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 James Kelly from Worcester College, Oxford University, is fascinated by Daniel Defoe's accounts of the great storm of 1703. Here he looks more closely at some of the fascinating details of the most devastating storm ever to have hit the UK.
Few, who experienced it, are ever likely to forget the storm which battered England and Wales overnight on 15 October 1987. Winds gusting up to seventy-five knots wrought havoc across southern counties. A cross-channel ferry was blown aground at Folkestone, fifteen million trees were uprooted, there was widespread disruption to communications and, tragically, eighteen people lost their lives across Britain. However, even these statistics pale beside contemporary reports of the devastation caused by a freak storm, which raged over much the same geographical area, between 26 November and 3 December 1703.
It was almost certainly Daniel Defoe who placed a series of advertisements in London newspapers in December 1703, inviting readers to communicate first-hand accounts of the storm and its effects. Defoe, a bankrupt, and a nonconformist radical, had just been released from Newgate prison following his incarceration for a seditious libel against the High Tory Anglican establishment. Sensing a potentially lucrative opportunity in the literary marketplace, Defoe edited a selection of the responses he received, publishing them in a volume entitled The Storm (July 1704). His correspondents indicate that the wind, which was generally westerly, exerted its maximum force over the first two days and that during this interval most damage was done. Lead roofing on Westminster Abbey scrolled up like parchment before it was torn from the building, Ely Cathedral suffered structural damage, and scores of church spires were obliterated. The damage caused to private property was incalculable. At sea, the Eddystone light was destroyed and all its occupants drowned, and within the first six hours of the storm the Royal Navy had lost twelve ships and over 1700 men. Virtually all the ships moored in the lower reaches of the River Thames, some 700 vessels, were driven into a heap around Limehouse. Defoe estimated that the number of fatalities on land stood at 123 with over 8,000 killed offshore.
Letters from the shires give a compelling impression of different aspects of the storm. The Reverend Joseph Ralton of Bessels Leigh, near Oxford, writes of a towering whirlwind travelling at walking speed across country, snapping an old oak in its path, sucking up the water in cart-ruts, tumbling a barn like a pack of cards. Mr Ralph Thoresby, FRS, with admirable precision, reports an earthquake experienced at Hull at three minutes after five on the evening of 28 December. Two accounts refer to the demise of the Bishop of Bath and Wells and his wife when their bedroom ceiling collapsed. Defoe insinuates gossip into the narrative which hinted that the attitudes of the crushed bodies, when they were found, indicated that the Bishop had made it as far as the door in an effort to save his own skin, while his lady died clutching the bedclothes.
 Elsewhere, Defoe surveys a catalogue of maritime misadventure. He conjures up the spectacle of shipwrecked sailors briefly reprieved on Goodwin Sands at low water. Observers reported the men wandering aimlessly to and fro, frantically signalling for help, terrified that the next tide would wash them into the next world. A dismal litany of the ships and crews lost from a single seaport on the Sussex coast is accentuated by a description of Walter Street, sole survivor of the Happy Entrance, ‘who swimming three days on a mast between the Downs and North Yarmouth was at last taken up.’ The Association, a second-rate frigate approaching the Downs, was hurled across the North Sea over to the coast of Norway. But a lucky Thames waterman, lying asleep in his barge at Blackfriars, spun downstream to Tower Dock where he gently ran aground. The occupant never woke nor heard the storm.
There seems little reason to doubt the essential truth of Defoe’s declaration that he published The Storm to convey a reliable historical account to posterity, though there is, perhaps, a twinge of indulgent satisfaction in his register of high Anglican steeples toppled by the wind. The collective testimony of Defoe’s correspondents probably records the effects of a hurricane driving up the English channel. Similar phenomena, though less severe, were reported along coastal areas in parts of France and Holland over the same period.
Related links:
Weather in Literature:
The Modern Novel
Shakespearean Storms
Thomas Hardy
The Romantic Poets
Mark Twain
Daniel Defoe
Oxford University's
English Faculty
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