and his stock of animals. These testimonies bear witness to the importance of natural disasters in the history of mankind and the emergence of the great cosmological religions.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  143 A catastrophe occurs because mankind has angered God (or the gods), who destroys the world but saves a chosen few to serve as the germ of a new humanity. This is the outline of the myth. Represented above all by the biblical tale of the Great Flood, this tale has exerted an extraordinary ­influence on humanity, lending a historical dimension to the idea of divine punishment for the evils of mankind as the backdrop for the projection of the myth. Catastrophe, cataclysm and natural disaster have been interpreted in terms of this myth ever since. Though I have begun by talking about the Flood, the topic may appear remote to some readers, insofar as this chapter deals with natural disaster in the form of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. What is the relationship between the two? Let me begin with a genealogy of evil, a concept that has troubled the history of all peoples whose belief systems are founded on the biblical account of the world.5 Many authors have observed that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 launched a great debate, which eventually contributed decisively to the end of the catastrophist idea that great natural disasters were caused by divine anger at mankind’s evils and vices. The rationalist thought of the Enlightenment, which was very much in vogue when the earthquake happened, played a key role. This placed the problem of evil at the very centre of a discourse that begins with Leibniz, continues with Kant and runs on through the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau, who were contemporaries of the Lisbon earthquake and actively participated in the debates that followed the catastrophe. The tremendous impact of the Lisbon earthquake is summed up in extreme terms by Susan Neiman in her book Evil in Modern Thought: The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today. How much weight can a brute reference carry? It takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that make civilization possible.6 Neiman addresses the intellectual reactions to the Lisbon earthquake and the act of genocide perpetrated at Auschwitz. As the author describes them, reactions to the Lisbon earthquake absolved humanity of any offence against God as the cause of the catastrophe, treating it rather as a natural phenomenon. Auschwitz, in contrast, has come to signify absolute evil. Our task, then, will be to show the influence of a great natural disaster on the new awareness of risk that developed in eighteenth century Europe. Given the response to the outbreak of plague in England only a few decades earlier, it was in Britain that the first reaction to the devastation wreaked on the Continent of Europe pointed most intensely towards a secular, scientific interpretation of the catastrophic power of natural forces. This response marked the birth of public catastrophe, and it was the thinkers of the Enlightenment who contributed most to bringing it about.

144  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

Earthquakes and evil, geologists and philosophers Charles Lylle published his Principles of Geology between 1830 and 1833, and in the three volumes of his treatise, widely regarded as the foundational text of modern geology, he gave an account of the Lisbon earthquake that had occurred 75 years earlier. At the same time, however, he described some historical cosmogonies and showed how observations of changes in the Earth’s crust and particularly the collection of fossils stood side by side with catastrophist theories such as the story of the Flood at the time when the science of geology was taking its first faltering steps in the Renaissance. In 1670, for example, the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla published a treatise on the fossils of Calabria, which he illustrated with a series of magnificent engravings. According to Lylle, Scilla’s work: proves the continued ascendancy of dogmas often refuted; for we find the wit and eloquence of the author chiefly directed against the obstinate incredulity of naturalists as to the organic nature of fossil shells. Like many eminent naturalists of his day, Scilla gave way to the popular persuasion, that all fossil shells were the effects and proofs of the Mosaic.7 The general atmosphere was still dominated by the idea of the Flood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in describing it, Lylle refers to the ways in which this theory hampered the development of Geology as a science: The theologians who now entered the field in Italy, Germany, France, and England, were innumerable; and henceforward, they who refused to subscribe to the position, that all marine organic remains were proofs of the Mosaic deluge, were exposed to the imputation of disbelieving the whole of the sacred writings (…). An additional period of a century and a half was now destined to be consumed in exploding the hypothesis, that organized fossils had all been buried in the solid strata by Noah’s flood.8 For centuries, fossils were believed to show beyond doubt that the waters had once covered the earth, and what better proof could, indeed, be found of a universal flood than the fossils discovered at the very tops of European mountain ranges like the Alps, the Apennines and the Pyrenees. Lylle, however, judges such conjectures harshly, although they were shared by many leading naturalists of the day, who had made their own not inconsiderable contributions to science and the study of fossils. Never did a theoretical fallacy, in any branch of science, interfere more seriously with accurate observation and the systematic classification of facts. In recent times, we may attribute our rapid progress chiefly to the careful determination of the order of succession in mineral masses, by

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  145 means of their different organic contents, and their regular superposition. But the old diluvialists were induced by their system to confound all the groups of strata together instead of discriminating, to refer all appearances to one cause and to one brief period, not to a variety of causes acting throughout a long succession of epochs. They saw the phenomena only as they desired to see them, sometimes misrepresenting facts, and at other times deducing false conclusions from correct data.9 In his summary history of the science of geology Lylle mentions the case of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), one of the greatest of English scientists, though he would eventually be overshadowed by his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton. It appears that he even disputed the paternity of the law of gravity with Newton. Hooke provides an excellent example to highlight the new thinking that was beginning to emerge in relation to earthquakes and the formation of the Earth’s crust in general. His posthumous works, published in 1705, include A Discourse of Earthquakes, which must have been written around 1668 and which explains, among other matters, the reason why fossils are to be found among the peaks of the Apennines, the Pyrenees and the Alps. Lylle cited Hooke in his own work as follows: These and other appearances, he said, might have been brought about by earthquakes, “which have turned plains into mountains, and mountains into plains, seas into land, and land into seas, made rivers where there were none before, and swallowed up others that formerly were, &c., &c.; and which, since the creation of the world, have wrought many great changes on the superficial parts of the earth, and have been the instruments of placing shells, bones, plants, fishes, and the like, in those places where, with much astonishment, we find them”.10 Though markedly more naturalistic than his predecessors’ accounts, Hooke’s exposition of these phenomena also included ideas of a more biblical cast, because it remained his intention to explain aspects of the story told in the Book of Genesis like the separation of the earth from the waters in terms of natural phenomena, among them the elevation of mountain ranges, which supposedly took only a matter of days. It may be that the extravagance of some of these ideas later condemned some of his theories of earthquakes to an undeserved obscurity. In 1760, John Michell, a professor of Geology at the University of ­Cambridge, published his Conjectures Concerning the Cause, and Observations upon the Phaenomena of Earthquakes. This work appeared only five years after the Lisbon earthquake, and it owes much to the information that its author was able to obtain from the written testimony of numerous survivors of the disaster. Based on his study of the event, Mitchell concluded that the Lisbon earthquake had been caused by a massive subterranean movement of rock many miles away.11 This was one of the first scientific

146  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 contributions made to our understanding of earth tremors, and it is significant that it was precisely the Lisbon earthquake that was the main subject of Michell’s treatise. Lylle considered him a pioneer whose work had advanced ideas that would later be taken up by the emerging science of modern Geology. In Lylle’s own words: He advanced many original and philosophical views respecting the propagation of subterranean movements, and the caverns and fissures wherein steam might be generated. In order to point out the application of his theory to the structure of the globe, he was led to describe the arrangement and disturbance of the strata, their usual horizontality in low countries, and their contortions and fractured state in the neighborhood of mountain chains. He also explained, with surprising ­accuracy, the relations of the central ridges of older rocks to the ‘long narrow slips of similar earth, stones, and minerals,’ which are parallel to these ridges. In his generalizations, derived in great part from his own observations on the geological structure of Yorkshire, he anticipated many of the views more fully developed by later naturalists.12 The history of Geology shows how contradictory the contemporary understanding of earthquakes was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, religious thinkers continued to insist that the Bible was the only acceptable account of the convulsions that occasionally arose in the Earth’s crust, at the same time imposing the flood theory. Paradoxically, however, there were already some naturalists who work beginning to anticipate some of the theories that would later be developed by the science of geology even from the standpoint of the theory of the flood. Even so, this is this story as told by the great geologist Lyle towards the middle of the nineteenth century. In order to reflect as nearly as possible the predominant view of earthquakes actually existing in the eighteenth century, then, we need to go back to The General History of Earthquakes, a work published in London by Bettesworth & Hodges in 1734, just twenty-six years before the Lisbon disaster of 1755, whose author chose to hide his identity behind the initials R.B. In his initial message to the reader, the author mentions in passing the recent earthquakes that had struck Jamaica and indeed England itself, stressing that the only way to prevent their recurrence is repentance and the expiation of sins. Let us consider the opening lines of this book, wherein the author outlines the theme of his work: Among the several Plagues and Judgments wherewith the Almighty visiteth, and punisheth the Enormities and Sins of Mankind, that of Earthquakes may be accounted the most Dreadful and Tremendous, which in an instant swalloweth up thousands of people of all Qualities and Ages, together with the most superb and stately Edificies that Pride and Ambition can raise.13

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  147 Here we see earthquakes painted as an instrument of divine retribution, indeed the greatest such instrument, directed especially against pride, recalling the construction of the Tower of Babel. Despite these dire warnings, however, the book in fact goes on to provide a description of earthquakes as a natural phenomenon: An Earthquake is a shaking of the Earth, occasioned by Winds and Exhalations inclosed within the Caves and Bowels of the Earth which can find no passages, or at least none long enough to discharge themselves and therefore breaking forth with great force and violence, it sometimes shaketh the Earth, another while rendeth and openeth the same, sometimes casting up Earth a great height into the Air, otherwhile causing the ground to sink down a great depth, swallowing Cities, Towns, Palaces, Castles, yea prodigious high Mountains, leaving in the place nothing but deep holes, or long unfathomable Lakes of Water.14 This description may appear somewhat picturesque today, but it forms part of a treatise containing numerous observations and a classification of earthquakes into four types. The first consists of tremors, which may affect the foundations of buildings and shake them when they are slight, or even topple them when they are strong. The second type lifts the ground so that any buildings standing on it come crashing down. The third type occurs when rents and fissures appear in the earth, swallowing up entire cities. And the fourth type raises up entire mountains from the surface of the earth and creates rivers and lakes, while producing great fires and belching forth smoke and ash. Though this catalogue is fairly complete, it still confounds phenomena which, though sometimes related, are in fact different according to modern science. Volcanic eruptions are lumped together with earthquakes according to the author, who talks of steams, exhalations and ash. Together with this classification, the author mentions certain natural phenomena which appear to precede earthquakes and can be interpreted as warning signs. These “signs” or “harbingers” as R.B. calls them range from sudden movements in the sea in the absence of wind, which might indicate an approaching tsunami, to the behaviour of birds, which can detect tremors in the roots of trees. Ultimately, earthquakes have natural causes, but this is not all –there is also an overarching supernatural causality involved. But though we have given some account of the Natural Causes of Earthquakes, yet it is very apparent that many have been supernatural, and caused by the immediate hand of God, of which we find several instances in holy Scripture, that we might dread and tremble before the Almighty, who needs neither Vapours nor Exhalations to Execute his Vengeance upon incorrigible Offenders.15

148  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 The paragraphs cited offer an apposite summary of the understanding of earthquakes in mid-eighteenth century Europe, and although it may seem strange today a phenomenology of seismic movements and volcanic eruptions, which were not always clearly differentiated, based on more or less precise observation coexisted, if sometimes uneasily, with the doctrine of evil and the divine origin of catastrophe. The author of The General History of Earthquakes takes an extremely cautious approach to the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” causes, attributing the latter to the wrath of the Almighty in the face of mankind’s wickedness, as could hardly be otherwise. Where the naturalists and geologists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries debated the divine origin of the changes affecting the surface of the earth in their treatises, focusing especially on earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and floods, the reflections and arguments of contemporary philosophers were intensely concerned with the nature of evil and its relationship with God. In the historical period preceding the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, these streams of thought proceeded along separate channels, and it was only after the catastrophe struck that the two currents converged, giving rise to far-reaching changes in the way that natural disasters and great calamities in general were viewed. This will be a central theme of the present chapter, in which I will address the philosophy of theodicy, which deals with the problem of evil and divine providence. In 1710, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) published his Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (“Essays of Theo­ dicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil”).16 The basic problem was, and is, as old as the Book of Job: how can we admit the goodness, or even the existence, of God in a world of evil and suffering? Leibniz coined the term “theodicy” or divine justice to address just this problem. The argument that evil, suffering and catastrophe are inherent in nature and in mankind had for some time been used by philosophers to deny that there could be any rational argument for the existence of God. These thinkers held rather that the divine could be explained only by faith. One of the proponents of this “fideism” was Pierre Bayle (1647– 1707), and it was in response to his arguments that Leibniz wrote the Théodicée. Bayle was a French Huguenot who lived in exile in Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. He was a staunch defender of religious tolerance and was radically opposed to forced conversion. In Bayle’s view, faith and reason were opposed, since God can only exist where reason fails. Faith cannot exist in a hypothetically rational world, because it is revealed. Meanwhile, the existence of evil only intensifies the need for faith in God. Leibniz responded to this argument mentioning Bayle expressly by name: And I find that M. Bayle, shrewd as he is, is not always free from this confusion. Mysteries may be explained sufficiently to justify belief in

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  149 them; but one cannot comprehend them, nor give understanding of how they come to pass. Thus even in natural philosophy we explain up to a certain point sundry perceptible qualities, but in an imperfect manner, for we do not comprehend them. Nor is it possible for us, either, to prove Mysteries by reason; for all that which can be proved a priori, or by pure reason, can be comprehended. All that remains for us then, after having believed in the Mysteries by reason of the proofs of the truth of religion (which are called ‘motives of credibility’) is to be able to uphold them against objections.17 Leibniz sought to explain how evil could exist in the world side by side with God’s infinite goodness, and this became the central idea of his “theo­ dicy”. God’s existence can be shown by reason, and Leibniz set out to prove it. In his own words: Having so settled the rights of faith and of reason as rather to place reason at the service of faith than in opposition to it, we shall see how they exercise these rights to support and harmonize what the light of nature and the light of revelation teach us of God and of man in relation to evil.18 Leibniz appeals to the rationality of mathematical calculation as his source of inspiration: Now this supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For as a lesser evil is a kind of good, even so a lesser good is a kind of evil if it stands in the way of a greater good; and there would be something to correct in the actions of God if it were possible to do better. As in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not possible nothing at all is done: so it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any. I call ‘World’ the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe. And even though one should fill all times and all places, it still remains true that one might have filled them in innumerable ways, and that there is an infinitude of possible worlds among which God must needs have chosen the best, since he does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason.19 Hence, “perfect wisdom”, which according to Leibniz can only be predicated of God, “is no less orderly” than mathematics. In his recourse to

150  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 mathematics, Leibniz uses the example of the numerical maximum and minimum, because in their absence, he argues, “nothing at all is done”. God’s wisdom, like the science of mathematics, must choose between maximum and a minimum, and this could not be so without the existence of an optimum, a best possible world. Given the existence of many possible worlds, then, the rational argument is that God must have chosen the best of these. The argument that God must choose to make one (best) possible world rather than any other lies in his perfection, and it is because of this that the world actually exists. It is the best of all possible worlds. In it, God is the cause of our freedom to choose and evil is a necessary part of the best possible world if we are to exercise our freedom. The Théodicée was the only book published by Leibniz in his lifetime, but it had an enormous impact, among other reasons because it prolonged the debate between Bayle and the German philosopher and mathematician published in the monthly journal Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants in 1698. Pierre Bayle was already dead by the time Leibniz published his Théodicée in 1710, but the debate remained very much alive. One of the most famous contributions was made by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), whose Essay on Man was published in 1733. This long poem is divided into “epistles”, each derived from a general proposition formulated in the introduction to the work, which sets out the essayistic arguments subsequently developed in poetic form. The leitmotiv everything is for the best, which informs the poet’s principal intention, condenses the idea already advanced by Leibniz that God created the best of all possible worlds, running through Pope’s work as the thread linking it with the optimism of the Théodicée. Without going into detail about this poem, which is beyond the scope and true direction of this work, we may nevertheless note the continuity between Leibniz’s Théodicée and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Both acknowledge that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Pope himself, puts this thought in the following terms in his first Epistle: All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.20 The key moment when these completely divergent rationalist and religious schools of thought about evil and divine providence would finally clash came just after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which was the pretext and trigger for the confrontation. This was the more or less general atmosphere at a time when contemporary thinkers found themselves obliged to change course and

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  151 reflect once again on the presence and extent of the suffering to which we are all constantly exposed in the face of a terrible event that was as unexpected as it was sudden: the earthquake and tidal wave that destroyed the city of Lisbon on 1 November 1755, causing thousands of deaths. Could it still be argued that a partial evil had occurred within a greater good?21 (Translation from Spanish) It was this idea that inspired the great philosopher François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), better known by the pseudonym Voltaire, to become the leading critic of his contemporaries’ optimism. Two of Voltaire’s works are directly concerned with or set in the Lisbon earthquake. In the first place, his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne was published in 1756, just one year after destruction of the city. Meanwhile, his novel Candide: or the Optimist, without doubt the best known of all his works, places the eponymous hero in Lisbon at the time of the great earthquake for several chapters. Voltaire uses his adventures in the city at this time to sharpen his satirical wit against faith and religion. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) himself responded to the first of these works, the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, in a long letter to Voltaire in which he expresses his alarm at the extreme pessimism he finds in the poem. The convergence of works by leading thinkers and scientists on the circumstances and then the consequences of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 made the catastrophe into a milestone in the history of ideas. It holds pride of place in the history of natural disasters, especially in Europe, not only because the quake itself is acknowledged to have been of unparalleled intensity compared to other historical earthquakes but also because it devastated a great city like Lisbon, which had become an emporium of maritime trade between Europe and the Portuguese colonies overseas. All of these circumstances unquestionably made the disaster into one of the great historical events of eighteenth-century Europe. It is important to underscore the European dimension of the earthquake, for its emotional impact reached every corner of the Continent and the British Isles, even if it actually occurred at the westernmost edge of Europe and had no serious consequences beyond the Iberian Peninsula and northern Morocco. We will have occasion to consider this question further on, but the matter is worth mentioning because it also reflects the historical significance of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as a forerunner for the media treatment of natural disasters today. It is no exaggeration to view the Lisbon earthquake as the historical starting point for the expansion of risk through mass communication to an ever more global audience in a way that we may still regard as truly modern. I have here sketched out the scientific and philosophical context in which the Lisbon earthquake occurred, and I will return to this matter later on, although focusing my reflections on contemporary accounts of the

152  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 ­ isaster. For now, let us consider the historical precedents of the event, d which may reveal how old ideas persisted but at the same time new ones were gradually emerging, sometimes in conflict with established modes of thought, and in turn inspiring novel attitudes towards the action that needed to be taken in the face of a catastrophe of such magnitude.

Historical precedents: the Sicilian earthquake of 1693 and the Lima earthquake of 1746 A seismic event of a similar magnitude to the Lisbon earthquake had in fact occurred some fifty years earlier in Europe, when a series of tremors rocked eastern Sicily beginning on January 9, 1693 and hitting a maximum of 7.3 on the Richter scale22 at 1.30 a.m. on January 11. The epicentre was somewhere offshore near the city of Catania, which was devastated both by the earthquake itself and by a subsequent tsunami. The cities of Syracuse and Ragusa and countless smaller towns and villages were also left in ruins. The volcano Mount Etna, which looms over the area that was most severely affected by the earthquake, had erupted again in 1669 after three centuries of inactivity. It is today thought that the reawakening of Etna and the Sicilian earthquake may be related, as a volcanic eruption can sometimes trigger earthquakes within a period of years.23 The following fragment is from a report that was immediately dispatched by the Spanish Viceroy to the court in Madrid: On the 9th at 2.45 a.m. Italian time, the first tremor took place, which lasted a long Credo. No damage was noted in Messina, but the second one came about on the 11th of the same month at 4:30 a.m. It lasted a quarter of an hour and caused great grief as no house or palace remained undamaged and many fell to the ground (…). The processions and harsh penitences which [the populace] have made are without equal in the world. And there have been many public confessions … (…). All these cities, towns and manors are levelled without the foundations showing. The city of Catania is like the palm of your hand, except for the seaward walls (…). From Palermo there are reports via letters that the quakes threw down many palaces and houses in that city, but the rest have remained standing.24 This testimony offers some idea of the tremendous devastation caused by the earthquake of January 1693, at the same time illustrating the immediate reaction of the populace, who gave themselves over to mass acts of penitence, processions and public confessions. This reaction of Sicilian society, with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities to the fore, directly links the reality of the natural disaster to divine justice following the historical pattern of contemporary philosophical and geological thinking. However, the authorities themselves immediately set about rebuilding the razed cities,

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  153 and in many cases their efforts came over time to be seen as a model of ­successful town planning on the grand scale. Even today we still recognize the artistic achievements of this reconstruction. Sicily belonged to the Spanish Crown in 1693, and the maximum authority on the island was the Viceroy, at that time the Duke de Uceda, who appointed Giuseppe Lanza, Duke de Camastra, as his commissioner to oversee the reconstruction work just two months after the earthquake. Many of the leveled towns and cities were rebuilt from their ruins, while others, including many villages, were moved and recreated at entirely new sites. The town of Noto is one of these. It was rebuilt in the style of the Spanish and above all Italian Baroque to create a model city in terms of its planning and architecture, which is currently a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Let us consider this example. The city of Noto was completely destroyed by the 1693 earthquake and was then rebuilt on a new site. It was, then, to be an entirely new city, and the thorny issue of the site on which it was to be built took some time to resolve. I have already had occasion in the preceding chapters to mention certain other cases that occurred in Spanish America in the sixteenth century, where we have seen that ideas of safety and risk were among the issues tabled in discussions over the resiting of towns devastated by natural disaster. It is of course true that principles like protection and solidity had to find room, not without difficulty, with the belief in divine justice and with the need to manage nature, striking a balance between the ideal and the pragmatic. In the seventeenth century, religion was still the overarching source of all transcendental ideas about man and his place in nature. However, we may also observe an incipient science, which was able to demonstrate its value through its practical achievements in improving the living conditions of the populace at large and so progressively to keep gaining ground. The balance would eventually tip in favor of science in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, but before then, and even at the time of the Lisbon earthquake, practical science still had to concede pride of place to religion. In Sicily, it was religion that was first to act with all its pomp and ceremony, while practical issues of architectural design were raised only slowly and prudently in the wake of devotional observance. Noto was completely rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake some 7 km from its original site, which is nowadays known as Noto Antica. This is very unusual, since towns that are destroyed by natural disasters, especially earthquakes, are usually rebuilt on the same site. In his seminal work on the town’s reconstruction The Genesis of Noto,25 Stephen Tobriner underlines this exception, which separates Noto from cities like Lisbon or Messina, destroyed by earthquakes in 1738 and 1908, Catania, flattened by the same earthquake as Noto and razed by the eruptions of Mount Etna, or in more recent times San Francisco (1906) and Managua (1972). It is this singularity that led Tobriner to make his comprehensive study of the building of the

154  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 new town of Noto. The impact and effects of the 1693 earthquake on Noto are described with terrible clarity in the accounts of survivors cited by Tobriner, including this case in which an eyewitness tells of a second, even stronger tremor that occurred in the early morning of Sunday, January 11, 1693: Then came an earthquake so horrible and ghastly that the soil undulated like the waves of a stormy sea, and the mountains danced as if drunk, and the city collapsed in one miserable moment killing more than a thousand people.26 The Viceroy of Sicily was quick to act in the face of the general devastation caused by the earthquake, and the twin thrust of his decisions is revealing. According to Tobriner, the Duke de Uceda centralized oversight of the actions taken to mitigate the consequences of the earthquake immediately in the month of January, appointing two boards or commissions to undertake the organization of aid efforts, adopt financial measures, and obtain and examine reports from the ground. One of these boards was secular and was made up of nobles charged with civil affairs. The other was formed by ecclesiastical authorities with responsibility for all matters religious. The Viceroy chaired both boards, which met every Tuesday and Thursday in Palermo. I believe this separation is significant to the Viceroy’s understanding of the calamity that had hit Sicily. To begin with, the separation of the commissions points to the incipient secularization of the natural disaster itself. This is a question that I will go into in greater depth in the following pages. Meanwhile, the Duke de Camastro was appointed Vicar General for the provinces of Val Demone and Val di Noto, the worst affected by the ­earthquake. He was to play a decisive role in the reconstruction project, alongside Carlos de Grunenberg, a Flemish soldier who at the time held the position of Royal Engineer to the King of Spain. A specialist in military fortification, he had overseen the construction of the citadel at Messina in 1681, and he seems to have been the chief architect of the urban layout of the new town of Noto. His first decision with regard to the future reconstruction of Noto was that it should be rebuilt on the original site of the flattened town. This was also the opinion of the civic authorities. The arguments were very similar to those habitually made with regard to the construction of new settlements in Spanish America in the sixteenth century. An abundance of fresh water at or near the location and a plentiful supply of wood and other building materials were critical to the choice of the site for a new town. In the case of Noto, a further argument was used that would not have made sense in the New World, with some exceptions like Tenochtitlan (Mexico) or Cuzco (Peru). This was the appeal to the “Ancients”, whose supposed wisdom would necessarily have led them to choose the optimum location for the town, which was advanced as a compelling reason to rebuild Noto on its

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  155 original site. However, a change of mind occurred between February and March as doubts arose over the practicality of rebuilding the town on the same site. In the end, the local authorities opted to move the town, although they failed to agree on the choice of a new site. The debate was wide-ranging, and accounts of it written in later years offer differing points of view, which Tobriner suggests are coloured by the competing interests of their authors. According to Tobriner, the decisive reasons for abandoning the original site of Noto are to be found in the wider context of the devastation caused by the 1693 earthquake. Though some forty towns were destroyed throughout Sicily, only eight these were eventually moved from their original site. One of these towns, Avola, is only four kilometres from modern Noto and it was resited from a hilltop to the coastal plain. The reason for this relocation is simply explained by the inhabitants in a letter addressed to the King cited by Tobriner: “given the risk of a new disaster, since the place is mountainous”.27 The importance of the term “risk” appearing here can hardly be understated. Meanwhile, a despatch sent by the Viceroy to the Spanish Court eloquently describes the terms under which this risk was assessed: Rebuilding on the old site was not abandoned willingly, but because of real necessity – both for the hillside being broken up and for the narrowness of the site and its streets. The houses are also constructed in a very dangerous way, one above the other, so that with the least tremor one house would pull all the others down with it, as we learned in the last earthquake when the most damage was occasioned by the poor arrangement of the city on the [hill].28 Tobriner seems to be in no doubt that the arguments openly voiced in the documents referring to Avola would equally explain why Noto was abandoned. In the case of Noto Antica, the “dangers inherent in its medieval arrangement and rugged site” were decisive.29 In general, it may be observed that almost all of the Sicilian towns moved after the 1693 earthquake were resited from steep, hilly terrain to flatter locations nearer the coast. The assessment made of the risk of another earthquake was the main reason for this. The case of Noto, and indeed of Sicily in general, in 1693 reveals the historical stage of development reached by scientific ideas about nature in the second half of the seventeenth century. When the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 occurred, this stage seems to have given way to a new era with the catastrophe itself as the starting point. Religion continued to hold a monopoly over ideas about nature, and its Catholic interpreters had already shown in 1633, when they condemned Galileo, that they were not prepared to brook any scientific challenge to orthodox doctrine. Hence, the reaction to the Sicilian earthquake could only be to interpret the phenomenon as signifying divine justice and requiring the expiation of sins. The same would happen in Lima in 1746 and in Lisbon in 1755. However, once the

156  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 processions, sermons and acts of penitence gave way to the need for reconstruction, a certain pragmatism took hold. The application of scientific knowledge was expressed at the time through architecture, and it played a key role. As an undertaking, the reconstruction of the Sicilian cities was marked by the notion of risk and the likelihood of another earthquake. However, it was very difficult to ensure that all possible precautionary measures were taken, given the existence of vested interests which, among other matters, prevented the resiting of towns and villages. Even so, eight out of the forty localities affected were rebuilt elsewhere. The new urban design was very different from the old, as the twisting and turning maze of medieval alleys on the Arab pattern gave way to a rectilinear grid of broad streets. As a result, the formal and cognitive shade of the old street plan was replaced by a regular crisscross of wide, airy streets in the new layout. What would become the spirit of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth was already taking visible shape in the planning of new Sicilian towns like Noto in 1693. The practical applied science this involved met with a much more enthusiastic response at the time than any of the explanations afforded by theoretical science for the great problems of human existence, such as the origin of life, cosmology, the action of nature, human diversity, the origin and legitimacy of power, the nature of evil or any of the other overarching questions that have occupied human minds since then. First in Sicily, then some fifty years later in Lima and finally just nine years afterwards in Lisbon, we may observe a dual approach, which initially explains natural disaster in terms of divine justice but then goes on to add a pinch of experimental science, disseminated only among the elites, and a large dose of applied science with results that would only become visible after reconstruction was complete. Though the pattern of thought followed after the Lisbon earthquake was similar, it was not a pinch of theoretical science that was added to the brew but an outpouring of new ideas, particularly in Voltaire’s case, that would radically reshape the ways in which natural disasters were represented and explained. In the New World, the Lima earthquake of 1746 was of a similar magnitude to the Lisbon disaster of 1755, which it barely predated. We cannot, then, dismiss the possibility that there may have been a significant relationship between the events of Lima and Lisbon, which occurred just nine years later. Aside from the nearness in time, let us not forget that Lisbon was one of the principal ports in the transatlantic maritime trade in both directions, and as such the port of entry to Europe for all the news arriving from beyond the sea. The Lima earthquake happened at 10:30 p.m. on October 28, 1746, and it lasted between three and four minutes, the span it takes to say the Credo or Creed three times, a traditional means of measuring time which we have already seen used in 1693 to estimate the duration of the tremors that shook Sicily.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  157 noise, trembling and ruin happened all at the same time, so that in just four minutes of the hour, which was the duration of the greatest force of the earthquake, some were buried in the falling houses and others in the streets, crushed as the walls collapsed on them while they ran, but most [survived] in the gaps among the ruins … the earth shook the buildings with such convulsions that each shock threw down more, which brought with them great loads of masonry, especially in the churches and high chambers, destroying all in their path that had yet been pardoned by the earthquake, whose tremors, though instantaneous, were successive, and in the intervals some men were able to flee one place for another and in this way they survived, while others were saved because it was impossible for them to move.30 In this fragment of the report sent by the Viceroy Manso de Velasco to the Spanish Court in Madrid, the Jesuit priest Pedro Lozano graphically describes the brief moments as the city collapsed, while those not entombed in the rubble fled in terror. Shortly afterwards a tidal wave hit the port of Callao, just 11 kilometres from Lima on the coast. The raging sea swept over the walls built to protect the city against pirates and tsunamis, and its inhabitants were swallowed up by the waters. More died in Callao, in fact, than in Lima itself. According to Pérez-Mallaína,31 the Lima earthquake of 1746 reached a magnitude of 8.4 on the Richter scale according to modern estimates, causing between 5,000 and 6,000 fatalities, most of them killed by the tsunami that devastated Callao. Hardly 200 or 300 of the port’s 5,000 inhabitants survived. These figures, which match the official estimates included in the report sent by the Viceroy to Madrid, should be considered in relation to the total population of around 65,000 living in Lima and El Callao at the time of the earthquake. Pérez-Mallaína’s estimate is that close to 8 per cent of the population of the city and its port perished in the earthquake, although the figure would be only 2 per cent considering Lima alone. In the case of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, meanwhile, Pérez-Mallaína estimates the number of victims at between 10,000 and 15,00032 out of a total population of 250,000, or around 5.5 per cent.33 Numerous contemporary documents have been preserved, including reports, chronicles, letters and accounts of all kinds, which circulated among the civil and ecclesiastical authorities and among the general population immediately after the event. Alongside descriptions of the devastation wrought on the city, these documents also constantly refer to divine justice, sin and atonement but also to portents and prophecies, which allegedly augured the catastrophe. Pérez-Mallaína mentions this in his book Retrato de una ciudad en crisis: In any case, the warning that is most frequently mentioned in the accounts was given by Mother Teresa de Jesús, an aged nun of the

158  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 c­ ongregation of Discalced Carmelites of San José, who was said to be more than one hundred years old and who had confided to her confessor that God was about to unleash his justice on the city and its inhabitants, although she would not witness his punishment herself because she was to die shortly beforehand. The ancient nun duly passed away just 13 days before the earthquake.34 In his memorial of 1748, the chronicler Llano de Zapata describes both the nun’s prediction and the constant processions begging God’s forgiveness that took place in the devastated city of Lima in the days following the catastrophe, and he recounts that one of these brought together as many as 6,000 penitents, around 600 of whom had covered themselves in ash.35 Nevertheless, this chronicler was as near to being a scientist as any of those who wrote about the Lima earthquake according to Pérez-Mallaína. He was apparently not only well versed in classical theories of earthquakes but also abreast of the latest experiments, like those conducted by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1703. Llano de Zapata mentions the “physical causes of the tremors” and appears to follow the theories ­ expounded by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, two renowned Spanish mariners and scientists, who argued in their Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional of 1748 that earthquakes were caused by the action of the sulfurous and nitrous materials found in the bowels of the earth, which would form a paste when mixed with water, ferment and finally burst into flames, producing the same effects as gunpowder when it ignites and explodes in an enclosed space.36 There was still no theory of plate tectonics at that time, and the predominant explanations for earthquakes varied between ideas like those of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa and those which ascribed the phenomenon to powerful currents of water flowing underground, which could erode the surface layer of earth and so cause quakes. However, these primitive scientific explanations, which were both rudimentary and wrong, existed side by side in the writings of those who expounded them with the determining presence of divine will. Llano de Zapata is once again the best example of those who wrote about the Lima earthquake of 1746 in its immediate aftermath. According to Pérez-­ Mallaína on Llano de Zapata: ancient astrological beliefs, classical theories of combustion and modern experiments all coexisted side by side. But in addition to this mix, there was the vital ingredient of divine intervention, faithfully representing Christian rationalism.37 This brief summary of the reactions to the Lima disaster of 1746 and the response among contemporary thinkers illustrates certain ideas about earthquakes that were widespread at the time both in America and in

