"Casualties and disasters": Defoe and the interpretation of climatic instability.

Abstract

The Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, that struck Southern England and Wales became a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century for the destructive potential of Nature. This article examines Daniel Defoe's 1704 text The Storm, a compilation of reports of damage from across England that Defoe prefaced with a long introductory essay about his own experiences and speculations about the causes of the disaster. Defoe and his correspondents offer important analyses of the relations among humankind, landscape, and climate, even as they set their remarks in the context of eighteenth-century theology. Ultimately, The Storm seeks to reconcile its scientific and religious impulses by resorting to an eco-cultural materialism that emphasizes the complex feedback loops between landscape, climate, and human activities.

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The Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, that struck Southern England and Wales became a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century for the destructive power of Nature directed by a chastising God. (1) Preaching on the thirtieth anniversary of the storm, Andrew Gifford called it "the most terrible Desolation of [its] kind that ever was known in the Memory of Man, or recorded in any History" (24). Survivors observed memorial days of prayer and fasting on the anniversary of the storm, and annual sermons to commemorate the dead continued well into the nineteenth century--reiterating the theological commonplace that "the tempest" was evidence of God's "great and terrible Judgment" and a forewarning to sinners that "the desolations which have been made in the earth" presaged the Day of Judgment (Stinton, Sermon 5; Pritchard, Desolations 28). In crucial ways, all of these sermons are indebted to, and often draw explicitly on, Daniel Defoe's The Storm: Or, a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen'd in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704), a unique compilation of eyewitness accounts that Defoe advertised for, assembled, and prefaced with a long essay describing his own experiences and reporting the tolls of destruction and death from across Britain. Published in two editions, The Storm remains a vital source of information for climatologists and historians; by marshalling the resources of early eighteenth-century print culture--the periodical advertisement and correspondents' letters--Defoe summarizes what statistics he could find and provides often striking vignettes of the destruction that occurred on November 27. His commitment to empirical verification reflects his solid understanding of the protocols of natural philosophy at the turn of the eighteenth century. "We have endeavour'd to furnish our selves with the most authentick Accounts we could from all Parts of the Nation," Defoe told his readers, and assured them that "a great many worthy Gentleman have contributed their Assistance in various, and some very exact Relations and curious Remarks" (69). In confronting the effects of this and other storms that ravaged England in the early eighteenth century, these "very exact Relations" superimpose empirical and theological interpretations: Defoe and his contributors justify their efforts to understand the physical forces that led to the "casualties and disasters" of 1703 with typological readings of their causes. In the process, The Storm reveals the complex ways in which our understanding of climate--in the twenty-first century as well as the eighteenth--both shapes and is shaped by a range of ecological, socioeconomic, and metaphysical values and assumptions.

Although hardly one of Defoe's most popular works, The Storm is a historically significant effort to register the "exact" and "curious" perceptions of the unsettled weather that characterized the early modern period. In its emphasis on eyewitness reports, the "virtual witnessing" that characterizes emerging notions of scientific methodology, his text describes some of the ways in which conditions during the Little Ice Age (c. 1350-1850)--a period of shorter springs and growing seasons, longer winters, and often abrupt and violent shifts in weather patterns--shaped larger perceptions of "Nature" itself. (2) In the first section of this article, I explore the problems of representing the storm in 1703 and reconstructing its causes and effects three hundred years later by using cutting-edge climatological models. If the survivors, including Defoe himself, repeatedly maintain that no description can convey their embodied experiences, their "very exact Relations and curious Remarks" point to some of the constraints on current efforts to reconstruct the climatological past and model the future. I then briefly describe conditions during the Little Ice Age to suggest that the frequency and strength of storms that England experienced led to a more volatile conception of the natural world than one might assume from reading ahistorically the literature of agricultural improvement, the eighteenth-century georgic, or early Romantic poetry. Rather than celebrating bucolic stability, writers in the early modern era frequently read into meteorological phenomena eschatological and even apocalyptic significance. Paradoxically, however, the complex interference patterns that arise when eyewitness accounts meet metaphysical explanations allow Defoe and his contributors to offer often compelling narratives of the relations between human activities and climate change. In the final section, I examine The Storm's sustained, if historically contingent, accounts of anthropogenic modifications of England's landscape and climate. Whatever the scientific limitations of Defoe's speculations, his text offers a primer in the eco-cultural materialism that saw everywhere reciprocal influences between English society and the natural world it was busy reshaping.

RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST, SIMULATING THE FUTURE

Since its inception in the seventeenth century, our "modern" understanding of climate has been characterized by a crucial tension between the semiotics--both discursive and mathematical--of representing catastrophic events and an embodied experience that resists all forms of representation. Such "crises of representation," as I have suggested, are at once theoretical and historical; in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and their contemporaries argued explicitly that mathematics and experimental science were only limited avenues to understanding what John Ray called "the wisdom of God, as manifested in the Works of Creation" (3). (3) In this respect, Defoe voices a common sentiment among members of the Royal Society in asserting that "Nature plainly refers us beyond her Self, to the Mighty Hand of Infinite Power, the Author of Nature, and Original of all Causes" (2). For Defoe as for Ray, the languages of man are only imperfect refractions of the transcendent word of God, and the "Infinite Power" displayed at the end of November 1703 beggars description. Consequently, even as he collects data and presents eyewitness accounts from "Gentlemen ... of Piety and Reputation" (69), Defoe maintains that the devastation of the storm exceeds the power of language to describe it: "Horror and Confusion seiz'd upon all, whether on Shore or at Sea: No Pen can describe it, no Tongue can express it, no Thought conceive it, unless some of those who were in the Extremity of it" (68). Yet these eyewitnesses are the first to concede that "the Havock the Storm had made ... was so universal in London, and especially in the Out-Parts, that nothing can be said sufficient to describe it" (Defoe 38). (4) Representation is always inadequate and opportunistic: Gideon Harvey's 1769 reprint of large chunks of Defoe's text in The City Remembrancer concludes with the editor's sneer that, "a few days after the Great Storm, the players were imprudent enough to entertain their audiences with ridiculous representations of what had filled the whole nation with such horror, in the plays of Macbeth and the Tempest" (2: 187). This attempt to recreate through stage effects the "horror" that playgoers had just experienced stands synecdochically for the irrevocable shortcomings of representation. Even as Defoe seeks to describe the destruction and memorialize the dead, he is aware that the insufficiency of language--"nothing can be said"--serves as an impetus to seek other ways to measure and represent the universal "Havock."