by Daniel Defoe
For had they perish’d e’er they went,
Where to no Purpose they were sent,
The Ships might ha’ been built again,
And we had sav’d the Money and the Men.
There the Mighty Wrecks appear,
Hic jacent,5 Useless Things of War.
Graves of Men, and Tools of State,
There you lye too soon, there you lye too late.
But O ye Mighty Ships of War!
What in Winter did you there?
Wild November should our Ships restore
To Chatham, Portsmouth, and the Nore,6 So it was always heretofore,
For Heaven it self is not unkind,
If Winter Storms he’ll sometimes send,
Since ’tis suppos’d the Men of War
Are all laid up, and left secure.
Nor did our Navy feell alone,
The dreadful Desolation;
It shook the Walls of Flesh as well as Stone,
And ruffl’d all the Nation.
The Universal Fright
Made Guilty H—7 expect his Fatal Night;
His harden’d Soul began to doubt,
And Storms grew high within, as they grew high without.
Flaming Meteors fill’d the Air,
But Asgil miss’d his Fiery Chariot there;
Recall’d his black blaspheming Breath,
And trembling paid his Homage unto Death.8
Terror appear’d in every Face,
Even Vile Blackbourn9 felt some shocks of Grace;
Began to feel the Hated Truth appear,
Began to fear,
After he had Burlesqu’d a God so long,
He should at last be in the wrong.
Some Power he plainly saw,
(And seeing, felt a strange unusual Awe;)
Some secret Hand he plainly found,
Was bringing some strange thing to pass,
And he that neither God nor Devil own’d,
Must needs be at a loss to guess.
Fain he would not ha’ guest the worst,
But Guilt will always be with Terror Curst.
Hell shook, for Devils Dread Almighty Power,
At every Shock they fear’d the Fatal Hour,
The Adamantine Pillars mov’d,
And Satan’s Pandemonium trembl’d too;
The tottering Seraphs wildly rov’d,10
Doubtful what the Almighty meant to do;
For in the darkest of the black Abode,
There’s not a Devil but believes a God.
Old Lucifer has sometimes try’d
To have himself be Deify’d;
But Devils nor Men the Being of God deny’d,
Till Men of late found out New Ways to sin,
And turn’d the Devil out to let the Atheist in.
But when the mighty Element began,
And Storms the weighty Truth explain,
Almighty Power upon the Whirlwind Rode,
And every Blast proclaim’d aloud
There is, there is, there is, a God.
Plague, Famine, Pestilence, and War,
Are in their Causes seen,
The true Originals appear
Before the Effects begin:
But Storms and Tempests are above our Rules,
Here our Philosophers are Fools.
The Stagyrite11 himself could never show,
From whence, nor how they blow.
Tis all Sublime, ’tis all a Mystery,
They see no Manner how, nor Reason why;
All Sovereign Being is the amazing Theme,
’Tis all resolv’d to Power Supreme;
From this First Cause our Tempest came,
And let the Atheists spight of Sense Blaspheme,
They can no room for Banter find,
Till they produce another Father for the Wind.
Satyr, thy Sense of Sovereign Being Declare,
He made the Mighty Prince o’th’ Air,
And Devils recognize him by their Fear.
Ancient as Time, and Elder than the Light,
Ere the First Day, or Antecedent Night,
Ere Matter into settl’d Form became,
And long before Existence had a Name;
Before th’ Expance of indigested Space,
While the vast No-where fill’d the Room of Place.
Liv’d the First Cause The First Great Where and Why,
Existing to and from Eternity,
Of His Great Self, and of Necessity.
This I call God, that One great Word of Fear,
At whose great sound,
When from his Mighty Breath ’tis eccho’d round,
Nature pays Homage with a trembling bow,
And Conscious Men would faintly disallow;
The Secret Trepidation racks the Soul,
And while he says, no God, replies, thou Fool.
But call it what we will,
First Being it had, does Space and Substance fill.
