Disasters & Accidents in the 18th century

116 sourced entries, 1700 CE to 1799 CE, oldest first. Also see Disasters & Accidents across every century or everything else in the 18th century.

• 1700February 3 – The 'Lesser Great Fire' destroys a substantial part of central Edinburgh, Scotland.source
• 1700April – Fire destroys many buildings in Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia, including two in the palace complex.source
• 1702April 3 – The Dutch East India Company ship Merestein strikes rocks and sinks in Saldanha Bay off Jutten Island, Africa with the loss of 101 of the 200 people on board.source
• 1702May 16 – Much of the city of Uppsala, Sweden is destroyed in a fire.source
• 1702May 19 – Over 90% of the city of Bergen, Norway, is destroyed and reduced to ashes in a Great Fire.source
• 1703January 9 – The Jamaican town of Port Royal, a center of trade in the Western Hemisphere and at this time the largest city in the Caribbean, is destroyed by a fire. British ships in the harbor are able to rescue much of the merchandise that has been unloaded on the docks, but the inventory in market-places in town is destroyed.source
• 1704March 23 – War of the Spanish Succession: The English Navy ships HMS Kent, HMS Bedford and HMS Antelope intercept two newly-built Spanish warships, Porta Coeli and Santa Teresa off of the coast of Cape Spartel, as the Spaniards attempt to sail into the Strait of Gibraltar. The two Spanish ships are captured after a seven-hour battle and taken toward Lisbon, but the Santa Teresa sinks along the way.source
• 1705c. October 3 – 31 people are killed in a colliery explosion at the Stony Flatt pit in Gateshead on Tyneside in England.source
• 1707October 22 – Scilly naval disaster: Four British Royal Navy ships run aground in the Isles of Scilly, because of faulty navigation. Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and at least 1,450 sailors all drown.source
• 1708April 28 – The Great Hoei fire breaks out in Kyoto, Japan, destroying the Imperial Palace and a large portion of the old capital.source
• 1708June 8 – War of the Spanish Succession: Wager's Action, a naval confrontation, takes place between a British squadron under Charles Wager and the Spanish treasure fleet off Cartagena in the Caribbean Sea. Spanish galleon San José explodes and sinks with the loss of almost all her 600 crew and an estimated 8.8 million ounces troy weight in gold; her wreck is located in 2015.source
• 1708Fearful of a Swedish attack, the Russians blow up the city of Tartu, Estonia.source
• 1708The Russians burn the city of Porvoo, Finland (at the time part of Sweden).source
• 1709Priceless medieval altarpieces, created by Tyrolese sculptor Michael Pacher, are destroyed.source
• 1710August 2 – British Royal Navy 90-gun ship HMS Vanguard is relaunched from Chatham; Vanguard sank in Chatham Dockyard in the Great Storm of 1703, but was raised in 1704 for rebuilding.source
• 1711October 7 – is wrecked on Scaterie Island, Nova Scotia with the loss of 102 lives.source
• 1711October 11 – Panic kills 241 people in the stampede on the Guillottière bridge in France near Lyon. Revelers returning from a festival on the other side of the Rhône river are blocked by from crossing after a collision between a carriage and a cart. At least 25 fall off the bridge and into the river, while 216 are trampled by people behind them.source
• 1711November 5 – The southwest spire of Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire, England is struck by lightning, resulting in a fire that spreads to the nave and tower, destroying roofs, bells, clock and organ.source
• 1711November 7 – The Dutch East India Company ship Liefde runs aground and sinks off Out Skerries, Shetland, with the loss of all but one of her 300 crew.source
• 1712March 15 – HMS Dragon, a 38-gun fourth rate frigate of the British Royal Navy, is wrecked on Les Casquets rocks to the west of Alderney.source
• 1715January 13 – A fire in London, described by some as the worst since the Great Fire of London (1666) almost 50 years earlier, starts on Thames Street when fireworks prematurely explode "in the house of Mr. Walker, an oil man"; more than 100 houses are consumed in the blaze, which continues over to Tower Street before it is controlled.source
