TSUNAMI, HURRICANE, DROUGHT AND now earthquake and flood. In a single year, the Earth has buckled and lashed out, piling calamity on catastrophe to the point where humanity inevitably asks whether the catalogue of disasters is natural, in the sense of random and routine, or whether these are evidence of a pattern: either global warming, government failure, or God’s wrath.

Writers have always responded to the Earth’s cruelties in this way, searching for an explanation of the forces that lie beyond human control. The biblical flood was evidence of a divine intention to cleanse the world of sin. In medieval Europe, as Norman Cohen has shown, plague and devastation prompted millennial movements, since they presaged Apocalypse and, therefore, redemption. The California earthquake of 1906 led to a sharp rise in religious fundamentalism.

In our own time, there are those who have seen Hurricane Katrina as punishment for the sins of New Orleans, Sodom on the Mississippi. Others allocated the sin elsewhere, in man’s alleged mismanagement of nature. In the aftermath of Katrina, Germany’s environment minister declared: “The American President has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina — in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures — can visit on his country.”

Sales of apocalyptic literature have grown hugely in recent times: the doom boom is nigh. While scientists give warning of scientific disaster — Atlantic hurricanes, a new European ice age as the Gulf Stream dies, the disintegration of the Antarctic ice shelf — others foresee Apocalypse, Armageddon and Rapture, the bodily ascent to Heaven of the saved. A recent poll in Newsweek showed that some 55 per cent of Americans believe in the Rapture, and more than a third believe that the world will end as predicted in the Book of Revelation. The 12 novels in the Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic fiction have sold more than 63 million copies.

Alongside the religious and scientific responses to natural disaster lies another, humanist, tradition. This surveys the devastation and finds not God’s vengeance but man’s powerlessness and, perhaps, his courage amid the implacable elements. The tempest puts man in his place in the natural world, like mighty King Lear humbled by the weather:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout.”

The best modern example of this genre is Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, an essay in fear telling the story of the great hurricane that struck America’s Eastern Seaboard in October 1991, and the fate of the swordfish boat Andrea Gail, lost 500 miles from land. Junger brilliantly evokes sea weather, “the smell of ocean so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.”

Simon Winchester has mined a rich seam of literary post-disaster reconstruction. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (2003) describes the worst volcanic eruption in known history, when Krakatoa vaporised, generating immense tsunamis, engulfing entire towns in hot ash, and forming islands of pumice in a hot sea. The shock waves travelled seven times around the globe, but some of the more intriguing reverberations were political and religious. Winchester argues that the Dutch abandonment of its Indonesian colonies in the wake of the calamity turned many towards radical Islam. The latest explosion in Bali can thus be traced, in part, back to that devastating eruption of 1883. Winchester’s latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: The Great American Earthquake of 1906, is published this month. In a similar vein, it describes the time when the Earth suddenly yawned across San Francisco, toppling buildings, igniting firestorms and crumbling to dust, in less than a minute, a significant part of the American Dream.

These authors owe a debt to Daniel Defoe. On November 26, 1703, England and Wales were struck by a devastating hurricane which ripped across the country, killing 8,000 people, hurling cows into trees, scything down forests and destroying a fifth of the royal fleet.

In The Storm, reissued on the 300th anniversary with an excellent introduction by Richard Hamblyn, Defoe gathered together eyewitness accounts and scientific evidence.

A factual work of reportage, The Storm brought out the themes that would resonate in Defoe’s later writings (most notably Robinson Crusoe) and in modern accounts of natural calamity: collective suffering, individual resilience and the implacable might of nature.

Many saw the storm of 1703 as God’s vengeance. A year earlier, the Archbishop of Dublin, William King, had declared that “earthquakes, storms, thunder, deluges and inundations . . . are sometimes sent by a just and gracious God for the punishment of mankind”.

The turning point would come a few years later, with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed a third of a great European city, killed tens of thousands and undermined theological certainty.

Voltaire, most famously, reacted with a rationalist’s fury, rejecting the notion that such suffering fitted some scheme of divine justice. In Candide, he would savage the philosopher Leibniz’s placid insistence that “all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

Just as we witness the horrific images from the Pakistan earthquake today — and wonder what shapes such brutal fate — so Voltaire railed in verse:

Women and children heaped up mountain high,

Limbs crushed under ponderous marble lie . . .

Can you impute a sinful deed

To babes who on their mothers’ bosom bleed?

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