The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by L. P. Gratacap

The writer of this article in the London Times had not realized, or had not heard of, the elevation of Cuba and the emergence of the broken range of keys between Cape Gracias de Dios and Jamaica, nor had he considered the “suctorial influence” of the Mexican current in the Pacific, southward on the west coast of Mexico and Central America upon the Atlantic areas, nor had he suspected the quantitative effect of a higher barometric pressure in the Atlantic over the pressure resident above the surface of the Pacific, a difference practically amounting to a push upon the surface distensions of the Atlantic in the direction of the Pacific, the very moment a sensible union between them took place. And it was a sensible union. His comparison of it to a pinhole was utterly misleading. Above a certain minimum, no matter what the size of the major bodies of water were, relatively, connection between them meant, under the circumstances, mixture, and a hole four hundred miles wide was much above that minimum. At the very moment when he penned this astute demonstration, the Gulf Stream had begun to throw its seething waters across the sunken isthmus. And the effects followed with startling rapidity. The author of the consoling reflections quoted, perhaps had hardly had time to have forgotten the obsequious reception his words received, when his admiring listeners were brought face to face with the worst consequences he had considered absurdly impossible.

The summer in Great Britain had been noticeably colder, and with the passage of the autumnal equinox, the winds increased in strength, and brought with them a terrifying cold. All records were broken, and the sinking thermometers withdrawing their silver threads into the diminutive bulbs, became suddenly the chief subjects of conversation. The corridor of the Houses of Parliament, the state room of Windsor, the clubs of Pall Mall and the parlors of the West End, no less than the alcoves of London Bridge, the shops in White Friars, or the auction stalls of the Ghetto, buzzed with the endless comparison of observations made on these hitherto unnoticed instruments of precision, and their slightest variations took precedence in the daily prints, over the aphorisms of the prime minister or the nullities of the king. An enormously increased sale of thermometers accompanied the sinister records of the deepening cold; importations of them from the United States spread an unprecedented wonder throughout the world as to the meaning of this change in climate, and the range of temperature, as the season advanced, was as much an object of solicitude as the growing expenditures of London, and more talked about than the fancied rupture between Spain and France. Meteorological journals were besieged with subscribers; Abbe, Loomis, Ferrel were as much in demand at the book stores as Glaisher or Thomson; Flammarion was as popular as Tyndal, and the lectures delivered at the British Museum had such suffocating success that the Red Cross Societies of London conceived the idea of public instructions for a tuppenny, to replenish their forgotten treasuries. The pedestrian and the chance acquaintance of the tramway would interview each other on the prevalent topic of alarm, and quote Wells, and Boussingault, and Daniel, and Quetelet, Forbes, Helmersen, Kamtz and Kupffer with more unction and accuracy than he did the current prices of wool or barley.

The fright began in the north, in Scotland. News first arrived from the Hebrides, of desolating cold and overwhelming snow storms; then the story was picked up by the Shetlands and Aberdeen, and then the really tragic fate of Iceland was recounted. The cable between Scotland and Iceland, completed in 1906, brought the tale. And a freezing tale it was. Iceland had become a snow heap; its interior valleys were filled up, from Heckla to Skaldbreid; from Skaldbreid to Esja one portentous blanket of snow had levelled all inequalities of the surface. The terror stricken inhabitants deserted their farms and fought their way to Reykjavik, leaving all they possessed of sheep, cattle and horses to be destroyed by the pitiless tooth of the Ice King. Reykjavik had been deserted; its people fleeing to ships and steamers as the remorseless winds piled up the white shrouds of its Arctic burial. The cable summoned assistance for those yet fighting for life on the water’s edge, where the sea air helped them to maintain a margin of cleared ground. Over ten feet had accumulated, and ceaseless blizzards, unchecked, and even increasing in fury, with a tireless and killing cold, had renewed the ice age within that boreal republic. The panic spread. From confidence and scorn the people of Scotland and England and Ireland plunged into the clamor of despair and maniacal forebodings. Religious fraternities of “Frigidists” were organized, whose exegesis made the prophecy of the End of the World a menace of destruction by ice. Geikie’s Ice Age, and Croll’s Climate and Time were read by earl and bellboy, and in the midst of the general consternation, the publishers of these books, in cheap form, doubled their business capacity and their fortunes.

Then came the sudden visitation of Edinburgh, with the scenes just recounted. The transference of these immense swarms of people, the evicted tenants of the north (poor creatures who had never owned the land they lived on except by the sufferance of some landlord duke or “gentleman,”) southward, was a task of difficulty. Sir John C—, was provost marshal of the city at the time (his father before him had held the same office), and had devised a scheme of goodly proportions and efficacy. He appointed wardens, who, with assistants selected by themselves, visited the families in the several bailiwicks in Edinburgh, and prepared them for the departure, and who also apportioned to the different wards of the town the streaming populations from all the neighboring villages, towns and the country sides. The railroads were seized by the government, and systematic transportation, begun and carried on night and day. They were taken to the larger seaports of England, and of course to London. Already secret misgivings that chilled the marrow of their bones, and made the blood circling in their hearts freeze with horror, were entertained by public men, that perchance this was not all, nor indeed the worst. Was the power of the Kingdom of Great Britain to be made the jest of the snowflake and the ice-cicle? The thought made reason totter, but new gleams of anticipation seemed suddenly to place upon that very thought the consecration of joy. They should be driven from their hearthstone to bring the English culture in other English lands, and emancipated men—men of the new type, like H. G. Wells—said that that culture, torn from the swaddling bands of a conventional tradition, the silly materialism of forms and dresses, of titles and classes, of imperialistic gew-gaws, and the impediments of habit, would expand into a modern civilization, which, carrying forward all the strains of strength, and imaginative and ideal aims, it had before, might incorporate in them the new procreative life of a liberal social state. Well! there was some consolation in that, but a consolation robbed of much positive consistency when all around them they saw the loss of trade, the paralysis of hope, the desertion of homes, and the rising threats of that inexorable and deaf deity—Nature.