Eternal Self-existing Power enjoy’d,
And whatsoe’er is so, That same is God.
If then it should fall out, as who can tell,
But that there is a Heaven and Hell,
Mankind had best consider well for fear
’T should be too late when their Mistakes appear;
Such may in vain Reform,
Unless they do’t before another Storm.
They tell us Scotland scap’d the Blast;
No Nation else have been without a Taste:
All Europe sure have felt the Mighty Shock,
‘T has been a Universal Stroke.
But Heaven has other Ways to plague the Scots,
As Poverty and Plots.
Her Majesty Confirms it, what She said,
I plainly heard it, tho’ I’m dead.
The dangerous Sound has rais’d me from my Sleep,
I can no longer Silence keep,
Here Satyrs’ thy Deliverance,
A Plot in Scotland, Hatch’d in France,
And Liberty the Old Pretence.12 Prelatick Power with Popish join,
The Queens Just Government to undermine;
This is enough to wake the Dead,
The Call’s too loud, it never shall be said
The lazy Satyr slept too long,
When all the Nations Danger Claim’d his Song.
Rise Satyr from thy sleep of legal Death,
And reassume Satyrick Breath;
What tho’ to Seven Years sleep thou art confin’d,
Thou well may’st wake with such a Wind.
Such Blasts as these can seldom blow,
But they’re both form’d above and heard below.
Then wake and warn us now the Storms are past,
Lest Heaven return with a severer Blast.
Wake and inform Mankind
Of Storms that still remain behind.
If from this Grave thou lift thy Head,
They’ll surely mind one risen from the Dead.
Tho’ Moses and the Prophets can’t prevail,
A Speaking Satyr cannot fail.
Tell ’em while secret Discontents appear,
There’ll ne’er be Peace and Union here.
They that for Trifles so contend,
Have something farther in their End;
But let those hasty People know,
The Storms above reprove the Storms below,
And ’tis too often known,
The Storms below do Storms above Forerun;
They say this was a High-Church Storm,13 Sent out the Nation to Reform;
But th’ Emblem left the Moral in the Lurch,
For’t blew the Steeple down upon the Church.
From whence we now inform the People,
The danger of the Church is from the Steeple.
And we’ve had many a bitter stroke,
From Pinacle and Weather-Cock;
From whence the Learned do relate,
That to secure the Church and State,
To save the Church, will pull the Steeple down.
Two Tempests are blown over, now prepare
For Storms of Treason and Intestine War.
The High-Church Fury to the North extends,
In haste to ruin all their Friends.
Occasional Conforming led the Way,
And now Occasional Rebellion comes in Play,
To let the Wond’ring Nation know,
That High-Church Honesty’s an Empty Show,
A Phantasm of Delusive Air,
That as Occasion serves can disappear,
And Loyalty’s a sensless Phrase,
An Empty Nothing which our interest sways,
And as that suffers this decays.
Who dare the Dangerous Secret tell,
That Church-men can Rebel.
Faction we thought was by the Whigs Engross’d,
And Forty One was banter’d till the Jest was lost.
Bothwel and Pentland-Hills were fam’d,
And Gilly Cranky hardly nam’d.14
If Living Poets Dare not speak,
We that are Dead must Silence break;
And boldly let them know the Time’s at Hand.
When Ecclesiastick Tempests shake the Land.
Prelatick Treason from the Crown divides,
And now Rebellion changes sides.
Their Volumes with their Loyalty may swell,
But in their Turns too they Rebel;
Can Plot, Contrive, Assassinate,
And spight of Passive Laws disturb the State.
Let fair Pretences fill the Mouths of Men,
No fair Pretence shall blind my Pen;
They that in such a Reign as this Rebel
Must needs be in Confederacy with Hell.
Oppressions, Tyranny and Pride,
May give some Reason to Divide;
But where the Laws with open Justice Rule,
He that Rebels Must be both Knave and Fool.