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  159 Europe. As we have already seen, the early geologists mingled their own empirical observations with theology in their writings. The precursor of the Lisbon earthquake occurred in America, and it is not hard to imagine how the maritime traffic between the two contents ­provided a channel, as we saw in the previous chapter, for the flow of ­writings that would eventually influence events in Lisbon in 1755. The key difference was the much more advanced stage of emancipation from religion among theoretical thinkers in Europe, a development that was ­ absent from Spanish America, where the dark, tortured mentality of the Spanish Baroque still prevailed with the determined support of powerful religious orders like the Jesuits, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. As we shall see shortly, reconstruction would take a more radical course in Lisbon than in Lima, because the balance of power in the former case favored the Marquis de Pombal, the all-powerful prime minister to the King of Portugal, much more than it did the Viceroy Manso de Velasco, who was merely a diligent and competent representative of the King of Spain in Peru, one of his many dominions. A closer comparison of these two natural disasters reveals details of deeper and more complex significance, which go beyond the stark dichotomy between obscurantism and enlightenment that seems so obvious ­initially. This is the central issue raised by the historian Charles Walker in his fascinating paper Lisbon and Lima: a Tale of Two Cities and Two Catastrophes, in which he argues that there were important parallels in the ­reactions to the two earthquakes despite the apparent differences. Here, he discusses the response to the Lima earthquake: An absolutist state, however, proved itself highly capable in returning order (and social hierarchies), assuring necessities, and rebuilding the city. Its leaders envisioned a vastly different city. The disaster prompted widespread discussions about the causes or meanings of earthquakes. Many questioned the Catholic Church’s insistence that it was providence, a sign of God’s wrath at this sinful city. The catastrophe left a long, multilingual paper trail that ultimately crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Analysts then and now agree that it was a key historical moment, a watershed, a turning point.38 Let us pause a moment to consider what the author describes as a “multilingual paper trail”. The principal account was that commissioned by the Viceroy Manso de Velasco, which was written by the Jesuit Pedro Lozano.39 This document provided the “official account” of the Lima earthquake of 1746, and it was translated into a number of different languages. Its original title was Individual y verdadera relación de la extrema ruyna que padeció la Ciudad de los Reyes, Lima, Capital del Reyno del Perú, con el horrible Temblor de Tierra. It was published first in Lima in 1746 and then in Mexico in 1747. Shortly thereafter it was translated into English and was published

160  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 in London in 1748, Philadelphia in 1749 and Boston in 1755. A French version appeared in The Hague in 1752 and a Flemish translation in Antwerp in 1749 The Portuguese translation was published in Lisbon in 1748. Based on this chronology, the first cities in which translations of the account of the Lima earthquake were published were precisely London and Lisbon, the two great European emporiums of maritime trade between the Old and the New World. In the case of Lisbon, a detailed description of the devastation caused by the Lima quake and its aftermath was already available to the interested Portuguese reader only two years after the disaster occurred. Let us recall, moreover, that this was just seven years before a similar catastrophe would befall Lisbon. There can be no doubt that awareness of the Lima earthquake influenced the subsequent course of events in the Portuguese capital, and it may therefore rightly be considered the true precursor of the Lisbon disaster. Most of the general earthquake-literature published at the time was of the kind to spread further despondency. Painful accounts appeared of the 1692 earthquake that had destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, described in one pamphlet as “the most terrible earthquake that has ever happened since the creation of the World”, and in the middle of February a new edition was published of the True and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake at Lima and Callao, a translation from the Spanish in a handsome 5$. book that described a catastrophe in Peru that happened in 1746, only four years previously, which was “one of the most dreadful, perhaps, that ever befell this earth since the general Deluge”.40 In his classic study of the Lisbon earthquake, Kendrick considers the state of ideas existing in the city of London before 1755, and in this context, he does not hesitate to mention the enormous impact which the English translation of the account of the Lima earthquake had had just a few years previously.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 On Saturday November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the city of Lisbon was rocked by a great earthquake. It was around 9.30 a.m. and many of the city’s people were attending mass at one or other of its numerous churches. Three shocks occurred, each separated by an interval of around a minute. The first shock was accompanied by a deafening roar, terrifying the people and the shaking buildings. Straightaway there was a second, the most intense and destructive, which lasted for nearly two minutes, throwing down houses, palaces and churches. A third shock occurred and then the disaster was over. Some ninety minutes later, the first of three tidal waves burst upon the shore at the mouth of the River Tagus, where the city of

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  161 Lisbon stands. The waves followed one after the other, killing many of the people who had sought refuge in the harbor or had taken to the ships in hopes of riding out the earthquake in safety. Finally, countless fires broke out, devastating what remained of the city and gutting its principal buildings. The fires raged for six days and destroyed most of the building in the city centre, leaving only 3,000 houses habitable after the earthquake out of the 20,000 there had been before it.41 This is but a brief outline of the great earthquake, based on the succession of three enormously destructive events – the shocks themselves, the ensuing tsunami and the fires that then spread through the entire city. The death toll caused by this concatenation of cataclysm was enormous; estimates range from at least 8,00042 to as many as 60,000 depending on the source. These divergences are explained by the unreliability of contemporary population estimates, which in the case of Lisbon varied between some 60,000 souls according to some sources and around 275,000 according to others. It is likely that the city had between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants, given that Lisbon was Europe’s fourth largest city behind London, Paris and Naples. Let me now go on to describe this tragic event relying on a range of sources. Lisbon was, of course, a great maritime port and many of its inhabitants were foreigners, among whom the English were by some way the most numerous. The trade in goods between Portugal and England was enormous, and the two countries had signed treaties releasing their ­merchants from tariffs and duties. Portugal exported wine, cork and oil to England and imported manufactured goods of all kinds, especially cloth. This trade was extremely favorable to England, and Portugal was its principal European ally. This meant that there was a considerable community of British merchants on the spot in Lisbon in 1755 earthquake, and some of these people wrote about the earthquake in their diaries and letters. A number of these eyewitness accounts were eventually published and have come down to us. I will use this direct testimony in what follows in order to approach as render as possible the moment when the earthquake struck and its immediate aftermath, though I will also make use of the accounts of historians as a supplementary source. Mr Farmer was an English merchant, who left the shattered city by ship bound for the port of Falmouth in Cornwall after the disaster. His account begins: Lisbon is a City so well known to All for the advantageous Commerce there carried on by the greatest Part of Europe, particularly the English, that to describe it here is unnecessary.   Let it suffice to say, It was one of the richest and best situated Cities in the World; and contained, with its Environs, about Five Hundred Thousand Souls, ‘till the fatal first of November, 1755; a Day remarkably clear and serene: When, about Ten o’Clock, without the least Warning, a most dreadful Earthquake shook by very short but quick

162  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Tremblings, the Foundations from under the Superstructures, loosening every Stone from its Cement. Then, with a scarce perceptible Pause, the Motion changed, and every Building rolled and jostled like a Ship at Sea; which put in Ruins almost every House, Church, and Public Building, with an incredible Slaughter of the Inhabitants.43 This fragment is from a second edition of Mr Farmer’s narrative, which was first published in London and then again in Boston in 1756, just a year after the catastrophe. This fact itself reveals the extraordinary diffusion achieved by this account, which was already circulating in America only months after the earthquake occurred. Though it is evidently an exaggeration to put the number of Lisbon’s inhabitants at 500,000, meanwhile, there can be no doubt that Lisbon was at this time, as Mr Farmer notes, “one of the richest and best situated cities in the world”. All Saints Day 1755 dawned clear and calm according to all accounts, with no forewarning of what was about to happen. The quake itself is described as a movement of the earth so violent as to shake the buildings down to their foundations, toppling one after another. It continued six Minutes; during which Time the Grinding of the Houses, the Fall of the Churches, the lamentable Cries of the People, and the horrid Darkness occasioned by the Dust, made every one think it the last moment of their Lives; and many believed themselves in the Bowels of the Earth!44 The eyewitness’ description of the six minutes for which the shocks lasted vividly portrays the horror endured by the victims of the earthquake, who hardly knew whether they were alive or dead. Lisbon’s heart was its port at the mouth of the River Tagus, which forms a great estuary before flowing out into the Atlantic Ocean. Here Mr Farmer observed that an earthquake can affect not only buildings but also ships, and he also describes the effects of the earthquake on the vessels anchored in the harbor. The River, which forms a great Bay opposite to the Town, was equally disturbed. Its bed was raised in many Places to the Surface; Ships drove from their Anchors, and jostled together with great Violence; nor did the Masters know if they were on Ground, or afloat.45 The worst was yet to come. Three great waves reared up out of the sea and engulfed the low-lying areas of Lisbon, causing more fatalities than the earthquake itself. Such events also feature in the descriptions of the Sicilian and Lima earthquakes cited earlier. When the epicentre of an earthquake is out to sea, it can cause a tidal wave which will wash away everything in its path when it hits land. This is exactly what happened in Lisbon, as described by our English eyewitness.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  163 Then suddenly the Sea, like a Mountain, came tumbling in; and about Belem, near the Mouth of the River, the Water rose Forty Feet in an Instant; and had it not been for the great Bay, to receive and spread the great Flux, the low Part of the City must have been under the Water: For as it was, it came up to the Houses, and drove the People to the Hills.46 But there was yet another calamity still to come – fire, which broke out all over the city after the earthquake and the tsunami, burning many of its principal buildings, palaces and churches to the ground. To finish the Calamity, Fire succeeded the same Hour, in many places at once. Before the People could recover themselves all the principal Parts of the City, the Houses where the Merchandize is lodged, the Palace, the India House, Grant House of the Braganzas, where the Crown Jewels were lodged, and the Castle, were consumed, with innumerable Churches and Convents, among which are Corpus Santo, the Patriarchal Church, Misericordia, a Palace and Prison of the Inquisition, the Church of St. Domingo, the Liberal Carmelites, all the Jesuits Colleges, Regular Canons of St. Clara, Old Cathedral, Prisons of Lamira, with the Courts of Justice, St. Francis de Denada, Nunnery of St. Clara, Corollary of St. Calvarir, and Multitudes of others of inferior Note, are down, and mostly burnt.47 Fire was the third horseman of Lisbon’s apocalypse. People had been the main victims of the first two moments of disaster, but this third phase affected the still numerous buildings that had withstood the tremors and the great waves, as the eager flames spread unchecked amid the chaos. The remarkable list made by this eyewitness includes most of the principal buildings of Lisbon. We may further suppose, given their importance, that these were the most solidly built structures in the city, but they had remained standing in despite of the earthquake’s destructive power only to succumb in the end to fire. The sequence of events involved in the catastrophe is perfectly defined in this eyewitness account. We may observe that the initial shocks caused the first victims and unleashed panic, while the tidal waves caused most of the fatalities and fire finally devastated what remained of the city. Mr Farmer also describes the aftershocks, the first of which occurred only ten minutes after the first tremor, while a second happened some two hours later. The eyewitness offers a dramatic description of the citizens’ reactions and behaviour: The Terror of the People was beyond Description:– Nobody cried; it was beyond Tears. They ran hither and thither, delirious with Horror and Astonishment, beating their Breasts and Faces, crying Misericordia! Mothers forgot their Children, and ran about loaded with Crucifixes

164  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and Images. In vain were the Sacraments shewn! In vain did people embrace the Altars and Images; Priests and People were buried in one common Ruin.48 In our times, we have become inured to journalistic accounts of wars, massacres, famine and disasters of every kind, so that a description like this barely holds our attention and all the less so because we can watch events as they unfold on our screens. In the eighteenth century, however, an eyewitness account penned by somebody who had actually been in Lisbon, vividly describing everything he had seen in all its horror, was something quite extraordinary. From this standpoint, Mr Farmer’s description is similar to Defoe’s account of the Great Storm of 1706. Where Defoe was already a professional journalist, however, Mr Farmer made no use of any documentary materials and does not recount the experiences of other survivors but tells only what he actually saw himself. There is a certain purity to this written testimony, which does not necessarily make it better but does mean that the material is of great value to the anthropologist applying the techniques of textual ethnography to transform a document into a fit object for study and analysis. Mr Farmer’s portrayal of the stricken people of Lisbon wandering aimlessly around their ruined city must have transfixed those reading his account just months after the events he relates. The enormous impact of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 throughout Europe is discussed in detail later, but for now let us consider the power of the eyewitness narratives written by a fair number of observers like Mr Farmer. These accounts played a key role in triggering and sustaining subsequent debate about the catastrophe, as we shall see. Mr Farmer also witnessed intense religious responses to the disaster, which he recounts in the ironic tones of a skeptic or non-conformist, in particular in his description of the whole paraphernalia of Baroque Catholicism, which would have been quite shocking to most people in the Protestant nations of northern Europe. On Monday following this Lady [Saint Mary] was put on the most visible Part of the shattered Church, smartly dressed in a Blue Petticoat; This the poor ignorant People were made to believe was her own doing, and that the same there with great Beneficence to assure the People there should be no more Earthquakes. Whereupon Numbers of Processions were made, and Presents given to her, from a People who had scarce enough left to buy present Subsistance; which was astonishing. But the Lady happen’d to be mistaken; for there was that Day a very great Shock; and the Earth was not quite settled and the Writing of this three Weeks after.49 The astonishment shown by this witness at the credulity of the citizens, who so fondly believed in the power of the Virgin Mary, was usual among

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  165 those who rejected the cult of images and the intercession of the saints. ­Furthermore, this part of Mr Farmer’s account ironically contrasts faith with nature, noting that a further shock occurred on the very same day as the Virgin was made to promise that there would be no more. The narrator appears here as a free observer, who weighs what he sees and even goes so far as to reach a conclusion. The aftershocks were still continuing even three weeks later, which meant “the Earth was not quite settled”. This is an acute observation, and it is striking that it should come from the pen of somebody who presented himself as a merchant. As a final detail, the writer reveals that he wrote his account just three weeks after November 1, All Saints Day and the day of the great earthquake. A second eyewitness account was taken down from the lips of “another gentleman” returning to England in the same ship as Mr Farmer. Unlike Mr. Farmer, who describes scenes and events as an observer, this other ­gentleman tells us what he did and what happened, although he does not fail to describe what he saw and the incidents in which he became involved. The Earthquake began a Quarter before Ten o’ Clock on Saturday Morning; and could, in my Opinion, be compared to nothing more properly than if we were suppose all the Carriages in the Universe passing by with the utmost Rapidity. It shook our House in a most violent Manner, and alarmed us to a prodigious Degree.50 Following this first impression, the eyewitness leaves his house and makes his way through the streets and squares of Lisbon seeking to reach the Plaza del Rossío, then as now the heart of the city. All along his route he witnesses scenes of terror and he survives a number of perilous episodes. We had not proceeded far, when our Passage was obstructed by the Fall of a House quite across the Street; which was soon succeeded by others, both on our Right Hand and Left. Whereupon we made the best of our Way down a narrow Lane; but there likewise a House soon fell on our Left, and on my Right there came down so large a Quantity of Rubbish, that had I fallen, I must have been inevitably buried in the Ruins, being almost covered as I ran; and it was not without great Difficulty that I disengaged myself, and cleared my Eyes, which however, were of little Service to me, it being so dark I could scarce see my Hand before me, the Earth trembling violently all this while.51 Reading these lines, we can but imagine the panic he must have felt, a feeling not of the proximity of danger but instantaneous, welling up at the very moment of peril. This narrative of panic is couched in a past tense, since it would be difficult to imagine an account voiced while the narrator is gripped by terror. Hence, this is a past and not a future narrative like that of risk. I believe this distinction is important, because it marks a certain distance

166  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 between the anonymous gentleman’s account and that penned by Mr Farmer which, though also retrospective, is much more analytical. It seems likely that it lacks the reflective quality of Mr Farmer’s narrative because it is a more or less immediate transcription of the spoken words of a survivor as he set foot in England, rather than a carefully crafted text written down some three weeks after the earthquake, lends a more thoughtful, introspective and analytic tone to his words. This is a substantial difference in my view, allowing us to distinguish between a narrative of panic and another of horror. In the latter, the moment of distress is presented as having already happened, suffered yet survived, if not without grave hurt. The virtue of the anonymous gentleman’s account is his ability to take his mind back to the events he had witnessed and to recount them sticking so closely to what he had actually experienced. In the end, then, both of these accounts are valuable and especially so for the comparisons we may draw between them. The eyewitness soon found himself obliged to desist from his original intention of reaching the River Tagus in order to board his ship. The way was impassable despite his prayers, and though he remained determined to reach the river: I was forced into a House, by the Fall of another Building, and received so violent a Blow on my Leg, from a large Piece of Timber, that I feel the Effects of it to this Day. I found this House inhabited by Blacks; and as it stood all the Shock, being very low, I can’t but regard the Accident which fixed me there as the Means, under God, of preserving my Life.52 Once again, the witness mentions an injury suffered when he was hit by a “piece of timber”, but then he had the immense good fortune to find a house “inhabited by Blacks”. This was not strange in Lisbon, because Portugal had established numerous colonies all down the African coastline and the Portuguese were active participants in the slave trade. The house would certainly have been poor and would have had no second story, making it better able to withstand the shocks from the earthquake. He remained in safety there for some time, but less than he might have wished, for a group of Portuguese arrived and put him out as a foreigner. According to our witness, however, divine providence once again intervened to save him. In any event, once the tremors had ceased the English gentleman was able to return home, where he found that at least the ground floor was still standing and that his family were alive. However, his companion, from whom he had been parted amid the collapsing houses in the street, had not returned and he decided to go out once again to look for him. This second sortie leads to a fascinating his description of what he saw at the Plaza del Rossío. Though rather long, this fragment is most revealing and I have decided to transcribe it completely: At length, however, I arrived at the Square (Rossio), where I found many Thousands of People in the utmost Confusion and Distress,

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  167 making the most hideous Noise I ever heard, and saw numbers of them smiting their Breasts and beating their Faces in the most cruel Manner, which were swollen to a monstrous Size, and so discoloured as to render them quite ghastly; prostrating themselves at the same Time before the Host with the profound Veneration, and embracing the ­Crucifixes and Images with such Transport of Eagerness and Affection as if they expected to find that in them which would compensate every Loss. On advancing further into the Crowd, I found several Gentlemen of the English Factory, and among them a certain Noble Lord, whom, with myself, the superstitious Portuguese obliged to fall down upon our Knees, and kiss the Cross; and even proceeded so far as to insist upon his Lordship’s performing this idle Ceremony without his Wig. Which last Circumstance, together with the mad Behaviour, stern Countenance, and incessant Murmurs of the People, giving me too much Reason to apprehend they might soon carry Matters to a more enormous length, I advised his Lordship and the other Gentlemen to retire as fast as possible: Which we happily found Means to do, glad to escape with our Lives from the infatuated Mob, whose cruel Principles naturally led them to believe they might appease the Wrath of Heaven by our Destruction.53 The Plaza del Rossío no doubt presented a Dantean scene, the very threshold of Hell. Thousands of people crowded and jostled there, kissing crucifixes and religious images, howling and screaming all the while. The English gentleman, shocked and terrified at what he was seeing, describes the tellingly aggressive reaction of the crowd towards the foreigners, whom they took to be Protestants. Let us not forget here that this narrative recounts the unfolding of a human tragedy brought about by a natural disaster as seen through the eyes of one whose religious background and mentality were far removed from those common among the people of Lisbon. This contrast appears in all its rawness in the fragment transcribed earlier. An English lord is forced to remove his wig and kneel to kiss the cross. Seen from the standpoint of someone who rejects superstition and aspires to practice a more rational form of religion and to reach God more directly, this fact alone must have brought to the fore the enormous contradiction brought to light by the Lisbon earthquake: was the cause of the calamity the wrath of God, or was it a natural phenomenon? The account transcribed earlier portrays clearly reflects a theatrical reality created by a kind of ceremony in which the unfortunate English lord was compelled publicly to admit that the earthquake was a divine punishment and demanded the expiation of sin. This example reveals the shape taken by the two great conceptions of nature present, each molded by the pressure of events as they happened and affecting not only thinkers, scientists, men of letters and other members of the elites, but also the common people, the “mob” as the anonymous gentleman calls them. According to his narrative, the Lisbon

168  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 masses experienced the catastrophe as an expression of God’s anger, and in these moments, they felt driven to find out the guilty parties. Foreigners, and even more so Protestant foreigners most of whom were English, the most numerous groups of such people in Lisbon, bore the brunt of the citizens’ ire according to our witness, along with the city authorities for allowing the heretics to live among them. It was for this, among other reasons, that God was punishing the sinful city of Lisbon. The final episode in the account transcribed earlier is the hasty flight of the group of Englishmen caught in the threatening crowd at the Plaza del Rossío, who seemed to believe “they might appease the wrath of heaven by our destruction”. As the narrative continues, we see our gentleman take refuge in the open countryside some two miles outside Lisbon. That first night saw further tremors, but after that what he notes, as Mr Farmer did, is fire. We were indeed secure from the Fall of Houses &c. but how great was our Consternation and Astonishment when we beheld the Flames ascending to Heaven from various Parts of the unhappy City, insomuch that it resembled a general Conflagration? Our Apprehensions whereof must be the more dreadful, as we had too much Reason to fear that those Effects which were covered by the ruins must be inevitably destroyed by the Flames.54 Of all the devastating afflictions visited on Lisbon, the most destructive was the fire that raged unchecked in the city for several days, burning down most of the city’s principal buildings according to Mr. Farmer. Our anonymous witness concludes his account with a solemn admonition and apocalyptic conclusion, which only shows that there were few indeed alive at that time who were entirely cured of sermonizing and preaching. And indeed all the Public Buildings, (the Mint and the Arsenal only excepted) with almost every private House, shared the same Fate. Which concludes this once great and opulent City a common Heap of venerable Ruins. A tremendous Monument of Divine Vengeance, and an awful Warning to the present and future Generations!55 It became commonplace to describe Lisbon as a sinful city in those days, and this was so just as much among the Protestant English, who may have despised the cult of the Virgin and the saints, the rites and the exaggerated expressivity of the traditional Catholicism so publicly practiced by the city’s inhabitants but nonetheless shared with them a providential conception of nature, if one that was more open and rational. This had already happened in London in the previous century on the occasion of the Great Fire of 1655 and the Great Plague of 1656. London was also called a “sinful city” and many believed that both catastrophes, falling so close together in time, were no more than the punishment it deserved. Though the reaction

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  169 was the same, if rather more intense in Catholic Lisbon, it remained basically the same a century later, but this does not mean that the years had passed in vain, as we will see shortly. Neither of the descriptions of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 I have considered so far provides a very full account of the tsunami which engulfed the city shortly after the shocks began. This is undoubtedly because neither of their authors actually saw the great wave that crashed into the city for long enough actually to describe it. However, we may turn to another witness, also English and again anonymous, who recalled in a private letter what he had seen in Lisbon on that terrible All Saints Day. Nicholas Shrady provides this account in his book The Last Day:56 On a sudden I heard a general outcry. The sea is coming in, we shall all be lost. Upon this, turning my eyes toward the river, which in that place is near four miles broad, I could perceive it heaving and swelling in a most unaccountable manner, as no wind was stirring. In an instant there appeared at some small distance a vast body of water, rising as it were, like a mountain, it came on foaming and roaring, and rushed toward the shore with such impetuosity that tho’ we all immediately ran for our lives as possible many were swept away.57 Some ninety minutes after the earthquake first struck on Saturday, November 1, 1755, three tsunamis in fact swept up the broad Tagus ­ Estuary by Lisbon and overwhelmed the city in five terrible minutes. Here I stood some time, and observed the ships tumbling and tossing about, as in a violent storm. Some had broken their cables and were carried to the other side of the Tagus. Others were whirled round with incredible swiftness, several large boats were turned keel upwards, and all this without any wind, which seemed very astonishing. `Twas at the time I am now speaking of, that the fine new quay, all built of rough marble, at an immense charge, was entirely swallowed up, with all the people on it, who had fled thither for safety, and had reason to think themselves out of danger in such a place. At the same time a great number of boats and small vessels, anchored near it, all likewise full of people who had retired thither for the same purpose, were swallowed up, as in whirlpool, and never more appeared.58 According to this eyewitness description of what happened on the Tagus Estuary, the three great waves caused enormous loss of life as they crashed ashore precisely because many of Lisbon’s citizens had fled to the waterside in the belief that they would be safe there, as our anonymous gentleman himself notes. Based on these eyewitness accounts, I have made a first approximation to the experience of some of the foreigners, in this case English residents, who

170  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 were in Lisbon on the fateful day of the earthquake. Such narratives are of enormous importance, as the far-reaching impact of the disaster throughout Europe, and particularly in England, could not otherwise be explained. ­Furthermore, we may observe significant differences in the substrate of ­religious and other beliefs that determined the ways in which the Catholic Portuguese and the Protestant English59 viewed nature, revealing the state of theological ideas prevalent among the people of both nations in the ­mid-eighteenth century. This may in turn help us understand more clearly the differences in their reactions. Those who have written most extensively about the Lisbon earthquake, mainly English-speaking academics, often mention the paucity of Portuguese sources from which to piece together events using contemporary documents. In this context, they almost always wheel out the somewhat hackneyed argument of the Inquisition. However, as Filomena Amador shows in her paper O terremoto de Lisboa de 1755: colecções de textos do século XVIII,60 however, this is due rather to their scant knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish. This paper describes an extensive collection of writings ­published in the years following 1755 and now forming part of the bibliographic collections held in Portuguese archives. The best known of all of these texts was penned by the contemporary Portuguese writer Joachim Joseph Moreira de Mendoça and was published in 1758 under the title Historia Universal dos Terremotos. This book contains an appendix dealing exclusively with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Moreira de Mendoça’s description begins: The morning of 1st November was warm and serene, like the beautiful days of late October, with a temperature of 17.5 degrees. The sky was cloudless, the sun shone and a light breeze blew to the north east. Around nine o’ clock and forty minutes, after a loud subterranean groan that terrified all the people, the earth shook for the first time, vertically, and then again horizontally north to south. The two tremors did not last more than a minute and a half, but after an interval of another minute, a further, more violent tremor occurred lasting for some two and a half minutes, and then a third which lasted over three minutes. There was an interval of perhaps one minute between the second and the third tremor. For these nine minutes, the underground noise made itself heard uninterruptedly. The sky darkened with the sulphurous gases exhaled by the earth (long, narrow fissures appeared in the streets) and above all because of the dust, which made the air unbreathable.61 (Translated from the Portuguese) This account of the first moments of the earthquake is very similar to those cited earlier, but it differs in that it includes data and descriptions that are more proper to a narrator writing after the event with a certain concern for science. Moreira de Mendoça included this description of the Lisbon

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  171 earthquake, of which he was an eyewitness as we will see later, in a volume on the history of seismic movements, which in its broad sweep takes in much of the history and geography of the known world. The author’s attention to detail and occasional naturalistic judgments are striking, for example where he mentions that the first earthquake to appear in the historical record occurred, to his knowledge, in 1815 bc: “It is said that the fable of the Flood called Deucalion among the Greeks arose from this event”.62 Interestingly, we may observe here that Moreira de Mendoça considers the Flood to be a fable derived from a great earthquake, to which he puts an actual date. The definition of earthquakes with which he begins his work is also significant: “Earthquakes, the most formidable of natural phenomena, have caused great changes in many parts of the surface of the globe”.63 To call earthquakes “natural phenomena” is most unusual for the author’s times, as is his assertion that the earth itself has been changed by the succession of seismic events. In this light, it is hardly surprising that Moreira de Mendoça’s description of the Lisbon earthquake mentions a number of facts that would have been considered more or less scientific at the time, which he included to lend verisimilitude to his account, as we had occasion to observe in Defoe’s works. In this one short paragraph, for example, he states the exact temperature, 17.5°, recorded in Lisbon at the time of the first tremor and mentions the exhalation of sulfuric gases from the earth. This is a pattern that would be followed by other narratives of risk, which began to appear as a news phenomenon, when publishing expanded and evolved on the back of technological development. Meanwhile, the importance of this narrative is shown by the fact that it takes up 56 out of a total 260 pages in Moreira de Mendoça’s book. The author was himself a survivor of the Lisbon earthquake, and he recounts the vicissitudes of his experience: I was a witness to these terrible events. Having endured the first earthquake and witnessed its ravages in the garden of my house, and finding myself and my whole family to be free by God’s mercy of any great misfortune while the buildings had not suffered any great damage, I went out to the Field of Santa Barbara, where I continued to beg the clemency of the Lord and the aid of his most Holy Mother, of whom I am a fervent if unworthy devotee. For fear that the Castle might catch fire, the field was cleared of many thousands of people who there listened to the exhortations of some priests. Out of care for the archive of this city’s chamber of property, which is in my charge and is most important as it contains the title deeds to more than 1,600 properties, I hardly took my eyes from the façade of those buildings, so as to be ready to save the archive if need be. There I spent the first days in the company of a few other people, and I saw nothing but ruin and horror, and heard nothing but wailing and weeping.64 (Translated from the Portuguese)

172  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Moreira’s experience was shaped by his professional concern for the archive of the Lisbon property registry and his determination to save it from the flames. We may suppose that it was for this reason that he spent days in an open field together with thousands of other survivors. His account is much more attentive to the religious reactions of the people of Lisbon to the catastrophe than those of the eyewitnesses cited earlier, and logically it is entirely free of the surprise and aversion expressed by the ­Englishmen in their descriptions of the spectacle offered by the streets of the city and by the crowds occupying the open fields. All day long there was a continuous clamor, here raised by devout families and congregations of people, most of them barefoot and all of them with bowed heads, who with repeated prayers implored the aid of Our Lady the Virgin Mary of France personified in the miraculous image of Peña de Francia; and there loud with the lamentations the calling of those who anxiously sought their lost relatives. Their words spoke only of destruction, death and misfortune. These poor souls appeared as if they had risen from the grave with no heart or life in them, all of them sorrowful and woebegone.65 (Translated from the Portuguese) Moreira de Mendoça’s account is extraordinarily pious here, extolling the virtue of the survivors who are portrayed as full of love for their fellows. Let consider another passage: There was nothing to be seen among men but the love of God and brotherly charity. Enemies embraced and begged forgiveness of each other. Friends and acquaintances expressed joy at finding each other alive. People consoled each other earnestly for the loss of family and goods. Such praiseworthy outpourings of virtue, but none of them lasting!66 (Translated from the Portuguese) Remorse and penitence were also intensely expressed in the streets of Lisbon, whose inhabitants swore repentance and undertook acts of contrition. Even the women and the rustics became prayerful. All feared the wrath of God and took to heart the recent ruin of the city and of their lives. The clamor of God-fearing voices was not without effect, as hearts were softened by reflection on so many sins and men broke down in tears. The contrition of each man encapsulated a condensed world, a new earthquake, in itself. The body shook with the horror of guilt, the heart burned with the love of God, and repeated torrents of tears seemed ready to extinguish breath. Those who met greeted each other by begging forgiveness, and the enmities and hatreds with which men lived

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  173 were reconciled. Some, who had no cause, appeared only to seek pardon for the scandal they had made of their lives. Many heretics abjured their errors and were reborn into grace.67 (Translated from the Portuguese) Despite the skeptical stricture “but none of them lasting”, Moreira de ­ endoça’s description of the behaviour shown by the people of Lisbon is M very different from the tone adopted by the English gentleman who witnessed the scene at the Plaza del Rossío. This contrast is a reflection of two very different kinds of religiosity; one accustomed to very rigid and intense externalizations of religious devotion in the public space through processions, penitential displays, huge masses and in eighteenth century Portugal the auto da fé; and another born of the Protestant Reformation, which stressed the importance of inner experience and direct communication with God. Moreira de Mendoça, meanwhile, mentions the many foreigners, most of whom would have been English Protestants, who were led to renounce their errors by the cathartic fervor he attributes to the survivors of the earthquake. The dramatic externalization and theatrical expression of grief described in the eyewitness accounts of the disaster were shared by the majority of Lisbon’s people in the streets and squares of their city after the earthquake, and this had much to do with the subsequent impact of the calamity throughout Europe and the different directions taken by these reactions. Some have argued, and I tend to agree with them, that the Lisbon earthquake was the great modern catastrophe,68 while others have suggested that it would be comparable, despite the lapse of almost 250 years, to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. Both events certainly produced an extraordinary dramatization, each via the media proper to the epoch, which reached thousands, or millions in the case of 9/11. A closer and more detailed comparison of these two catastrophes and their consequences would no doubt prove a worthwhile endeavor. In any event, we may observe here that the narrative of risk took a new direction after 1755, becoming increasingly focused on events and episodes displaying a certain sensational externality to which a newly developing narrative style would be applied to ever greater dramatic effect. This style would be central to the modern development of narratives of risk, and it is because of this and the fact that it first appears at the time of the Lisbon earthquake that the catastrophe can be described, following Russell Dynes, as the “first modern disaster”, or at least as the forerunner of modernity. Let us conclude with some considerations drawn from a comparison of the eyewitness reports written by observers who were present in Lisbon on that fateful All Saints Day of 1755. This chapter includes only a brief selection of the numerous accounts that have come down to us in numerous ­languages, mainly Portuguese, Spanish, English and French. This is in itself a matter of no small importance. In the first place, great value was placed at

