Death and Disaster
The coroner column.
Eruptions, explosions, plagues, fires, shipwrecks. The events whose body counts make them historically loud — and the small specific deaths that made them human.
0 of 25 questions mastered. Current level: 3.
The United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945. Which two, and what were the dates?
The Hiroshima bomb (*Little Boy*, a uranium-235 gun-type weapon) detonated at 8:15 AM local time on 6 August 1945 and killed roughly 70,000–80,000 people instantly, with the death toll rising to perhaps 140,000 by the end of 1945 from injuries and radiation. The Nagasaki bomb (*Fat Man*, a plutonium implosion weapon) detonated on 9 August at 11:02 AM and killed perhaps 40,000–75,000 by year's end. Tokyo had been firebombed catastrophically in March 1945 (perhaps 100,000 dead) but was not nuclear. Kyoto was on the early atomic target list but was removed by Secretary of War Stimson, who had honeymooned there.
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa produced what is still the loudest sound in recorded human history. The chief of police on Rodrigues Island reported what he thought was distant gunfire. How far away from Krakatoa was he?
Rodrigues Island is east of Madagascar, in the western Indian Ocean — about 4,800 km from the Sunda Strait. The sound reached him four hours after the eruption (sound travels approximately 1,200 km/h). The blast also produced a barometric pressure wave that circled the Earth three and a half times and was detected on weather-station barographs everywhere from London to Boston. Northern Australia, Singapore, and Cape Town all heard reports of the event but at lower volumes or none.
The Antikythera mechanism — the corroded bronze object that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old planetary computer — was recovered in 1900 from where?
Greek sponge divers under Dimitrios Kontos took shelter from a storm in the lee of Antikythera island in April 1900 and made a routine seabed inspection of the anchorage. One of them, Elias Stadiatis, brought up a single bronze arm. The first state recovery operation began in November 1900 and continued for ten months, eventually producing the mechanism, several substantial bronze and marble sculptures (the Antikythera Youth, the Antikythera Philosopher), substantial glassware, and thousands of ceramic amphorae. The wreck dates to approximately 60 BC. The mechanism was identified as something more than corroded bronze in 1902.
The 4 August 2020 explosion that destroyed central Beirut was caused by a substance that had been sitting in a port warehouse for six years. The substance was the same one that destroyed Texas City in 1947 and AZF Toulouse in 2001. What is it?
Approximately 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, impounded from the Moldovan-flagged MV *Rhosus* in 2013, had been sitting in Warehouse 12 of Beirut port. A fire at the warehouse on 4 August 2020 detonated it. The blast killed at least 218 people and was felt in Cyprus. The same chemical caused the Texas City disaster (16 April 1947, ~580 dead) and the AZF Toulouse explosion (21 September 2001, 31 dead — ten days after 9/11). Ammonium nitrate is normally stable; it detonates only under specific conditions of contamination, confinement, and heat.
At the Battle of Cannae on 2 August 216 BC, Hannibal's outnumbered Carthaginian army destroyed the largest Roman field army ever assembled. Roughly how many Roman soldiers died in a single afternoon?
Cannae killed approximately 50,000–70,000 Romans in roughly four hours, including one of the two consuls and about 80 senators. The single-day death toll wasn't exceeded by a Western army until the first day of the Somme in July 1916, 2,132 years later. Hannibal's tactical formation — a deliberate convex bow in his centre that withdrew under Roman pressure while his African infantry on the wings closed in from both sides — is still studied at every military academy. Rome didn't surrender. Within fifteen years it had destroyed Carthage.
Cleopatra VII killed herself in Alexandria on 10 or 12 August 30 BC, after Octavian had captured the city. The traditional method was?
The snake-bite story comes from Plutarch (writing about 130 years later) and is the tradition that has dominated subsequent European literature and visual art. Modern medical scepticism notes that cobra venom usually kills slowly and painfully — not the quick dignified death the traditional story describes — and proposes alternatives (a fast-acting poison concealed in a hollow comb, suffocation, even Octavian-arranged murder). The basket of figs detail is in Plutarch and may be folklore. Cleopatra was 39. Her son Caesarion was executed by Octavian within weeks.
After the Great Exhibition closed in October 1851, the Crystal Palace was dismantled, moved to a south London hill, and reassembled at larger scale. It stood there for the next 82 years. How did it end?