Leacraft had watched and waited. Every new development, each changing report, the wearily studied logs of the ships and steamers, the daily averages of temperature and rainfall, the swelling disorder in the climate of the United States, and confirmed rumors of the hot current—which might be the Gulf Stream—pouring, pouring northward, and hugging the shores of California and Washington and Oregon, and even repelling the cold from Alaska, supplying a stove to its shores, which, it was promptly surmised, would make of it a northern paradise, all, in a cumulative way, pointed to one result—the evacuation of England. His speculative mind hurried on to the picturing of the changed aspects of the national life, and he felt that for once Science, embodied in the laws of Nature, was about to put to flight the mentality of men, and pour the vials of its confusion over the proud, the boasting defiance of their thin optimism. And yet—what might not Opportunity perform? Perhaps the old receptacles of civilization needed emptying; their garnered seeds to be more quickly cast upon the winds of chance to germinate and flower again in the waste places of the world. And Leacraft hurried to and fro—a small inherited competency had dissolved his business bonds—a lonely, sad man, excited by the thoughts of the world’s trembling position on a new threshold of events, and thus forgetting the gnawing pains of his own disappointment.

During September he had been at the far north of Scotland, and retreated day by day with the invading cold, fleeing with its fleeing people, southward. On the memorable evening whose events have been rehearsed, he had found Edinburgh practically voided, and left to its entombment. The work of getting the people away, of convincing the incredulous, of providing for the needy, of deporting the treasures of this great depository, had been hastily and imperfectly done. In spite of Sir John C—’s useful plans, it could not be different. Disorder, recriminations, riot and clashes were inevitable at a moment of such sudden penetrating terror. Blocks after blocks of private homes remained with little or nothing of their rich contents removed. This condition was understood, and predatory bands of desperate men broke into them, encamped in them and defied expulsion. They laughed at warnings, and after filling their improvised camps with coal and stores, prepared with exultation to enjoy this novel debauch. Furniture and household effects had been dumped or deserted in the streets, and almost any extemporaneous digging in the drifts would uncover books, clothing and utensils. A grotesque hogarthian aspect had been produced by the retreat of the cats to the houses, and their mingled swarms at windows and on sills, whither they were strangely followed by hordes of mice and rats, expelled from the country and filtering into the city in scampering lines before the weather had reached the height of its tempestuous inclemency.

The documentary archives of the city had been locked up in great safes and left for more propitious days—in summer? This example had been imitated in thousands of the better class houses, as the professional, the official opinion, still hesitated to contemplate the monstrous alternative of a permanent sepulture of their beautiful home.

One thing had been accomplished, and it was well done. The people, those who would leave, had been gotten away. When on the tenth of September the first storm of snow began, and the mercury sunk to a few degrees below zero Fah., the suffering became intense. Soon the railroads were blocked. Enlightened opinion had received its instructions. The return of Scotland to the bondage of snow and ice was published, and the publications carried conviction to a great many. The loss of the Gulf Stream was at length acknowledged. The impetus of the discovery made the worst prophecies credible. The intensity of this acquiescence was astounding. It became a matter of faith that the population should vacate their own city, and they obeyed instructions unanimously with a touching self-surrender to fate. Great numbers left Leith by boats and steamers summoned from London. The railroads responded with promptitude, though, by reason of a sudden access of energy in the government, nothing less would have been tolerated, longer than was necessary to confiscate their property and franchises. The phenomenal desertion of the city by three hundred thousand souls seemed as fore-ordained, as obligatory in the regime of events, as the setting of the sun, or the return of the seasons.

But no activity of all the available means of transportation would have sufficed to take a population of more than three hundred thousand men and women in less than two months away from the city, unless it had been supplemented by other means. And a strange and most effective movement accomplished completely what more recondite or artificial methods would have failed to secure. The “Frigidists,” the group of fanatical preachers and their followers, who found in the present calamity an opportunity for a religious propaganda, or, through the fermentation and clouded expectations of their own zeal, believed it to be the expression of a supernatural agency, had begun a street crusade (always in Edinburgh popular and familiar) to accomplish the removal of the people. These singular fanatics served a most benevolent end, and their strange hallucinations wisely aided the anxious efforts of the authorities. They arrayed themselves in white, and went bareheaded through the streets of the city, exhorting all who would listen to accept their interpretations of the approaching judgment. They wove their texts of prophecy with denunciations of sin, and with the crowding evidences of some astounding climatic change, repeated with accelerated eagerness in paper, pulpit and forum, they acquired a tyrannous control over the emotions of the populace.

Then they quickly, and with excellent discernment, organized the people into small regiments, distributed to them white cockades and white rosettes and marched them out of the city, southward, over the frozen and snow-lined roads. This evacuation began scarcely soon enough for the best results. But it gave relief. These moving companies, accompanied with vans and horse carts, and vehicles of every description, gathering numbers along their way, grew in picturesque confusion, as flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were united to them, or the miners from the coal pits, and the artisans from the factories joined in the vast, singing army.