May Heaven the growing Mischief soon prevent,
And Traytors meet Reward in Punishment.
FINIS.
Notes
THE STORM
Biblical citations in the Notes are taken from the King James Version.
THE PREFACE
1 Noverint Universi… Presents: Since the Elizabethan era, legal documents, such as title deeds, began with the Latin phrase ‘Noverint universi per presentes’ (‘be it known to all men by these presents that’).
2 Rhodomontades: Boasts.
3 Belus…Jupiter: Ancient gods and legendary kings: Belus was an Assyrian god; Nimrod and Nimrus were Babylonian kings; Saturn and Jupiter were powerful ancient Greek divinities.
4 Deucalion’s Time: Greek myth relates that, in around 1450 BC, Zeus decided to destroy mankind by flood as a punishment for its impieties. Deucalion, the son of Prometheus and Clymene, and his wife Pyrrha, were said to be the only survivors.
5 Dedalus…flying through the Air: According to myth, Daedalus built a labyrinth for King Minos of Crete, but was himself imprisoned in it after he fell from favour. He and his son Icarus escaped from the island by contriving wings made of feathers and wax, but Icarus flew too near to the sun and was drowned in the Aegean sea. Daedalus made it safely to Sicily.
6 Samaria…ever since: In Greek myth, Phaeton was the son of the sun-god Helios, who lived and rose in the East. Phaeton made the journey to meet his father and begged for the chance to drive his sun-chariot across the sky. Phaeton was unable to control the powerful horses, however, and his attempt caused fire and destruction on earth until Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. Samaria, a region of Palestine, often suffered from heatwaves and drought.
7 King Arthur…and the like: Legendary British heroes who were the subjects of popular chapbooks, romances and histories such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Great Britain (c. 1136).
8 set at such a Main: To take such a chance.
9 If it shou’d… Mistakes appear: Lines from Defoe’s An Essay on the Late Storm, p. 210.
CHAPTER I
Of the Natural Causes and Original of Winds
1 Antiperistasis: Opposition or resistance.
2 Aristotle… Bohun of Winds, P. 9: Defoe apparently quotes Aristotle (c. 384-322 BC), Problems, Bk 23.2; Seneca (c. 3 BC-ad 65), Naturales Quaestiones, Bk 5.1.1; Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Dialogus physicus (London, 1661); Georges Fournier (1595-1643), Hydrographie (Paris: Michel Soly, 1643), p. 698; René Descartes (1596-1650), Les Météores (1637); and Ralph Bohun (d. 1716), A Discourse Concerning the Origine and Properties of Wind: With An Historicall Account of Hurricanes, and other Tempestuous Winds (Oxford: Tho. Bowman, 1671), p. 7. In fact all of Defoe’s quotations here are taken directly from Bohun’s Discourse, pp. 5-9.
3 the wisest Philosopher in the dark: Defoe uses the terms ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Philosopher’ throughout The Storm, by which was meant natural philosophy, to which we would now refer as science, and natural philosophers, to whom we would now refer as scientists or naturalists.
4 Vossius…Philosophy: The Dutch polymath Isaac Vossius (1618-89);the Irish Protestant chemist Robert Boyle (1627-91); the renaissance courtier and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), to whom Defoe claimed a family connection; the pioneer of empiricism Francis Bacon, later Lord Verulam (1561-1626); and the physician William Harvey (1578-1657) form Defoe’s pantheon of respectably Christian scientific thinkers. Hobbes, however, is singled out for rebuke as an atheist.
5 hunt Counter: To search backwards from effect to cause.
6 Terra Incognita: (Latin) Unknown lands.
7 Champion Country: Open fields.
8 When I view the Heavens…What is Man!: Psalm 8:3-4.
9 Johan Remelini…Riolanus: Johann Remmelin (b. 1583), leading German-born anatomist, and Jean Riolanus (1580-1657), leading French anatomist.