174  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 that time upon correspondence and the habit of staying in regular contact with family and friends by letter. This was possible thanks to the progress of both overland and maritime transport in the eighteenth century, although development was unequal in different countries. It need hardly surprise us, then, that many of the accounts we have formed part of the regular correspondence maintained by eyewitnesses with their relatives and acquaintances. Meanwhile, the custom of keeping diaries and writing narratives adds further relevance to the surviving eyewitness testimonies, while the literate public had grown far beyond what it had been in the past, so that such works were often published in the form of brief treatises, pamphlets and accounts. Obviously, a tragedy on this scale offered a more than suitable subject for the publication of such accounts, as the readership was practically guaranteed. This surely marks the beginning of a fledgling ­narrative sensationalism that was, moreover, more immediate and wide-ranging than in the case of the London plague of 1655. Far more people were now writing, and they had far more readers. Writings also reached the public faster thanks to the press, which had developed and spread widely over the preceding 100 years. The fact that the earthquake occurred in Lisbon also exerted a powerful influence, since the city was a magnet for people from all over Europe, who broadcast the news of what had occurred throughout their homelands. Reports of the disaster spread like wildfire, going far beyond the limits reached by news of the Lima earthquake, which had happened only a few years earlier. Obviously, the capital of a Spanish Viceroyship in the New World was one thing and Europe’s fourth largest city and second biggest port was quite another. Any lettered man in Enlightenment Europe would per se have enjoyed some social status and most would have been members of the minor nobility, merchants, enlightened clergy, professional people like doctors and lawyers, writers and other men of learning, pamphleteers, journalists, teachers and educated bureaucrats, like Moreira de Mendoça himself. The outlook of any of the aforementioned or people like them would have been very different from that of the common people or the mob, as some contemporary authors called them. Such people, including African slaves and their emancipated descendants, made up the majority of Lisbon’s inhabitants. They play a part in all accounts of the disaster, though they always seem to be somehow divorced from the experiences lived by the narrators of such reports, who appear on another level as observers and even, on occasion, as scapegoats and targets for the rabble’s ire. The spectacle of credulity and superstition is played out by these crowds of terrified commoners, who are seen to congregate around crucifixes and images of the Virgin or the saints only to be further cowed by the fire and brimstone sermonizing of the priests. This suggests that an interpretation of events already existed, and that it was already present in these narratives. The observers, including Moreira de Mendoça, appear to distance themselves from the

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  175 mass of the people and the clergy and to hint, sometimes quite openly, that superstition had taken hold in the streets of Lisbon. Against this superstition, these authors, who were themselves all believers of whatever hue, at times fall back upon the notion of divine providence, but they also reveal a substrate of more rationalist ideas, in which the earthquake is treated as a natural phenomenon. We cannot be sure whether any of the chroniclers knew of Leibniz’s Théodicée, but they would certainly have found themselves at home with this optimistic philosophy, in which the world created by God is the best of all possible worlds, even in spite of devastating events like the Lisbon earthquake. Before we address the debate that arose after the earthquake, we may note the mentality intrinsic to many of the eyewitnesses’ accounts, which already anticipated the looming controversy that would soon break out in Europe and would involve some of the leading thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The press also played a key role disseminating news of the events that occurred in Lisbon on All Saints Day 1755. Anna Saada and Jean Sgard have studied how reports of the earthquake were spread by the contemporary press in various European countries. Their historical review takes in news-sheets written in French, which at the time were also printed throughout northern and central Europe. French-language gazettes were published outside of France in Amsterdam, Bern, Brunswick, Cologne, The Hague, Leyden, Stockholm, Utrecht, Brussels and Liege, and French was of course the international language of eighteenth century Europe. As Saada and Sgard show, the first news of the Lisbon earthquake did not appear until November 22, although the disaster happened on November 1. However, there were reports of tremors in other places, and the Cologne Gazette reported on November 7 that the earth had been felt to move in Hamburg on November 1. On the following days, these early reports were expanded to include tremors occurring in Bordeaux, England, Holland, Germany and even Greenland. This gives some idea of the magnitude of the seismic wave produced by the earthquake. However, the most alarming news could not but come from southern Europe, initially from Madrid. In this case, a report which appeared on November 21 is the first to mention any loss of human life. The correspondent’s dispatch already displays an initial dose of sensationalism. It is dated November 3 and it describes an earthquake that occurred on November 1 in Madrid at 10 o’clock and seventeen or eighteen minutes Spanish time, which was one hour ahead of Portugal. The main event mentioned in this report was the fall of a large stone cross from the frontispiece of a church crushing two children.69 Shortly afterwards on November 22, the Gazette de France published letters dated November 10, which provided initial reports of events in Seville and Cadiz, and finally in Lisbon. The first report of the disaster in Lisbon to reach northern Europe is worth citing: With respect to Portugal, a letter sent from Lisbon which reached Madrid on the 8th day of the present month at four o’clock in the

176  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 afternoon reported that the earthquake made itself felt most horribly on the 1st day of the month at around nine o’clock in the morning. It destroyed half the city, all of the churches and the King’s palace.70 (Translated from the French) Reports were scanty in the following days, only repeating the time of the earthquake and noting that it had destroyed half of Lisbon, that all of the  churches and the royal palace had collapsed, and that there had been some 50,000 fatalities. According to Saada and Sgard, the available information was confined to the account given in a letter from the French embassy and another from the Papal Nuncio. No news had yet come directly from the Portuguese capital, and the Lisbon Gazette was silent. On December 16, the Cologne Gazette published a more complete report, which included details that had not hitherto transpired including outbreaks of looting and its repression. No ships plied the traditional sea route from Lisbon to England for a full month after the earthquake. It was only in December that numerous spontaneous, confused and emotional accounts began to appear all over Europe, written, in the words of Saada and Sgard, by “improvised journalists”. Beginning in December, scattered, spontaneous reports began to be heard from merchants, sailors and writers who had had the misfortune to find themselves [in Lisbon] in the role of improvised journalists, although their confused and emotive representations are often quite extraordinary.71 (Translated from the French) The impact of the Lisbon earthquake was without doubt greatest in England for a number of reasons. The Kingdoms of Portugal and England maintained privileged political and commercial ties, the two countries shared trade routes, and there were many Englishmen living, or who had lived, in Portugal. Meanwhile, the political and social climate in the British Isles in the mid-eighteenth century was conducive to the discussion of religious matters like those raised by the Lisbon earthquake and the immediate diffusion of reports of the disaster. Because of this, and the diversity and wealth of the available sources, I have concentrated mainly on contemporary materials kept in London. The first news to reach England also arrived from Madrid, and it too drew on reports that had reached the Spanish capital from Lisbon. Sir Benjamin Keene, who was in Madrid, wrote a letter dated November 10, 1755 to his friend Sir T. Robinson resident in London. This letter seems to have been the source used by The London Gazette to publish an initial report on the earthquake, which was attributed to the Spanish embassy in Lisbon: On the 8th Instant, a Messenger dispatched by the Secretary of the Spanish Embassy at Lisbon, with Letters of the 4th Instant, brought an

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  177 Account of the terrible Effects of the Earthquake which happened there, on the 1st, (the same day we felt it here, but without any considerable Damage) between the Hours of Nine and Ten, and which in five Minutes, destroyed the Palace, Churches, and most of the stately buildings; and that the Flames were still destroying the Remains of the City, from one extremity of it to the other, when the Courier came away.72 Most of these accounts were eventually printed as independent texts in pamphlets, treatises and even books or chapters of books, as in the case of Moreira de Mendoça’s description of events. A dozen or more such accounts had already been published by the end of 1755, and a dozen more appeared in 1756. The works published in the latter year, however, were no longer merely descriptive accounts, but also included religious, philosophical, political and scientific comment on the disaster, an important difference. In 1757, the English astronomer John Bevis published his work The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes in London, which included numerous eyewitness reports of the Lisbon earthquake. Another author writing in the wake of Bevis who also concentrated on Lisbon was John Michell, whose paper Conjectures concerning the Cause and Observations upon the Phaenomena of Earthquakes published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1760 would eventually come to be seen as a milestone in the development of seismology. As Saada and Sgard observe, “Fear had not disappeared, but it was focused now on the aftershocks and on the study of seismic phenomena”.73 It could be said, then, that a new concern with the repetition of earthquakes would emerge alongside the wilder expressions of apocalyptic thought in the extensive literature engendered by the Lisbon earthquake. To put this another way, interest had shifted to the probability, in other words the risk, of future earthquakes. Meanwhile, theoretical science (geology) and the applied sciences (engineering and architecture) would gradually acquire a more explanatory and preventive stamp. I will discuss these issues in the following pages.

Apocalyptic believers and enlightened thinkers The Lisbon earthquake was also remarkable as the catalyst for a series of powerful narratives. Indeed, there has been no other natural disaster that has spilled so much ink to this day. However, the tone and consistency of these narratives shift continuously. In the first place, we have the eyewitness accounts written by survivors, which were quickly published and circulated. Then there is the correspondence sent by Lisbon’s inhabitants, including a considerable number of foreign residents. These testimonies would feed the European gazettes, which may have taken time to begin reporting the events in Lisbon with any accuracy but afterwards published abundant information, in large part thanks to the testimony obtained by

178  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 their correspondents. All of this held the public’s interest for a long time. According to the Cologne Gazette of January 16, 1756, “the earthquake is still on everyone’s lips”.74 In her research into the impact of the Lisbon earthquake on European public opinion, Ana Cristina Araujo describes the enormous influence exerted by such first-hand accounts, whether realistic or fanciful, on the imagination of European readers. These “event-reports” embody the common perception of the event and the reactions which it generated. The genre included numerous topical texts – often anonymous – in verse or prose. Purportedly, they were transmitting news. They were printed on thick paper folded into small pamphlets and sold cheaply (...). These typically distorted reports were quickly written and short-lived and their immense success can be explained, on the one hand, by the power of the message behind them, and on the other by the beliefs, feelings and world view of most ­eighteenth-century readers. These popular texts, sensationalist and exuberant, commonly masqueraded as “accurate reports”, “new and accurate reports”, “fantastic descriptions”, “terrible news”, “real letters”, and the like.75 The earthquake was, then, the source of an abundant popular literature that was initially apocalyptic, sensationalist and fantastic, but that would evolve into something more measured, documentary and polemical after the appearance of Voltaire’s Poem on the Lisbon Disaster in May 1756. Before examining this work, however, it will be worth considering its genre, which flourished in the months and years after the Lisbon earthquake, allowing us to pick up the trail of apocalyptic thinking. By way of example, here is a fragment of a poem sold in London for sixpence in late 1755, very shortly after the earthquake. The Royal pair, now silent and alone, Wept their deserted solitary Throne; View’d with Distress their beaut’ous City fled, Friends, Statesmen, Subjects number’d with the Dead; But more their sympathizing Bosoms grieve The Want of Pow’r, Misery to relieve. Not Kings escape a universal Woe, But as the Peasant feels the Weighty Blow.76 The poem refers to the King and Queen of Portugal, whose palace was completely destroyed in the earthquake, one of the first details to become widely known across Europe, picking up on a very common trope in medieval thought and writing, in which death or disaster befall the rich and powerful, leveling them with the poor and humble. This trope, and the moralizing tone of the poem, would become a constant in this kind of literature.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  179 The Rev. Thomas Gibbons was a non-conformist minister who preached at the Independent Meeting House of Haberdashers’ Hall in London. He was known in his day as a writer of hymns, sermons and some apparently rather mediocre poetry. On November 30, 1755 he gave a sermon On Occasion of the Tremendous Earthquake at Lisbon, November 1, 1755, which must have been published very shortly afterwards, as a second addition appeared in 1756 at the modest price of sixpence. Meanwhile, Charles Bulkley, the Baptist minister of The Old Jewry Meeting House in London, preached his own Sermon on the Occasion of the Dreadful Earthquake in Lisbon, which was also published in 1756 and likewise sold for sixpence. Let us begin with Gibbons, who addresses the causes of evil and, in this case, of the natural disaster that was the Lisbon earthquake: In the late Earthquake we may behold an awful Display of the Divine Justice. I do not pretend to say that the Inhabitants of Lisbon were greater Sinners than the Inhabitants of other Cities; or, that we may infer superior Crimes from superior Calamities. Our Lord has prevented us from drawing such harsh Conclusions (…). But, though we ought not to conclude against Persons, that they are greater Sinners than others because they [are] extraordinarily afflicted, yet we must trace Sorrows and Distresses to some Cause, and that Cause, as all Causes are under the Controul, and are held in Dependence upon the First Cause or that great God himself, must be either the sovereign and unsearchable Pleasure of Deity, inflicting natural Evil without the ­Provocation of Guilt, or must be the just Resentments of the Almighty against Offenders. If we say the first, let us consider well what we say: we say that God may afflict and torment innocent and obedient Creatures: and if he may do it once, may he do it twice and thrice, and for ever? A Sentiment methinks that we should not hastily admit into our Creed, as it carries upon its Face such an unkind Imputation upon Deity, as it dissolves some of the most powerful and essential Obligations to Holiness, and opens a Scene of inconceivable Terror and Misery among the intelligent and rational Creation.77 The divine origin of the catastrophe is the first idea that the preacher seeks to establish. Without categorically asserting that the sins of the people of Lisbon were any greater than those of others (although he then goes on to make this claim) and hence were to blame for their extraordinary distress, he uses the Thomist argument from the first cause78 to argue that God alone could be the ultimate cause of the earthquake. However, he then appears to stand this argument on its head by claiming that it is impossible that God, whom he has just shown to be the unquestionable originator of the disaster, could punish innocents in this way since the Creation cannot but be “rational” and “intelligent”. It follows from all of this that if God is the cause of any catastrophe, then that event must perforce be the consequence

180  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 of some evil committed by men. Evil and catastrophe are thus inextricably bound up together. Gibbons goes on starkly to outline the nature of the evil he attributes to the city of Lisbon, which in his opinion was greater still than the sins of London itself.79 The biblical example was, of course, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, to which the preacher compares the Portuguese capital. He ends this particular paragraph by naming the principal sins of which the city was guilty, to wit Popery and the Inquisition. We have already seen how the animosity between Catholics and Protestants surfaced in the aftermath of the earthquake, but Gibbons’ words in this sermon provide a more complete and reflective picture. The responses of Protestants and Catholics to the calamity may have differed, but the differences reflect rather the usual bones of contention between the two creeds, namely the primacy of the Papacy and the existence of the Inquisition, than divergent conceptions of nature. Catholics and Protestants alike shared very similar providential views of nature, although the beliefs of the Protestants were generally more open, which is not to say that such openness was entirely absent among Catholics, whom we have already seen advancing theories to explain the natural causes of earthquakes (sulfurous gases, underground rivers and so on). And I cannot but observe, though I would not affirm that Lisbon was greater in Crime than all other Cities, and particularly than London, whose distinguishing Privileges and Advantages must inconceivably aggravate its Guilt, that if any Judgment in the Almighty’s Quiver seems to be chosen out as an extraordinary Punishment for extraordinary Sin, I should be apt to conclude it was such an Earthquake as that which has lately happened. It is what is in its own Nature, from its swift and uncontroulable Desolation, inexpressibly dreadful, and it is nearly a-kin to the Overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah which Event we are assured was the Effect of the Fiercest Indignation of the Almighty, and inflicted as Punishment of enormous Guilt. And, if the Opinion I have formed concerning Lisbon be right, it was a City of great and crying Abominations, and particularly, there reigned the grossest and most inhuman Popery; and there the Inquisition the  Emblem and the Rival of Hell, though now perhaps tumbled into the general Ruin once flood.80 The apocalyptic tradition stretches back beyond Christianity itself, reemerging in early Christian writings and in the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages as a legacy passed down from Judaic antiquity. The end of the world and the catastrophe that will destroy it are the two faces of the apocalypse, and both are present in this part of Gibbons’ sermon: And, lastly, In the late Earthquake we have a Kind of Premonition and awful Representation of the End of the World: The Convulsion of the

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  181 End of the World. The Convulsion of the Earth, the devouring ­Conflagration, and the Terrors and Overthrow of such a splendid and opulent City as Lisbon, methinks, may be considered as a kind of ­Premonition of the Dissolution of Nature. That God who soon tore up a City from it foundations, and shook the Nations around, can, by the same Omnipotence, break up this vast material Frame. He who expunged one of the brightest Spots, and leveled one of the biggest Eminencies upon this Globe, can, whenever he pleases, dissolve the Globe itself. (…) Before this great and terrible Day of the Lord comes, we have the Warnings and Heralds of it, and God has sent forth his Messengers of Vengeance to admonish us that he will ere long rise in the Greatness of his Power; and not only destroy Cities or Kingdoms, but even the World itself.81 The Lisbon earthquake prefigures the end of the world. The preacher’s ultimate message is this, and it is made explicit in this paragraph. The Christian eschatology found to a greater or lesser degree in the four Gospels and, especially, in the Apocalypse refers to the second coming of Christ in his glory to judge mankind. The end of days will be announced by a succession of great tribulations. Gibbons believed that the earthquake that had occurred in Lisbon was unquestionably a sign calling upon mankind to repent of its sins before the approach of Judgment Day. The “overthrow” of Lisbon was a great catastrophe and as such a “premonition of the ­dissolution of nature”, which is to say the end of the world. Our word “catastrophe” comes from the Greek katastrophē, which means “ruin” or “destruction” and is formed from the roots kata (down) and strophe (turn). According to its Greek etymology, then, the word “catastrophe” would refer to the collapse that was the earthquake’s first effect, making this natural phenomenon into his inspiration to describe a still more complete destruction. Today, we would say that a catastrophe is always an event that causes immense harm or damage. The preacher’s evident interpretation was that the catastrophe caused by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a sign of the end of the world. The sermon written by the Baptist minister Charles Bulkley is deeply reflective, and before going on to insist on the relationship between catastrophe and sin, the preacher is careful to discuss the origin of evil and of divine justice, which he does in a manner reminiscent of Leibniz’s Théodicée. He refers to the Lisbon earthquake in the following terms: In the first place, it is an event peculiarly well fitted to remind us of a divine power presiding over this world, and having an absolute dominion over all the parts and elements of nature. I say to remind us of such a power; because we must be previously convinced by other arguments, by arguments drawn from the regularity, order and stated appearances of the world, of the existence of such a power, ere we can

182  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 think of ascribing this or that particular event, whether adverse or prosperous, to his influence and agency. This will appear very evident from our recollecting only, in what manner we should propose to discourse or argue with one, who should profess himself an atheist, in order to convince him of the being of a God and the reality of a divine providence.82 Bulkley departs from the association between sin and its punishment in his argument, and from the apocalyptic tone of Gibbons’ sermon. He does not hesitate, however, to ascribe the event to God, though he does so in a different way. Before remarking on God’s infinite power, he tells us, and even before fearing that power, we must consider the world as it is – continuous, orderly and regular – which is much more important than any ­isolated event, such as an earthquake, if we are to prove the existence of God even to an atheist. Therefore, evil and suffering, even catastrophe, form part of the regular, quotidian world behind which God could be said to stand. In this light, the Lisbon earthquake would be a part of nature as created by God but not a divine punishment unleashed on a sinful city. Leibniz’s central thesis in his Théodicée was the assertion that evil coexists with the infinite goodness of God. There can be no doubt that the preacher’s arguments reflect the influence of the author of Théodicée, elevating his sermon to a higher plane of sophistication than the apocalyptic message pure and simple. This kind of discourse, which would later be criticized by Voltaire, places the earthquake squarely within nature, but it is a nature created by God in which the divine is ever-present. The natural explanation for the earthquake can thus sit side-by-side with belief in an all-powerful God, the creator of the best of all possible worlds in which evil also exists. Bulkly thus expounds a discourse that is subtly providentialist but nonetheless eschews any recourse to apocalyptic brimstone. Should we appeal, for the proof of these, to the devastations and miseries of war, to plagues and pestilences, to contagion and famine, to conflagrations, tempests, whirlwinds, or earth-quakes, and not rather to the uniformity, comeliness, beauty and established order of the visible world. Still, however, it is undeniably certain, that we may be convinced, even by such demonstrative evidence as this, of a divine power governing in the world, presiding over all its events and directing all its affairs; and yet, thro’ the influence of habitual levity, vanity and thoughtless pleasure, live in an almost continued forgetfulness of a truth so interesting, and an estrangedness of mind and affection from this supreme and most adorable creator of the universe. And when this is the case, can we possibly conceive of any thing more naturally fitted, more directly adapted to cure so fatal an inattention as those surprizing and deeply calamitous events, which, in consequence of our former convictions, we are necessarily led to ascribe to a divine power, and

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  183 which, therefore we cannot but conclude, must carry in them a most important and awful meaning?83 Like any other calamity, an earthquake is not an isolated event that can be related with the sins of any specific group of people, but rather a general phenomenon, from which we can only draw the conclusion that we are ruled by God, while such disasters merely remind us of his omnipotence. An earthquake is an event that is proper to nature and others are known to have occurred in the past, even if we may consider them to be rare. It is no objection to this kind of reasoning, as applied, upon the present occasion, that earth-quakes are not properly and strictly speaking, miraculous. Tho’ upon the whole they are uncommon events, yet have they so frequently happened, and such probable causes of them have been by naturalists assigned, as to forbid our looking upon them in that light. Great and alarming as has been that, which is now fresh in every one’s thoughts, many of the like nature have happened in former times, by one and another of which entire cities, with their numerous inhabitants, have been instantly swallowed up.84 However, we cannot ignore the hand of God in the earthquake, even if it is ascribed to nature. It seems that the ideas Bulkley wished his sermon to transmit would have been new to his audience, given the caution with which he expresses himself when he introduces arguments that depart from the prevailing apocalyptic train of thought. This can be seen in the following paragraph, in which the preacher continues the previous argument. But tho’ events of this kind are not properly speaking miraculous, it plainly appears from experience, that they are surprising enough to strike us, for the present at least, into the deepest attention. And to whatever natural causes we impute them, this, as has been already observed, is not in the least inconsistent, which ascribing them ultimately, as in reason we only can, to the supreme agency of a creating Deity. So that they are properly speaking the voice of God to man, to forgetful, unthinking man, reminding him, in a manner peculiarly solemn and affecting, of that sovereign lord of nature, to whom he owes his life and breath, all that he now enjoys, and his capacity for everlasting bliss, whom therefore he must be under infinite obligations to please and obey. It is the voice of God, reminding us of his universal providence, and of that irresistible power, by which he is enabled to inflict the severest punishments, either here or hereafter, upon the disobedient and perverse; punishments of the very same kind and nature, if these are the most likely to impress our minds with that terrible calamity, which has now so much alarmed us.85

184  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 The preacher thus distances himself from the apocalyptic interpretation of the Lisbon disaster in particular by denying that the earthquake could have been in any sense miraculous. A miracle is always a unique providential intervention, and the term can thus apply only to a single event. For all its uniqueness, however, Bulkley did not see the Lisbon earthquake as miraculous, because it was not an isolated divine intervention but was the action of nature, for all that nature might be God’s creation. This approach relates the problem more directly to divine justice, to God’s goodness and the problem of evil. The apocalyptic interpretation was simplistic in theological terms, insofar as it resolved the problem of the origin of evil and especially of destructive catastrophe by positing a direct relationship between sin and punishment. But this was too primitive a solution for the Europe of Reason and the Enlightenment. Even so, the mythical ideas of the preceding ­centuries stretching back to the Great Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah still weighed heavily on the eighteenth-century mind. Let us consider the very calculated twist in Bulkley’s argument in this sermon. Though the earthquake is not a miracle, it is certainly something exceptional, and as such it cannot but strike the conscience deeply. The light of reason thus reveals God behind the ordinary causes attributable to the earthquake. The argument thus reconciles the action of nature, which has its own causes, with the will of God, so becoming visible to men and reminding them that he is the creator of all. Supported by Leibniz’s Théodicée, we may infer from this argument that evil is in fact a part of the best of all possible worlds as created by God. Thanks to Bulkley, then, we may observe that new ideas were already beginning to emerge in London in 1755 just weeks after the Lisbon earthquake, although the preacher advances his own position in terms of calculated moderation hedged all around with the subtlest of arguments. His sermon offers some idea, then, of the shifting pattern of contemporary ideas, revealing a growing split between apocalyptic and providentialist positions. As R. Dynes86 argues, the Lisbon earthquake was the first modern catastrophe because, unlike all the disasters of ancient times, it occurred at a time of profound change in European society which it affected much more intensely than those other calamities that had befallen the Spanish dominions of Sicily (1693) and Lima (1746). Lisbon thus lay at the heart of the contemporary debate over the origin of natural disasters and evil, resulting in a direct challenge to the traditional authority of religion by the supporters of reason and free-thinking as they advanced ideas that were fundamental to modernity. The fact that a young Emmanuel Kant would write three essays on the nature of earthquakes for a local newspaper in far-off Konigsberg following the Lisbon catastrophe offers some idea of the extraordinary influence exerted by the disaster on even the greatest minds of the time. Kant sought from the outset to take on the role of an observer interested in the earthquake as a natural phenomenon, which must be described and explained, and he was at pains to make clear that his contribution was:

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  185 not a history of the misfortunes that people suffered, not a catalog of the devastated cities and the residents buried under their rubble ... I  will describe here only the work of nature, the remarkable natural conditions that accompanied the dreadful event and their causes.87 As a result, Kant came to be seen as one of the pioneers of scientific seismology, and it was in this light that the founder of the International Seismological Association, Georg Gerland, would affirm in 1910 that: In this omission of the doubtless exciting, but seismologically irrelevant trappings: in this broad view ... he gives the first truly scientific treatment of an earthquake ... Kant was the first to give a scientific analysis that intends to depict only ‘the work of nature’ and the causes of the events, one that was exemplary well beyond his own day.88 Meanwhile, Voltaire and Rousseau would take the Lisbon earthquake as their starting point to debate key questions of moral philosophy, and the devastation that it caused would open the eyes of the young Goethe, who entertained religious doubts as a result.89 Of all of these reactions, it was Voltaire’s that had the most lasting impact because of the way it was expressed. His Poem on the Lisbon Disaster and the novel Candide, his bestknown work, have over time become the two key works dealing with the earthquake. In the preface to his Poem, we already find an unambiguous statement of principles: If the question concerning physical evil ever deserves the attention of men, it is in those melancholy events which put us in mind of the weakness of our nature; such as plagues, which carry off a fourth of the inhabitants of the known world; the earthquake which swallowed up four hundred thousand of the Chinese in 1699, that of Lima and Callao, and in the last place that of Portugal and the kingdom of Fez. The maxim, “whatever is, is right”, appears somewhat extraordinary to those who have been eye-witnesses of such calamities. All things are doubtless arranged and set in order by Providence, but it has long been too evident, that its superintending power has not disposed in such a manner as to promote our temporal happiness.90 Despite his professed admiration for Alexander Pope, Voltaire disputes in the strongest possible terms that “all is for the best”, beginning in the Preface, where he refers to himself in the third person: The author of the Poem on the Lisbon disaster does not attack the illustrious Pope, whom he has always admired and loved; but, being sorely struck by the misfortunes of mankind, he wishes to rebel against the abuse that can be made of the ancient axiom All is well.91 (Translated from the Spanish)

186  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 The core of Voltaire’s response to Pope and, it might be added, to Leibniz is that evil exists independently of God, that it is to be found here on Earth, and that we do not know its nature. Voltaire explains this, once again in the third person: He admits, then, as all do, that there is evil in the world as well as good, and he admits that no philosopher has ever been able to explain the origin of moral evil and physical evil....92 (Translated from the Spanish) From our historical standpoint, we may go further still than the French philosopher to assert that this is one of the first modern formulations of the principle of evil. According to Voltaire, “there is evil in the world” but we do not know its origin. The epistemological turn in Voltaire’s thinking arose as a consequence of divers biographical and other influences, of which the Lisbon earthquake may have been the most important. If Voltaire was faithful to any tradition, it’s the one that began with Bayle. Both hold that clear-eyed description of reality should precede any speculation about it. Candide’s blind speculation showed that he never learned to think for himself. He sees the world through the lessons of Pangloss, whose fame as the world’s greatest philosopher derived from being the tutor on call in a Westphalian castle. Candide gains a measure of wisdom when, guided by the skeptical Martin, he rejects speculation entirely in favor of hard and simple labor. And one claim of “The Lisbon Earthquake” is that cold observation -of mangled bodies and children’s cries- is enough by itself to prove philosophy vain.93 This last line shows Voltaire as an opponent of “philosophy”, a term that was often used critically in the eighteenth century to denote a certain kind of speculative thinking, but in it we may also find the key to his attitude to the Lisbon earthquake. Even wearing its most dreadful face, evil and affliction must be examined directly in order to ascertain their nature. Not speculation, whether theological or philosophical, but observation alone will allow us to differentiate between physical and moral evil, as Voltaire notes in the earlier transcribed passage. The news of what had happened in Lisbon on All Saints Day 1755 must have reached Voltaire fairly quickly, given that his first known reaction is found in a letter dated November 24, 1755 written to his friend Jean-Robert Tronchin in Lyon: 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 neighbors, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  187 undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants – Swiss, like yourself – swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon.94 Four days later, on November 28, he would write the following to the ­Protestant pastor Elias Bertrand: This is, then, the sorry confirmation of the disaster at Lisbon and twenty other towns. This is indeed serious. If Pope had been at Lisbon, would he have dared to say that all is well?95 (Translated from the Spanish) In this first reaction, Voltaire already directs pointed criticisms at Leibniz’s theodicy and his understanding of the creation as the “best of all possible worlds” and at the optimism expressed by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man. As I have argued earlier, the Lisbon earthquake occurred at a time when the belief in happiness and optimism had become widespread, a development in which the ideals of the Enlightenment had played a key part by affirming the primacy of reason as a means of understanding the world. Leibniz exemplified this application of reason to reconcile the divine work of creation and the presence of evil in the world. Alexander Pope’s poetic works extolled the same ideas. Following the agonized, tortured worldview of the Baroque, a new current had emerged in both philosophy and the arts that was at once exuberant and optimistic, if perhaps a little ingenuous. Though he shared in this new consciousness in his own life, Voltaire reacted immediately to the catastrophe of the Lisbon earthquake, fiercely attacking both Leibniz and Pope. The Poem on the Lisbon Disaster was published in 1756 together with another work, the Poem on Natural Law, which Voltaire had written in 1752. The Poem on the Lisbon Disaster begins with these lines: 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. Behold these shreds and cinders of your race, This child and mother heaped in common wreck, These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—96 To this grim description of the effects of the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire would in the next line add the figure of “a hundred thousand whom the earth devours”. Though the death toll from the earthquake was indeed enormous, it was still far less than this figure, and today it is usually estimated as

188  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 having been between 50,000 and 15,000, depending on the source. Voltaire contrasts the maxim that “all is well”, which he attributes to the “philosophers”, with this in any case dreadful horror. 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? Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid? In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.97 Voltaire inveighs against the apocalyptic party, demanding to know what crime Lisbon could have committed that would set it apart from London, Paris or Madrid, and what sins might stain the city but not Paris, where people dance while Lisbon groans. He responds fiercely when he imagines himself accused of pride for his refusal to admit that the sins of the victims were the cause of God’s alleged wrath. This a quintessentially Voltairean argument, which he develops poetically in the first part of the work. If evil is a part of the best of all possible worlds, that created by God, we should not be able even to imagine a world that could be better, as such an idea would be directly contrary to both the Divinity and his creation. “ ‘Tis pride”, ye say – “the pride of rebel heart, To think we might fare better than we do”. Go, tell it to the Tagus’ stricken banks; Search in the ruins of that bloody shock; Ask of the dying in that house of grief. Whether ‘tis pride that calls on heaven for help And pity for the sufferings of men.98 Voltaire attacks the rhetorical grandiloquence of both the apocalyptic party and the optimists, contrasting the apparent transcendence of their discourse (it is for this that he labels them “philosophers”) with the harsh reality of the earthquake. This is the sense of expressions like “search in the ruins”, “ask of the dying”, “calls on heaven for help” and “pity for the sufferings of men”. His aim is to reconstruct a poetic narrative of events as he imagined them. Against the abstract, theoretical disquisitions of the theodiceans, Voltaire sets himself up as a philosopher of fact and of reason applied to the facts. This is the epistemological difference encapsulated in what was unquestionably the most important and influential of all the writings to come out of the Lisbon earthquake. It is a new discourse, in which it is the reality and consequences of the actual events that matter. Though there is as yet no science here, a current of Humean empiricism runs throughout the poem.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  189 To mourn so terrible a stroke as this. Would it console the sad inhabitants Of these aflame and desolated shores To say to them: “Lay down your lives in peace; For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed; Your ruined palaces shall others build, For other peoples shall your walls arise; The North grows rich on your unhappy loss; Your ills are but a link in general law; To God you are as those low creeping worms That wait for you in your predestined tombs?99 To admit the suffering and ruin caused by the earthquake is not to submit to the perfection of creation and nor is it pride; it is to recognize misfortune in the world and to understand that it cannot be dismissed by the adage “all is well”. In this last fragment, Voltaire attacks Pope’s argument that lamentations and supplications misfortune and suffering are but a show of pride. He also ironically rejects the idea that evil is but a tiny portion of the whole and as such itself a “good” within the general laws which show us “all is well”. Alexander Pope made this argument in his Essay on Man, but it only arouses indignation in Voltaire: Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, “ ‘Tis for mine: ...” … But errs not Nature form his gracious end, From burning suns, when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep? “No” (‘tis reply’d) the first Almighty Cause “Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws....100 In the heart of his long poem, Voltaire addresses evil as such, now stripped of all its manifestations: All dead and living things are locked in strife Confess it freely – evil stalks the land, Its secret principle unknown to us. Can it be from the author of all good? Are we condemned to weep by tyrant law Of black Typhon or barbarous Ahriman? These odious monsters, whom a trembling world Made gods, my spirit utterly rejects. But how conceive a God supremely good, Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves, Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?101

