It was during the frost of 1788-89 that a fair was held on the Thames. The river was frozen as low as Gravesend; but it was only in London that booths were set up. The Thames fair lasted during the Christmas holidays and the first twelve days of January.
At Strasburg, on December 31, a temperature of fifteen degrees below zero was shown. At Berlin on the 20th, and St. Petersburg on the 12th, temperatures of twenty and twenty-three degrees below zero respectively were noted. But in Poland and parts of Germany an even greater degree of cold was recorded. For instance, at Warsaw, 26½ degrees below zero; and at Bremen thirty-two degrees. At Basle, on December 18, the thermometer indicated nearly thirty-six degrees below zero. In the district around Toulouse bread was frozen so hard that it could not be cut till it had been laid before the fire. Many travellers perished in the snow. At Lemburg, in Galicia, thirty-seven persons were found dead in three days towards the end of December. The ice froze so thick in ponds that in most of them all the fish were killed.
The winter of 1794-95 was remarkable in this country as giving the lowest average temperature for a month ever recorded in England. The mean temperature for January, 1795, was only 26.5 degrees; or more than three degrees lower than that of last January. January 25, 1795, is commonly supposed to have been the coldest day ever known. The thermometer in London stood at eight degrees below zero during part of that bitter day; and in Paris, where also there were six consecutive weeks of frost, at 10-3/7 degrees below zero. The Thames was frozen over at Whitehall in the beginning of January. The Marne, the Scheldt, the Rhine, and the Seine were so frozen over that army corps and heavy carriages crossed over them. Perhaps the strangest of all the recorded results of cold weather occurred during the same month. The French General Pichegru, who was then operating in the North of Holland, sent detachments of cavalry and infantry about January 20, with orders to the former to cross the Texel and to capture the enemy's vessels, which were 'imprisoned by the ice.' 'The French horsemen crossed the plains of ice at full gallop,' we are told, 'approached the vessels, called on them to surrender, captured them without a struggle, and took the crews prisoners:' probably the only occasion in history when effective use could have been made of a corps of horse-marines.
The winter of 1798-99 was very cold, but not so exceptionally cold in England as on the Continent. The Seine was completely frozen over from the 29th of December to the 19th of January, from the Pont de la Tournelle to the Pont Royal. Farther east the cold was much greater. The Meuse was frozen over so thickly that carriages could cross it, and at the Hague and at Rotterdam fairs were held on the river. A regiment of dragoons starting from Mayence, crossed the Rhine upon the ice.
The winter of 1812-13 was exceeding cold in November, December and January. It was this unusually early and bitter winter which occasioned the destruction of Napoleon's army in Russia, and the eventual overthrow of his power. (For no one who considers his achievements during the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 can doubt that, had the army with which he invaded Russia been at his command, he would have foiled all the efforts of combined Europe against him.) The cold became very intense in Russia after the 7th of November. On the 17th the thermometer fell to 15 degrees below zero, according to Larrey, who carried a thermometer suspended from his button hole. The retreat from Moscow began on the 18th, Napoleon leaving the still burning city on the 19th, and the evacuation being complete on the 23rd. Everything seemed to conspire against Napoleon and his army. During the march to Smolensk snow fell almost incessantly. Even the only intermission of the cold during the retreat caused additional disaster. On the 18th of November, Russian troops had crossed the frozen Dwina with their artillery. A thaw begun on the 24th, but continued only for a short time; 'so that from the 26th to the 29th the Beresina contained numerous blocks of ice, but yet was not so frozen over as to afford a passage to the French troops.' It was to this circumstance that the terribly disastrous nature of the passage of the Beresina must mainly be attributed.
The winter of 1813-14 was colder in England than on the Continent—I mean, the winter here was colder for England than the winter in any region of continental Europe was for that region. The frost lasted from December 26 to March 21, and the mean temperature of January was only 26.8 degrees. The Thames was frozen over very thickly, and a fair was held on the frozen river.
The winter of 1819-20 was bitter throughout Europe. Mr. Thomas Plant, in an interesting letter to the Times of February 4, says that this winter was one long spell of intense frost from November to March, and was almost as severe as that of 1813-14. In Paris there were forty-seven days of frost, nineteen of which were consecutive, from December 30, 1818, to January 17. 'In France,' says Flammarion, 'the intensity of the cold was heralded by the passage along the coast of the Pas de Calais of a great number of birds coming from the farthest regions of the north by wild swans and ducks of variegated plumage. Several travellers perished of cold; amongst others a farmer near Arras, a gamekeeper near Nogent (Haute Marne) a man and woman in the Côte d'Or, two travellers at Breuil, on the Meuse, a woman and a child on the road from Etain to Verdun, six persons near Château Salins (Meurthe), and two little Savoyards on the road from Clermont to Chalons-sur-Saône. In the experiments made at the Metz School of Artillery, on the 10th of January, to ascertain how iron resisted low temperatures, several soldiers had their hands or their ears frozen.' During this winter the Thames, the Seine, the Rhône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Garonne, the lagoons of Venice, and the Sound, were so far frozen that it was possible to walk across them on the ice.
The winter of 1829-30 was remarkable as the longest winter of the first half of the present century. The cold was not exceptionally intense, but the long continuance of bitter weather occasioned more mischief in the long run than has attended short spells of severer cold. The river Seine was frozen at Paris first for twenty-nine days, from December 28th to January 26th, and then for five days from February 5th to February 10th. The river had not been so many days frost-bound in any winter since 1763. Even at Havre the Seine was frozen over; and at Rouen a fair was held upon the river on January 18th. On January 25, after a thaw of six days, the ice from Corbeil and Melun blocked up the bridge at Choisy, forming a wall 16½ feet high.
The winter of 1837-38 was remarkable for the long frost of January and February, 1838. It lasted eight weeks. Mr. Plant mentions that 'the lowest point of the thermometer during this long and severe frost occurred on January 20, when the readings were from 5 degrees below zero, in this district' (Moseley, near Birmingham), 'to 8 and 10 degrees below zero in more exposed aspects.' 'On the 13th of January, the old Royal Exchange, London, was destroyed by fire; and the frost was so great that, when the fire brigade had ceased playing on one portion of the burning pile, the water in a short time became icicles of such large dimensions, that the effect has been described as grand in the extreme.'