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Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

13. Unlucky Coringa

Few cities have been as unlucky as Coringa, India. Until 1839, it was a bustling Bay of Bengal port city, near the mouth of the Godavari River on India’s east coast. It had a population numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and a harbor that hosted thousands of ships annually, busily loading and unloading goods and produce.

Today, Coringa is a tiny village near the coast, of no distinction or note, and with a population of no more than a few thousand. The drastic decline in fortunes was caused by a pair of devastating cyclones, one in 1789, and an even more destructive one fifty years later, in 1839.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.