The success of the fictional Netflix drama La Palma, depicting a volcano-triggered tsunami in the Canary islands, has echoes of a very real disaster that began in Portugal in the 1700s, but may have had major reverberations – literally – on a local West Cork beach.
AT about two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, November 1st 1755, ‘the sea swelled in an uncommon manner in the Bay of Kinsale, rushing in like a mountain flood’, according to The Dublin Journal newspaper, dated November 4th that year.
The paper referenced ’15-foot waves breaking the cables and anchors of boats’.
It was all most peculiar, because there wasn’t the slightest trace of wind off the Cork coast. With the same violence, the sea poured into Kinsale’s marketplace, ‘which greatly alarmed the inhabitants’, it reported.
The newspaper claimed it had received similar accounts from places to the west of Kinsale. Never had Ireland experienced anything like that before.
Earlier that day, at 9.36am, the inhabitants of Cork city had felt the ‘very sensible shock’ of an earthquake, which continued for almost a minute.
Meanwhile, over 2,500 miles away in Lisbon, the centre of Portugal’s vast trading empire, a nun called Kitty Witham was doing the washing up in the convent kitchen.
‘It began like the rattling of coaches and the things before me danced up and down upon the table,’ she wrote in a letter to her aunt on January 27th 1756.
She took to her heels with the other nuns. ‘I looked about me and the walls [were] a-shaking, and a-falling down … the lime and dust so thick there was no seeing ... We spent the day in prayers … we had shakes and trembles all that day and night.’
Others were lighting candles for All Saints’ Day when they felt the initial tremors, judged by scientists today to be in the order of 8.4 to 9.1 on the Richter Scale.
Smaller tremors continued for months afterwards.
In fact, the night before Kitty wrote her letter, she felt a ‘very sharp one’. Lisbon had been reduced to ‘nothing but a heap of stones’, she told her aunt.
The fires burned from five days to six weeks, depending on which source you read. Estimates of how many people died also vary – some historians believe as many as 100,000 perished. Kitty Witham reckoned 40,000.
Another eyewitness, the Rev Richard Goddard from Wiltshire, in Lisbon to visit his brother, also likened the tremors to the approach of ‘several coaches’.
When they began – according to his watch at 9.47am – he had difficulty staying on his feet, and had to grab hold of a flagpole.
Suddenly … ‘almost total darkness’. As the city fell into ruins, he saw ‘crowds of people screaming, calling out for mercy … we expected every moment to be swallowed up … the world was coming to an end.’
A scene from the gripping Netflix drama La Palma which tells the fictional story of a tsunami triggered by a volcano.
The seawater ebbed away, grounding boats. Suddenly, at around 11 am, came a report that the sea was breaking in and all the lower part of the city was already under water.
‘Mountainous waves’ threatened inevitable destruction. Hundreds of earthquake survivors who were standing on the Stone Quay were now swept to their deaths.
An anonymous writer describes a vast body of water ‘foaming and roaring’, boats being swallowed up, as in a whirlpool – never to reappear.
Hundreds of dead and dying people lay on the streets, carriages were crushed to pieces, the bones of nobles burned and jumbled together with those of their servants and animals.
As soon as buildings collapsed, the ruins caught fire. Lisbon’s churches, where hundreds of people were attending mass, became death traps. From the Portuguese coast, the sea swells spread to the south west of England and south west Ireland, all the way to Canada, Brazil, and the West Indies.
According to oral tradition, the sand dunes on the beach at Barleycove between Crookhaven and Goleen on the Mizen peninsula ‘came up’ as a result of the tsunami on the night of November 1st and 2nd. They lie along the tidal channel, a few hundred metres behind what today is considered a ‘beach to die for’.
West Cork geologist Dr Tony Beese, whose is currently writing a book on the tsunami heritage of West Cork, reckons it is likely that the successive waves generated by the tsunami were captured inside Barleycove.
Sand samples from the beach have been sent to Prof Mark Bateman at the University of Sheffield for radioactive dating, to determine whether they are old enough to have been transported from Portugal to Barleycove in a tsunami 270 years ago.
Conclusions from the sand analysis are being written up for publication later this year. ‘It is a fascinating story,’ says Bateman.
‘It would be great to find physical evidence which proves that oral traditions are not just fantasy, but at the very least are based around real events that happened.’