190  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Voltaire finds it unacceptable that evil should come from God, and yet it seems to him beyond doubt that evil is everywhere among us. He then goes on to query the existence of God. This he does not explicitly deny, but by raising the presence of evil in the world, as so cruelly revealed by the Lisbon earthquake, he is able to question whether we can properly conceive of an all-loving, perfectly good God. It was this argument that would justify the radically skeptical pessimism of Voltaire’s critics, and of Rousseau in particular. Like Pope before him, Leibniz also comes in for criticism from Voltaire for his inability to recognize evil in the immense harm it causes or to see that it afflicts the just and the sinner alike: Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it; The human race demands a word of God. ‘Tis his alone to illustrate his work, Console the weary, and illume the wise. Without him man, to doubt and error doomed, Finds not a reed that he may lean upon. From Leibnitz learn we not by what unseen Bonds, in this best of all imagined worlds, Endless disorder, chaos of distress, Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain; Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woe In common with the most abhorrent guilt. ‘T is mockery to tell me all is well. Like learned doctors, nothing do I know.102 When he turns a little further on to Pierre Bayle, however, his verses acquire a different tone, not of criticism but of admiration. Nature appears to Voltaire as it is, brimming with its own destructive powers, against which philosophical speculation about the creation, the heroism of mankind and Platonic ideals are but vain words that serve for nothing against the juggernaut of nature. It is not Plato who inspires Voltaire but the skepticism of Bayle, who was always open to doubt: Plato has said that men did once have wings And bodies proof against all mortal ill; That pain and death were strangers to their world. How have we fallen from that high estate! Man crawls and dies: all is but born to die: The world’s the empire of destructiveness. This frail construction of quick nerves and bones Cannot sustain the shock of elements; This temporary blend of blood and dust Was put together only to dissolve;

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  191 This prompt and vivid sentiment of nerve Was made for pain, the minister of death: Thus in my ear does nature’s message run. Plato and Epicurus I reject. And turn more hopefully to learned Bayle. With even poised scale Bayle bids me doubt. He, wise and great enough to need no creed, Has slain all systems – combats even himself:”103 The Voltaire who so praises Bayle appears as a rationalist, an empiricist and an ironic skeptic, who takes to heart the lesson of Lisbon to proclaim that there is no “system”, no philosophy, theology or ideology that can explain the origin of evil; there are only the facts, which belong in this case to nature. It could in this light be said that it was Voltaire who made the greatest contribution to removing the problem of evil from the realm of religion in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. In my opinion, this crucial development laid the foundations for today’s ­intricate, problematic and at times profound debate about the origins of evil, especially given our historic experience of genocide and crimes against humanity. On August 18, 1756, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote to Voltaire to express his opinions of the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, which he had by then had the opportunity to read.104 All my complaints are against your poem on the Lisbon disaster, because I expected from it more worthy evidence of the humanity that apparently inspired you to write it. You reproach Pope and Leibnitz with belittling our misfortunes by maintaining that all is well, but you so burden the list of our miseries that you further disparage our condition. Instead of the consolations that I expected, you only afflict me further. It might be said that you fear I don’t feel my unhappiness enough, and that you are trying to soothe me by proving that all is bad.105 Rousseau reproaches Voltaire for leaving the readers of his poem in a state of desolation by reciting all the miseries that afflict them. His conclusion is that the maxim “all is well” favored by Leibniz and Pope has become “all is bad” for Voltaire. The profound and lucid debate that began with Rousseau’s criticism of Voltaire in his letter is concerned with optimism, and its points of reference are first Leibniz and then Pope. In the first place, the very word “optimism” was originally a philosophical term, which appears to have been coined on the back of Leibniz’s mathematically inspired use of the Latin “optimum” in his Thèodicée. The world as created by God is the “optimum” among all possible worlds according to the German’s argument. However, the optimism proposed by Leibniz evolved from a philosophical argument into a worldview, and it is especially in this significantly

192  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 broader sense that the term it is used by Rousseau. Let us consider an example: Do not be mistaken, Monsieur, it happens that everything is contrary to what you propose. This optimism that you find so cruel consoles me still in those woes that you paint as inconsolable.106 Rousseau praises the value of Pope’s Essay on Man as a source of consolation for his mind and alleviation for his grief: Pope’s poem softens my pains and inclines me to patience; yours sharpens my afflictions, prompts me to grumble, and, depriving me of any shattered hope, reduces me to despair.107 Rousseau expresses the need to recognize the comfort offered by providence, and by doing so he removes the origin of evil from the providential realm of the Creator and resituates it among men. He then turns his gaze back to Lisbon, setting up the city as an example of the evils caused by human ignorance, lack of foresight and greed. Indeed, though he does not use the term, he foreshadows the notion of “risk” and the possibility of managing natural disasters: Without leaving your Lisbon subject, concede, for example, that it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened.108 Translating from the language of Rousseau’s times into more modern terms, we find that his argument concerns risk, since the origin of evil, in this case physical evil, lies not in nature but in the stance which people (in this case the people of Lisbon) take towards nature. Any location of course involves some risk, but this risk, which expresses a relationship, could have been mitigated had the city been built to a different plan, or had its buildings been low rather than high. Rousseau also considers the behaviour of the people of Lisbon, condemning their avarice in a moral judgement: But we have to stay and expose ourselves to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would have to leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take – one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money?109

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  193 It might be asked, then, whether Rousseau truly differentiates between physical and moral evil, since he sees lack of foresight, ignorance and avarice as the real causes of the misfortunes that befell the people of Lisbon. Rousseau removes the origin of the catastrophe from the realm of the divine, so he is not of the apocalyptic party, but by calling the earthquake an evil, he persists in moralizing a natural disaster. Voltaire, in contrast, does not moralize the causes of the disaster but only its consequences, as we shall see. Voltaire and Rousseau never directly debated the earthquake, even by letter, as the former’s only reply to the latter’s epistle was a brief note dated September 12, 1756, in which he apologizes for his failure to respond to the arguments raised by Rousseau in his reply to the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. My dear philosopher, We are able, you and I, in the intervals of our ills, to reason in verse and prose. But at the present moment, you will pardon me for leaving there all these philosophical discussions, which are only amusements. Your letter is very beautiful, but I have with me one of my nieces who for three weeks has been in rather great danger; I am her sick-nurse and very sick myself. I shall wait to get better before daring to think with you.110 Voltaire’s reply would not appear until the publication of his Complete Works in Paris in 1785 and 1786, in which it was included in a section titled Advertence on the Poem on Natural Law and the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. It is interesting to observe here how Voltaire repeats the arguments he had already used in his Poem in answer to Rousseau’s observations, again referring to himself in the third person: In the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, M. Voltaire attacks the opinion that all is well, which came to widely held among philosophers in England and Germany at the beginning of this century. The question of the origin of evil has proved insoluble until now, and so it always will be. In our opinion, evil in the form in which it exists is a necessary consequence of the order of the world, but in order to know whether any other order is possible, it would be necessary to know the complete system of all that which actually exists. Reflecting, meanwhile, on the way in which we acquire our ideas, it is easy to see that we can have no idea of possibility in general, given that our idea of possibility in relation to real objects is not formed until after the observation of the existing facts.111 (Translated from the Spanish) This is a most interesting fragment. Let us, therefore, pause a moment to examine it to find what it may tell us about the Lisbon earthquake and its

194  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 influence on the reflections and debates of the leading minds of the day, and on the impact of their ideas on the historical development of the concept of risk. The overarching theoretical problem following the disaster of the Lisbon earthquake was the origin of evil, a crucial question in human thought and especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least since the Book of Job. In the years before the earthquake this problem had re-emerged as a central concern of the leading thinkers of the time, including Bayle, Leibniz and Pope, but in my opinion, it was Voltaire who was the first to make the transition towards risk, even if he did not expressly intend to do so. By his initial radical rejection of the notion that all is well, Voltaire took up the challenge posed to God and his Creation by the Lisbon earthquake, a natural disaster of epic proportions, the echoes of which long reverberated around Europe. Unlike the people of Lisbon and the city’s religious authorities, he would not admit that the earthquake had been a divine punishment for their sins, and it was this that led him to rebel against the maxim that all is well. He advances his response in the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, which is not based on the convoluted arguments of the philosophes, but on a vigorous description of the terrible misfortunes caused by the earthquake. This draws a crucial distinction between physical and moral evil. Another key detail in the earlier fragment is Voltaire’s use of the term “possibility”. I believe that what he is suggesting here is what we would now call “probability”. Voltaire uses two expressions, “possibility in general” and “possibility in relation to real objects”, establishing a clear distinction between them. This allows him to deny that we can have any knowledge of the “possibility in general” of the physical and moral evils relating to earthquakes, which he holds to be natural phenomena, while at the same establishing that we do have another form of knowledge obtained from the examination of the existing facts. I would suggest that this form of knowledge or “possibility in relation to real objects” is what we would today call “probability”, the existence of which requires a basis of empirical knowledge supported by observation. Unlike “probability” and its concomitant, risk, mere “possibility” in the absence of observation can only lead us into uncertainty. Voltaire’s reasoning thoroughly secularized natural disaster, while his position as an eighteenth century Enlightenment thinker means we can link up his ideas with the earlier notions discussed in the preceding chapters, further adding to the genealogy of risk. Thus, we may note that a key feature of the concept of risk was its secularization over a period of centuries. This secularization occurred first where it was uncontroversial, in areas of a practical bent like commercial law and navigation, and then spread to arithmetical calculation and epidemiology. In the case of natural disasters, however, such developments were effectively stymied by the problem of evil, eventually sparking a controversy that would involve some of the most brilliant minds of the eighteenth century. It was then that Voltaire took the field in the name of reason and science. He did so by stating that

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  195 “our idea of possibility in relation to real objects is not formed until after the observation of the existing facts”. Hence, our understanding of any matters relating to a natural disaster can only be based on systematic observation of the facts guided by reason. On this basis, we can infer that an earthquake is a real object, a natural event that can be studied in order to establish the possibility or “probability” of recurrence and of the likely consequences. If Voltaire’s discourse, as I have described it in this section, does not explicitly mention risk, it nevertheless grounds the concept theoretically, and it does so in an area that had until then been forbidden territory. In the eighteenth century, the most basic concepts of human nature, like the problem of evil, and especially physical evil and the cataclysmic manifestations of nature, were still the province of theology and religious belief, which was jealously guarded by the Church (whether Catholic or Protestant) supported by narratives that drew their inspiration from the biblical account of the world. As Auguste Comte explained in his law of the three stages, science historically struggled with religion for pre-eminence first in the field of practical knowledge and only afterwards in the field of the great concepts and problems of human existence. This was certainly the case with the catastrophic destruction wrought by natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake and the course of philosophical and theological debate in the eighteenth century. Something similar would also happen in the following century with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which encroached on perhaps the most sensitive terrain of all – the creation and the origin of life. The difference, however, was that the status of science in society had advanced incomparably by the mid-nineteenth century as compared to the eighteenth. At this point, however, I wish to descend from the abstract heights of thought to the more concrete fields of politics, literature, religious practice, urban planning, public health and prevention. This will also reveal the continuity of the problem I have addressed in the preceding chapters, which is none other than the confrontation between the apocalyptic and the enlightened parties, embodied in this case by two extraordinary antagonists, the Jesuit Father Gabriel Malagrida and the politician Sebastián José de Carvalho y Melo, better known as the Marquis de Pombal.

“Bury the dead and feed the living” The number of deaths caused by the Lisbon earthquake has long been a matter of debate. In a comparative study of all estimates made after the catastrophe, J.A. França112 concluded that the final death toll would lie somewhere between 10,000 and 90,000 and that a figure of around 10,000, 4 per cent of the city’s population, was the most likely. Meanwhile, Kendrick113 estimates a probable figure of 10,000 to 15,000 victims, and the eyewitness Moreira de Mendoça writing shortly after the earthquake put the number

196  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 of deaths on November 1, 1755 itself at some 5,000 people, rising to twice that number by the end of the month. The significant differences in these estimates may be due to the exaggerated figures contained in letters written after the catastrophe by the numerous foreigners present in Lisbon on that fateful day to their families and friends at home. The “official” estimates in the possession of the Marquis de Pombal, Minister of Foreign Affairs and War at the time of the earthquake, put the final death toll at between 6,000 and 8,000. The city’s large English colony suffered seventy-seven fatalities. There were less than twenty deaths among the Portuguese nobility and other distinguished persons, though the death of the Count de Perelada, Spain’s ambassador to Portugal, was a matter of some political importance. There can be no doubt that the common people suffered the most, as panicked crowds filled the streets, converging at the pool and in the Praça do Rossio, which provided the backdrop for the Dantean scenes described in the eyewitness accounts discussed earlier. Voltaire himself paints a fearful picture in various passages of his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, which cannot differ much from what actually happened. The number of buildings destroyed was enormous compared to the relatively small number of likely fatalities. It is estimated that only around 3,000 of the 20,000 houses in Lisbon were still habitable after the earthquake. This apparent disparity is explained above all by the fire that broke out after the tremors and the tsunami. The worst damage befell the centre of the city, where the most important buildings stood, most of which were destroyed. These included the Royal Palace, the Royal Opera House, the Mint, the Arsenal and the Customs House, as well as numerous churches belonging to the Inquisition and the Patriarchate of Lisbon.114 Most of the port installations were lost, and many merchant ships were wrecked or sunk. According to our R. Dynes’ estimates, the English merchants suffered losses totaling some thirty-two million Spanish dollars and the Hamburg merchants a further eight million. The blaze that devastated Lisbon was fanned by a northeasterly wind and could not be put out for six days after the earthquake. It devoured the whole of the lower city, where its centre lay, and many of the houses clustered on the surrounding hillsides. Fires seem to have broken out ­ simultaneously in different places among the ruins including the Carmo and Trinidade convents, and the palace of the Marquis de Lourigal, and then to have spread from the Praça do Rossio towards the Tagus. Kendrick describes the terrible results of the conflagration: It was as savage a gutting of the heart of a city as can be found anywhere in the previous history of Europe, and after this ferocious blaze had done its work the richest and most thickly populated district of Lisbon was a charred desert of smoking ruins with the dead bodies of hundreds of the inhabitants lying beneath the ashes and cinders of their homes.115

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  197 The Portuguese geologist Pereira da Sousa catalogs the damage caused by the earthquake in his great work O Terremoto do 1º Novembro 1755 e um Estudo Demografico, which was published in several volumes between 1919 and 1932. In this work, Pereira measured the earthquake’s intensity using the Mercalli scale, finding that damage was very severe all along the northern shore of the Tagus, where the old city of Lisbon lay, from today’s Praça de Dom Luis and the Cais do Sodré wharf as far as the Artillery Museum, and westwards to the north-south line of the Rúa do Sécula, which runs down from the Praça do Principe Real. The Lisbon earthquake left one story that has been repeated over and over again ever since. The Portuguese king, Dom José, sought refuge in Belém, just a few miles away, accompanied by a group of courtiers who had survived or been away from Lisbon on the day of the cataclysm. He was joined there by his Secretary of State, the Marquis de Pombal, who was immediately granted an audience with the king on November 1, 1755 itself. Asked “What should we do now?” Pombal responded to the monarch with the words “Bury the dead and feed the living, Sire”. Repeated over and over again, his words would become the symbol of a new way of looking at natural disasters that stood in stark contrast with any of the providential, apocalyptic or penitential reactions we have had occasion to observe in other moments and situations. In the earlier earthquakes in Sicily in 1699 and at Lima in 1746, reconstruction work only began after a relatively long interlude of fearful penance. This changed in Lisbon, because enlightened minds like Pombal in the Portuguese court understood that it was necessary to act from the first moment to mitigate the effects of the catastrophe, viewing the earthquake as a natural disaster rather than an overt act of God even while preachers like the Jesuit Father Malagrida were still preaching incendiary sermons in the city’s churches. Mankind could take action because God had nothing to do with the disaster. This was the underlying idea behind both the king’s question and Pombal’s reply. It could be said, then, that this simple exchange legitimized the concept of the “public catastrophe”, which is to say the idea that society must act to prevent or mitigate disasters, meaning sudden events capable of causing large-scale damage and suffering. The story of the Marquis de Pombal’s response to King José I of Portugal is, of course, apocryphal, and it is likely enough that he never actually uttered the famous words. Mark Molesky suggests in The Gulf of Fire116 that the words were actually uttered by somebody else. According to this version, which comes ultimately from Nuno Monteiro’s book D. José: na sombra de Pombal,117 it was actually the Marquis de Alorna, former governor of the Portuguese possessions in India, who was responsible for giving the king this advice. The fact that it later came to be attributed to the Marquis de Pombal only underscores his key role in the events following the Lisbon earthquake, so that he appears as the main protagonist in all subsequent accounts. The earthquake raised the already influential Pombal to the height of his power, for King José I was little inclined to deal with the

198  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 multiple tasks of government himself and his aged and infirm prime minister was entirely overcome by the disaster. The Marquis’ actions on the tragic day of the earthquake are described in some detail in a contemporary document entitled Historia Económica e Política do reinado de D. José. Let me cite a brief fragment: the first day of November 1755 came, for all time a most grievous and memorable date for Lisbon, and what would the Secretaries of State without Portfolio do? (...) What did Sebastián José (the Marquis de Pombal) do? He left his wife and children in the ruins of their palace in the Rua Formosa, he left his stepfather dead among the ruins of the Casa do Carmo; he mounted a mule and went by ways strewn with fallen walls and the bodies of the dead to visit his masters, and heartening them greatly, as none other of their servants did; he remained by the king’s side, issuing a great many orders.118 (Translated from Portuguese) Pombal was tireless in his activity on November 1, 1755. He awoke that day at his home in Lisbon, but he was one of the survivors. He then went directly to Belém on the outskirts of the city to find the king, and he spent most of the following week with him in his carriage, eating and sleeping with him as they went from place to place, and issuing one decree after another, having won Dom José’s confidence. Following the example of the Spanish authorities, he sent a circular containing thirteen questions regarding the earthquake to all the parishes of Portugal in January. The information sought included detailed descriptions of what had happened, the number of victims, the damage sustained by buildings, the effects on watercourses, fountains and wells, the effects of fire, the behaviour of the sea, the appearance of fissures, demographic data and possible food shortages, among other matters. Indeed, the questionnaire represented such a wide-ranging compendium of data for its time that some have seen it as marking the birth of seismology.119 The Marquis de Pombal’s intense activity is described in a work published in Lisbon in 1758 under the title Memorias das principaes Providencias que se derão no Terremoto, que padeceo a Corte de Lisboa no anno de 1775.120 It is often attributed to Amador Patricio de Lisboa, although its author was in fact the poet and philologist Francisco José Freire according to Kendrick. This contemporary work lists the measures or “providencias” adopted under the direction of the Marquis de Pombal according to their nature, and Gonçalo Monteiro has classified them into a total of fourteen categories contained in more than 400 documents. The collection numbers more than four hundred documents beginning on November 1, 1755 itself followed by a large volume issued in the ensuing weeks. They are organized into 14 types of measure or

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  199 ­ providencias”, which the compiler clarifies in a long preamble: to “ prevent plague and hunger, to cure the injured, to encourage the return of those who had fled the city, to punish (severely) all looting and acts of piracy, to aid the Algarve and Setúbal, to call up troops from the provinces, to house the homeless, to reestablish worship in the churches, to provide for homeless nuns, to implement diverse decisions adopted “for the good of the people”, to beseech the intervention of Our Lady, to place the realm under the protection of the Jesuit Saint Francis Borgia, and it is for that purpose, so it is said, that the first orders were issued to begin rebuilding the city.121 (Translated from Portuguese) Taken as a whole, these orders and measures reflect a decision-making model that is comparable, allowing for the lapse of time, with the kind of immediate action that would be taken today in the event of a catastrophe like that which occurred in Lisbon. It is the immediacy, vigor and breadth of Pombal’s reaction that make it extraordinary. Even today, the basic actions required to mitigate the consequences of a natural disaster are to care for the injured, to feed the survivors, to prevent epidemics, to put a stop to looting and maintain public order, to provide shelter for the homeless, and to restore a semblance of normality as quickly as possible. These were precisely the “providencias” ordered by the Marquis de Pombal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, as witnessed by the documents examined by Gonçalo Monteiro. It is hardly surprising, then, that Portugal’s response to the earthquake of 1755 has come to be considered the first time that a major natural disaster was viewed and treated as a public catastrophe. Gonçalo Monteiro makes this point in more theoretical than historical terms. The apparent modernity of Lisbon’s catastrophe of the 18th century tends to favor readings that are inclined to view the disaster as the kind of traumatic experience after which everything looks and becomes different. In short, the Lisbon earthquake was a watershed moment, which created the conditions for change. The resulting aura of modernity is evident in the conflict between providentialist and scientific views of the phenomenon, in the reconstruction of Lisbon, in the enormous expansion of government’s ability to intervene in society and, of course, in Carvalho’s own actions.122 (Translated from Portuguese) Measures of this kind would become standard for later catastrophes. A good example is the action Pombal took to prevent any outbreak of plague. The first challenge was speedily to remove the corpses of the victims, which were collected from the streets and among the ruins. On the day after the earthquake, the Marquis de Pombal ordered, with the consent of the Patriarch of

200  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Lisbon and Cardinal Primate of Portugal, that the barges remaining at the port should be loaded with the bodies of the dead. The Patriarch further granted a dispensation allowing burial without the usual funeral rites and ceremonial of the Catholic Church and the barges were then taken out scuttled. Above and beyond the immediate measures needed to control a crisis that could easily have degenerated into panic and chaos, the Marquis de Pombal also addressed the short and medium term, adopting policies to halt speculation, looting and an exodus of the population. Another urgent business was the provision of temporary shelter for the homeless and the collection of material for making huts. Profiteering in wood, of which there was a shortage, was stopped, and all available supplies were commandeered for Lisbon. Rents of land used for the erection of emergency hutments were controlled. People were encouraged to return, where possible, to their homes, and landlords were not allowed to evict their tenants from surviving dwelling-houses, and those who kept lodgings were not allowed to put up their prices (...). On 29 November a detailed survey of the ruins was ordered to be made so that the extent of the properties destroyed would be on record to prevent future litigation about their exact sites and exact size. The engineers were made to control the disposal of debris, particularly the routes whereby it was to be shifted, a necessary precaution in the hilly city, and to arrange the siting of the rubble dumps and the levelling operations in the squares.123 As reflected in the numerous decisions taken, Pombal’s approach included a very clear idea of what planning is and what it means. It was not merely a matter of rebuilding what the earthquake had destroyed as quickly as possible, but of imagining and designing a city for the future based on a new concept of urban planning. This meant preventing haphazard individual action, making it necessary in the first place to establish the rules of the game and responsibility for oversight. To begin with, a street-by-street survey of the earthquake damage was ordered, and then on December 30, 1755, just over a month after the disaster, all building outside the city limits was prohibited and no construction was allowed within the city itself until the survey could be completed. Shortly afterwards, on February 12, 1756, all new houses erected before the edict of December 30 were ordered to be demolished. The person in charge of realizing the Marquis de Pombal’s plans for the construction of a new Lisbon was Manuel da Maia, High Engineer of the Kingdom. As happened after the Sicilian earthquake of 1695, especially in the reconstruction of the town of Noto, it was once again a military engineer with long experience building fortifications who was responsible for the design of the new urban plan for Lisbon. Fortress engineering had advanced enormously since the sixteenth century, both in Europe due to

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  201 the incessant warfare between its states, and in the Americas, where Spanish and Portuguese hegemony was in a permanent state of defense against the threat from other emerging colonial powers like England, France and Holland, and against pirates. Urban planning on the grand scale in the eighteenth century was, then, the province of engineers rather than architects, who were concerned above all with the construction of buildings. However, engineering had remained an exclusively military discipline since the sixteenth century. With his long military experience, some of it gained in Lisbon itself, Manuel da Maia presented a memorandum or report to the “Regedor das Justiças”, the Duke de Lafões, a cousin of the King, on December 4, 1755, which contained a profusion of ideas for the reconstruction of the Portuguese capital. His contribution is very much in the Portuguese style but, as José Augusto França notes in his book Une Ville de Lumiéres. La Lisbonne de Pombal, it is also related with an idea that would soon take hold throughout Europe. In da Maia’s writings we find, then, a discussion of urbanistic hypotheses, a proposal for architectural models and original observations on matters such as the safety of buildings and hygiene in the streets. His ideas were followed and to them we owe many of the principles that would shape Pombaline Lisbon. In his later years, da Maia (who did not die until 1768) would continue to stand behind the architects of the reconstruction.124 (Translation from French) França presents Maia as a consummate professional, who was both aware of the latest ideas and had the capacity to conceive of urban planning in theoretical terms. The clarity of his ideas reveals a man of a practical and realistic bent, and a conscientious professional familiar with the science of his time. We may also observe that his tastes say much about his imaginative ability.125 (Translation from French) The good sense that França attributed to da Maia shines through in his four proposed solutions for the rebuilding of Lisbon. The breadth of his solutions spanned the full range of possibilities from rebuilding the fallen structures in situ and restoring the streets just as they were before the earthquake to the creation of an entirely new city still on the shores of the Tagus Estuary but at Belém, a location a little to the west of Lisbon that was, and is, much loved by its people. Between these two extremes, he found room for two further proposals, which were to restore the old city while widening its streets, or to rebuild the central district according to a new plan. Interestingly, da Maia criticized the first of his own proposed solutions on

202  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 the grounds that restoring the city without changing its urban design by building on the ruins left by the earthquake would do no more than provide new houses. Meanwhile, a key aspect of this criticism is tacitly risk based, although da Maia does not himself mention the term: this approach (always to build upward) assumes that the recent earthquake does not prefigure another, and that nothing of the kind is to be expected.126 (Translation from French) Da Maia’s response to the natural disaster thus includes risk as a determining factor that cannot be ignored, and he addresses it by proposing a third solution that goes beyond the second, which envisaged only widening the streets. The pivotal idea of this third proposal is that none of the new buildings should be higher than two stories which, together with wider streets, would prevent their walls from collapsing on and killing or maiming ­passers-by. To include risk in urban planning in this way after a major natural disaster was a new departure. As we have seen, risk had already come to be taken into account as a criterion to decide on the site of new towns in Spanish America, and in the case of Noto in Sicily it was a decisive factor in the decision to build a new town some way away from the original site. However, what we now see in Lisbon thanks to da Maia’s ideas of urban design is a much more specific definition of risk and its scientific integration with the activities inherent in architectural and urban design. The focus of the great reconstruction was the “Terreiro do Paço” or Palace Ground, site of the ruined royal palace. In 1759, the Marquis de Pombal approved the plans drawn up by the architect Eugenio dos Santos to build a wide porticoed square flanked by three-story buildings equal in height to those of the surrounding streets and open to the seashore on the fourth side. This is the Praça do Comércio, which was given its name as a tribute to the city’s raison d’être, its port and the merchants of Lisbon, who financed its construction by means of a levy applied to their goods. It remains the heart of the city today, and its buildings then as now housed the customs bureau and other government offices. The square is the principal symbol of the destruction and reconstruction of Lisbon, marked by the imposing equestrian statue of King José I at its centre. Before tragedy struck Lisbon, trouble was already brewing between the monarchy and the Society of Jesus in Brazil, where the Jesuits were firmly rooted, as they were in the neighboring Spanish territory of Paraguay. This conflict would eventually end with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759 on the orders of the Marquis de Pombal, and from Spain in 1767 during the reign of King Carlos III. Meanwhile, the Marquis, by now Secretary of State (or prime minister in modern terms), believed that the presence of the Jesuits was contrary to the interests of the Portuguese empire. The Lisbon earthquake was the epicentre of this clash.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  203 On a Sunday evening in May 1761, an elderly Jesuit of Italian origin was executed by garrote in the Praça do Rossío. This was Father Gabriel Malagrida, who was seventy-two years old and had spent almost the whole of his Church career in the Portuguese dominion of Brazil, where he had first arrived in 1721, and then at court in Lisbon, capital of the empire. For a time, he was even a favourite of the king, but now he was accused of heresy and faced trial by the Inquisition in an auto-da-fé. During his long stay in Brazil, he had acquired an aura of sainthood, which accompanied him on his return to Portugal in 1749 and gained him widespread popular acclaim. Molesky provides the following anecdotal account of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding his arrival at court: Hailed as a “living saint” for his legendary missions among the selvagens (as well as his many reputed miracles), he was received at the great Riverside Palace by His Most Faithful Majesty, the aging, half-paralyzed João V, on his knees. “Do not call me king,” the star-struck monarch implored his famous visitor. “Call me sinner.”127 As of that moment he became a powerful figure, though he would return to Brazil in 1751. On his return to Portugal in 1754 at the request of the queen mother María Ana de Austria he would remain close to the House of Bragança dynasty, which had reigned since the kingdom regained its ­ ­independence from Spain in 1640. After the Lisbon earthquake, Father Malagrida began preaching inflammatory sermons and surrounded himself with a legion of devoted followers. These sermons were soon published as a compendium under the title Juízo da verdadera causa do Terramoto que padeceu a Corte de Lisboa no primeiro de novembro de 1755, which appeared in 1756. Malagrida began to develop the argument of the “true cause”, which could be none other than “os nossos intoleráveis pecados” (“our intolerable sins”), at the same time belaboring a long list of other refutable causes, almost all of them drawn from contemporary science, including “vapors”, “exhalations”, “phenomena”, “contingencies” and “natural causes”. Even more than other preachers, Malagrida was acutely aware of the rise of science in his time, and he believed that the true enemy were not the Protestants and heretics, but the scientists and all who would argue that earthquakes were produced by natural causes. The following passage offers a taste of his preaching: You must then know, Lisbon, that the only destroyers of so many houses and palaces, the wreckers of so many churches and monasteries, the slayers of so many of your inhabitants, the fires that have devoured so many treasures, the [tremors] that keep [the earth] from regaining its natural solidity are not comets, nor yet stars, or vapors or exhalations, they are not phenomena, they are not contingencies or natural causes; they are solely are own intolerable sins.128 (Translated from Portuguese)

204  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 In another passage, Malagrida launches an angry diatribe against those he dubs “politicians”, among them, although not mentioned by name, the Marquis de Pombal, who had taken such determined action to ensure a speedy reaction to address and mitigate the effects of the catastrophe. Malagrida insinuates that these people are “atheists”, worse even than the ­Protestants,129 Muslims or Jews, who may cling to a false religion but ­nonetheless believe that the sole cause of earthquakes is divine wrath. Let not those who affirm that they [disasters] are the product of natural causes say that this holy orator, bound as he is by the zeal of divine love, rails only against sin as the origin of all the calamities endured by men, and that he endeavors only to convince those ardent spirits, that he seeks only to terrify those same men and to increase their affliction with the threat of wrath like a drawn sword; because it is true that, had I not been censured and prevented from saying what I believe about these politicians, I would have called them atheists; because this is a truth known even to the Gentiles… that there is no other cause for earthquakes than divine indignation, which for this reason they called Vim Divina.130 (Translated from Portuguese) Malagrida also uses the example of the sinful city, in this case Lisbon, drawing a stark comparison between the crowds drawn into the streets and squares by any kind of spectacle and the empty churches: Plays, music, the most immodest dances, the most obscene comedies, diversions, bullfights drew such crowds as to fill the streets and squares; but not a soul appeared in the churches, on the Holy Feasts, in the sermons, in the apostolic missions, however fervent. It was mortifying to see even persons of celebrated wisdom, eloquence and virtue attend those profane spectacles.131 (Translated from Portuguese) At the same time, Malagrida directed harsh words at the Portuguese court, which he accused of falling off from the devotion and penitence shown in other cities. I have heard it said that the people of those cities where the destruction was not so great did, and still do, marvels with their penitence, bare feet, crosses, flagellation, fasting on bread and water and infinite other mortifications, but here, where all around is ruination and death, we see nothing, or almost nothing, of such righteous and indispensible disciplines, so that other cities wonder at the scant demonstrations of public penitence made by the Court of Lisbon.132 (Translated from Portuguese)

