The Coast is Toast

In Brief

There's really nothing like a volcano to show a people's true colors. In the Philipines, the recent eruption of Mayon Volcano brought out some rampant materialistic arrogance in the face of nature that shold do any ex-US colony proud. But it reminds us here at History House of the more dire turn of events that followed the seventeenth century eruption of Mount Aetna in Sicily.

Party On

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The News

3/2/2000 Mayon Volcano, in the Phillippines, erupted all through the last week of February 2000. Though not cataclysmic, it was the worst outburst from the mountain sine 1993 and forced a number of evacuations.

The normally peaceful Mayon Volcano

Last week, the violent eruption of Mayon Volcano in the Philippines relocated some 83,000 villagers from what had heretofore been prime real estate north of Borneo. The unflappable locals remarked that they were unafraid of the impending river of ash and flame, because they had cars in which they might escape. (We here at History House find their naivete in the face of natural upheaval endearing.)

The Filipinos have it easy, for desertion of one's home in the wake of geological disaster has not always been so simple. On March 8, 1669, Mount Etna blew in Sicily. The Sicilians, bereft of both geologists and automobiles, sought solace in desperate appeals to the Big Guy, as recounted by a contemporary British, and therefore, stolid, traveler:

As the fire approached, the Religious, every where appeared with much Devotion, carrying in Procession their Reliques [cads made a fortune selling fraudulent bits of Christ's cross and saints' bones, known as relics, to those frail in judgment] in which they reposed no small confidence, followed by great multitudes of people, some of them mortifying themselves with whips ... with great complaints and cries.

The usual exorcisms were performed, to no avail. Each call for aid seemed to anger the mountain more: ashes choked the air, and white-hot rocks rained on their despicable, fetid hovels, setting them afire and liberating captive pigs. Unfortunately, their insistence on wailing and lamenting distracted the huddled masses:

Whilst the people were thus busied in their Devotions, and astonished by their fears, News was brought that a considerable number of Thieves and Robbers had taken opportunity of this general Distraction, to make a prey of the already distressed people, and that they had murdered several of them for their Goods...

Oops. Modern-day Filipinos enjoy a standing police force to keep everything tidy. The Sicilians of the seventeenth century had to make do with another kind of enforcement: the commander of the town rounded up horses and a posse of Spaniards to stop the looters. These Spaniards quickly took to looting themselves. The surely exasperated commander built three sets of gallows to hang the errant members of his own merry band. Assuredly the original thieves continued to run wild while the commander occupied himself stretching the necks of his inferiors.

Problems in the Philippines at present seem to hinge on whether to pack the china or not. The Sicilian town of Catania, where the above episode took place, was trying to save itself from the impending lava flow by digging a sluiceway. Some fifty men donned wet cowhides to keep their flesh from searing, and tried to dig a trench to divert the slow-moving lava away from their beloved town.[1] They worked frantically; it is easy to envision the tools blistering their hands and the hair singeing on their bodies. The residents of the village next door, Paterno, soon noticed the flurry of activity. They also noticed that this channel would divert the lava down the main street of their own little town.

A collection of men from Paterno had a capital idea: run up to the men from Catania, who were feverishly digging in their wet cowhides, and beat them soundly with fists, sticks, and rocks. The leather-draped Catanians could do nothing but flee the hail of stones and watch their town sink under a sea of roiling fire. Verily, the coast was toast. We suspect those from Paterno went home and got drunk in wild celebration. Hey, we'd do it, too.

Footnotes

1. For a corking account of volcano control, see The Control of Nature by John McPhee. In it, Icelanders halt a massive lava flow in the mid-1980s with - believe it - fire hoses

 
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