A small electrical fire in a staff lavatory escaped containment around 7 PM on 30 November 1936. The building's dry timber panelling and massive ventilation produced conditions in which the fire crossed the entire 1,800-foot length in two hours. About 200,000 people watched it burn from the surrounding south London hills; the glow was visible from eight counties. None of the alternatives are true: the surviving twin water towers were demolished in 1941 (preventatively, so the Luftwaffe couldn't use them as navigation landmarks during the actual Blitz), but the main building had been gone for five years already.
On 6 December 1917 the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb destroyed half of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cause was?
The French munitions ship *Mont-Blanc* collided with the Norwegian relief ship *Imo* in the Narrows of Halifax harbour. *Mont-Blanc* caught fire and exploded twenty minutes later. The blast killed approximately 1,950 people, blinded another 1,000 (mostly from flying glass), and flattened most of the city's North End. The telegraph operator Vince Coleman stayed at his key to warn incoming trains — his message has been preserved. Boston sent a relief train within hours, which is the origin of Nova Scotia's annual Christmas-tree gift to the city of Boston that continues to this day.
Joan of Arc led the French army to break the English siege of Orléans in 1429, escorted the dauphin to be crowned Charles VII at Reims, and was captured by Burgundians the next year. Who actually burned her, and where?
Joan was captured by Burgundian forces in May 1430 and sold to the English. The English wanted her dead but needed cover, so she was tried by an English-aligned ecclesiastical court at Rouen on charges of heresy and cross-dressing. She was burned in Rouen's marketplace on 30 May 1431. She was 19. A 1456 retrial — convened by the king whose coronation she had made possible — formally rehabilitated her. She was canonised as a saint in 1920, almost 500 years later. The Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1478 and had nothing to do with her.
The French geologist Alfred Lacroix arrived at the destroyed Caribbean city of Saint-Pierre six weeks after Mount Pelée had killed 28,000 people in two minutes. He spent four years reconstructing what had happened. What did he name the previously-unrecognised phenomenon he identified?
Lacroix coined *nuée ardente* — the modern technical term is *pyroclastic density current* — for the fast-moving, ground-hugging cloud of superheated gas and ash that had killed Saint-Pierre. His 1904 book *La Montagne Pelée et ses Éruptions* is the foundational text of modern volcanology. Plinian columns had been recognised since Pliny the Younger's account of Vesuvius in 79 AD; lahars and calderas were already named features. The substantive Lacroix contribution was identifying — for the first time, on observational evidence — that horizontal pyroclastic flows existed and could be the principal killing mechanism of a volcanic eruption.
The Laki fissure in Iceland erupted for eight months from June 1783, releasing a sulphur cloud that killed about 23,000 people in Britain alone. How much of Iceland's own population died in the subsequent famine?
Approximately 10,000 of Iceland's roughly 49,000 inhabitants died — a 21% population reduction in a single year, the worst proportional natural-disaster mortality of any European country in the post-medieval period. The cause was famine, not direct gas exposure: sulphate fallout on Icelandic pasture killed 80% of the sheep, 50% of the cattle, and 50% of the horses, collapsing the island's agricultural economy. The Danish Crown, which administered Iceland, briefly considered evacuating the surviving population to Jutland.
In August 1281 the largest seaborne invasion force assembled before D-Day sailed for Japan: 4,400 ships, 140,000 troops, sent by Kublai Khan after a failed first attempt seven years earlier. On the night of 15 August it was destroyed. By what?
A typhoon struck the bay of Imari on the night of 15 August 1281 and destroyed approximately 4,000 of the Mongol-Korean ships at anchor. The samurai garrison had been holding off the landings on land for almost two months but could not have stopped the invasion alone. The word *kamikaze* — *divine wind* — would be revived in 1944 for the Special Attack Units. Maritime archaeology in Imari Bay since the 1980s has confirmed the storm's destruction and shown that many of the ships had been rushed into production with poor-quality construction.
Mount Pelée's eruption destroyed the Martiniquan capital of Saint-Pierre in two minutes on 8 May 1902, killing about 28,000 people. How many of the city's inhabitants survived?