• 1715July 24 – 1715 Treasure Fleet: A Spanish treasure fleet of 12 ships, under General Don Juan Ubilla, leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 11 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida (some centuries later, treasure salvage is found from these wrecks).source
• 1716December 4 – Fifty people are killed, and 150 houses burned, when a fire breaks out in Wapping, London. The blaze comes two days after a fire at the Spring Gardens at St. James's, London, which destroyed the French Chapel there and which was put out by several rescuers, including the future King George II.source
• 1717April 26 – The Whydah Gally, flagship of English pirate Samuel Bellamy, is wrecked in a storm off Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The Whydah sinks with a reputed tons of treasure on board, and all but two of her crew are lost, including Bellamy.source
• 1718December 4 – Fifty people are killed, and 150 houses burned, when a fire breaks out in Wapping, London. The blaze comes two days after a fire at the Spring Gardens at St. James's, London, which destroyed the French Chapel there and which was put out by several rescuers, including the future King George II.source
• 1719December 2 – Workers in Falun Mine, Sweden, find the apparently petrified body of "Fet-Mats" Israelsson (d. 1677), in a flooded part of the copper workings.source
• 1721January 6 – The Committee of Inquiry on the collapse of the South Sea Company in Great Britain publishes its findings.source
• 1722November 20 – The Dutch East India Company cargo ship Schoonenberg runs aground in South Africa's Struis Bay and is looted by most of its 110 crew, beginning a legend and questions of whether the wreck was part of a conspiracy or simply an accident. Almost 300 years later, the event is reconstructed in detail by investigators.source
• 1724November 19 – The Dutch East India Company frigate Slot ter Hooge strikes rocks and sinks off Porto Santo Island, Madeira, with the loss of 221 of the 254 people on board.source
• 1724December 7 – In the aftermath of an attack against Jesuit Catholics led by the Lutheran mayor of the Prussian city of Thorn (modern-day Toruń, Poland), ten Lutheran officials (including mayor Johann Gottfried Rösner) are executed in the town square. Rösner and seven others are decapitated by an axe, while two others are hanged, drawn and quartered for blasphemy.source
• 1725August 27 – At least 216 people die in the sinking of the Chameau, a ship of the French Navy, after the vessel is driven by a storm into rocks off of the coast of Nova Scotia. Reportedly, 180 bodies wash ashore near Louisbourg. The ship's cargo, which included a fortune in gold and silver coins, is discovered 240 years later in 1965.source
• 1725A fire in Wapping, London, destroys 70 houses.source
• 1728July 23 – At the conclusion of the Szeged witch trials in the city of the same name in Hungary, six men and six women are burned at the stake on the island of Boszorkány Sziget (Hungarian for "Witch Island").source
• 1728October 20–23 – The Copenhagen Fire of 1728 (the largest in the Danish city's history) burns.source
• 1729May 8 – A fire breaks out inside the fully walled town of Haiger within the Holy Roman Empire (in the modern-day state of Hesse in Germany) and destroys all the buildings.source
• 1729May 12 – Six English pirates, including Mary Critchett, seize control of the sloop John and Elizabeth while being transported to America to complete their criminal sentences. They overpower their captors but are later captured in Chesapeake Bay by HMS Shoreham and hanged in August.source
• 1729July 27 – A fire that breaks out on this day in Constantinople destroys 12,000 houses and kills 7,000 inhabitants.source
• 1731January 8 – An avalanche from the Skafjell mountain causes a massive wave in the Storfjorden fjord in Norway that sinks all boats that happen to be in the water at the time and kills people on both shores.source
• 1731February 3 – A fire in Brussels at the Coudenberg Palace, at this time the home of the ruling Austrian Duchess of Brabant, destroys the building, including the state records stored therein.source
