The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes.
And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
On the billows fall and rise.”
NE of the most destructive storms on record, and certainly the most terrible ever known on the whole English coast is the great storm of 1703. It is the only storm which has ever been made the subject of a Parliamentary memorial. It raged for a week over nearly the whole of England. Scores of vessels were driven on shore and perished. At Bristol, the in-driven sea filled the merchants’ cellars, destroying sugar, tobacco, and other produce, to the value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Eighty people were drowned in the river and adjacent
STORM ON THE SHOALS, 1703.
marshes; fifteen thousand sheep were drowned by the overflow or backing up of the Severn. At London, the river was filled with vessels, the crews of which were nearly all on shore. The storm tore them from their moorings, and drove them into a bight on the opposite side of the stream. It was a strange sight they presented after the storm. Defoe says that “there lay, by the best account he could take, few less than seven hundred sail of ships, some very great ones, between Shadwell and Limehouse inclusive; the posture is not to be imagined but by them that saw it; some vessels lay heeling off with the bow of another ship over her waist, and the stern of another upon her forecastle; the boltsprits of some drove into the cabin windows of others; some lay with their sterns tossed up so high that the tide flowed into their forecastles before they could come to rights; some lay so leaning upon others that the undermost vessels would sink before the other could float; the number of masts, boltsprits and yards split and broke, the staving the heads and sterns and carved work, the tearing and destruction of rigging, and the squeezing of boats to pieces between the ships, is not to be reckoned; but there was hardly a vessel to be seen that had not suffered some damage or other in one or all of these articles.”
In the city itself, the streets were covered with tiles, slates, bricks, and fallen chimneys. Common tiles rose to nearly six times their usual price. Numbers of people were killed by crumbling roofs or falling houses. In Gloucester, six hundred great trees were prostrated in a space of five acres. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, and his wife, were among the more noted dead. The total loss of life has been estimated at from eight to thirty thousand. The former is Defoe’s, but as he only counts those of which he obtained direct personal information, this estimate is certainly too low.