The Farmer And Mechanic

2,000 Souls Burned In a Theatre.
The most fatal theatre fire was the burning of the Saragossa Theatre in 1778, when 600 persons lost their lives.
At the Carlsruhe Theatre, in 1847, 104 persons perished. The burning of the Opera House, at Nice, in 1851, in which 62 persons were burned or crushed to death, is still fresh in the public memory.
In these Islands many theatres have been burnt down, but some providential chance has always intervened to limit the proportions of the catastrophe.
The fire had broken out in the daytime: the performance had not begun or had not ended, or there were few spectators in the house. If, for example, the Surrey Theatre, when it was burnt down during the daytime, in 1865, had contained an audience, few would have escaped alive, so rapid was the action of the flames. But of all the calamities which have ever in modern times overtaken a crowd of human beings in a single building, the burning of the church of La Compania, Santiago, 1863, has never been equalled or approached.
In one short hour 2,000 people, nearly all ladies of youth, rank and beauty, were reduced to ashes. The flower of the capital of Chili had gathered in the church, in a spirit of religious excitement, to pay its devotions at the closing celebration of the Immaculate Conception. Every seat was full. Nothing that invention could suggest or wealth supply was omitted in the adornments of the occasion. The interior of the church was hung from roof to floor with floating gauze and rich drapery, and lighted with festoons of innumerable paraffine lamps. An acolyte, in lighting the last lamp before the shrine, raised a flame which spread instantaneously. A rush soon choked the entrances with a wall of dead and dying twelve feet in height. The melting lead from the roof and the blazing oil of the several lamps poured down upon the heads of 2,000 tender women, who could be seen from the windows of neighboring houses, rushing wildly to and fro, without an outlet of escape. The falling of the roof put an end to their agonies, completed a catastrophe which stands without a parallel. The last, but not least, was the recent burning of the Ring Theatre, Vienna, when about 750 lives were lost.