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  205 Malagrida’s words rang out in the churches of Lisbon at the same time as Pombal labored to heal the mangled city and begin its reconstruction. However, the Jesuit divine saw this endeavor merely as an affront to his exhortations to penitence. The exertions and efforts of the people of Lisbon should not be wasted on improvising immediate shelter and afterwards rebuilding their houses, but as in other cities, according to Malagrida, should be directed entirely towards the public exhibition of repentance, public penitence and mortification. Any behaviour that might indicate care, protection, rescue or precaution was condemned in the strongest possible terms by the Jesuit zealot as signifying the belief that the earthquake was not a manifestation of God’s will. Oh, if I might but see such determination and fervor in this penitence as I see in the erection of tents and dwellings, as if he who lives in the open fields away from the houses were not under the protection of the Lord and free from any danger!133 (Translated from Portuguese) Malagrida was immediately banished to Setúbal upon the publication of his sermons by an order issued, significantly, on November 1, 1756. What Gonçalo Monteiro has called “devout terror” had spread throughout the city of Lisbon, which did not lack pulpits from which to preach the language of dread. The Marquis de Pombal himself had asked the Patriarch of Lisbon to put a stop to the preaching of alarmist sermons that blamed the sinful city of Lisbon for the earthquake, but dismal prophesies of woe and disaster nevertheless abounded, especially as the first anniversary of the catastrophe approached. Gonçalo Monteiro describes the atmosphere in Lisbon in the months and years after the cataclysm. The years following the earthquake saw the publication of numerous works of all kinds calling for penitence, stoking the fears of the population and prophesying further tremors that would be far stronger than the moderate aftershocks felt since November 1. The tone from the pulpits was little different. This terror had far-reaching effects on the ordinary life of the city, through which legions of penitents regularly marched bearing the external signs of their faith proper to the Baroque culture of the age, which had by this time taken hold of the public imagination.134 (Translated from Portuguese) The confrontation epitomized by the figures of Pombal and Malagrida came to a head after an attempt on the life of the king. On the night of September 3, 1758, the carriage in which Dom José I was returning to his residence in Belém was attacked by three men. They fired several shots, killing the coachman and seriously wounding both the king and his attendant. The attack was immediately linked to a conspiracy of nobles against the king

206  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and the Marquis de Pombal. The account given in a report sent to London by a British diplomat on September 13 differs markedly from what might be called the “official” version of events, however. It seems that the king was on his way to a tryst with his lover accompanied by the court favourite Pedro Teixeira. The pair usually went in two carriages with the king in the first and Teixeira in the second. The masked riders who were lying in wait allowed the first carriage to pass, assuming that the king would be riding in it, and fired only on the second. On this occasion, however, the king and his attendant were together, and both were hit. The report concludes that the true target of the attack was not the king but his attendant and favourite Pedro Teixeira, so that the attempt could be considered rather a settling of scores with Teixeira or an act of protest on the part of aristocrats resentful of the enormous power wielded by the Marquis de Pombal as the king’s prime minister, who had sought to manifest their opposition to the government of the day by assassinating somebody close to the royal family. In any event, incident was seen as a conspiracy and several high-ranking nobles including the Duke de Aveiro and his son were eventually arrested some four months after the assassination attempt. On January 13, 1759 six nobles, mainly from the House of Távora, and four commoners were publicly executed opposite the royal palace in Belém. A huge crowd gathered at the execution ground to watch what Paice calls “The most sensational event since the earthquake”.135 The consequences of the assassination attempt would go beyond the original core group of nobles opposed to the Marquis de Pombal, however. The clash between the interests of the Portuguese monarchy and the activities of the Society of Jesus in Brazil focused persecution on the Jesuits too, and in particular on Father Gabriel Malagrida, who was thrown into prison on January 11, 1759. On September 3, 1759, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, and the ensuing rupture between the kingdom and the Holy See sealed Malagrida’s fate. He was placed under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. His trial mingled political interests, his own dementia, brought on no doubt by his advanced age and time in prison, and the delusions of his interrogators, who accused him of heresy. In the Inquisitors’ own words: accused of the crime of heresy, for affirming, arguing, writing and defending propositions and doctrines opposed to the true dogmas and doctrines proposed and taught by the Holy Mother Church of Rome.136 (Translated from Portuguese) On September 20, 1761 Malagrida was condemned: to be led, bound hand and foot and preceded by a crier, to the Praça do Rossío and there put to death by garrote, whereafter his remains shall be burned and reduced to dust and ashes.137 (Translated from Portuguese)

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  207 The sentence was carried out on the evening of the same day in an auto-da-fe attended by the king himself and the whole of the court, doubtless including the Marquis de Pombal himself. Molesky describes the execution as follows: he was denounced as heretic and a traitor, stripped of his priestly functions, and, in the macabre tradition of the Inquisição, forced to don a pointed cardboard miter and a grey linen sack adorned with demons and bright red flames. His hands bound behind him, a mordaça (or gag) placed in his mouth, he began his final journey through the streets of the capital accompanied by a pair of Benedictine monks, two attendants, and over fifty fellow prisoners of the regime.138 [My translation from Spanish] In spite of the degrading theatre of the Inquisition’s autos-da-fé, which were designed primarily to instill fear in the hearts of the people, the confrontation between the apocalyptic party and the enlightened supporters of science emerges once again in this scene. The great paradox was that the Inquisition itself was on the side of the Enlightenment and its most celebrated representative in Portugal, the Marquis de Pombal, instigator of the proceedings, while the victim was none other than Gabriel Malagrida, the leading figure of the apocalyptic (and therefore religious) party. The only apparent reaction to the execution of the Jesuit preacher came from the crowd who always attended spectacles of this kind. The condemned man was allowed to say a few brief words seeking the king’s pardon, but: It was precisely at this moment, according to one eyewitness, that the night sky cleaved apart and a radiant light illuminated the square for several minutes as if it were day causing many of the astonished spectators to cry out “Milagre! ... Milagre!” (Miracle! ... Miracle!”). Others claimed that the heavenly rays had only illuminated the prisoner’s pale face. Despite the determined efforts of Pombal to demonize the old man, many in the crowd still considered him a saint.139 This supposed miracle shows that many still believed Malagrida’s providentialist, apocalyptic message and saw the execution as the martyrdom of a saint. However, the garrote was soon tightened around the condemned man’s neck, strangling the life out of him. His corpse was laid out on the scaffold, covered with wood and burned to ashes, which were then thrown into the Tagus to wash away the memory of the heretic. News of the execution soon spread beyond Portugal, producing a range of reactions from horror among the Jesuits to elation among their opponents. It was once again Voltaire who would point out the intolerance of the two opposing parties. “Thus”, he wrote, “was the excess of the ridiculous and the absurd joined to the excess of horror”.140

208  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 That the final act in the transcendental historical episode that began with the earthquake of November 1, 1755 should have been an auto-da-fé is somehow symbolic. The legendary confrontation between the Marquis de Pombal and Malagrida thus marked the boundary of the historical change wrought by the Lisbon catastrophe. The paradox of this denouement is that it should have been the Inquisition, that staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy, which took the lead apparently on the side of reason. Clearly Pombal had, with the support of the Portuguese monarchy, leveraged the obscure affair of the attempt on the king’s life and other alleged conspiracies so as to convert the Holy Office into his instrument after the rupture with Rome and the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom. Let us, then, examine the reality of events in order to essay a possible interpretation. The ideological battle that erupted after the Lisbon earthquake was preceded by a period of increasingly intense scientific, philosophical and theological debate in Europe, which became all the more heated after the tragedy struck. In the case of Portugal, meanwhile, we may also note the rivalry between the imperial colony in southern Brazil and the Jesuit missionaries present in the region. The actions and positions adopted by Pombal and Malagrida in the metropolis itself were, however, a direct consequence of the earthquake and the attachment of these two adversaries to the opposing belief systems that I have here called the “apocalyptic” and the “enlightened” worldviews. From the moment of the disaster, a fierce ideological struggle unfolded in which each of the antagonists would play his cards in his own preferred historical milieu. In Malagrida’s case this meant the pulpits, which allowed him to leverage the enormous influence of the Society of Jesus, in all probability in league with one or more of the conspiracies hatched by the enemies of the Marquis de Pombal. The Marquis, meanwhile, took up the rebuilding of Lisbon with enormous energy, which allowed him to use the levers of absolute power placed in his hands by King José I with ever greater freedom. The only possible outcome was Malagrida’s eventual defeat by his immensely powerful enemy. It was in this inquisitorial atmosphere that Voltaire would place the protagonists of his novel Candide, ou le Optimisme (1759), the writer’s most popular work and the fruit of the same thinking that inspired his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. The novel, however, is full of adventure and highly satirical in its tone and intention. As in the Poem, the target of Voltaire’s criticisms and ridicule is the optimism that lies at the root of Leibniz’s Théodicée and Pope’s Essay on Man. However, he also makes the Inquisition and the Jesuits the butt of his satirical attacks. Candide, the novel’s protagonist, comes to Lisbon with his tutor Dr. Pangloss after being shipwrecked in a storm. As soon as he arrives an earthquake occurs: Scarcely had they reached the city, lamenting the death of their benefactor, when they felt the earth tremble under their feet. The sea swelled and foamed in the harbour, and beat to pieces the vessels riding

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  209 at anchor. Whirlwinds of fire and ashes covered the streets and public places; houses fell, roofs were flung upon the pavements, and the pavements were scattered. Thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins....141 Master and pupil then aid in the work of succoring the victims and Pangloss is very much to the fore offering consolation. Voltaire lampoons the optimists through Pangloss’ words of solace to the suffering citizens of Lisbon: “For”, said he, “all that is, is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right”.142 Fatally, Pangloss’ words are overheard by a “familiar”, an agent of the Inquisition, who replies: Apparently, then, sir, you do not believe in original sin; for if all is for the best there has then been neither Fall nor punishment.143 Candide and Pangloss are eventually arrested and thrown into prison by the Inquisition to await their auto-da-fé, Voltaire relates the circumstances so: After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.144 Candide is scourged in the auto-da-fé and Pangloss is hanged, but on the same day the earth again rumbled and shook according to Voiltaire, sardonic as ever. Cowed and bruised after his beating, Candide exclaims, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”145 Candide is perhaps the most celebrated expression of the change of attitudes that occurred when the thinkers of the age turned their backs on the enlightened optimism proclaimed by Leibniz. Voltaire despises “candour” and embraces doubt, but he remained an empiricist, for whom the facts came first and the proximate experience of an actual evil would always prevail over the kind of theoretical speculation practiced by those he contemptuously brands “philosophers”. The Lisbon earthquake was key to Voltaire’s position, the harbinger of a change in the times that would eventually take its full shape in nineteenth century modernity, when the western world would develop a culture that was founded on progress but was at the same time prey to its dark side in the form of poverty, crime,

210  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 natural disasters, catastrophes and epidemics. These situations would become inseparable from the concept of risk and from the fear that appears ever more strongly in the art, literature, journalism, theatre and science of the Industrial Age.

Public catastrophe and the problem of evil In the previous section, I used the figures of the Marquis de Pombal, Father Malagrida and once again Voltaire to make three sketches of events as they happened and as they were imagined after the Lisbon earthquake. A different worldview emerges in each case – Pombal’s heralds modernity and the triumph of reason; Malagrida’s exalts the old order of religion in a world governed by the divine will; and Voltaire’s is that of a skeptical rationalist, drawing attention to the contradictions of progress made evident by the execution of the Jesuit firebrand. Voltaire foresaw that scientific, industrial and technological development would eventually show its most terrible face, as at last it did in the twentieth century with World War I, the Holocaust and the detonation of the two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By linking up these three conceptions of the world, we will obtain a panorama of the historic change that began with the Lisbon earthquake, which removed evil from the sphere of religion or, to put it more precisely, which ended the automatic attribution of divine purpose to natural disaster. This was, of course, the basic concept of the apocalyptic catastrophism that was so clearly espoused by the Jesuit Malagrida in his sermons. Meanwhile, the position that physical evil belongs to the natural order created by God as a part of the best of all possible worlds is the fundamental conception that prevailed among the Enlightenment thinkers influenced by Leibniz and Pope, among them Rousseau himself. Finally, we come to the radical empiricism of Voltaire, who believed that evil, as he himself wrote, “is here on Earth”, where the presence of God is to say the least doubtful. In the end, the Lisbon earthquake and its consequences expelled apocalyptic thinking from the realm of nature and ushered in the secularism of the Enlightenment. This process emerged with enormous vigor in the Marquis de Pombal’s Lisbon, and implicit in it was the determination to intervene immediately in catastrophes, which was nothing new but now became unstoppable (among other reasons thanks to the rogue assistance of the Inquisition). This is the interpretation that we might make today of the famous words, “Sire, bury the dead and feed the living”, apocryphally attributed to the Marquis de Pombal. He may never have said them, but he certainly acted on them. The concept of “public catastrophe” emerged only in recent times and it did not explicitly include any notion of risk, mitigation or vulnerability until the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the concepts of mitigation, risk and prevention were implicitly present long before in the immediate reactions after the Lisbon earthquake and in the plans drawn up for the reconstruction of the city. Never before had so

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  211 many new ideas and measures come together with such force to address a cataclysm from the perspective of reason and science. The ensuing transformation of natural disaster into public catastrophe following the Lisbon earthquake implicitly involved the notion of risk. This was not the result of any great innovation, since the precise terminology denoting the concept of risk had already taken firm root and was widely used in the European languages by the mid-eighteenth century, especially in the actuarial science of the time. As we have seen in the course of this history, the notion of risk became established in different activities at different times. In the eighteenth century, however, risk had still hardly penetrated ideas about natural disasters, and if I have referred earlier to the theological transcendence of causal explanations of nature as one of the reasons for this absence, I wish now to stress that Europe, and especially western Europe, had actually suffered very few earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in the previous centuries. Even so, the eruption of Mount Etna in 1663 and the Sicilian earthquake of 1695 were important precedents. As we have already seen, the notion of risk may be observed in the reactions of the authorities and of the architects responsible for rebuilding, and the Spanish word riesgo appears in contemporary documents. In the Americas too, where natural disasters like hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes were much more frequent and had had a deep impact on the minds of conquistadors, navigators, missionaries, explorers and colonists alike, risk was commonly taken into account in navigation, in the planning of new settlements and in the reconstruction of towns affected by disasters of one sort or another. The historical context at the time of the Lisbon earthquake was very different, however. In the first place, Lisbon was one of Europe’s leading cities and a major port handling trade with the colonies and it was home to a large foreign population of mainly British merchants, who were close to the ideas of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The enormous development of the press and ever better communications ensured a rapid flow of information from correspondents between different countries. From a political standpoint, the ideas of the Enlightenment had reached Portugal, where they were embodied in the all-powerful figure of the Marquis de Pombal, who was loathed by many in the Portuguese aristocracy and by the Jesuits. The earthquake and the Marquis’ own prompt reaction had raised him to the zenith of his power as the prime minister of King José I. Pombal thus held sway over everything that happened both in Lisbon and beyond. He defined the “public catastrophe” with his actions, orders and plans, and it is because of this that he must be considered the protagonist of these events, above and beyond the symbolism of his apocryphally famous injunction to “feed the living”. Mid-eighteenth-century Europe was a hotbed of new ideas, debates and theories, and the progress of science brought about by the Enlightenment provided the ideal conditions for a reassessment of natural disasters under the influence of earlier ideas about

212  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 geology, discrediting the apocalyptic interpretations of the religious ­providentialists which had hitherto prevailed. What is interesting about this case, is that the clash between the apocalyptic and enlightened parties had never before been so visibly, indeed theatrically, expressed as it was by the followers of religion in the streets and pulpits of Lisbon and by the rationalists in letters, tracts, pamphlets, poems and novellas. I have endeavored to describe this development in the preceding sections, because I believe that the public exhibition of this historically transcendental debate contributed directly to the success of the enlightened party and the defeat of their apocalyptic antagonists, although it must be said that the execution of Malagrida made a most unedifying finale. The recognition that the Lisbon earthquake was a matter of public emergency rather than divine intervention represents a radical change in the understanding of natural disasters, given that these views of the event were diametrically opposed to each other. We assume today as a matter of course that disasters can be foreseen and prepared for, and that immediate intervention is needed in the event of a catastrophe to mitigate its effects and ensure effective rebuilding. This understanding of natural disaster and of how to deal with a catastrophe was almost unimaginable in 1755, however. It took the accumulation of all the circumstances I have described to bring about the necessary change of mentality, and it can only be said that it was an extraordinary lesson for humanity. Since the great earthquake, the pragmatic approach that took shape in the devastated ruins of the Portuguese capital has grown into a vast apparatus of disaster prevention and intervention measures designed to deal with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, hurricanes, tidal waves, wildfires, nuclear accidents, shipwrecks, plane and train crashes, wars, famines and all kinds of other catastrophic events capable of causing widespread death and destruction which might afflict a community, or even an entire nation, from time to time. Over time, natural disasters and their catastrophic consequences have become global events thanks to the mass media, which nowadays broadcast information and images of any such event almost immediately. As a result, catastrophes run their course one after another before our very eyes on television and online, sometimes giving the impression that catastrophe is what defines the condition of the world. Yet, we may ask whether our world is actually so catastrophic. This is today the key question, just as the questions in 1755 were “Why should God punish us so?” and “How can a God capable of causing such evil exist?” In view of the historical events and debates described here, and in today’s world, it would seem that it is the experience and problem of evil that disturb us, but we should not forget that it all began in Lisbon. The Marquis de Pombal’s famous words are, perhaps, the best-known testimony left by the Lisbon earthquake along with the involvement of Voltaire and Rousseau in the ensuing debate, which need not surprise us since the two were the foremost thinkers of Enlightenment Europe. The debate

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  213 itself was not particularly polemical, in part because Voltaire did not immediately reply to Rousseau’s criticism of his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, which sparked the controversy, and it is highly unlikely that Rousseau ever saw the response that Voltaire finally published some years later in an extensive collection of his writings. The tone of their correspondence reflects a certain mutual respect, which we know was more intense on Rousseau’s part than vice versa. Voltaire felt a degree of contempt for Rousseau and it is believed that he was the author of the pamphlet Sentiment des Citoyens published in 1765, in which he accused Rousseau of abandoning his six children in orphanages after their birth. This was of course entirely true though it placed the author of Emile in a very delicate position. Rousseau began to compile documentation for his autobiographical Confessions as a means of clearing his conscience after this ugly side of his life became public knowledge. Be this as it may, relations between the two writers worsened sharply after their polemics over Voltaire’s Poem and Candide. Nevertheless, I believe that their immediate reactions to the death, suffering and destruction caused by the earthquake and the destruction of such a large city as Lisbon cannot have been very different, and in neither case would it have been tainted by any hint of catastrophism. Even so, there are notable differences between the two, as an examination of their writings will show. The most significant of these concern the problem of evil, in my opinion. To begin with, we need to recognize that both Rousseau and Voltaire were instrumental in releasing attitudes to the suffering caused by natural disaster from the dominion of divine providence. In doing so, they simultaneously removed the problem of evil from the exclusive sphere of ­religion, thereby raising the great problem of modernity: evil and its origin. This was a key question in nineteenth-century debates of fundamental issues like slavery, the poverty inherent in industrial capitalism, the dominion of the machine over the individual, epidemics and imperialism. In the twentieth century, meanwhile, the same fundamental debate arose again in the face of the slaughter caused by two world wars and countless regional conflicts, the extermination of millions as a result of genocide and crimes against humanity, the development of atomic weapons and accidents at nuclear plants, the new epidemics of AIDS and Ebola, hunger and underdevelopment, totalitarianism and tyranny. An initial divide between the two thinkers may be observed with regard to the question of evil and its origins, which was of such importance to modern society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rift appears first in Rousseau’s unease upon reading Voltaire’s Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, which, he confesses, left him profoundly disconsolate. Still clinging to his eighteenth century optimism, he points to the teachings of Pope, remarking that he misses any gentle words in the poem that might help him regain composure in the face of such terrible devastation. He objects, then, not so much to the harshness of Voltaire’s tone as to his hopelessness. This is the cornerstone of his position

214  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 that divine providence is indeed good and does offer solace, while the evil such events reveal so powerfully comes from nature, where “all is well” to borrow Pope’s famous phrase. Hence, any evil that a natural disaster might occasion can only be a moral evil caused by man and not by providence through nature. Nature is neutral. Susan Neiman explains this in the ­following terms in her book Evil in Modern Thought: It was a curious phenomenon. Here Rousseau began to demarcate a sphere of natural accident that is neutral: disaster has no moral worth whatsoever and need have no negative effects. The latter were the result solely of human failure. On the other hand, this was the beginning of a modern distinction between natural and moral evil. It is crucial to such a distinction that natural evils have no inherent significance. They are neither punishment nor sign but part of an order that is, literally meaningless. On the other hand, the distinction was fed by archaic appeals to guilt that end in making even those evils caused by natural disaster somehow or other our fault –and hence having meaning after all. The traditional assumption that there must be a connection between sin and suffering was thereby both cancelled and preserved. It should come as no surprise that Rousseau’s characteristic focus on human contributions to our own suffering appeared in orthodox religious contexts. Hence his remarks about Lisbon remained more traditional than Voltaire’s. While Rousseau underlined the modern separation between natural and moral evil, he did so in a way that seemed to blame us for both. And the only positive suggestion he offered for alleviating either form of evil was a return to a society with more primitive architecture.146 Though he saw nature as neutral, Rousseau was unable to find or define any fault or origin of evil outside of it. According to Susan Neiman, ­Rousseau’s contribution appears to converge with the religious context, insofar as there seems to be a connection between his inculpation of society and the idea of punishment inherent in the ecclesiastical response to disaster, especially as seen in Lisbon. Rousseau addresses this issue directly in an approximation to the concept of risk. The terrible damage caused by the earthquake would not have occurred if there had not been “twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories” in the city, as Rousseau wrote in his letter to Voltaire. Likewise, there would have been fewer victims if the people of Lisbon had not been overcome by their greed for goods: “How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take – one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money?” The inhabitants of Lisbon were therefore responsible for their own sufferings, because they had built such a city and because they would not leave it without their goods. In this light, Neiman sees Rousseau’s reaction as much more traditional because, in raising the question of evil in relation to the Lisbon earthquake, he includes his idea that society corrupts the individual. It is in society, then, where the

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  215 origin of evil lies, and it is this which makes it necessary to rebuild what Neiman sees as a more primitive society and to return to good, which unquestionably exists and which must be providential according to Rousseau. This explains his preference for Pope, who offers him solace. It could also be said that the utopian dimension of Rousseau’s ideas had a powerful influence on his reaction to the Lisbon disaster. Faced with the panorama of destruction visited upon Lisbon, Rousseau suggests that no evil would have occurred if the city had not existed, a view that is in accord with his aversion for urban life, one of the distinguishing features of his thought. As he wrote in Emile, “Cities are the abyss of the human species”.147 In contrast, the idyllic representation of the free man can only be understood in the pristine purity of nature unsullied by society. The Rousseauan longing for a pastoral idyll is not yet dead. Twentiethcentury revivals of utopian practice have fled the city gates and sought a haven in the bosom of nature. In the end the agrarian and pastoral nostalgia of Jean-Jacques and his followers is of interest principally for the history of small, escapist ventures.148 This argument is made by Frank and Fritzie Manuel in their excellent book Utopian Thought in the Western World, in which they include Rousseau among the great utopian thinkers, as the Frenchman’s work includes a wealth of Arcadian ideas, although none of his works is expressly styled a “Utopia”. Rousseau’s eupsychian149 legacy is the fantasy of a perfectly autonomous, fulfilled “I” for everyman, the wholeness of a communal “I” that is an organic unity, and the integration of the entire individual “I” with the communal “I” with hardly a ripple on either surface. The amalgamation was achieved in rhetoric and philosophical argument not only in Rousseau but in those who came after him. Hegel and Marx150 Rousseau’s utopia calls for humankind, which has been corrupted by society, to return to a primitive state of nature. However, this can only happen when the free “communal” individual is reborn through a “social contract”, allowing his integration into a community that will once again be “natural”. Nature, which is the work of divine providence, is the origin of all good, and society is the origin of evil. In his letter to Voltaire, Rousseau wrote: I do not see how one can search for the source of moral evil anywhere but in man’s freedom and perfection – which are also his corruption. As for our physical pains: if sensate and impassible matter is, as I think, a contradiction in terms, then pains are inevitable in any world of

216  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 which man forms a part – and the question then becomes not “why is man not perfectly happy” but ‘why does he exist at all?” Moreover, I think I have shown that most of our physical pains, except for death – which is hardly painful, except for the preparations that precede it – are also our own work.151 Evil, whether physical or moral, can only be attributed to “corrupt man” in Rousseau’s own words, and the Lisbon disaster would be the most important real case to which he would apply his moral justice, absolving nature and blaming society. Rousseau’s utopian ideal is born out of the recognition of nature as a primitive state in which good and with it the free “I” are together realized. This is the mythical light in which Rousseau observes the world, identifying evil and its origin, which is society. The utopian roots of Rousseau’s thought lie in this communal fantasy, which can only be achieved through the freedom of a primitive nature in which the individual “I” becomes part of the collective “I”. This melancholy spiral was fixed in Rousseau’s mind throughout his lifetime and it appears in his Confessions, which he wrote when he fell away from it. In this work, he would cast his mind back to the far off days when he lived in the village of Bossey just a few miles from Geneva. He was twelve years old when he went there to live with his cousin Abraham Bernard at the home of the Calvinist minister Lambercier, and years later he would recall the time he spent there between 1722 and 1724 in the following terms: The simplicity of this rural life was of infinite advantage in opening my heart to the reception of true friendship. The sentiments I had hitherto formed on this subject were extremely elevated, but altogether imaginary. The habit of living in this peaceful manner soon united me t­ enderly to my cousin Bernard; my affection was more ardent than that I had felt for my brother, nor has time ever been able to efface it (...). The manner in which I passed my time at Bossey was so agreeable to my disposition, that it only required a longer duration absolutely to have fixed my ­character, (...) Everything contributed to strengthen those propensities which nature had implanted in my breast, and during the two years I was neither the victim nor witness of any violent emotions.152 Rousseau defers his melancholy for a while when he a describes this time in his life, which he recalls in terms of the happiness that comes from a simple, free, sensitive and peaceful existence in the bosom of an idyllic nature identified with the village of Bossey. As he describes it, his stay there forged practically his entire character. Rousseau must, then, have built for himself over the course of time a mythical narrative of the melancholy which the memory of his experiences in the Swiss village evoked in his mind. In Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholy I, the angel and putto stare out of the picture where the cause of their melancholy lies, which can therefore

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  217 only be the product of their imagination. In the same way, Rousseau often looked back in his imagination to the two years he spent in Bossey over the course of his life, which had become the locus of his melancholy and the source of a myth capable of inspiring his utopia. This myth only ripened fully when it became the source and foundation of a utopia that would replicate itself over more than two centuries as it burgeoned into one of the most influential ideas of modern thought. It is worth stopping to consider how Rousseau transmuted into pure utopia the melancholy that his memories of this stage of his childhood and adolescence evoked in him. In his Dialogues, a posthumous text that was only published in 1782 in London, he writes: The inhabitants of that ideal world of which I speak are fortunate to be maintained by nature, to which they are more closely bound, in that favorable idea of her that she has instilled in all of us, and for that reason alone their soul retains always its original character. Primitive passions, which all tend directly to our happiness, only concern us with objects related to them, and having no principle other than self-love, are all by nature affectionate and pleasant.153 According to Rousseau, the natural and original state of mankind cannot be maintained, because society creates so many obstacles as to make the very existence of such a state impossible. Hence, the individual can only resist. However, if people were to combine and harness their collective strength, they would find a new form of association that would integrate the individual with the communal “I”. This is Rousseau’s “social contract”, which he formulates in the following terms: The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still  obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.’ This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.154 Franz and Fritzie Manuel offer an admirable insight into the influence of Rousseau’s utopian myth on the genealogy of ideas that has come down to us today as part of a revolutionary, critical school of thought that is extraordinarily negative in its description and evaluation of the past history and contemporary condition of our world. Rousseau’s utopian “I” has been embraced by a branch of psychology and has been spread about in multiple versions; the communal “I” is a political dogma taught over half the globe; and their fusion is part of a world revolutionary credo. (...) and the eighteenth century developed

218  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 a magnificent vocabulary for portraying the anti-utopia of contemporary civilization, to which the utopia offered an alternative. Others had preceded Rousseau in analysing the mal moral; but once he spoke, the minor prophets who succeeded him could not free themselves from his spell. His words reverberate in documents as diverse as the writings of Kant and the youthful correspondent of Babeuf, not to speak of Dom Deschamps, Restif de la Bretonne, the Marquis de Sade, Mercier, William Godwin and Marx. After two hundred years the Rousseauan anti-utopia has lost nothing of its intensity and pungent irony.155 Utopia and anti-utopia are theoretical creations used by Rousseau to represent good and evil, and they have lasted to the present day. In the context of the present work, and in particular given the stance I have adopted to study the Lisbon earthquake and its consequences, I propose that both creations be treated as forming Rousseau’s vision and evaluation of the disaster as expressed in the position he afterwards took, which in this case is so clearly contrary to that of Voltaire. Rousseau’s utopia was not born out of Lisbon, but Lisbon was the first occasion on which he deployed the idea to interpret an event that shook the peoples of contemporary Europe. This fact in itself magnifies the historical significance of the Lisbon earthquake, because it was not just the first modern catastrophe but also the first time that a catastrophe was considered from a modern standpoint with regard to the problem of evil. In the first place, evil is seen as either physical or moral, but it is not a divine punishment and its causality is not providential. Physical evils, and especially those caused by natural disasters, are a part of nature and should properly be the object of scientific study. So far Voltaire and Rousseau could be said to concur, but if we examine their arguments further, we find a fundamental divergence, which could be considered the great ideological split in modern society. Rousseau sees society as the root cause of the evil that afflicts humankind, while Voltaire affirms that the nature of evil is unknown. Rousseau contrasts the evil that he finds in society with the good that is the utopian communal “I”, but Voltaire has no utopia to offer. This he states clearly in the preface to his Poem on the Lisbon disaster, in which he again expresses himself in the third person: He admits, then, along with everybody else that there is evil here on earth, as well as good; he admits that no philosopher has ever been able to explain the origin of moral or physical evil; he admits that Bayle, the greatest dialectician who has ever written, has learned only to doubt, and that he wrestles with himself; he admits that there is as much weakness in the lights of man as miseries in his life.156 (Translated from Spanish) The ability to doubt, a direct factual approach and self-criticism are the virtues that Voltaire attributes to Bayle while at the same time making them

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  219 his own. Evil exists and is all around us, but we do not know what it is. We experience it, of course, and often enough we may observe it in all its stark reality. We are aware of its consequences, and we recognize its powerful presence, but its ontology, the nature of its being, escapes us. Voltaire is a thinker of both the light and the darkness, like Goya in his paintings, enlightened at first but ever more pessimistic thereafter. He rejects the principle that “all is for the best” and satirizes the optimists. However, his pessimism about the world is not the fruit of melancholy and nor is it in any sense mythical, but rather it is essentially empirical. This duality, at times a sharp clash, provides a basis for comparison between Voltaire and Rousseau, but at the same time it allows us, as we trace the genealogy of modern ideas, to observe the split between the mythical and the empirical, which defines the key ideological conflict of our age. Among the events that occurred after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, one incident stands out that is symbolic, from today’s perspective, of the moral texture of both Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s outlook and reactions to the disaster and its aftermath. This was the execution of Father Gabriel Malagrida in an auto-da-fé staged by the Portuguese Inquisition, which was controlled by the Marquis de Pombal, an episode that reveals the profound contradiction lurking beneath the “progressive” ideals of the time, allowing an enlightened government to use an institution which, more than any other at the time, stood for “reactionary” dogma. Evil means were thus found necessary to achieve a higher end, and the hapless Father Malagrida was sent to his death on charges trumped up by the Inquisitors, the very incarnation of evil. How did Voltaire and Rousseau view this execution? As we know from his repeated allusions to the execution Father Malagrida in his letters, like this one to the Duke de Richelieu, Voltaire was shocked: He was accused of parricide, and was indicted for the belief that Anne, mother of Mary, was born immaculate and for claiming that Mary had received more than one visit from Gabriel. All this is pitiful, and horrifying. The Inquisition has found the secret of inspiring compassion for the Jesuits. I would rather be a Negro than Portuguese. Oh you wretches, if Malagrida was involved in the assassination of the king, why have you not dared to question him, to cross-examine him, to judge him and to condemn him? If you are so cowardly and witless that you dare not judge a parricide, why do you disgrace yourselves by having him condemned by the Inquisition on such nonsensical grounds?157 (Translation from French) We might wonder who is the target of Voltaire’s diatribe, since it is not the Inquisition, which he sees as a mere instrument and therefore not to blame. Rather, he appears to point the finger at the Portuguese government in the person of the king and, especially, his all-powerful prime minister, the Marquis de Pombal, who were responsible for “having [Malagrida] condemned by

220  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 the Inquisition” on “nonsensical grounds”, according to the last line of the text transcribed. “Thus was the excess of the ridiculous and the absurd joined to the excess of horror”, in Voltaire’s words.158 The last line of the fragment from Voltaire’s Preface to the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster transcribed earlier is also interesting in this respect. Here he admits (in the third person) that “there is as much weakness in the lights of man as miseries in his life”. The two faces of progress or the “light” is a recurring theme in Voltaire, and it has been very important to modern thought because it visualizes the dark side of revolutionary, millenarian and utopian fantasies of all kinds, a matter which has cost modern society dear more than once. The genius of Goya represented this in his famous engraving The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. There is no text in which Rousseau ever directly refers to the execution of Malagrida. We may suppose, however, that he would not have found it objectionable insofar as the achievement of good demanded a necessary evil. Can we attach any symbolic value to Malagrida’s death, viewing it as a historical precedent. It is worth considering that his admonitory execution was the high point of a drama played out in an auto-da-fé, and in this sense it may be seen as a harbinger of the revolutionary terror that would stain the Parisian Place de la Revolution with blood, when the infamous spectacle of the guillotine was staged there just a few decades later in 1793, and a foreshadowing of the mass killing in the service of utopia in the twentieth century, as epitomized by the Holocaust and the Gulag. Murder as a lesser evil or unavoidable means to a supposedly noble end lies at the heart of totalitarian thinking, and we would do well to consider that it was after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that a school of thought grew up, which associates evil with society and good with the purity of a non-existent and ­unattainable ideal, thereby allowing not just a negative view of the world but an imaginary, mythical and utopian remedy for its present ills. Voltaire ­provided a counterweight to this kind of thinking by rejecting utopia and demanding a direct, free-thinking and critical approach to the facts. It was this attitude which left Rousseau disconsolate, for he found no room in it for any kind of utopia. Be this as it may, the many attempts to make divers utopias a reality have brought only calamity upon humanity in modern times. The debate between Voltaire and Rousseau for the first time revealed a moral gap, which remains with us to this day. From a contemporary standpoint, this is a historic turning point and its importance is far greater than has ever previously been realized.

