The Unbelievable Destruction of The Great Storm of 1703
By: Grant Piper
Tags: England, This Day In History, Weather, Science, History

The Great Storm (Public domain)

The Unbelievable Destruction of The Great Storm of 1703

A butcher bill that almost defies imagination

On the evening of December 7th, 1703, author Daniel Defoe was sitting in his home pondering the state of the poor weather which had been plaguing England for the past couple of weeks. Wind and rain had been pounding England for days on end and it seemed as though there would be no end in sight to the dreary state of affairs.

It was on that night, that Defoe glanced over at his barometer and was puzzled to see that the mercury within had dropped to a point lower than he had ever seen it before. In fact, the reading was so low that his only conclusion was that his children must have tampered with his instruments when he was not looking.

Unbeknownst to Defoe at the time, the barometer was accurate and was warning of a powerful storm which was moving onshore. The resulting winds were so powerful that they blew fish straight out of many ponds that dotted the countryside. Defoe would stay up that night absolutely transfixed by the power of the storm and would be compelled afterwards to write a detailed account of the event.

The storm

For a violent period of about twelve hours England was pounded by torrential rain and powerful winds. According to the document, A Letter for the Reverend Mr William Derham, F. R. S. Containing His Observations concerning the Late Storm recorded by the Royal Society, William Derham recorded a low pressure of 973mb in Essex during the storm — a reading nearly unheard of outside of the tropics.

This was the result of a powerful low pressure system which congealed into an extratropical cyclone which came ashore from the west and swept across southern England, and the English Channel before sweeping across France and Germany. The south of England bore the worst of the storm’s fury.

Wind speeds have been estimated to have been blowing at a constant rate of about 80mph with gusts approaching 120mph in some areas. In early 18th century England, this level of wind was too much for nearly all of the structures in the country. The damage was miserable and widespread.

Damage and casualties

A plate depicting the destruction of a light house during the storm. (Public domain)

The tally of damages was kept by a variety of sources, including Defoe who set out to collect as many eyewitness accounts of the storm as possible. Nothing was spared. Ships and boats were grounded, trees were uprooted, roofs were blown away and buildings collapsed.

Some of the damage tolls included:

4,000 old oak trees uprooted

2,000 chimney columns toppled

400 windmills destroyed

700 ships damaged or destroyed

The Eddystone Lighthouse collapses into the sea

Worse than the material damages was the loss of life that accompanied it. The destructive winds buried people in their homes as they slept. Thousands of sailors died. One account has over 6,000 men dying at sea. Some ships were destroyed so quickly and so thoroughly by the winds and the surf that entire crews vanished without a single survivor.

The total death count has been pegged at 8,000 but some accounts have it as high as 20,000.

The queen spoke of the tragedy saying:

[the storm is]a Calamity so Dreadful and Astonishing, that the like hath not been Seen or Felt, in the Memory of any Person Living in this Our Kingdom

Defoe wrote in The Storm that many small towns dotting the English coast appeared as though destroyed by enemy armies. He wrote:

[the many towns] looked as if the enemy had sackt [sic] them and were most miserably torn to pieces

Dennis Wheeler studied the storm in 2003 and said that it was so severe that there did not exist a contemporary vocabulary in England to describe the force and breadth of the storm.

Wheeler wrote of it:

It was so severe, none of these poor captains had ever experienced it before, so they didn’t have any yardsticks to base the description on. One gave up and just wrote ‘a most violent storm’ and left it at that, for sheer want of anything more he could say.

At the time many saw it as divine retribution for the actions and behavior of England during the War of Spanish Succession and many called for repentance and fasting following the passing of the storm.

In terms of damages and casualties, this is the worst storm ever to strike England and was the most powerful until the Great Storm of 1987 which saw a similar weather event strike the country.

It was one of the first natural disasters to be recorded in a modern way with nearly instant news pamphlets and accounts appearing on the streets following the event.

References