Two confirmed survivors. **Louis-Auguste Cyparis** was a young black labourer in the city dungeon awaiting trial for assault; the thick stone walls of his underground cell shielded him from the worst of the pyroclastic flow. He survived for four days with severe burns before rescuers reached him. **Léon Compère-Léandre** was a shoemaker whose house sat on the extreme eastern edge of the city, at the limit of the surge's lethal range. Cyparis later joined Barnum & Bailey's Circus as a sideshow attraction; he died in the United States in 1929. Compère-Léandre stayed on Martinique and died there in 1936.
Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under twenty feet of pumice and ash. The traditional date for the eruption was 24 August, but recent archaeology has revised it. What year, at least?
79 AD has stuck since antiquity. The August date came from a corrupt manuscript reading of Pliny the Younger's letters and has been steadily eroded by archaeology: woollen cloaks on victim bodies, autumn-harvest material in shops, and most decisively a charcoal inscription dated 17 October found in House V.6 in 2018. An October eruption — about 24 October — is now consensus. Pliny the Elder died on the second day of the eruption while trying to mount a naval rescue from Misenum.
Between January and October 1692, the Salem witch trials produced how many deaths — and by what methods?
Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill between 10 June and 22 September 1692. **Giles Corey**, the only American ever to die under *peine forte et dure* (heavy stones laid on the chest until death), was pressed to death on 19 September after refusing to enter a plea — he wanted his property to pass to his sons rather than be forfeit to the colony. Several additional accused died in prison awaiting trial. **No one was burned at the stake**: burning was a European punishment for witchcraft and heresy; the English-American colonial courts hanged. The trials ended in October 1692 when Governor William Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
On the morning of 30 June 1908, an asteroid or comet fragment exploded above the Siberian taiga. How large was the area of forest the blast flattened?
About 2,150 square kilometres of forest were flattened in a radial pattern — roughly the area of greater London, or about a third the area of Rhode Island. The blast left no crater because the object exploded in the atmosphere at about 5–10 km altitude rather than impacting the ground. About 80 million trees were flattened. The first scientific expedition (Leonid Kulik's, 1927) reached the site nineteen years after the event because the Russian Revolution and its aftermath had occupied substantial governmental attention in the interval. The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 was about a thirtieth the size of Tunguska.
On the morning of 30 June 1908 something exploded several kilometres above the Siberian taiga with the force of a hydrogen bomb. The first scientific expedition to reach the site arrived how long afterward?
Kulik reached the Tunguska blast zone in 1927. The Russian Empire had bigger problems in 1908 (it was running out of money and political legitimacy), then the First World War, then the Revolution, then the Civil War. Kulik found about 2,150 square kilometres of forest flattened in a radial pattern around a central point — but no crater. The explosion is now understood as an airburst of a stony asteroid or icy comet roughly 50–60 metres across at about 5–10 km altitude. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor was a much smaller version of the same phenomenon.
Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain, died in November 1737 after twelve days of severe abdominal pain. The cause was an injury she had been concealing for thirteen years. From whom?
Caroline had ruptured an umbilical hernia during the birth of her youngest daughter Princess Louisa in 1724. She concealed it from her husband, her physicians, her ladies-in-waiting, and the wider court for thirteen years. The 18th-century English aristocratic-female taboo against acknowledging any bodily defect — and the matching social taboo that prevented royal physicians from examining the queen's abdomen without explicit permission — made the concealment possible. The hernia ruptured on 9 November 1737; she did not admit its existence until 13 November; surgical intervention by John Ranby on 18 November came too late. She died on 20 November, aged 54. George II outlived her by 23 years and never remarried.
During the Black Death of 1349, thousands of penitents marched across Europe in organised processions, whipping themselves twice a day in public, and preaching anti-clerical sermons. The movement was banned within months by?
Clement VI banned the *Brethren of the Cross* — the flagellants — in October 1349. The movement had grown into a parallel religious authority, distributing forgiveness without clerical mediation and producing several anti-clerical and increasingly anti-Jewish pogroms across the Rhineland in 1348–49. Clement himself spent the worst of the Black Death sitting in a chamber between two large fires on his physician's instructions and survived. Charles IV was the secular ruler of the Holy Roman Empire but had no jurisdiction over Catholic doctrinal questions. The Patriarch of Constantinople led the Eastern Orthodox church — separate institution since 1054. The University of Paris was a theological authority but did not issue binding decrees.
