Strong Earthquakes in North-Western Africa in the Second Half of the 17th Century, AD: A Critical Reappraisal of the Historical Evidence - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 162

4.2 The 1673 Algiers Earthquake: Was it Part of a Larger Picture?

A search among the pamphlet collections of the main European national libraries
led to the retrieval of a Portuguese pamphlet (Rela¸am nova, e verdadeira , 1673;

Fig. 2) that if not quite the same as the Spanish pamphlet quoted by Ambraseys
and Vogt (1988), appears indeed to be a closely related item. The news reported
in this pamphlet seem to have circulated widely, as witnessed by an entry by a
contemporary Mexican diarist (De Robles, 1665-1703) that relates the same tale
presented in the Spanish pamphlet.
The text of Rela¸am nova, e verdadeira

...

(1673) is presented as a letter that
was written on May 30, 1673, by an enslaved Domenican Friar to Alonso Enriques
de San Thomas, the Bishop of Malaga. This letter describes a long sequence of
earthquake shocks that were felt in Algiers between May 10 and May 21, along
with several astronomical phenomena that accompanied them, and the religious
functions celebrated by the Catholic slaves in the Algiers slave quarters, or Bag-
nos (Table 2). All of these details that are easy to confirm (e.g., the name of the
Bishop of Malaga, the existence of Catholic places of worship in the Bagnos) are
correct and the circumstances described are known to be realistic. On the other
hand, there is no mention of earthquakes in the Algiers news for March 1673 and
the following months, as featured in the Genoa and Venice Avvisi (ASMo, 1673)
and in the Gazette de France. By itself, however, this is insufficient to prove that
the earthquake described in the Rela¸am nova, e verdadeira

...

(1673) did not occur
at all. The circumstances described in it could actually be related to a minor local

...

Fig. 2 Frontispiece of the
Rela¸am nova,
e verdadeira ... (1673)