• 1731April 28 – A fire at White's Chocolate House, near St. James's Palace in London, destroys the historic club and the paintings therein, but is kept from spreading by the fast response of firemen.source
• 1731June 4 – The English market town of Blandford Forum is destroyed by fire, with the exception of 26 houses. About one-third of the uninsured losses are paid for by the collection of disaster relief money.source
• 1731September 30 – The village of Barnwell, Cambridgeshire, England, is "burned down entirely" by a fire.source
• 1731October 23 – A fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster destroys 114 irreplaceable manuscripts (including a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and damages 98 others (among them the manuscript of Beowulf). Richard Bentley, the King's librarian and the House's owner, saves the only copy of the Codex Alexandrinus, carrying it under one arm as he leaps from a window. Bentley's ten year labor in translating the Greek Testament is ruined by the blaze. The remaining 844 manuscripts later form the heart of the collections of the British Library.source
• 1732September 16 – A military warehouse explosion kills up to two-thirds of the population of Campo Maior, Portugal.source
• 1734June 21 – In Montreal, New France, a black slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is tortured then hanged by the French authorities for allegedly setting a fire that destroyed part of the city.source
• 1734December 24 – A fire destroys the Royal Alcázar of Madrid, the residence of the Spanish royal family, along with more than 400 valuable paintings, 100 sculptures and thousands of documents.source
• 1735February 3 – All 256 people on board the Dutch East India Company ships Vliegenthart and Anna Catherina die when the two ships sink in a gale off of the Netherlands coast. The wreckage of Vliegenthart remains undiscovered until 1981.source
• 1736April 19 – A fire in Stony Stratford, England, consumes 53 houses.source
• 1736August 12 – A fire in Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, destroys 2,000 buildings, the city's post office, and several palaces.source
• 1736December 7 – Benjamin Franklin builds the first volunteer fire company in Philadelphia.source
• 1737July 17 – The British ship Catherine founders in a storm off of Nova Scotia's Cape Sable Island during its voyage from Ireland to Boston, killing 98 of the 201 people on board.source
• 1738January 1 – At least 664 African slaves drown when the Dutch West Indies Company slave ship Leusden capsizes and sinks in the Maroni River during its arrival in Surinam. The Dutch crew escapes, and leaves the slaves locked below decks to die.source
• 1738December 27 – After setting off from Rotterdam in August with 240 immigrants to America, the British ship Princess Augusta is wrecked near Block Island off of the coast of the colony of Rhode Island. During the voyage, 200 passengers and seven crew die from illness spread by contaminated water. Another 20 die after the crew leaves and rows to shore. The wreck later becomes the subject of the legend of the "Palatine Light" ghost ship and of John Greenleaf Whittier's 1867 poem "The Palatine".source
• 1740January 8 – All 237 crewmen on the Dutch East India Company ship Rooswijk are drowned when the vessel strikes the shoals of Goodwin Sands, off of the coast of England, as it is beginning its second voyage to the Indies. The wreckage is discovered more than 250 years later, in 2004.source
• 1741May 14 – HMS Wager, one of the vessels of George Anson's voyage around the world, is wrecked on the coast of Chile, killing most of the crew who have survived scurvy.source
• 1742June 20 – İzmir, formerly the ancient Greek city of Smyrna, is destroyed by fire.source
• 1743April 13 – The British East India Company ship Princess Louisa is wrecked off the coast of Maio Island in the Cape Verde Islands, killing 49 of her 179 crew.source
• 1743July 13 – All 276 people on board the Dutch East India Company ship Hollandia drown after the ship strikes a rock off of the Isles of Scilly in England near Cornwall. The wreckage is located in 1971.source
• 1744January 6 – The Royal Navy ship Bacchus engages the Spanish Navy privateer Begona, and sinks it; 90 of the 120 Spanish sailors die, but 30 of the crew are rescued.source