The Norse Greenland colony lasted about 470 years before it vanished. Its last documented event was a routine social occasion — the kind that anywhere else in medieval Europe would not have been recorded at all. What was it?
The Hvalsey Church wedding of 16 September 1408 — between Thorstein Ólafsson and Sigríd Björnsdóttir — is the last documented event in the Norse Greenland record. It survives because the parties later moved back to Iceland and registered the marriage there; the certificates were preserved. After 1408 the colony went silent. When Hans Egede sailed for Greenland in 1721 looking for surviving Norse descendants, he found only ruins. The Hvalsey Church itself — a small stone structure built around 1300 — still stands almost intact, one of the best-preserved medieval European buildings in the Americas.
An enormous volcanic eruption around 1257 left a substantial sulphate-aerosol signal in both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores — about twice the Tambora 1815 signal — and produced an unusually cold European summer in 1258. The source volcano was identified in what year?
Identified in October 2013 by a team led by the French geographer Franck Lavigne, using converging evidence from tephra geochemistry (the glass-shard composition in polar ice matched Lombok pyroclastic deposits), radiocarbon dating, an 18th-century Old Javanese chronicle (the *Babad Lombok*) that records a catastrophic mountain eruption in the kingdom of Pamatan dated to roughly the right period, and climate-model consistency between the eruption magnitude and the recorded 1258 European cold summer. The mountain (Samalas) was approximately 4,200 metres tall before the eruption; about 1,700 metres of its vertical profile was removed in May 1257. The crater is now the Segara Anak caldera on Lombok.
In Strasbourg in July 1518 a woman called Frau Troffea danced in the street and could not stop. Within a month several hundred others had joined her; some died of it. The city council's first official treatment, on the advice of the physicians' guild, was?
The Strasbourg authorities concluded — on the standard humoral medicine of the day — that the dancing was caused by 'hot blood,' which could be cured by yet more dancing until the bad blood was expended. They hired musicians, built two large stages on the central squares, and contracted with several local guildhalls to admit the dancers. It didn't work; the dancing continued into September, several dozen people died of strokes, heart attacks, and exhaustion, and the city eventually reversed course and sent the dancers to the shrine of Saint Vitus in the Vosges instead. The modern medical consensus is mass psychogenic illness, possibly aggravated by ergotism.
In January 1962, at a girls' boarding school in newly independent Tanganyika, three students began to laugh and could not stop. Within months, how many schools had been forced to close because of the contagious laughter?
The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 affected 14 schools in the Bukoba District over about 18 months and around 1,000 students. The standard modern medical diagnosis is *mass psychogenic illness* — a real condition with a long European history (the medieval dancing plagues, the early-modern convent crises, the 1518 Strasbourg episode). The episode was published in the *Central African Journal of Medicine* in 1963 by the Mwanza district medical officer and is the best-documented modern case. There was no organic cause; the affected children were physically healthy.
On 4 August 1578, on a small floodplain in Morocco, three kings died on the same battlefield in a single afternoon — an event with the convenient name *Battle of the Three Kings*. Two were rivals for the Moroccan throne; the third was the young king of?
King Sebastian of Portugal had spent years organising a Catholic crusading expedition into Morocco. He died charging into the centre of his collapsing army; his body was never reliably identified, and a Portuguese myth (*Sebastianismo*) insisted for centuries that he had survived and would return. The two Moroccan kings — the reigning Saadi sultan Abd al-Malik (probably typhus) and his rival Mohammed al-Mutawakkil (drowned in the river fleeing) — also died that afternoon. Sebastian's childless death produced the Iberian Union of 1580 (Spain inherited Portugal under Philip II), which produced — eight years later — the catastrophic Spanish Armada.
The 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague is famous. It had a much larger predecessor 144 years earlier that started after a major Rhine flood and moved up the river. The year?
The Aachen outbreak of summer 1374 followed a major Rhine flood and was the largest documented medieval dance mania. Several hundred people in each affected city danced for days or weeks. Some danced themselves to death. The geographic spread up the Rhine corridor matched the trade-and-pilgrimage routes; the medical interpretations at the time ranged from demonic possession (the Catholic Church's official line) to organised heresy (a popular alternative) to ergot poisoning from contaminated rye (the modern medical revision). The 1349 date was the Black Death year — the Strasbourg dance was almost two centuries later.
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