Risk in the modern “complex of evil” What was the role of risk in the new mindset that arose, as I have tried to show, out of the Lisbon earthquake and its consequences? In my opinion, the separation of evil from the domain of religion in the eighteenth century by new secular modes of thought in philosophy, politics and morals gave rise to a new “complex of evil”, which would continue to develop over the

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  221 years to become a leitmotiv of modernity. Meanwhile, the decisive progress of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would address the problem of evil in countless areas, including biology, chemistry, epidemiology and medicine in general, geology, architecture and engineering, and the application of statistical methods to the prediction of disasters and in insurance. Furthermore, existing disciplines like law would develop along positive lines (especially in the case of criminal law) and would be reshaped in new codes, and the science of economics would focus on the problems of poverty and social inequality. Finally, political theory and practice would concentrate on the redefinition of the new, secularized evil. So far, I have presented risk as both a social phenomenon inherently linked to communication and as a probabilistic calculation. However, my research has focused especially on the former aspect, and because of this I have stressed narratives of risk, analysing and interpreting numerous written sources to trace the development of the concept over the centuries. Meanwhile, I have ended this work with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, right in the middle of the eighteenth century, and with the dialogue between ­Voltaire and Rousseau, because I see this as the climax of a key stage in the existence and communication of risk and narratives of risk. The decisive fact was the way in which accounts of risk were combined with other stories in a broader narrative complex. I have called this the complex of evil, because it incorporates an array of different currents and its leitmotiv is a new concept of evil that is secular, of course, and much broader than its predecessors insofar as it includes ideas of both physical and moral harm, and of the dangerous qualities associated with a given person, animal or thing. Until the Lisbon earthquake, narratives of risk were specific, even instrumental or practical, and they were confined to particular events, such as a hurricane or an epidemic, or pursuits like navigation. The catastrophe of 1755 was, however, the first time that a natural disaster had actually triggered a weighty and highly influential philosophical debate concerning such a wide-ranging, profound and abstract category as evil. As a result, various different narrative strains would progressively fuse together under the pressure of ongoing historical events to become what I have called the “narrative complex of evil”. Evil became like a black hole capable of attracting all kinds of grievous events, so that any narratives concerning suffering or harm were sucked into a single category whatever the nature of the misfortune or the relationship of the victims with its causes. Though the extraordinary diversity of this modern concept of evil was always admitted, the new narrative styles that evolved in the press and literature of the nineteenth century, including sensationalism, melodrama and horror, never made their nature explicit, resulting in an extraordinary confusion between narratives of uncertainty, risk, fear and terror. I believe that this is what truly defines modern narratives of evil, insofar as they form part of a complex that combine myriad different stories, the precise definition and classification of which remains problematic.

222  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Table 7.1 proposes an initial taxonomy of the key concepts involved in the history of risk in the modern age, which can only be addressed by situating risk within this complex narrative of evil and describing it in its terms. Voltaire was quick to grasp that evil may remain hidden behind the smokescreen of confusion thrown up by this narrative complex, leading him to warn that though evil is present on earth we do not know what it is. To put this another way, it is extremely difficult to describe the nature of evil, despite the profusion of malign phenomena we see all around us. In its narrative representation, the phenomenology of evil is a continuum beginning with situations where the cause of harm is not understood or is unknown. This means that the relationship between the cause of harm and its victim is merely a “possibility” discerned from a position of ignorance, which provides only a vague outline of the evil concerned resulting in a situation of uncertainty. In this regard, let us note that we all exist in a never-ending state of uncertainty in which there is always a possibility that we may suffer some kind of harm at any moment. It is because of this that uncertainty is accepted as a fact of life. It is everywhere; it is lasting; and it exerts only minimal pressure in our day to day existence. As I have tried to show in this work, where we have a basis of knowledge about the potential harm that a given event, creature or person could cause another, we create a “probability”, which must always have a basis in knowledge. It is at this point that we find ourselves faced with risk which, as I have argued, exists as of the moment at which we recognize based on prior knowledge that there is a likelihood of harm whenever a relationship arises between an object of risk and an object at risk. A situation of uncertainty can of course become a situation of risk if at any given time a person or group acquires a sufficient degree of knowledge about a former possibility to transform it into a probability, thereby creating a risk out of an uncertainty. Probability offers the benefit of anticipation, because it stands always some distance in space and time from the actual occurrence of the harmful event or circumstances concerned, and this provides a space for preventive action. As the gap in space and time narrows, however, the former understanding of the circumstances which allows the emergence of a narrative probability gradually evaporates away to nothing. It is here that fear appears. Fear is not a concept like risk but an emotional state of awareness, which melts away knowledge to become a paralyzing inhibitor of action. In this case, the relationship Table 7.1  Narrative complex of evil Evil

Relationship Understanding

Acceptance

Scope

Duration

Intensity

Uncertainty Risk Fear Terror

Possibility Probability Proximity Action

High Medium Low/High None

Broad Specific Close Immediate

Very long Medium Short Brief

Weak Medium Acute Very acute

Scant Limited None None

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  223 between the object of risk and the object at risk is one of proximity or increasing proximity, since the plotline of a narrative usually involves the progressive approach of the former to the latter, for example as the murderer stalks his victim or the hunter his prey, as a hurricane nears the coast or as an epidemic spreads. Though fear is an ever-present emotional state among human beings, it was the nineteenth-century reworking of traditional stories by folklorists and the Romantics that produced first the gothic novel and eventually horror films, in which fear itself is made into a narrative device that has since become a key feature of modern Western culture. The acceptance of fear is very low as soon as it is felt, but it may be high when it is encapsulated in a story, drama or film. The intensification of fear produces terror, which is triggered when the object of risk meets the object at risk, causing actual harm. Terror is “action”, and it has virtually no duration and involves no knowledge or understanding. The ability to act in a situation of terror is in fact usually the result of training and expert knowledge, and it is therefore only available to specialists like police officers or soldiers. Terror strikes in moments like a bombing and often in crowds, as seen in accidents at sports stadiums and spectacles. Those involved have, of course, no understanding of what is going on, and their behaviour is erratic and uncontrolled. Though it is strictly inaccessible in narrative terms, terror does have a place within the narrative model because of its relationship with fear, which can be written into narrative. Terror cannot be narrated as such, however. Evil takes many shapes in modern society and the narratives which it creates are diverse and may or may not link up, but it is nonetheless possible to find examples of historical events that reveal the continuum described earlier. The persecution of the Jews by the Nazis is an example, having produced narratives that follow this kind of progression like the Diaries of Viktor Klemperer, a German academic of Jewish origin, who kept a journal between 1933 and 1945, in which he set down his experiences as a Jew married to a gentile in Dresden. His Diaries were first published in German in 1995, and then only because one of his students found them in 1978 among the papers he left when he died in 1960. It was never Klemperer’s intention to publish these writings, but they nonetheless provide an extraordinary testimony to everyday life in the Third Reich. The central theme of the Diaries, which run to almost 2,000 pages, is the Nazis’ criminal racial policies against the Jews, whom they hounded from the moment they took power. This persecution was to form the axis around which the lives of Klemperer and his wife turned for twelve long years. We know well how these baleful policies were implemented, especially after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and how they escalated into the Final Solution. Klemperer’s Diaries are unique, however, because they follow this process day by day, and they are of special interest here because of their changing tone, as they relate the series of developments that eventually led to the murder of millions of Jews in the death

224  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 camps. Klemperer and his wife were acutely aware of the end that awaited those who were deported, among them many personal friends and acquaintances, and for long they kept their suitcases packed for when the time came. As a mixed-race couple, however, their own fate was postponed time and again in accordance with the National Socialist race laws, until the city of Dresden was consumed by fire and chaos in three days of mass aerial bombardment by the Allies in February 1945, which allowed them to flee the city and wander as refugees through the disintegrating Reich as the war approached its end. The account of evil given by Klemperer in his Diaries is a lived experience described with tremendous immediacy, which makes it an invaluable source of documentary evidence for the investigation of evil and its configuration through narrative. The story begins with the spread of rumors and the occurrence of certain anomalous events, though these did not at first suggest what was about to happen. The first thing Klemperer noticed was that his students were beginning to stay away from his classes. However, such matters became ever more disquieting and discrimination against the Jews more obvious, until he was finally prevented from publishing his articles and research. The ensuing series of events occurred in crescendo: Klemperer was expelled from the university; his home was expropriated and given away to an Aryan; he was prohibited from taking books out of the public library; he was ordered to dispose of his car; he was forced to wear a Star of David sewn onto his clothes; he was ordered to move to a house reserved for Jews; he was forced to work in a factory and then to sweep the streets; and he was imprisoned for a month. All this time, he watched as his neighbors in ­Dresden’s Jewishonly apartment blocks were deported to the Theresienstadt camp in the Protectorate of Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia, which served as a holding camp before their removal to the extermination camps in Poland. Even as ­Klemperer wrote his diaries, he knew about the concentration camps and what was happening there. Nevertheless, he and his wife were among the small group of mixed-race couples who escaped the round-ups in Dresden and survived, although they spent the war years with their suitcases packed awaiting deportation. Allied bombing eventually destroyed the city in three days of continuous raids in early 1945, a nightmare of terror in which the Klemperers looked death in the face. However, the rigid Nazi controls over Dresden’s few remaining Jews were swept away in the chaos of the firestorm and they were able to flee the city. The process that begins with uncertainty and ends with terror can be traced throughout these Diaries, and there can be little doubt that untold thousands of European Jews experienced the same nightmare progression. These makes Klemperer’s account exceptional. The first part of the Diaries is filled with a pervasive uncertainty as the first rumors reach his house just outside the city of Dresden. However, there is also a certain acceptance of what he and his wife take to be a transient situation or in some cases merely wild speculation. The Klemperers frequently discussed emigration with

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  225 family and friends, but Viktor was no Zionist and had in fact converted to Christianity because he considered himself a German, and all the more so given his service in the First World War. The idea of emigration was quite simply not for him. Even so, the conversations he reports in this part of his Diaries express uncertainty through constant questions about the future. Communication with others is basically verbal in the form of rumours and hearsay. After the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the lives of German Jews were gradually hedged around by a thicket of rules and regulations. This new situation obliged Klemperer to reassess events as they happened in light of Nazi legislation and propaganda. Many Jewish families in Klemperer’s circle tried to emigrate at this time, but it was already becoming difficult to obtain permission from the authorities. Klemperer increasingly struggled with his own strong feelings of Deutschtum or ­Germanness and a new notion of risk, which emerged as the news and whispered stories grew ever more worryingly precise. So, he found himself facing a new object of risk, which formed before his very eyes out of the Nazis’ laws, orders and actions, a predicament that would last for years. The likelihood of deportation now appeared as a present threat and this finally persuaded him to try to escape. In this situation of risk, Klemperer was still in a position to take early action and he sought to emigrate to the United States, where his brother lived. By the time he had made up his mind to leave Germany it was too late, however, because the Nazis had already put a stop to Jewish emigration. Klemperer increasingly lived in fear, at times falling prey to moments of terror in brushes with deportation or as a result of verbal and even physical attack by Nazi thugs spurred on by the sight of his Star of David. He relates one episode of particular dread that reveals much about the situation. The war had already begun and Klemperer was denounced for failing to black out his windows as required by the mandatory air raid procedures. He spent a month in prison, all the while fearing that he would end up in the gas chambers or would simply be taken out and shot. He was of course unable to write a single line about this terrifying experience at the time, but committed a detailed account of his time behind bars to paper as soon as he was released. This part of Klemperer’s Diaries is special, because it reflects not only the concern for the truth that pervades the whole work but also a concern for literary style. As I have explained earlier, the nearness of evil can sometimes erase the understanding of the object of risk gained while some distance still existed. Klemperer’s Diaries describe various situations like his time in jail where this process can be observed. It is difficult to talk or write about the cause when one lives in fear and the trigger is close by, visible and manifest. Fear of this kind is expressed basically as an account of the experience, like that made by Klemperer after his release from prison, when his object of risk, Nazism and the Nazis’ plan to wipe out the European Jews, was closer than ever. In my opinion, the prison story in Klemperer’s Diaries offers a clear-cut

226  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 example of the literary nature of fear and the way in which our culture has sought to domesticate it through narrative. The four allied aerial bombardments that destroyed Dresden and slaughtered the city’s inhabitants began on February 13, 1945. As the bombing continued, the Klemperers wandered the streets in the grip of collective terror. Bombs were raining down and buildings collapsing all around, and Viktor became separated from his wife in the chaos, imagining her dead until he was able to find her again. Unlike The Destruction of the European Jews, the first comprehensive study of the Holocaust produced by the conscientious, honest and competent historian Raul Hilberg, Klemperer’s Diaries are a testament to his own lived experience. However, each of these works, the former written from the distant standpoint of documented scholarly research and the latter close up and personal, is true in its own way. One point in common, however, is that Hilberg’s seminal work also minutely describes the progressive murder of millions and the annihilation European Jewry. The temporal progression of evil reflected in both books runs essentially in parallel, only gradually showing its myriad faces to the victims. Both the Diaries and The Destruction of the European Jews contain the truth, but their truths are not the same – Klemperer’s is “real” where Hilberg’s is “documentary”. I have ended this chapter by linking Lisbon to Auschwitz despite the gulf that separates them in scientific and moral terms because, in my opinion, the great earthquake of 1755 marked the historical starting point for a new understanding of evil in which the concept of risk played a key part, and which ended with the Holocaust, however distant the two events may seem. What is comparable here is the underlying narrative. This is the paradox and the danger of modern discourses of evil in all their multiple versions, which always end up strangely alike.

Notes   1 The dating and authorship of the Pentateuch have long been a matter of debate. It seems to be the work of a number of different authors working between 900 and 400 bc    2 MacGregor, N. – 2011 A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Allen Lane    3 Since then, countless archeologists, historians, adventurers and explorers have sought to show that the Flood really happened, and numerous expeditions have been made to Mount Ararat in search of the remains of Noah’s Ark   4 The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem, which relates the adventures of the eponymous hero and king of Uruk, a Sumerian city that reached its height in the third millennium before Christ. The text we have today is inscribed on different tablets in cuneiform writing   5 The Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition is not in fact alone in this notion of divine retribution. Other cultures inspired by other religions, such as the Inca civilization of Peru, saw natural disaster as a manifestation of the anger of the gods    6 Neiman, S. – 2002 Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 1

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  227   7 Lylle, C. – 1832 Principles of Geology. New York: D. Appleton & Co. p. 24 (Gutenberg Project)    8 Lylle, C. – Op. cit. p. 25    9 Lylle, C. – 1832 Principles of Geology. London: John Murray. p. 33   10 Lylle, C. – Op. cit. p. 29   11 Zeilinga de Boer, J. and Sanders, D.T. 2005 Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 3   12 Lylle, Ch. – Op. cit. p. 42  13 R.B. – 1734 The General History of Earthquakes. London: Bettesworth & Hodges. p. 5   14 R.B. – Op. cit. p. 6   15 R.B. – Op. cit. p. 10  16 Leibniz, G.W. – 2012 Théodicée. Introduction, translation into Spanish and notes: Tomás Guillén Vera, Granada: Editorial Comares. The book was first published in French in Amsterdam   17 Leibniz, G.W. Theodicy (Project Gutenberg) p. 65   18 Leibniz, G.W. Theodicy (Project Gutenberg) p. 111   19 Leibniz, G.W. Theodicy (Project Gutenberg) p. 115   20 Pope, A. An Essay on Man (Project Gutenberg) p. 31   21 Villar, A. (ed.) – 1995 Voltaire-Rousseau. En torno al mal y la desdicha. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. p. 19   22 The Richter scale was of course devised much more recently  23 Feuillet, N., Cocco, M., Musumeci, C. and Nostro, C. “Stress interaction between seismic and volcanic activity at Mt. Etna”. Geophysical Journal International (2006) 164, 697–718  24 Tobriner, S. – 1982 The Genesis of Noto: An Eighteen-Century Sicilian City. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 25 and 26   25 Tobriner, S. 1982 p. 25   26 Tobriner, S. 1982 p. 25   27 Tobriner, S. 1982 p. 33   28 Tobriner, S. 1982 p. 34   29 Tobriner, S. 1982 p. 29   30 Cited in Pérez- Mallaína, P.E. – 2001 Retrato de una ciudad en crisis. La sociedad limeña ante el movimiento sísmico de 1746. Madrid: C.S. I. C. and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. p. 54   31 Pérez-Mallaína, P.E. 2001. p. 61   32 Other estimates are significantly higher   33 Pérez-Mallaína, P.E. 2001. p. 62   34 Pérez-Mallaína, P.E. 2001. p. 393   35 Llano de Zapata, J.E. – 1748 Carta o diario ... p. 28. Cited in Pérez- Mallaína, P.E. (2001), p. 393   36 Juan, J. and De Ulloa, A. – 1748 Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional. Madrid. Volume III, pp. 108–109   37 Pérez- Mallaína, P.E. 2001, p. 78  38 Walker, C.F. – “Lisbon and Lima. A Tale of Two Cities and Two Catastrophes”. In Lauher, G. and Unger, T. – 2008 Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastrophediskurus im 18. Jarhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. p. 386

228  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755   39 Walker questions Lozano’s authorship and attributes the account to a secretary of the Viceroy, one Victorino Montero.  40 Kendrick, T.D. – 1957 The Lisbon Earthquake. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company. p. 23  41 Dionísio, J. – 2008 “After the Lisbon Earthquake: Reassembling History”. European Studies 26. pp. 151–167   42 Dionísio, J. 2008 p. 154   43 “Two very Circumstantial Accounts Of the late dreadful Earthquake at Lisbon: Giving a more particular Relation of that Event than any hitherto publish’d”. BOSTON, Re-printed and Sold by D. Fowle in Ann-Street and Z. Fowle in Middle-Street. M, DCC,L,VI. 1756 p. 3   44 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 4   45 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 4   46 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 5   47 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 6   48 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 6   49 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 7   50 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 8   51 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 8   52 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 8   53 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 10   54 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 10   55 Two very Circumstantial Accounts ... Op. cit. p. 10  56 Shrady, N. – 2008 The Last Day. Wrath, Ruin & Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. New York: Penguin Books  57 Anonymous, An Account by an Eyewitness of the Lisbon Earthquake of November I, 1755 (Lisbon: British Historical Society of Portugal, 1985) 10. In Shrady, N. (2008) p. 19.   58 Anonymous Op. cit. p. 19  59 It is nonetheless the case that the notion of the “English Protestant” is an ­overgeneralization, as there were also many Catholics in Britain at the time. As Mr. Farmer mentions in his account, the Irish, who were then subjects of the English Crown, were mostly Catholic and many of them were in church celebrating the Feast of All Saints on the day of the earthquake, with the result that more of them were killed than their English compatriots   60 Amador, F. – 2007 “O terremoto de Lisboa de 1755: colecções de textos do século XVIII”. História, Ciencias, Saúde. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Vol. 14 no. 1 Jan./Mar.   61 Moreira de Mendoça – 1758 Historia universal dos terremotos. Lisboa: na offc. In Antonio Vicente da Silva. p. 113   62 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 13   63 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 1   64 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 121   65 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 122   66 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 122   67 Moreira de Mendoça 1758 p. 119  68 Dynes, R. – 2003 The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: The First Modern Disaster. University of Delaware Preliminary Paper 333

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  229   69 Saada, A. and Sgard, J. – “Tremblements dans la presse”. Braun, T.E.D and Radner, J.B. (eds.) – 2005 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Representations and Reactions. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. p. 210   70 Saada, A. and Sgard, J. 2005 p. 211   71 Saada, A. and Sgard, J. 2005 p. 214   72 Murteira, H. – 2004 “The Lisbon earthquake of 1755: the catastrophe and its European repercussions”. Economia Global e Gestão (Global Economics and Management Review), Lisboa, vol. 10, p. 79   73 Saada, A. and Sgard, J. 2005 p. 215  74 Araujo, A.C. 2006 “European public opinion and the Lisbon earthquake”. European Review. Vol. 14. No. 3, p. 313   75 Araujo, A.C. 2006 p. 314  76 Palau i Orta, J. – 2011 “El Terremoto Atlántico de 1755 y sus representaciones”. Tiempos Modernos 22 (2011/1) p. 2   77 Gibbons, T. – 1756 A Sermon Preached at Haberdashers-Hall, November 30th, on Occasion of the tremendous Earthquake at Lisbon. London: Printed for J. Buckland and others. p. 8   78 The first cause argument was used by Saint Thomas Aquinas (1220–1274) to prove the existence of God.  79 In the last chapter we had occasion to see how London, which suffered the twin scourges of the Great Fire and the Great Plague in the seventeenth century, was held up as the great capital sin and was believed by many to have been punished by God for its evil ways.   80 Gibbons, T. 1756 p. 16   81 Gibbons, T. 1756 p. 26   82 Bulkley, Ch. – 1756 A Sermon Preached on Occasion of the Dreadful Earthquake at Lisbon, Nov. I, 1755. London: Printed for J. Payne. p. 24   83 Bulkley, Ch. 1756 p. 25   84 Bulkley, Ch. 1756 p. 26   85 Bulkley, Ch. 1756 p. 27  86 Dynes, R. – 1998 Seismic Waves in Intellectual Currents: The Uses of the Lisbon Earthquake in 18th Century Thought. University of Delaware: preliminary paper 272. p. 2  87 Coen, D.R. – 2013 The Earthquake Observers. Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. p. 7   88 Coen, D.R. 2013 p. 7   89 I have taken these references from Neiman: S. 2002. – Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 1   90 Voltaire. 1905 The Works of Voltaire. Werner. p. 5   91 Villar, A. (ed.) – 1995 Voltaire-Rousseau. En torno al mal y la desdicha. Madrid. Alianza Editorial, p. 155   92 Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 157   93 Neiman, S. 2002 p. 132   94 Tallentyre, S.G. – 1919 Voltaire in his Letters, being a Selection from His Correspondence. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons www.whitman.edu/ VSA/letters/index.html]; and also in Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 233   95 Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 233  96 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/Poem_on_the_Lisbon_ Disaster

230  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  97 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster  98 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster  99 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster 100 Larrimore, M. (ed.) – 2010. The Problem of Evil: A Reader. p. 202 101 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster 102 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster 103 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/ Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster 104 Rousseau, to whom Voltaire had sent a copy of his Poems upon their publication, did not write this letter with the intention that it should be circulated to a wider public, and he in fact sent it to a good friend of Voltaire with instructions to deliver it to the philosopher at his own discretion. Dr. Tronchin, the gentleman concerned, in the end decided to send the letter on to Voltaire. It was eventually published, however, first in Germany in 1759 and then by Rousseau himself in 1764 105 Leigh, J.A. (ed.) – 1967 Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/ JJR%20letter.html and also Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 184 106 Leigh, J.A. (ed.) – 1967 Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/ JJR%20letter.html and also Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 185 107 Leigh, J.A. (ed.) 1967 Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/ JJR%20letter.html] and also Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 185 108 Leigh, J.A. (ed.) 1967 Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/ JJR%20letter.html] and also Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 185 109 J.A. Leigh, ed., Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva, 1967), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/ texts/JJR%20letter.html] This passage has sometimes been interpreted as reflecting Rousseau’s scientific view of the Lisbon disaster, given the way it alludes to prevention and to the measures that could have been taken to mitigate the likely effects of a catastrophe. However, it was not Rousseau’s intention in these lines to uphold such measures as scientific rather than providential, but to castigate the burghers of Lisbon for their failings and their responsibility for the devastating consequences of the earthquake. Hence, this observation aligns rather with Rousseau’s idea of society, which has gradually fallen from an original state of goodness, than with the discovery of mankind’s vulnerability as is sometimes supposed 110 The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 5, edited by Kelly, C., Master, R.D and Stillman, P. Translated by C. Kelly https://books.google.es/books?id=hTWvAAAA QBAJ&pg=PT550&lpg=PT550&dq and also Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 209 111 Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 p. 220

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  231 112 França, J.A. 1965 La Lisbonne de Pombal. Une ville des Lumières. Parías: SEVPEN. p. 58 113 Kendrick 1957 p. 54 114 These figures are taken from Dynes, R. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: the first modern disaster 115 Kendrick 1957 p. 55 116 Molesky, M. – 2015 This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason. New York: Viking Press 117 Gonçalo Monteiro, Nuno G. 2008. D. José: na sombra de Pombal. Lisboa: Temas e Debates 118 This document formed part of the library of the Brazilian bibliophile José Mindlin, and the passage cited is found in folios 9 and 10. The reference is from Gonçalo Monteiro, Nuno G. 2008. D. José: na sombra de Pombal. Lisboa: Temas e Debates. p. 106 119 This information is from Paice, E. 2008 – Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. London. Quercus. p. 174 120 Lisboa de, A.P. 1758. Memorias das principaes Providencias que se derão no Terremoto, que padeceo a Corte de Lisboa no anno de 1755. Lisbon 121 Gonçalo Monteiro, N.G. 2008 p. 108 122 Gonçalo Monteiro, N.G. 2008 p. 104 123 Kendrick 1957 pp. 82–83 124 França, J.A. 1965 p. 68 125 França, J.A. 1965 p. 68 126 Cited in França, J.A. 1965. p. 69 127 Molesky, M. 2015 p. 4 128 Malagrida, G. – 1756 Juizio da verdadera causa do Terremoto que padeceo a Corte de Lisboa no primeiro de novembro. Lisboa: Officina de MANOEL SOARES. p. 3 129 Nevertheless, some Protestants held that the ultimate cause of the earthquake were the sins of the Catholic Church itself, which had shed so much blood in the tribunals of the Inquisition. Among them was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who voiced this argument in his pamphlet Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon 1755 130 Malagrida, G. 1756 p.7 131 Malagrida, G. 1756 p. 23 132 Malagrida, G. 1756 p. 29 133 Malagrida, G. 1756 p. 21 134 Gonçalo Monteiro, N. 2008 p. 117 135 Paice, E. – Wrath of God. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. London: Quercus. p. 206 I have followed the account provided by Paice in his book. 136 Gonçalo Monteiro, N. 2008 p. 188 137 Gonçalo Monteiro, N. 2008 p. 117 138 Molesky, M. 2016 p. 3 139 Molesky, M. 2016 p. 16 140 Molesky, M. 2016 p. 18 141 Voltaire. 1918 Candide. New York: Boni and Liverlight, Inc Publishers. (Project Gutenberg). p. 19 142 Voltaire. 1918 p. 21 143 Voltaire. 1918 p. 21 144 Voltaire. 1918 p. 24

232  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 145 Voltaire. 1918 p. 25 146 Neiman, S. Op. cit. p. 39 147 Rousseau, J.J. – 1817 Emile, or on Education (translated [into Spanish] by the Abbot Marchena) Bordeaux: Pedro Beaume 148 Manuel, Frank E. & Fritzie P. – 1979 Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 439 149 A “Eupsychia” is an ideal society formed by a group of around 1,000 individuals, who are able to live in harmony because they are psychologically healthy and can constantly reform themselves. This utopia was proposed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) 150 Manuel, Frank E. & Fritzie P. 1979 p. 440 151 Leigh, J.A., (ed.) – 1967 Correspondence complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4 (Geneva), pp. 37–50; translated by R. Spang www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/ JJR%20letter.html and also Villar, A. 2009 p. 186 152 Rousseau, J.J. 1 153 Rousseau, J.J. – 2001 Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. Dialogues. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. 154 Project Gutenberg eBook, The Social Contract & Discourses, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Translated by George Douglas Howard Cole, release date July 19, 2014 [eBook #46333], www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm#A_ DISCOURSE_b] 155 Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. 1979 p. 440 156 Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. Preface 157 Letter from Voltaire to the Duke de Richelieu, November 27, 1761 In Mostefai, O. and Scott, J.T. 2009 Rousseau and L’Infâme. Religion, Toleration and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightment. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. p. 72, where the quotation is given in French. “On l’ a accusé de parricide, et son procès porte qu’ il a cru qu’Anne, mère de Marie, était née impolluée, et qu’il prétendait que Marie avait reçu plus d’une visite de Gabriel. Tout cela fait pitié, et fait horreur. L’inquisition a trouvé le secret d’inspirer de la compassion pour les jésuites. J’aimerais mieux être nègre que portugais. Eh miserable, si Malagrida a trempé dans l’assassinat du roi, pourquoi n’avez vous pas osé l’interoger, le confronter, le juger, le condamner? Si vous êtes assez lâches, assez imbéciles pour n’oser juger un parricide, pourquoi vous déshonorez en le faisant condamner par l’ inquisition pour des fariboles?” 158 Molesky, M. – 2016 This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or the Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason. New York: Vintage Books. p. 18

Bibliography Báez, F. 2013 Los primeros libros de la humanidad. El mundo antes de la imprenta y el libro electrónico. Madrid: Fórcola. Bolt, B.A. and Banda Tarradellas, E. 1985 Terremotos. Barcelona: Orbis. Coen, D.R. 2013 The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dynes, R. 1998 Seismic Waves in Intellectual Currents: The Uses of the Lisbon Earthquake in 18th Century Thought. University of Delaware: preliminary paper 272.e

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755  233 França, J. A. 1965 Une ville des Lumières. La Lisbonne de Pombal. Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études. Gonçalo Monteiro, N. 2008 D. José na sombra de Pombal. Lisboa: Temas e Debates. Hurtado Simó, R. 2016 El ocaso del optimismo. De Leibniz a Hamacher. Debates tras el terremoto de Lisboa de 1755. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Kendrick, T.D. 1956 The Lisbon Earthquake. London: Methuen. Keys, D. 2000 Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World. First American edition. New York: Ballantine Publishing. Kölbl-Ebert, M. and Geological Society of London 2009 Geology and Religion: A History of Harmony and Hostility. London: Geological Society. Leibniz, G.W. (n.d.) La teodicea o Tratado sobre la libertad del hombre y el origen del mal. Madrid: Aguilar. Lovejoy, A.O. 1983 La gran cadena del ser. Barcelona: Icaria. Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie, P. 1979 Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maxwell, K. 1995 Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendes-Víctor, L.A. 2009 The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Dordrecht: Springer. Molesky, M. 2015 This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Neiman, S. 2002 Evil in Modern Thought. An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nozes, J. and British Historical Society of Portugal 1990 O terramoto de 1755: testemunhos britânicos. Lisbon: British Historical Society of Portugal. Paice, E., 2008 Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. London: Quercus. Pearson, R. 2005 Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. First US edn. New York: Bloomsbury. Poirier, J.-P. 2005 Le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne. Paris: Odile Jacob. Ricœur, P. 2007 Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology. London: Continuum. Saada, A. and Shard, J. “Tremblements dans la presse”. In Braun, T.E.D and Radner, J.B. (eds.) 2005 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Shrady, N. 2008 The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. New York: Viking. Sigurdsson, H. 1999 Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions. New York: Oxford University Press. Stols, E., Thomas, W. and Verberckmoes, T. (eds.) 2006 Naturalia, mirabilia & monstrosa en los imperios Ibéricos. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Svensen, H. 2009 The End is Nigh: A History of Natural Disasters. London: ­Reaktion. Tobriner, S. 1982 The Genesis of Noto: An Eighteenth-Century Sicilian City. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ugalde, A. 2009 Terremotos. Cuando la tierra tiembla. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Van Rose, S. and Ortíz de Lanzagorta, M. 1990 Los terremotos. Torrejón de Ardoz Madrid: Akal. Villar A. (ed.) 1995 Voltaire-Rousseau. En torno al mal y la desdicha. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

234  The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Withington, J. 2009 Historia mundial de los desastres. Madrid: Turner. Zeilinga de Boer, J. and Sanders, D.T. 2005 Earthquakes in Human History: The Far reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Villar, A. (ed.) 1995 Voltaire-Rousseau: En torno al mal y la desdicha. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. p. 19