• 1744March 13 – The British ship Betty capsizes and sinks off of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) near Anomabu. More than 200 people on board die, although there are a few survivors.source
• 1744July 8 – The Royal Navy privateer Somerset capsizes and sinks in the Bristol Channel, killing 86 of the 97 crew.source
• 1744October 4 – In one of the greatest disasters for the Royal Navy, HMS Victory sinks in a storm in the English Channel, killing 1,100 sailors and officers it had been bringing back from Gibraltar to England, including Admiral John Balchen. The wreck will be located 264 years later, in January, 2009.source
• 1745December 28 – For 5 days, fire destroys buildings in Istanbul.source
• 1747September 21 – A hurricane in the Caribbean Sea sinks 11 British ships, most of them off the coast of Saint Kitts.source
• 1748March 25 – A fire in the City of London starts at Change Alley in Cornhill and continues for two days. Dr. Samuel Johnson later writes, "The conflagration of a city, with all its turmoil and concominant distress, is one of the most dreadful spectacles which this world can afford to human eyes". Another history notes more than a century later that "the fire led to a great increase in the practice of fire insurance", after the blaze causes more than £1,000,000 worth of damage.source
• 1748June 1 – A fire in Moscow kills 482 people and destroys 5,000 buildings.source
• 1749April 14 – British Royal Navy ship HMS Namur is wrecked in a storm near Fort St. David, India, with the loss of 520 lives.source
• 1749June 4 – A fire in Glasgow leaves 200 families homeless.source
• 1750January 24 – A fire in Istanbul destroys 10,000 homes.source
• 1750July 11 – Halifax, Nova Scotia is almost completely destroyed by fire.source
• 1751July 31 – Fire destroys 1,000 houses in Stockholm.source
• 1752June 3 – A fire destroys 13,000 houses in Moscow in the Russian Empire, only 11 days after a May 23 fire destroyed 5,000 homes; by June 6, two-thirds of the city has been damaged or destroyed.source
• 1752June 21 – Pickawillany (now Piqua, Ohio), the capital of the Miami Indian nation, is attacked and burned by Odawa, Ojibwe and French soldiers under the command of Odawa War Chief Charles Michel de Langlade.source
• 1753January 3 – King Binnya Dala of the Hanthawaddy Kingdom orders the burning of Ava, the former capital of the Kingdom of Burma.source
• 1753November 12 – A fire destroys the Emperor's Palace in Moscow.source
• 1755July 17 – In a convoy of ships from Great Britain, returning to India for the East India Company, the lead ship Doddington (on her third voyage) wrecks in Algoa Bay near modern-day Port Elizabeth in South Africa, losing 247 of its 270 passengers and crew, together with a chest of gold coins from Robert Clive worth £33,000. In 1998, 1,400 coins from the wreck site are offered for sale, and in 2002 a portion is given to the South African government. Around twenty survivors of the wreck are eventually able to make safety after an open boat voyage.source
• 1755December 2 – The second Eddystone Lighthouse off the coast of England is destroyed by fire.source
• 1758December 13 – The ship Duke William sinks in the North Atlantic, with the loss of over 360 lives, while deporting Acadians from Prince Edward Island to France.source
• 1758A fire destroys parts of Christiania, Norway.source
• 1759July 19 – The Great Stockholm Fire 1759 breaks out at Södermalm in Stockholm, Sweden.source
• 1759October 18 – A fire destroys the Macedonian city of Salonika, reducing 4,000 houses to ashes.source
• 1759Fire destroys 250 houses in Stockholm.source
• 1760February 15 – The British Royal Navy ship HMS Royal Katherine runs aground off Bolt Head in England, with the loss of 699 lives.source
• 1760March 20 – The Great Fire of Boston, Massachusetts, destroys 349 buildings and marks the biggest conflagration in the American colonies up to this time.source
• 1760April 12 – Two of six French ships run into a British blockade led by Britain's Admiral Edward Boscawen. Of the remaining four, one sinks before it can reach North America.source
• 1761August 6 – The Parlement of Paris votes to close all colleges, associations and seminaries associated with the Jesuit Order, following a long campaign by Louis-Adrien Le Paige.source