8 Conclusion Risk in its historical context

I have endeavoured in these pages to systematically explore a perspective of past events that can be addressed ethnographically through their historical context. In doing so, I have sought to reconstruct key historical developments like the maritime exploration of the Mediterranean and the growth of trade, the conquest of the Ocean, the first transoceanic voyages, the Spanish conquest and colonization of America, the effects of the great epidemics and natural disasters like earthquakes, while listening to the echo of contemporary voices in the surviving written documents. Over the course of the centuries, the available documentary sources grow in quantity and quality, and as the story progresses over time each of the chapters of this book becomes longer and is more richly and intricately contextualized. As could hardly be otherwise, I have cited fragments of some of my sources in these pages to support and substantiate my arguments. My aim in applying this method was to lay bare the singular genealogy of the concept of risk and show how it developed historically in parallel with the genesis of scientific knowledge and practice. Originally found in religious contexts, the primitive idea of risk gradually found its way into other fields like law and navigation, where it provided practical benefits and supported numerous technical advances. The introduction of the compass in the twelfth century is a case in point, since the device was based on the physical properties of the Earth’s magnetic field. However, the concept proved less easy to translate into other more theoretical fields like cosmology, cosmography, mathematics, statistics or geology. These, among others, were areas where risk clashed with religion. Be this as it may, risk has always been an expert concept. The first major long-term historical context that must be explored if we are to understand the conceptual genesis of risk is the movement of people and goods over the vast empty spaces of the desert and the sea in the Middle Ages. It need hardly surprise us that the term rizq was invented by the Arabs, seasoned long-distance traders who had trafficked across the desert in caravans since ancient times. Meanwhile, the emergence and expansion of Islam would remove the future from the sphere of divination to place it squarely in the hands of God. As Islam spread and expanded, the

236  Conclusion: risk in its historical context “northern” Arabs1 reached the Mediterranean, which they came to dominate applying the experience of the Byzantines and adopting technical innovations like the compass to aid navigation.2 These early Arab mariners were already well acquainted with the art of calculating their position using the stars, a skill learned from their experience of overland journeys, so that crossing the waters must have seemed to them in some way similar to traversing the empty deserts. As we have seen, their expertise eventually passed to the trading cities of southern Europe, whose merchants Latinized the Arabic rizq to risicum and secularized the term for use in their commercial dealings. This was the origin of maritime insurance in the late Middle Ages, an invention that allowed risk to be bought and sold. The long-term historical context remained the same, however, to wit the movement of people and goods across the sea. To change the historical context, the idea of risk can also be related with the growth of trade and the beginnings of mercantile capitalism, since the newly invented concept was only one of a series of important innovations that occurred in the Middle Ages, including the development of trading houses and establishments, bills of exchange and double-entry bookkeeping, not to mention maritime insurance. Eventually, the wide waters of the ocean would replace the Mediterranean, but the challenge of establishing safe sea routes remained, despite improved ships, the development of ever better navigation techniques and the progress of cosmographic and cartographic knowledge. Risk played a part in all of these developments, having grown beyond a mere term of commercial law to become a concept that referred to human life and all of the spaces in which it was lived, whether at sea, in the towns and cities or in the countryside and the untilled wild. Meanwhile, the semantic reach of the term “risk” broadened steadily until it entered Spanish, a language that was widely used in the sixteenth century for navigation treaties and contracts, the accounts of explorers, conquistadors and missionaries, pamphlets and broadsheets, and even novels. These texts reveal the enormous change brought about by the discovery by Europeans, and chief among them the Spanish, of the extraordinary and exuberant continent of America, where natural disasters were far more frequent than in the Old World. Columbus himself wrote a description of the hurricane he experienced on his last voyage, and Cabeza de Vaca too reported such a storm though this time on land. At this point, we may discern a new long-term historical context, that of natural disaster. Nature was often overwhelming in the Americas, and natural disasters soon became a source of narratives of risk based on volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes and vast floods, all phenomena that astonished and terrified the early colonists of the New World. In this American context, the term risk put down deep roots in sixteenth-century Spanish adopting a broad meaning which alluded to the likelihood that some adversity or harm might befall a ship at sea, a newly founded town in still hostile territory, an expedition sent to explore a volcano, the workers in a mine or a force sent out to combat an enemy, which usually meant the

Conclusion: risk in its historical context  237 native Americans. These are the most common settings for narratives of risk in the period of the Spanish exploration, conquest and colonization of America. The English, Dutch and French arrived as new colonial powers in the seventeenth century to compete with the Spanish and Portuguese empires that had arisen a century earlier, a development that expanded the scope of narratives of risk and introduced the term “risk” into both French and English. It could be said, then, that risk returned to Europe after its initial sojourn in the New World, and it did so with a vastly broader semantic scope, which allowed the term to be used in many more contexts. Transatlantic trade spurred the development of the European colonial metropolises of Seville, Lisbon, London and Amsterdam, and in two of these cities risk would take centre stage in the late the seventeenth and centuries. In London, the plague, which had been a recurrent scourge in Europe since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, was transformed in the late sixteenth century into a new situation of risk by the newly created newspapers, the invention of descriptive statistics (especially mortality tables), the emergence of an early epidemiology, and by literary narratives like the diaries famously kept by Samuel Pepys and books like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Under the influence of the colonial narratives that had developed in Spanish America, meanwhile, risk itself became a literary genre, derived from the adventure novel set in exotic locations overseas, as embodied in the work of Daniel Defoe. In Lisbon, meanwhile, the earthquake of 1755 triggered the great clash of ideas about natural disaster and the origin of evil, however, pitting apocalyptic believers against Enlightenment rationalists. At the same time, the progress of science in an era dominated by rationalist philosophy and Enlightenment ideas led many thinkers to question the Biblically inspired explanation of natural disasters as divine punishment for the sins of mankind that had prevailed until this time. As Lisbon was rebuilt under the leadership of the Marquis de Pombal, a new vision arose of disaster as public catastrophe and risk, allowing the probability of a repeat occurrence and the need to anticipate and provide for a possible future earthquake to be considered as a factor in the reconstruction of the city. News of the earthquake spread rapidly thanks to the presence of correspondents in Lisbon and the existence of a network of gazettes and broadsheets in all the main European capitals, and the catastrophe sparked a Continent-wide debate in which Voltaire and Rousseau, the two most famous philosophers of the time, played a key role, laying the foundations for a new way of addressing the problem of evil, which removed it from the field of religion. At the same time, however, they brought opposing conceptions to the table, opening the door to the conflict of principles and ideological divide that have marked modern times. It is because of this that my concluding argument of this last chapter, which I hope will illuminate the whole thrust of this work, is that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 put an end to the

238  Conclusion: risk in its historical context ancient conception of apocalyptic catastrophism, which had for so long underlain the understanding of natural disasters. It was replaced by the notions of public catastrophe and of risk, both of which rested on science. It was likewise at this point that the theological conception of evil was broken, allowing the emergence of modern approaches to the problem of evil, which are no longer undivided and exclusive. Thus one epoch in the cultural history of risk came to an end and another began with no discontinuity but with a crucial change in ideas and concepts, and a twist in historical events that would require a second study of the genealogy of risk in the modern era and, specifically, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though it meant rehashing arguments already advanced in the earlier chapters of this book, I have begun these concluding remarks with a summary of the historical evolution of risk over time and in different places. I adopted this approach because I wished to weave a concluding argument to span the whole historical epoch concerned, which is to say the period from the seventh to the eighteenth century. In the end, it seems to me plain that my search for the original sources of the concept of risk led me on a journey through the key eras of globalization. It is this dependence on globalization that is, I believe, the key feature of the genealogy of risk. As Islam spread from the seventh century onwards, the Arabs came to dominate an immense area from the Atlantic shores of North Africa to the Far East. They imposed a single religion as well as their language and the power of the successive Caliphates in this vast territory for centuries, at the same time building extensive trade networks and enabling a flourishing of the arts, science and culture that in many ways prefigures what would later become the European Renaissance. Islam at this time was a global system, as the Roman empire had been before it and the Spanish and British empires would afterwards become. In all of these cases, the religious movements, empires and nations concerned were able to expand over huge distances, holding far-flung lands under their sway across desert trade routes and the ocean, exploring, conquering, colonizing and trading over ever more of the Earth’s surface. This in turn enabled them to plant their own religions, languages and cultures far from their places of origin. They pioneered the development of large-scale, general and lasting trade routes, which were in all cases reasonably safe despite bandits and pirates, as epitomized by the Arab caravans and ships, the Spanish treasure fleets and the Manila Galleons, and the British Navy and the sea route to India. The history of humankind has been made by successive waves of globalization even down to our own times, when its essentially media and technologybased dimension has spread worldwide. Risk is the child of globalization processes that faced the historic challenge of dominating distant lands on the other side of the empty wastes of desert and sea. Across such vast and dangerous distances where there were hardly any points of reference, the future appeared to the voyager more uncertain and terrible than ever, demanding an intense effort of will to proceed to the journey’s end. We

Conclusion: risk in its historical context  239 have seen this experience repeated over and again in the deserts, at sea, on the wild coasts, in the jungles and in the mountains where the adventurers of the expanding empires faced shipwreck, hurricane, pirates, disease, hostile natives, fighting and skirmishes, volcanoes and earthquakes. Risk was born out of such reversals of fortune as a new concept that would expand in step with globalization. From a methodological standpoint, this succession of globalizations is what has allowed me to weave a coherent genealogy of risk and to observe how certain major historical events link up over space and time, acting as bridges or channels for the communication of risk. The paradigm is navigation, which enabled the concept of risk to escape the confines of the Mediterranean and cross the Atlantic to America. This same maritime risk later returned to Europe, taking root in particular in the great colonial metropolises of London and Lisbon, which suffered terrible catastrophes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the case of the Lisbon earthquake, which occurred at a time of rapid economic, political and cultural development, writing piggybacked on navigation to serve as the communication channel between the continents. The global systems created by different civilizations and empires provided the vehicle that extended the reach and expanded the meaning of risk. I have associated the historical of narratives of risk with writing rather than any oral tradition, because I consider it axiomatic that risk first emerged in the written medium. The Koran can only be understood as a written text, and though it was revealed to Mohammed orally, it was not until it was written down some years after the Prophet’s death that it came to be seen as the sacred book of Islam and the direct word of God. A text that included the term rizq thus became a sacred object and therefore untouchable and immutable. Because the etymological root of our word “risk” appears in the Koran, its meaning has hardly changed over centuries. Indeed, neither rizq nor any derived term is used in modern Arabic to refer َ ‫ ُمخَا‬or mujaatara. to the modern concept of risk but rather the word ‫ط َرة‬ Meanwhile, risicum came to be used in the Middle Ages as a contractual term in notarial instruments and other documents in which the lasting nature of the written word was an essential feature. In a society like that of medieval Europe, where most people were illiterate, writing was a tool for the exercise of power and the reflection of prestige and it was favored initially by the Church and somewhat later by secular notaries and scribes, who were the learned experts of the day. This is clearly evident in the case of notaries, who had to know the law and their own professional codes in order to draft contractual formulas that could be trusted to provide guarantees. The contract was the paradigm for the kind of writing that produced the concept of risk in Europe. One of the features of documents of this kind is that the narratives they contain were, and still are, largely formulaic. This was certainly the case with the concept of risk, which therefore had only limited expressive capacity. Even so, we can make out a limited narrative

240  Conclusion: risk in its historical context that contextualizes risicum and its equivalents in the Romance languages by examining successive examples of such contractual documents, where the term usually alludes to a vessel that will set sail with a cargo from a given port of origin to a given destination. The vessel itself is often named, and its master may be too. Be this as it may, the principal who will bear the risk of the voyage is always clearly identified. All of these matters and any other ancillary circumstances that may be mentioned are sufficient to form a meaningful narrative when linked together in a text. Hence, we can confirm that risk appears for the first time in the Mediterranean Europe of the Middle Ages as a narrative referring to the movement of persons and goods contained in contractual instruments made, normally in the context of maritime trade, by notaries or scribes, which is to say by experts in mercantile law and in the then arcane art of writing. As I mentioned in the first chapter of this work, I have found the word “riesgo” used in Spanish in a late fifteenth-century novella, El Baladro del Sabio Merlín con sus Profecías, which deals with the Arthurian matter and was published in Burgos in 1498. The transatlantic voyages and the conquest and occupation of the New World soon afterwards expanded the narrative scope of risk to take in the new challenges posed first by the ocean crossing and then by the vast jungles and wild mountain ranges of the American interior, all the while locked in a fierce struggle with untamed nature and threatened by the chance of disaster in the form of hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. All of these situations multiplied the appearance of the word “risk” in the relaciones and hojas volantes, the printed accounts and flysheets from New Spain that were to become so characteristic of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas. This contextual expansion of risk and the increasing use of the word itself is clearly apparent in contemporary Spanish literature and especially in the novels dealing with the Americas that began to appear at this time. The frequent appearance of the word riesgo or “risk” in both parts of Cervantes’ great novel Don Quixote, respectively published in 1605 and 1615, shows that it had definitively taken root in the Spanish language by the early sixteenth century. The word “risk” spread to other languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably French and English, where it appears in writing of all kinds but notably in the press. From then on, the subject of risk would become indissolubly associated with the press as a narrative style which prefigures what would by the mid-nineteenth century become known as “sensationalism”. Thereafter we find risk linked to the mass media in a fundamentally symbiotic relationship. In the present study, we have seen only the early days of this association, which was already becoming important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and gathered pace following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, by which time a network of gazettes existed all over Europe with correspondents in the principal capitals, who were able to supply detailed information about major events

Conclusion: risk in its historical context  241 almost as soon as they occurred. This regular press fed the intellectual milieu, fostering other much more profound and ambitious literary endeavors, like Defoe’s journalism in the case of the plague and the religious tracts, scientific treatises and philosophical polemics published after the Lisbon disaster. The narrative nature of risk appears first in writing, as I have explained in this work, and later as a largely visual discourse in our own time. This is the first great lesson to be gleaned from the present history of the concept. The second lesson came as a surprise to me. When I began the research that led to this book, I imagined that probability, the epistemological foundation of risk, had taken shape first as a result of advances in arithmetical calculation and had only later escaped from this field of scientific expertise to become a general narrative resource in common use throughout our culture, especially in the more developed societies. However, my historical investigations have led me to the conclusion that the reverse is true – probability existed as a narrative resource at least as far back as the seventh century, when it inspired the early Arab and Islamic notion of rizq, which later fed through into the maritime world of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. It was in fact only in the sixteenth century that a number of Italian mathematicians and humanists, chief among them Girolamo Cardano, were inspired by the six faces of the dice to investigate the principles of mathematical probability. These six faces precisely defined and delineated the six possible outcomes of a given event, in this case the roll of the dice, all of which were equally probable. The future event (the roll of the dice) could therefore be described in numerical terms, since there were only six possibilities, one for each face of the dice, and this in turn allowed calculation of the probability of a given outcome. Mathematical probability and the calculation of risk were thus invented after narrative probability and risk, and this is to my mind the most important finding from my research into the genealogy of risk. Probability was at first deductive, and it was only later that it became inductive. Risk was the subject of narrative before calculation.

Notes 1 It was the “northern” Arabs who began the expansion of Islam. Meanwhile, the “seaward” inhabitants of the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula and the enclaves of the Gulf of Oman had long been expert mariners, sailing and trading around the Indian Ocean. These people were much slower to adopt Islam 2 The first maritime expedition undertaken by Muslims in the Mediterranean was the conquest of Cyprus in 653

Index

Abulafia, David 28, 61 accidents 17, 83, 123, 166, 213, 223; and the Arabic word “rizq” denoting the primitive notion of risk 9–11, 54, 85–6, 88, 236; and losses of cargo 17, 53; natural 214; and the transport of goods by sea 16 adventures 8, 14, 37, 42, 62, 65, 72, 76, 78, 109, 112, 114, 117–18, 151, 208; of Christopher Columbus 42; and desert islands 114; exploratory 45; involving the three most powerful peninsular kingdoms 24–5, 42; maritime 33, 37, 106, 116; of Pedro Serrano 115; and the writings of Daniel Defoe 68, 70–3, 83, 105–37, 164, 237 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 68, 70, 110, 116–17, 135 Advertence on the Poem on Natural Law and the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster 193 Africa 25, 27, 37, 42; circumnavigation of 45; coast of 22, 24–5, 27, 29, 37; and the confrontation between Portugal and Castile 25; and the disagreement between Ptolemy and Mela 31; and the Portuguese adventurers 34 Age of Exploration 26 The Age of Exploration 26 All Saints Day 1755 160, 162, 165, 169, 173, 175, 186 Amador, Filomena 170 Americas 2, 22, 24–6, 37, 39, 42–55, 58–69, 71–9, 105–6, 108, 112, 114, 158–9, 235–7, 239–40; and Central America 61; conquests, and colonization of 105, 235, 237; continent of 28, 70, 116, 123; and

North America 53, 58; and South America 65; and Spanish America 66, 68, 72, 79, 112, 153–4, 159, 202, 237 The Anatomy of Melancholy 110, 113 Andalusian ports 37 apocalyptic believers 177, 237 Arab Sea-faring (George F. Hourani) 7 Arabic 2, 7, 14, 54, 85–7; and the Islamic world 8; language 3, 86; necessity of compensating someone for losses 11; notion of rizq 3, 9–11, 54, 86, 88, 236; origins 3, 14 Arabs 1, 5–10, 16, 23–4, 28, 35–6, 39, 54, 85, 87, 90, 105, 235, 238; and astronomy treaties 7; caravans and ships 238; conquests 5, 106; early 241; expansion in the Mediterranean Sea 29, 90; northern 236; pre-Islamic 7 Arouet, François-Marie 151 Ars Conjectandi 82 astronomical knowledge 7 Atlantic Ocean 2, 22, 28, 31, 33, 37, 42, 44, 46–8, 106, 159, 162 banking 10, 16, 106 Bayle, Pierre 148, 150, 186, 190–1, 194, 218 Belém 197–8, 201, 205–6 beliefs 23, 54, 60, 65, 67–8, 85, 89, 97–9, 128, 148, 153, 169–70, 178, 180, 182; absolute 85; ancient astrological 158; degrees of 98; medieval 60; religious 1, 54, 67–8, 195; shaping of 136; systems of 143, 208 believers 4, 9, 85, 89, 175, 177, 237; able to receive from those who had the magic or supernatural power 84 Bernoulli, James 82 Bevis, John 177

Index  243 Bible 31, 61, 122, 142, 146 Bishop of Cambrai (Pierre d’Ailly) 31, 43–5 Black Death 123, 237; see also Great Plague blood 70–1, 190, 220 boats 13, 33–4, 38, 40, 42, 65, 73, 169 bodies 29, 45, 67, 111, 133, 169, 186, 196, 198, 200 Bossey village 216–17 Brazil 22, 42, 202–3, 206 Britain 24, 107, 120, 124, 133, 143, 151, 176 British 120, 124, 133, 151, 176; colonists 115; conquests 115; diplomats 206; empires 238; navy 238; ports 134; troops 133 broadsheets 236–7; see also newspapers Bruni, Leonardo 31 buildings 67, 147, 153, 157, 161–3, 166, 168, 171, 192, 196, 198, 200–2, 226; new 202; shaking 160; standing 147; stately 177; three-story 202 Bulkley, Charles 179, 182, 184 Burgess, Anthony 130, 132 Burke, Edmund 130 Burke, Peter 130 Burkhardt, Titus 86 Burton, Robert 110–13 Byzantines 6, 24, 236 Caboto, Giovanni (John Cabot) 24 calculations 23, 36, 38–40, 49, 67, 82, 92–4, 98–100, 241; of latitude 9, 16, 38–9, 85; probabilistic 99, 221 calculus 88, 91, 93–4, 97; numerical 96, 98–9; probabilistic 82 Caliphs 6–7 Callao 157, 160, 185 Cambrai, Bishop of (Pierre d’Ailly) 31 Canary Islands 22, 25–6, 28, 37, 47, 61 Cape of Good Hope 25, 27 Cape St. Vincent 45 captains 15, 26, 37, 49, 53, 64, 74, 78, 116 caravans 5, 10, 16, 53, 83, 89, 235 “caravels” 22–3, 34 Cardano 82, 89, 91, 93–4 cargo 11–13, 33–4, 49, 65, 82, 89, 240 Caribbean islands 62, 65 Carrera de las Indias (Route to the Indies) 28, 35, 39, 46–8, 55, 76 carriages 198, 205–6 cartographic knowledge 236 cartographic workshops 30, 33

cartography 9, 27, 29, 31, 60, 84–5, 89, 106 Casas de Contratación, Seville 37 Caspian Sea 31 Castile kingdom 14, 22, 24–8 Castilian ships 25 Castilians 24–5, 28–9, 34, 61 Catalan language 12, 14, 24 Catania 152–3 catastrophes 107, 114, 143, 148, 151–2, 157–60, 162–4, 168, 172–3, 179–82, 195–7, 199, 204–5, 210, 212; ancient 142; destructive 184; Lisbon 184, 199, 208; modern 142, 173, 184, 218; public 143, 197, 199, 210–11, 237–8 Cathay 59, 61 Catholic kingdoms 31 Catholics 62, 65, 180, 195 causalities 96, 147, 218 Central America 61 Cervantes, Francisco 64, 78, 87, 240 Ceuta 22, 24–7 chance 4, 53, 75, 82, 86–8, 92–4, 96, 99, 105, 108, 110, 150, 240; games of 82, 86–8, 93–4, 99; processes 97; and random events 87 change 14, 16, 55, 60, 73, 93, 107, 109, 150, 155, 184, 199, 209, 236, 238; in the design of oceangoing ships 33; global climate 110; historic 208, 210; in the way the notion of risk was used beyond a contractual formula 15 chaos 163, 190, 200, 224, 226 China 7–8, 61, 90, 105 Christianity 25–7, 30, 85, 180, 225 Christians 8, 16, 23, 46, 71–2, 74 Chrysorolas, Manuel 28 churches 32, 65, 107, 157, 160, 162–3, 175–7, 195, 197, 199, 203–5, 239 Cipango 43, 59 cities 24–5, 106–7, 124–8, 151–5, 157–61, 163, 168–9, 172–4, 176–7, 179–81, 196, 198–202, 204–5, 214–15, 224; devastated 158, 185; largest 161, 174, 192, 213; opulent 123, 168, 181; ruined 152, 161, 164; sinful 159, 168, 182, 204 citizens 124, 127–30, 163–4, 168; of Lisbon 169; suffering (Pangloss) 209 clergy 119, 174–5; see also churches climate change 110 “cogs” 34 Cologne Gazette 175–6, 178

244  Index Colón, Fernando 43–6, 65 colonial powers 115–16, 201, 237 colonization 22, 64, 98, 105, 235, 237, 240; see also conquests Columbus, Christopher 2, 5, 22–4, 30–2, 34, 37, 42–8, 49, 54, 58–63, 65, 105, 117, 236; believes he would find the Indies on his first voyage 61; biography 42; carried by the trade winds from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean 28; comparison of the Indies with Eden 60; crew 65–6; documents 45, 58, 62; kneels down on a beach and plants the Castilian banner 59; life and projects 23; sets out to navigate the Atlantic route westward to the Indies 43; voyages 16, 28, 45 Comentarios Reales de los Incas 69 commercial cities 22, 24, 54 commercial cities of the Mediterranean Sea 22 commercial knowledge 24, 84 commodities 13, 16 compass 7–9, 16, 23, 29, 35, 37–9, 85, 90, 235–6 compass needle 60 compensation 13 The Complete Works of Voltaire 193 Comte, Auguste 195 concentration camps 224 confessions 152 Confessions (Rousseau) 213, 216 conflicts 14, 123, 152, 199, 202, 237 confrontations 25, 73, 150, 195, 205, 207 conquests 5–7, 22–40, 65, 75, 89, 105–6, 235, 240; Arab 5, 106; British 115; Spanish 235, 240; Turkish 106 continent 43, 59, 61, 110, 115, 133, 143, 151, 239; Americas 28, 70, 116, 123; new 22, 46, 61, 66, 74–5; southern 76 contracts 10–11, 13, 15–16, 45–7, 48, 54–6, 63, 84, 117, 236, 239; insurance 110; maritime 9–11, 14, 16–17, 39, 54, 89, 94, 98; social 215, 217 contractual formulas 15, 239 controversy 97, 105, 111–12, 175, 194, 213; contemporary 42; historiographical 42 Coromines, Joan 2–3, 15, 87 correspondence 82, 94, 99, 101, 135, 174, 177, 213

Corriente, Federico 3 Cortés, Martin 36–7, 47 cosmographers 37, 39, 43, 47 cosmography 23, 30, 37–8, 40, 42–4, 60, 101, 235 cosmological religions 142 courts 152, 163, 203–4, 207 Cresques, Abraham 30 Crombergers (family of German printers) 75 crucifixes 163, 167, 174 crusades 8, 26–7, 89 culture 23, 84, 101, 209, 226, 238, 241 D. José: na sombra de Pombal 197 da Maia, Manuel 200–2 d’Ailly, Pierre (Bishop of Cambrai) 31, 43–5 damage 11, 13, 15–17, 46, 49, 51–3, 55, 66–7, 75, 77, 152, 155, 177, 181, 196–8; effective 51; “imagined” 51; large-scale 48, 171, 197; and suffering 13, 120 danger 35, 50, 52, 63–5, 69–70, 86, 107–10, 116, 121, 127, 155, 165, 169, 221, 226; avoidance of 110; great 68, 79, 193; navigation 15, 52 Darwin, Charles 142, 195 de Austria, María Ana (Queen Mother) 203 de Epalza, Mikel 3–5, 9 de Fermat, Pierre 82, 94, 99, 101 de Gama, Vasco 25, 27, 29 de Jesús, Mother Teresa 157 de la Desierta, King Claudes 15 de la Vega, Sebastián Garcilaso 6 de Mariscal, Blanca López 67–8, 76 de Melo, Sebastião José Carvalho (Marquis of Pombal) 107 de Mendoça, Joachim Joseph Moreira 170–4, 177, 195 de Montaigne, Michel 111 de Parival, Jean-Nicholas 112–13 de Pisa, Leonardo 90 de Pombal, Marquis 107, 159, 195–202, 204–8, 210–12, 218–19, 237 de Quirós, Pedro Fernández 76–7 de Santángel, Luis 58, 61 de Vaca, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza 65–6, 120, 236 de Velasco, Manso 157, 159 de Venuit, King Ban 15 de Zapata, Llano 158

Index  245 deaths 107, 111, 118, 121, 124–8, 188, 190–1, 195–6, 204, 206, 208, 212–13, 216, 219, 223; due to earthquakes 178, 196; honorable 15; and the Nazi concentration camps 224; toll of 161, 187, 195–6 Defoe, Daniel 68, 70–3, 83, 105–37, 164, 237; Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 68, 70, 110, 116–17, 135; argues that great natural disasters are proof against the divine power 122; associates risk with God in addressing the catastrophic outcomes of natural disasters 122; describes the Great Storm of 1706 131, 164; describes the plague in Holland 1663 131; describes the plague in Holland in 1663 131–2; A Diary of the Plague Year 105–37; The Dreadful Visitation 129; and Due Preparations for the Plague 129; and The Fortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders 114, 117; and A General History of the Pyrates 115–16; and his narrative of risk 136; and the influence of Thomas Hobbes 117; and the Journal of the Plague Year 105–37; master of literary journalism 130; sources for Robinson Crusoe 115; The Storm 110, 114, 118, 121–2, 129, 132; works of 118, 133, 135, 171 del Castillo, Céspedes (historian) 22, 25 deportation 224–5 destruction 119, 121, 151, 167–8, 172, 181, 184, 202, 204, 212–13, 215, 226; catastrophic 195; complete 181; and evil 213, 226; and the Plague Year 120 devils 71–2, 74 di Pizarro, Francisco 63–4 diaries 45, 66, 117, 124–6, 128–9, 132, 135, 161, 174, 223–6, 237 Diaries (Klemperer) 223, 225–6 The Diary of Samuel Pepys 125, 132 A Diary of the Plague Year 105–37 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues 109 disasters 23, 107, 114, 123–4, 159–61, 163–4, 173–7, 183–4, 186–7, 192–4, 197–200, 204–5, 211–12, 214, 218–19; and the Caribbean hurricanes 65; and the Great Plague 107, 112, 114, 124–6, 128–32, 134, 136, 168, 174; and the Great Storm 107; and the Lima earthquake 78, 152, 155–60, 162, 174,

184–5, 197; and the Lisbon earthquake 107, 121, 142–226, 237, 239–41; mitigating 197; new 155; prevention of 212 Discalced Carmelites of San José 158 discoveries 16, 22, 27, 44, 58, 61, 66, 83–4, 107–8, 114, 117, 123, 236; geographical 31; new 111 The Discovery of Mankind 28 diseases 124, 126, 128, 239 divine 2, 122, 148, 158, 182, 193, 210; anger 143; intent 121; intervention 158, 184, 212; justice 148, 152–3, 155–7, 179, 181, 184; power 122, 181–2; providence 89, 148, 150, 166, 175, 182, 213–15; punishment 107, 114, 142–3, 167, 182, 194, 218, 237; purpose 210; retribution 147 doctors 127–8, 174 doctrines 148, 206 documentary 178, 226; evidence 224; materials 164; samples 17; value 128 documents 10–15, 45–7, 62, 75, 115, 155, 157, 159, 164, 198–9, 218, 239; contemporary 170, 198, 211; contractual 240; legal 15, 76; medieval maritime 52; notarial 10, 54; original 46; printed 58; written 98, 235 dominions 64, 159, 213 Don Quixote 78 “Drakkar” ships 33 The Dreadful Visitation 129 Dresden 223–4 Drury Lane 125, 131–2 dualism 101 duality 97, 99, 219; narrative-calculus 100; probabilistic 101; and probability 97 Due Preparations for the Plague 129 Durkheim, Emile 1, 88 Dynes, Russell 173 earth 3–4, 31–2, 43–5, 142, 144–8, 158, 160, 162, 164, 170–1, 186, 189, 208–9, 235, 238; and all the waters of the 31; and the chart makers 29; and the influence of Ptolemy 32; surface of 29; tremors 146, 165 earthquakes 66, 75–6, 79, 112–13, 116, 143–8, 151–67, 169–71, 173–85, 187–9, 193–206, 208–9, 211–14, 235–7, 239–40; historical 151, 160–1, 165, 171, 212, 226;

246  Index earthquakes continued Lima 78, 152, 155–60, 162, 174, 184–5, 197; Lisbon 107, 121, 142–226, 237, 239–41; the Lisbon 186; mitigating the consequence of 154, 197, 199, 204, 212; natural causes of 147, 180; new 172; violent 107 Edson, Evelyn 29–32 El nudo y la esfera 27 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 1 Elmo, Saint 68 The Emergence of Probability 96 emigration 224–5 Emile 213, 215 empire 203, 238–9 England 46–8, 107, 110, 112, 116–17, 124, 127, 130, 133, 135, 143–4, 161, 165–6, 170, 175–6; and the attitude of religious leaders to disasters 146; and the freedom of the press 107; gentleman of 166–7, 173; and the Great Fire of London 1666 107; and the Great Plague 1655 107, 112, 114, 124–6, 128–32, 134, 136, 168, 174; and the Great Storm 1703 107; merchants 67, 161, 196, 211; scientists 145; and the term “risque” appears for the first time in English as a French loanword in 1621 109 Enlightenment 121, 143, 156, 159, 184, 187, 207, 210–11; eighteenth-century 175, 194; ideas 237; rationalists 107, 237; reforms 107; thinkers 210 Enrique, Prince 26–7 epidemics 107, 124–5, 134, 199, 210, 213, 221, 223 epidemiology 99, 134–5, 194, 221 epistemologies 39–40, 82, 96–7 Escalante, Juan 39–40, 46–55 Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal 148 Ethiopia 26, 32 etymology 2–3, 54, 87 Europe 10–11, 27–8, 32–3, 36–7, 43–5, 86–7, 107–8, 112–13, 123–4, 151–3, 159, 161, 173–6, 237, 239–40; central 175; cities 107; contemporary 218; courts 42; eighteenth-century 151; gazettes 177; and Jews 224–6; kingdoms of 22; languages of 2–3, 58, 211; in the late Middle Ages 15; medieval cartography 29;

navigators 37; powers 110, 123; public opinion in 178; and the Renaissance 5, 238; society 65, 112, 184; southern 2, 10, 24, 29, 98, 175, 236 Europeans 10–11, 25, 28–9, 32, 36, 45, 58–9, 61–2, 64–6, 236 evil 74, 113, 127, 133, 135, 143–4, 148–9, 179–80, 182, 184, 186–95, 209–10, 212–16, 218–26, 237–8; identifying 216; mankind’s 143; moral 186, 193–4, 214–15; natural 179, 214; nature of 148, 156, 218, 222; origin of 148, 181, 184, 191–4, 214–15, 237; partial 150–1; physical 185–6, 192, 195, 210, 218; secularized 221 Evil in Modern Thought 143, 214 evolution (historical) 238 executions 207, 210, 219 expeditions 13, 24, 26–7, 62, 77, 111, 236 experiments 82, 100, 158 exploration 26–7, 31, 34, 64, 74, 78, 89 explorers 36, 211, 236 eyewitness accounts 120, 125–6, 161, 163–5, 169, 173, 177, 196 eyewitnesses 126, 128, 130, 154, 162–3, 165–6, 171–2, 174–5, 207 fables 45, 119, 171 faith 9–11, 23, 60, 85, 89, 148–9, 151, 165, 205 fatalities 157, 162–3, 176, 196 “favourable cases” 95 fear 4, 6–7, 63, 126–7, 135, 171, 177, 191, 205, 207, 210, 221–3, 225–6; conscious 4; reason to 126, 168 Fernández, Juan 76–7, 116 Fernández, Pedro 76 fiction 69, 118, 129–30, 132–4 Fillastre, Gillaume 30–1, 43 Final Solution 223 fires 111–12, 147, 161, 196, 203 First World War 210, 225 Flint, Valerie 23, 60 Flood, Great 50, 112, 122, 142–4, 146, 148, 171, 180, 184, 212, 236 Florence 28, 30–1 Florio, John 109 foreigners 161, 166–9, 173 formulas 12–13, 16–17, 46, 82, 89, 117; contractual 15, 239; mediaeval 91; pre-established 15, 46 “fortuitous cases” 53

Index  247 “fortuna” (synonym of “risicum”) 10, 108 fortune 1, 11–12, 52, 62, 86, 90, 117, 134, 187, 239; good 23, 117, 166; ill 87 The Fortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders 114, 117 fossils 144–5 França, J.A. 195, 201 France 3, 30, 46–8, 106, 111, 113, 128, 172, 175, 201; and the emergence of the theologians 144; and the influence of Michel de Montaigne 108 freedom 107, 148, 150, 208, 215–16 fresh water 64, 154 games of chance 82, 86–8, 93–4, 99 garrote 203, 206–7 genealogy 3, 55, 97–8, 105, 122, 143, 194, 217, 219, 238, 241 General History of Earthquakes 146, 148 A General History of the Pyrates 115–16 Genoa 2, 9, 11, 13, 24, 42, 46, 54, 89, 106 Geographia 28, 30 geographic knowledge 2, 31, 45 geography 5–7, 28–9, 32–3, 42–4, 60, 106, 115, 171 geology 144–6, 177, 212, 221, 235 geometry 37, 42–4 Gerland, Georg 185 Gibbons, Thomas 179–82 globalization 105–6, 238–9 God 3–4, 7–11, 15–16, 23, 54–6, 74, 85, 88–9, 122–3, 142–3, 147–9, 166–8, 179, 181–4, 188–91; love of 172; providence of 23; trust in 1, 4–5, 9–10, 54; voice of 183 Godwin, William 218 gold 12, 24, 26–7, 62–3 Goldsmith, Oliver 130 Graunt, John 124, 129–30, 134–5 Great Britain see England Great Flood 50, 112, 122, 142–4, 146, 148, 171, 180, 184, 212, 236 Great Plague 111–12, 123–9, 131–6, 182, 185, 199, 237, 241 Great Storm 67, 107, 114, 120, 129, 164 The Gulf of Fire 197 Gulf of Guinea 22, 25, 42 Hacking, Ian 94, 96–7 Hale, John R. 26 Hamburg merchants 196 harbors 59, 161–2; see also ports health, public 124–5, 195 heaven 3, 7, 60, 78, 167–8, 188

heretics 168, 173, 203, 207 Hilberg, Raul 226 Hispanic texts 76 Historia del Almirante 43 Historia del Huérfano 78–9 Historia Económica e Política do reinado de D. José 198 Historia General y Natural de las Indias 76 historians 24–5, 44, 88, 106, 110, 115, 126, 135, 161; Céspedes del Castillo 22, 25; Charles Walker 159; Geoffrey Parker 110; Henry Kamen 113; Raul Hilberg 226 historical events 105, 118–19, 132, 136, 151, 212, 221, 223, 238–9 history 5–7, 16–17, 29, 33, 43, 68–9, 84, 105–6, 120–1, 129, 132–3, 142–3, 145–6, 151, 171; ancient 119; cultural 106, 238; of humankind 6, 106, 238 The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes in London 177 Hobbes, Thomas 117 Hodges, Nathaniel 126–9, 134–5 Holland 131, 148, 175, 201 Holocaust 210, 220, 226 Holy Land 26 Hooke, Robert 145 Hourani, George F. 7–8 House of Braganç dynasty 203 “The House of Rizq” 5 House of Távora 206 houses 120, 125, 152, 155, 157, 161–3, 165–6, 168, 171, 196, 199, 203, 205, 209, 224; collapsing 166; new 200, 202; private 168 hunger 67, 69–71, 199, 213 hurricanes 52, 65–6, 74, 79, 107, 112, 116, 118–20, 123, 211–12, 221, 223, 236, 239–40 Iberian Peninsula 22, 24–5, 27, 35, 47, 151 Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus 23, 60 India 7, 25, 27, 31, 45, 58, 69, 78, 90, 96–7, 142, 197, 238 Indian Ocean 6, 25, 31, 38 Indians 62–4, 79 Indies see West Indies information 17, 22, 26, 28, 30, 42, 47, 54, 69, 115, 124–5, 136, 145, 176, 198; broadcasting 212; confidential 42; first-hand 132; publishing 177; secret 42; shared 120

248  Index Inquisition 101, 163, 170, 180, 196, 203, 206–10, 220 insurance 9, 13, 16, 49, 54–6, 110, 221; contracts 110; invention of 16–17; marine 9, 12, 30; policies 10, 13, 17, 39, 50, 54–6, 89, 98 interests 23, 26, 28, 31, 42, 46, 49, 62, 64, 66, 92–3, 121, 124, 202, 206; common 26; competing 155; political 206; public 129, 178; vested 156 Isabella, Queen 26, 59 Islam 3, 5, 16, 85–6, 89, 105, 235, 238–9; and the concept of rizq 17, 98, 241; and the world of 6, 101 islands 24–5, 36, 43–6, 53, 58–9, 61, 69–71, 73, 78, 116–17, 153; inhabited 25; uninhabited 83; western (Azores and Madeira) 45 “Isles of the Indies” 45 Italian language 43, 109 Italy 32, 48, 78, 90, 113, 124, 131, 144 Itinerario de Navegación 46–8

King Philip II 51 kingdoms 14, 25–7, 37, 44, 107, 113, 181, 185, 200, 203, 206, 208; legendary 26; of Portugal and England 176; powerful Mediterranean maritime 24; powerful peninsular 25 Kings, Catholic 62, 65 Klemperer, Viktor 223–6 “Knorr” ships 33 knowledge 5, 7–9, 22–3, 29–30, 40, 53, 82–3, 85–6, 89–90, 92, 98–9, 101, 105–6, 194, 222–3; ancient 84; astronomical 7; autonomous 101; cartographic 236; commercial 24, 84; of cosmography 23, 42; expert 7, 9, 101, 223; geographic 2, 31, 45; historical 7; new 6, 84; numerical 125; practical 85, 195; probabilistic 85; of probability 85; scientific 1, 43, 156, 235 “kogges” 33 Koran 1, 3–5, 15–17, 239

Jesuits 159, 202, 206–8, 211, 219 Jesus 71, 202, 206, 208 Jews 10, 30, 204, 223–4 Johnson, Samuel 130 José: na sombra de Pombal 197 journalism 75, 106–7, 118, 120–1, 130, 133, 135, 210; birth of 112; critical 107; of Defoe 241; early 133; modern 133; primitive 75; sensationalistic 135 journalistic accounts 132, 164 journalists 17, 129–30, 132, 135, 174; first 135; modern 132; professional 164 Juan, Jorge 158 Juana (called “Beltraneja”) 26, 59 jungles 239–40

languages 2, 36–7, 51, 86, 98, 105, 108–9, 159, 192, 205, 236, 238, 240; international 175; legal 15; marine 33; non-European 2; sacred 86 Latin 2, 10, 12, 14, 28, 46, 58, 86, 191 latitudes 8–9, 16, 32, 38–9, 43, 85 laws 89, 110–11, 145, 186, 189, 195, 221, 224, 235, 239 Leibniz, Gottfried 143, 148–9, 182, 186–7, 190–1, 194, 209–10 letters 44, 58, 60–3, 123–5, 130–1, 151–2, 155, 157, 174–6, 178, 191, 193, 196, 212, 214–15; exchanging 135; private 169; published 175 The Liber Abaci (“Book of Calculation”) 90 Lima earthquake 78, 152, 155–60, 162, 174, 184–5, 197 Lindsey, Jack 123 Lisbon 44, 106–7, 151, 153, 155–6, 159–77, 179–81, 184, 186–8, 191–2, 196–205, 208–9, 211–15, 218, 237; city of 151, 160, 180, 197, 205; crime 188; devastation of 196; inhabitants of 179, 214; and the Plaza del Rossío 165–8, 173 Lisbon and Lima: a Tale of Two Cities and Two Catastrophes 159 Lisbon earthquake 107, 121, 142–226, 237, 239–41; All Saints Day 1755 160, 162, 165, 169, 173, 175, 186; and fires 111–12, 147, 161, 196, 203; and the

Kahneman, D. 99–100 Kamen, Henry 113 Kant, Immanuel 143, 184–5, 218 Keene, Benjamin 176 Kendrick, T.D. 160, 196, 198 King Alfonso V 26 King Ban de Venuit 15 King Carlos III 202 King Charles II 125 King Claudes de la Desierta 15 King Enrique IV 26 King Ferdinand 26, 59 King José I 197, 202, 208, 211 King Juan II 26

Index  249 inhabitants 162, 173–4, 177; and the Lisbon Gazette 176; prefigures 181; and the property registry 172; and the reaction of Voltaire 187; and the reconstruction of Lisbon 199, 201–2, 208; and Rousseau 193, 216; and tremors 147, 152, 154–7, 163, 166, 168, 170–1, 175, 192, 196, 203, 205 literature 65, 68, 72, 88, 106, 116–18, 120, 135, 142, 177–8, 195, 210, 221; castaway 73; colonial 116; earthquake 160; Hispanic 77; popular 178; private 135; Spanish 74, 78, 240; Spanish American 66, 68, 72, 79 livestock 67 Llibre del Consolat de Mar 10–12 Loimologia sive Pestis nuperæ apud Populum Londinensem grassantis Narratio Historica 126, 130 London 106–7, 114, 120, 122–8, 130, 132–4, 136, 146, 160–2, 168, 176–80, 184, 188, 237, 239; city of 114, 124, 126, 160; contagious atmosphere and quarantine 134; disasters 107; early eighteenth-century 135, 137; and the Great Plague 107, 112, 114, 124–6, 128–32, 134, 136, 168, 174; life 124–5; merchants 130–2; and Newgate prison 114 London Courant 119, 176 London Gazette 119, 176 looting 176, 199–200 López, Blanca 67–8, 76 losses 11, 15–17, 24, 46, 48, 63, 67, 90, 98, 136, 167, 172, 175, 192, 196; enormous 169; and maritime insurance 13; shipping 11; unhappy 189 Lylle, Charles 144–6 Madeira Islands 22, 24–5, 42, 45 Madrid 47, 77, 106, 152, 157, 175–6, 188 Magne, Laurent 109 Malagrida, Fr Gabriel SJ 195, 197, 203–8, 210, 219; and the attitude of Rousseau 220; directs harsh words at the Portuguese court 204; exalts the old order of religion 210; execution of 212, 219–20; words ring out in the churches of Lisbon 205 Manuel, Frank 215, 217 Manuel, Fritzie 215, 217

“mappaemundi” 28–9 maps 23, 28–30, 32–3, 42 marine insurance 9, 12, 30 maritime adventures 33, 37, 106, 116 maritime charts 28 maritime contracts 9–11, 14, 16–17, 39, 54, 89, 94, 98 maritime history 34 maritime insurances 9–10, 12–13, 16, 30, 63, 106, 122, 236; see also marine insurance maritime language 53 Maritime Museum of Madrid 47 maritime trading 11 marriage 5, 26 Marseille 9–10, 54, 89, 109, 128–9, 131, 134, 136 mass media 132, 135–6, 212, 240; see also media massacres 111, 113, 164 mathematical 1, 47, 98, 100; formulation 90; operation 91, 93; probability 1, 82–3, 89–90, 93, 95, 99, 101, 241; theories 96 mathematicians 37, 82, 91–2, 150 mathematics 97, 99, 101, 106, 149–9, 235 Mead, Richard 128, 131, 134–5 media 173, 238; modern 136–7; news 137; stories 136; treatment of natural disasters 151 mediaeval formulas 91 medieval beliefs 60 medieval documents 52, 55 medieval Europe 23, 59, 239 medieval maps 30 medieval navigation 33 medieval sailors 23 Mediterranean 1–2, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 14–16, 22–5, 27, 29–30, 33–4, 54, 83–4, 89–91, 105–6, 108–9, 235–6; and Atlantic maritime traditions 27; coast 24; commercial cities of the 22; jurists 83; maritime trading 54; medieval sea contracts 11; navigation 22, 24, 30; origin of risk 1–17; ports 30; sailing 2; sailors 33; thirteenthcentury 34 Mediterranean Sea see Mediterranean Mela, Pomponius 30 memorials 43, 76–7, 130, 158 merchandise 35, 46, 48–9, 53–5, 62–3

250  Index merchants 6, 8, 10, 16–17, 90–1, 110, 115, 131, 161, 165, 174, 176, 202; Arabs 10; English 67, 161, 196, 211; Hamburg 196; mediaeval 98; Portuguese 26, 161; wine 115 Messina 152–4 Mexico 75–6, 154, 159 Michell, John 145, 177 Middle Ages 2, 30, 36, 106, 180, 235–6, 239–41 Middle East 2, 5, 54, 90 miracles 184, 207 misfortunes 11, 48, 69–70, 72, 87, 113–14, 117, 127, 172, 176, 185, 189, 191, 193, 221; of castaways 70; and hunger 70; at sea 83; supplications 189; terrible 194 Monteiro, Gonçalo 198–9, 205 Monteiro, Nuno 197 moral evil 186, 193–4, 214–15 Muhammad 5 Muslims 5–6, 27, 204 “naos” 23, 34, 37, 49–1, 52–4, 77 narratives 30, 58, 64, 70, 82, 89, 95, 117–18, 128, 135, 170, 174, 195, 221, 223; early Spanish American 112; literary 237; modern 66, 69, 221; new world 66; original 39; of risk 64, 66, 69, 74, 76–9, 89–90, 117–18, 120–1, 128–9, 135–6, 171, 173, 221, 236–7, 239 natives 28, 61–2, 64–6, 70, 79, 237 Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality 130 natural disasters 64–8, 74–6, 78, 112, 114, 120–2, 142–3, 151–4, 156, 193–5, 197, 199, 202, 210–14, 235–7; history of 151; managing 192; and phenomena 112; secularized 194; understanding of 212, 238 natural law 117, 187, 193 naturalists 144, 146, 148, 183 nature 66, 68, 71–2, 84–5, 88, 116–17, 122, 148–9, 153, 155, 167–8, 180–6, 190–2, 214–19, 221; absolving 216; actions of 156, 184; dissolution of 181; human 61, 195; mysterious 117; organic 144; primitive 216; secular 85; symbolic 51 Náufragos (or Castaways) 65 navigation 2, 5, 7–9, 13–17, 31, 33, 36–40, 42, 47–50, 53, 55, 78–9, 82–3,

89–90, 239; aiding with compass 236; art of 43, 46–8, 60; astronomical 32, 37, 42; coastal 33; instruments 38, 84; maritime 6, 11–12, 46, 55; medieval 10; and new routes 6, 9, 22–3, 31, 39; techniques of 2, 27, 236; technologies 106; transoceanic 33, 39; treaties 236 navigators 6, 8, 26–8, 33, 36–8, 44, 47–9, 53, 59, 63, 211 Nazis 223–5 Neiman, Susan 143, 214–15 New Spain 75, 240 news 16, 32, 62, 75, 111, 115, 132–3, 136, 156, 174–6, 186, 207, 225, 237; disseminating 175; of events in Marseille 128; public 111; reporters 130; transmitting 178; see also media news-sheets 175 newspapers 119, 129–30, 132–3, 236–7; Cologne Gazette 175–6, 178; London Courant 119, 176; Oxford Gazette 112, 132; printed 131–2; printed daily 130 nobles 70, 154, 205–6, 220 North Africa 5, 23–7, 238 notaries 83, 239–40 Noto (now known as Noto Antica) 153–6, 202 Nuremberg Laws 223, 225 O terremoto de Lisboa de 1755: colecções de textos do século XVIII 170 Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality 124, 126, 133 oceanic exploration 34 oceans 22–40, 42, 53, 72, 106, 123, 235–6, 238, 240; conquest of 28; northern 31 Odyssey 83 Old Testament 142 omnipotence 181, 183 Origin of the Species 142 original sin 209 origins 2–3, 86–8, 94, 96, 117, 156, 184, 186, 191, 193, 195, 213, 215–16, 218, 236; common 2; divine 5, 148, 179; true 87 Orinoco River 60–1 Orthodox Muslims 3; see also Muslims outcomes 9, 82, 84, 88, 90–1, 93–5, 99, 122; catastrophic 122; negative 13; possible 82, 93, 129, 208, 241 Oxford English Dictionary 109–10 Oxford Gazette 112, 132

Index  251 Pacioli, Luca 89, 91–2, 94–5 palaces 147, 152, 160, 163, 177–8, 196, 198, 203 Palermo 152, 154 pamphlets 111–12, 133, 160, 174, 177–8, 212, 236 paradise 59–62, 69 Paris 106, 124, 130, 158, 161, 188, 193 Parker, Geoffrey 110 parricide 219 Pascal, Blaise 82, 94, 96–7, 99, 101 penitence 152, 156, 172, 204–5 Pepys, Samuel 125–7, 135, 237; describes groups of sailors held in quarantine aboard their ships dying of starvation 125; and The Diary of Samuel Pepys 125, 132; and an eyewitness account of the Great Plague 1665 125 Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo 34–5, 157–8 persecutions 2, 206, 223 Persians 7–8 Peru 69, 72, 76–8, 154, 159–60 Philip, King 51 philosophers 4, 97, 144, 186, 188, 193, 209, 218; contemporary 148; Rousseau 143, 151, 185, 190–3, 210, 212–21, 237; Voltaire 185, 193, 212, 218–21, 237 philosophy 2, 43, 111–12, 117, 148, 177, 186–7, 191, 220 physical evil 185–6, 192, 195, 210, 218 physicians 126–8 pilots 35–9, 42, 47–9, 53, 64, 77 piracy 12, 79, 82, 91, 111, 115, 199 pirates 8, 78, 98, 115, 123, 157, 201, 238–9 Pisa 9, 29–30, 89–90 plague 111–12, 123–9, 131–6, 182, 185, 199, 237, 241; bubonic 128; Great London 125–6, 128, 131, 174; outbreak of 143, 199 Plato 190–1 Plaza del Rossío 165–8, 173, 203, 206 Poem on Natural Law 187, 193 The Poem on the Lisbon Disaster 151, 178, 185, 187–8, 191, 193–4, 196, 208, 213, 218, 220 Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne 151 poems 8, 150, 189, 212–13 Poland 111, 133, 224 political satire 107 politicians 17, 125, 204

Pope, Alexander 25, 150, 185–7, 189–91, 194, 210, 213, 215 ports 8–10, 13–14, 16, 33–5, 43, 65–7, 89, 106, 115–16, 123, 128, 156–7, 161–2, 200, 202; Andalusian 37; British 134; Cadiz 115; Lisbon 106–7, 115; Mediterranean 30; Porto 115; of southern Europe 10 Portugal see Portuguese Portuguese 14, 22, 24–9, 32, 34, 44, 106–7, 109, 159–61, 166, 170–3, 175–6, 178, 196–200, 202–8; army 26; capital of Lisbon 160, 176, 180, 201, 212; and Castilian navigators 2; Catholic 170; colonies overseas 151; courts 197, 204; discoveries 26, 32; dominion 25, 203; empires 202, 237; government 219; Inquisition 101, 163, 170, 180, 196, 203, 206–10, 219–20; insurrection 110; monarchy 25–6, 197, 206, 208; navigators 25; nobility 25, 196 power 64–5, 113, 118, 156, 159, 164, 178, 181–2, 197, 211, 223, 238–9; absolute 208; catastrophic 143; of religious orders 159; supernatural 84; see also colonial powers pre-established formulas 15, 46 preachers 179–84, 197, 203 preaching 5, 168, 203, 205 press 75, 107, 119, 132–4, 136, 174–5, 211, 221, 240; contemporary 175; fast-expanding daily 135; regular 241; see also media priests 164, 171, 174 Principles of Geology 144 prisons 117, 163, 206, 209, 225 probabilistic ratios 82, 95 probability 8, 23, 29, 46, 49–3, 55, 62–3, 76, 82–102, 106, 129, 194–5, 222, 237, 241; calculation of 86, 92, 95, 99; calculus 82, 87, 90–2, 94, 98; definition of 95–6; mathematics 96; narrative 88, 90–1, 96, 98, 129, 222, 241; numerical 93, 98; science of chance or 96; statistical 97; theory of 92, 94, 96–7, 99 Protestants 167–8, 170, 180, 195, 203–4 providence 3, 89, 94, 119, 122, 159, 185, 192, 214 Providencia Island 116 Pryor, John 34 Ptolemy 28–33, 43–5

252  Index Ptolomeo, Claudio 7 public confessions 152 public health 124–5, 195 punishments 158, 168, 180, 182–4, 209, 214 quarantine 125, 134 The Quarantine Act 1721 134 Queen Isabella 26, 59 Quixote, Don 78 Koran 4 reason 126, 133, 145, 148–9, 155, 167–9, 172, 183–4, 187–8, 193–5, 204, 208, 210–11, 217, 220; divine 84; and earthquakes 184, 187–8, 194, 210–11; supreme 149; and Voltaire 187, 194, 210 reconstruction 54, 153–4, 156, 159, 197, 200–1, 205, 210–11, 237 religion 1–2, 4, 8–9, 23, 84–5, 88–9, 97, 101, 105–6, 111–12, 149, 153, 210, 212–13, 237–8; false 204; new 5; single 238 religious 2, 214, 235; beliefs 1, 54, 67–8, 195; devotion 173; motivations 27; movements 238; practices 195; providentialists 212; schools 150; tolerance 148 Renaissance 5, 27, 68, 86, 91–2, 144, 238 reports 58, 76, 131, 134, 152, 154, 157, 174–6, 201, 206, 225; accurate 178; distorted 178; early 175; eye-witness 112; first-hand 129; initial 175–6; private 132 research 17, 98, 142, 178, 221, 224, 241; documented scholarly 226; historical 127; historiographical 55 “resecare” (Spanish word “riesgo”) 14 resources 67, 73, 116; financial 77; needed to survive 71; new technical 16 Riesco, Juan 14 risk 1–17, 42–55, 62–4, 74–9, 82–3, 85–7, 105–6, 108–10, 121–3, 133–7, 194–5, 202, 210–11, 220–3, 235–41; activated 53; analysed 114; calculation 51, 241; etymology of 2; history of 49, 137, 222; invention of 8, 16, 29, 82; management 135; managing 136; maritime 239; meaning of 54, 239; narratives of 64, 66, 69, 74, 76–9, 89–90, 117–18, 120–1, 128–9, 135–6, 171, 173, 221, 236–7, 239; notion of

1–2, 10–11, 15–16, 23, 35, 46, 51, 54, 62–3, 89, 93, 156, 210–11; object of 11–12, 46, 49, 62, 82, 222–3, 225; original 5; secularization of 16, 122; situation of 50, 54, 78, 222, 225; word related to the Arabic 14–15, 46, 50, 53–6 River Tagus 160, 162, 166 rivers 43, 145, 147, 162–3, 166, 169 rizq (notion of) 1, 3–7, 9, 11, 14–16, 23, 54, 85–6, 89, 98, 108, 239, 241 Rodríguez, Juan 75 romance languages 12, 86, 240 Rome 105, 206, 208 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 143, 151, 185, 190–3, 210, 212–21, 237 Rousseau, Jean Jacques: anti-utopia 218; defers his melancholy attitude 216; eupsychian legacy 215; and his utopian ideal 216–18; longing for a pastoral idyll 215; outlook and reaction to the Lisbon earthquake disaster 214, 218–19; and the utopian myths 216–18; and Voltaire 185, 193, 212, 218–21, 237 routes 6–8, 16, 22, 26, 31, 35, 39, 43–5, 46, 83, 89, 165, 200; caravan 5, 27; coastal 34; commercial 9; southern Atlantic 22; western 44 ruins 113, 121, 152–3, 157, 162, 165, 168, 171–2, 181, 187–9, 196, 198–200, 202, 209; common 164; devastated 212; searching in the 188; smoking 196; venerable 168, 209 rumours 36, 44, 131–2, 135, 224–5 Saada, Anna 175–7 sailing 8, 12–13, 23–5, 31, 33, 40, 43, 47, 50–2, 77 sailors 17, 30, 32, 36, 39–40, 45, 47–9, 53, 66, 74, 109, 125, 176 sails 8, 12, 26, 31, 34–6, 39, 48–50, 65, 67, 72, 78, 85 Saint Elmo 68 saints 165, 168, 174, 207 schisms 111–12 scholars 26, 30, 32, 43, 47, 110 science 2, 8, 23, 43, 88–9, 94, 96, 99, 101, 144–5, 194–5, 201, 210–11, 221, 237–8; actuarial 211; applying 29; classical 84; contemporary 203; emerging 8, 146; experimental 156; history of 1, 88; maritime 27;

Index  253 mathematical 88; modern 84, 101, 147; new cartographic 29; practical 153; theoretical 156, 177 scientific knowledge 1, 43, 156, 235 scientific seismology 185 scientists 17, 37, 46, 151, 158, 167, 203 sea charts 29 sea contracts 10–11, 45, 50; see also maritime contracts sea voyages 82 seamen 36–7, 42–4, 46–9, 66; see also sailors secularization 66, 68, 122, 194 Selkirk, Alexander 116 sensationalistic journalism 135 sermons 118, 121, 156, 179–84, 203–5, 210 Serrano, Pedro (or Juan Maestro - the pseudonym he adopted) 69–74, 112, 115–16 Seville 27, 36–7, 45, 47, 75, 115, 175, 237 Sgard, Jean 175–7 ship owners 13, 37 shipbuilding 35, 45, 84, 89, 106 ships 5, 11–13, 22, 24–5, 32–8, 40, 48–50, 52, 54, 65–7, 69–74, 76–7, 125, 161–2, 165–6; cargo 34; foreign 134; “kogges” 33; merchant 196; multidecked 35; “naos” 23, 34, 37, 49–1, 52–4, 77; sixteenth-century oceanic 35; small 51 shipwrecks 48, 65, 68–9, 71–4, 82, 91, 98, 111, 114, 116–17, 212, 239 Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion 128 Shrady, Nicholas 169 Sicily 74, 153–6, 184, 197, 202; cities 156; earthquake 152, 155, 162, 200, 211; society 152 sins 76, 114, 121, 146, 155, 157, 167, 172, 179–84, 188, 194, 204, 214, 237; intolerable 203; original 209 Slovic, P. 99–100 social contracts 215, 217 Social History of Knowledge 130 Sodom and Gomorrah 180, 184 Soler, Isabel 27 Solomon Islands 76 sources 1–2, 26, 31–2, 45, 125, 130, 133, 161, 176, 178, 188, 192, 215, 217, 235–6; direct 119; documentary 121, 129, 235; multiple 120, 134; original 45, 238; overarching 153; supplementary 161

Spain 22, 24, 26, 33, 45–7, 58–60, 65, 69, 72, 74, 78, 106–7, 113, 116, 202–3; ambassadors 196; Habsburg 110; kings of 51, 154; and New Spain 75, 240 Spanish: authorities 198; Baroque 159; castaways 71, 73; churches 74; conquests 235, 240; Empire 65, 71, 79, 105; exploration 237; explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza 120; fleets 46–8, 67, 123; flu epidemic 136; language 78, 240; literature 74, 78, 240; monarchy 26, 60; navigators 46, 65; transoceanic navigation 28; treasure fleets 238 statistics 99, 118, 124, 126, 134–5, 235 stories 32–3, 42, 44–6, 49–1, 69–74, 76, 78–9, 83–4, 111–12, 115–16, 118–19, 142, 144–6, 221, 223–4; adventure 114, 117; biblical 122, 142; oral 42; popular 68; prison 225; short 11; traditional 223 The Storm 110, 114, 118, 121–2, 129, 132 storm, tropical 74 storms 34, 52, 65–6, 68, 108, 110, 113–14, 118–23, 129, 132, 208, 236; terrible 65, 68 streets 134, 156–7, 165–6, 170, 172–3, 196, 199, 201–2, 204, 207, 209, 212, 224, 226; and earthquakes 155, 157, 170, 173, 204; empty 125; fumigating 125; and houses 155, 165, 224; infected 134; of Lisbon 172, 175; of London 120, 127 supernatural 66, 147–8; causality 147; dimension 74; forces 84 survivors 67, 73, 128, 154, 164, 166, 171–3, 177, 198–9 Swift, Jonathan 130 Tagus, River 160, 162, 166 Tagus Estuary 169, 196–7, 201, 207 territories 24–5, 238 terror 135, 157, 163, 165, 181, 205, 221, 223–5; collective 226; devout 205; inconceivable 179; revolutionary 220 texts 3, 13, 36, 46, 51, 72–3, 75, 114, 119, 122, 128, 132–4, 220, 236, 239–40; ancient 33; crafted 166; foundational 144; legal 12; popular 178; posthumous 217; sacred Islamic 4; written 239 Théodicée 148, 150 theory of probability 92, 94, 96–7, 99

254  Index thinkers 89, 91, 107, 143, 148, 151, 167, 175, 194, 209, 212–13, 219, 237; contemporary 150, 158; enlightened 177; religious 146 Thirty Years’ War 110, 112 Thomist arguments 179 Tobriner, Stephen 153–5 Tomson, Robert 67–8 Toscanelli 23, 42, 44 totalitarian thinking 220 towns 65, 67, 111, 147, 152–6, 162, 187, 202, 211, 236; see also cities trade 5, 10, 16–17, 25–6, 75, 89, 106, 110, 112, 122–3, 133, 161, 235–6; navigation and maritime 9, 42, 123, 133; winds 28, 47 translations 126, 130, 151, 160, 201–2, 207, 219 transoceanic voyages 2, 5, 83, 105, 108, 235 transport 9–10, 16, 24, 167 treatises 36, 43, 46–8, 144, 147–8, 174, 177; contemporary medical 134; cosmographic 31; of navigation 46–8; scientific 241 tremors 152, 158, 170; earth 146, 165; and the Lisbon earthquake 147, 152, 154–7, 163, 166, 168, 170–1, 175, 192, 196, 203, 205; violent 170 troops 64, 199 tropics 59–60, 70 True and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake at Lima and Callao 160 tsunamis 107, 147, 152, 157, 161, 163, 169, 196 Turkey 111 Turkish conquests 31, 106, 131 Tversky, Amos 99–100 typhus 124–5 Ulysses 83, 117 uncertainty 1, 9, 82–5, 87, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 110, 117–18, 194, 221–2, 224–5; absolute 6, 8; complete 93; pervasive 224; renewed 89; terrible 83 understanding 27, 30, 32, 40, 66, 69, 83–4, 90, 94, 99, 146, 148–9, 187, 222–3, 225; contemporary 146; modern 3; new 226; relative 85; semantic 109; supernatural 72 Une Ville de Lumiéres. La Lisbonne de Pombal 201

utopia 215, 217–18, 220 Utopian Thought in the Western World 215 Val Demone province 154 Val di Noto province 154 Valera, Consuelo 58 Vasco de Gama 25, 27, 29 Venice 9, 30, 43, 54, 89, 91, 106 vessels 22, 33, 35, 48, 67, 83, 89, 98, 107, 123, 162, 208, 240; transoceanic 34; see also ships Viking expeditions 53 Virgin Islands 45 Voltaire 185, 193, 212, 218–21, 237; and Advertence on the Poem on Natural Law and the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster 193; attacks Pope’s argument that lamentations and supplications misfortune and suffering are but a show of pride 189; attacks the rhetorical grandiloquence of both the apocalyptic party and the optimists 188; and Complete Works 193; disputes that “all is for the best” 185; pseudonym for François-Marie Arouet 151; and Rousseau 185, 193, 212, 218–21, 237; a thinker of both the light and the darkness, like Goya in his paintings 218 voyages 16, 22, 24–8, 34, 43–5, 46–8, 51, 54, 58, 60–1, 65, 83–5, 88, 236, 240; early ocean 68, 98; long 29, 33–4, 76; maritime 9; oceanic 38, 47, 58, 114–15; southern 60; transatlantic 240; transoceanic 2, 5, 83, 105, 108, 235 Walker, Charles 159 Walpole, Horace 134 war 4, 6, 26–7, 64–5, 67, 89, 99, 105–6, 110–11, 123, 164, 182, 196, 212, 224–5; civil 110; galleys 34; machines 35 warships 8, 33, 35 waters 7, 9, 31, 36–8, 60, 66, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 77, 142, 144–5, 157–8, 163, 236; drinking 64; of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean 6; scarcity 78; and the search for 73; stowing of 34; torrential 60 waves, tidal 151, 157, 162–3, 212 wealth 4, 27, 31, 65, 86, 92, 115, 117, 176, 215; associated 60; extraordinary 114; great 26

Index  255 whirlwinds 122, 182, 209 winds 16, 36, 38–9, 42, 45, 47, 60, 65, 68, 72, 77, 118, 120–1, 147, 169; fair 15; irregular 24; scarce Mediterranean 33; strong 60, 67 world 6, 14–15, 23, 59–60, 106, 110–13, 143, 148–9, 160–2, 180–2, 186–91, 210, 212, 215–17, 219–20; ancient 142; classical 29; colonial 71; habitable 31; known 22, 27, 32, 171, 185; maritime 109, 241; new 22–3, 58, 65, 68, 70–1, 74, 105, 107, 109, 112, 115–16, 154, 156, 236–7, 240; old 74, 236; western 11, 209, 215

A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English 109 writers 17, 44, 68, 83, 107, 118, 127, 129–30, 135, 165, 174, 208, 213; of hymns, sermons and “some apparently rather mediocre poetry” (The Rev. Thomas Gibbons) 179; and improvised journalists 176; and the plague 134; professional 131; sources 58, 221 Zionists 225