• 1763August – Fire in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire, destroys 2,600 houses.source
• 1765May 18 – Not long after British rule has started over the formerly French colony of Quebec, an accidental fire destroys one quarter of the town of Montreal.source
• 1768August 7 – The palace of the Ottoman Grand Vizier is destroyed by a fire in Constantinoplesource
• 1768August 30 – A fire burns much of the Library of the Vatican.source
• 1768December 1 – The slave ship Fredensborg sinks off Tromøya, Norway.source
• 1769August 18 – Brescia Explosion: The city of Brescia, Italy is devastated when the Church of San Nazaro is struck by lightning. The resulting fire ignites 200,000 lb (90,000 kg) of gunpowder being stored there, causing a massive explosion, which destroys 1/6 of the city and kills 3,000 people.source
• 1770February 1 – Thomas Jefferson's home at Shadwell, Virginia is destroyed by fire, along with most of his books.source
• 1770May 20 – A stampede at a celebration of the newly wedded Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste in Paris kills more than a hundred people.source
• 1771October 9 – The Dutch merchant ship Vrouw Maria sinks off the coast of Finland; Captain Raymund Lourens and his crew escape unharmed.source
• 1775February 26 – The British East India Company factory on Balambangan Island is destroyed by Moro pirates.source
• 1776June 6 – A fire destroys major parts of the town of Askersund, Sweden.source
• 1776September 20 – The Great Fire of New York (1776) starts during the night, ending the following morning.source
• 1779February 14 – Captain James Cook is killed on the Sandwich Islands, on his third voyage.source
• 1780September 29 – The Danish ship-of-the-line Printz Friderich runs aground on the Kobbergrund shoal and is a total losssource
• 1780November 28 – A lightning strike in Saint Petersburg begins a fire that burns 11,000 homes.source
• 1781January 5 – American Revolutionary War: Richmond, Virginia is burned by British naval forces, led by Benedict Arnold.source
• 1785May 10 – An unmanned hot air balloon released as part of a bet crashes in Tullamore, Ireland, causing a fire that burns down about 100 houses, making it the world's first aviation disaster (by 36 days). The town’s coat of arms now represents a phoenix emerging from the ashes.source
• 1785June 15 – After several attempts, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and his companion, Pierre Romain, set off in a balloon from Boulogne-sur-Mer, but the balloon suddenly deflates (without the envelope catching fire) and crashes near Wimereux in the Pas-de-Calais, killing both men, making it the first fatal aviation disaster.source
• 1786January 6 – The outward bound East Indiaman Halsewell is wrecked on the south coast of England in a storm, with only 74 of more than 240 on board surviving.source
• 1786September 25 – The mine of Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes collapses killing more than a hundred people. The event is a major setback for quicksilver production in the Spanish Empire.source
• 1788March 21 – The Great New Orleans Fire destroys 856 buildings, including St. Louis Cathedral and The Cabildo, leaving most of the town in ruins.source
• 1789An estimated 150,000 of Paris's 600,000 people are without work.source
• 1793July 31 – Oulu Castle in Finland is destroyed in an explosion following the burning of a powder cellar.source
• 1793Crowds in Paris burn monarchist emblems.source
• 1794December 8 – The Great New Orleans Fire (1794) burns over 200 buildings in the French Quarter.source
• 1795June 5–7 – The Copenhagen Fire of 1795, starting in a naval warehouse, destroys 941 houses.source
• 1796December 18 – British Royal Navy ship HMS Courageux is wrecked on the Barbary Coast with the loss of 464 of the 593 onboard.source
• 1797November 16 – (or November 23?) – British Royal Navy frigate is wrecked on the approaches to Halifax, Nova Scotia; of the 240 on board, all but 12 are lost.source
• 1799October 9 – (a famous treasure wreck) is sunk in the West Frisian Islands.source
• 1799November 5 – HMS Sceptre is driven ashore and wrecked in a storm in Table Bay, South Africa, with the loss of 349 and 41 survivors.source