10 I was fearfully and wonderfully made, &c.: Psalm 139:14.
11 The Winds…from the middle Region: Bohun, Discourse, pp. 9-10. ‘Resilition’ means recoiling.
12 as the Lord Verulam…Case of his Feathers: Convection from the fire caused suspended feathers to move in the current. Francis Bacon described the experiment in The Naturall and Experimentall History of Winds, &c. (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1653), pp. 92-3.
13 He holds the Wind in his Hand: Isaiah 11:15
14 The Wind blows…it cometh: John 3:8.
15 Mansones: Monsoons.
16 God shall rain upon…a horrible Tempest: Psalm 11:6.
17 Sodom and Gomorrah on fire: See Genesis 19:24-5.
CHAPTER II
Of the Opinion of the Ancients
1 Cambden tells us: William Camden (1551-1623) in his Britannia of 1586, translated from the Latin in 1610 as Britain: or, a Chorographical Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Islands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie (London: Bishop & Norton, 1610), pp. 34-9.
2 Et Penitus Toto…known World: Virgil, Eclogues, Bk I. 66.
3 Quem Littus…Fretum: ‘Lybia’s sun-scorched shores and Thule, whither no ship can sail’: Claudian, The Third Consulship of Honorius, 53.
4 Belluosus…Britannis: ‘the ocean teeming with monsters, that roars around the distant Britons’: Horace, Odes, Bk IV. xiv. 47-8.
5 Shooters-Hill in Kent: In A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 118, Defoe points out that Shooters Hill, near Greenwich, marks the geographical border between London clay and the chalk of the North Downs.
6 the Danish Fleet came almost up to Hartford: Defoe had recently contemplated the impact of the Danish raids of the tenth and eleventh centuries in The True-Born Englishman, his verse satire of c. 1701: ‘Danes with Sueno came,/In search of plunder, not in search of fame.’ See The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1997). P-31.
7 Rumney-Marsh: Much of the
Romney Marsh, in Kent and Sussex, was under water until the retreat of the sea in the Middle Ages. The former port of Rye, on the River Rother, now sits three miles inland.
8 Ely…to dislodge them: Ely, built on a clay island surrounded by marshland, was a centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion, holding out for five years until its defeat in 1071.
9 The Piss-pot of the World: Defoe is only too happy to offer a meteorological refinement to his general hatred and suspicion of Catholic Ireland.
10 the Phónicians: Inhabitants of Phoenicia, an ancient maritime nation, corresponding to the coastal plains of modern Lebanon and Syria.
11 And Thule…Sails to bear: Claudian, The Third Consulship, 53.
12 Quanta Delphino…major: ‘The British whale exceeds the dolphin’: Juvenal, Satires, X. 14.
13 Yarmouth Road…them: In his Tour Defoe described the loss of a 200-strong fleet of coal ships off Yarmouth Roads in 1692, branding that stretch of the Norfolk coast ‘one of the most dangerous and most fatal to the sailors in all England, I may say in all Britain’. Tour, pp. 92-4.
14 Barbary: North Africa.
15 a Lee Shore: A shore upon which the wind blows.
16 Sea-room: An unobstructed sea in which to manoeuvre a ship.
17 go under a main Course: Use the main sails on the lower yards of a ship.
18 the Battle of Actium: A sea-battle fought off the west coast of Greece in 31 BC, in which Octavian’s Roman fleet defeated the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra.
19 Julius Caisar’s Fleet…Carthage: Caesar’s fleet was hit by a storm in the English Channel in 55 BC (see The Gallic War, Bk IV. 29); for Aeneas’s storm see Virgil, Aeneid, Bk I. 34-123.
20 Spanish Armada…every Shore: Francis Drake’s (c. 1540-96) ‘Hell Burners’, as fireships then were known, were powerful psychological weapons in the battle against the Spanish Armada of August 1588. The storm of 14-15 August drove the Spanish ships into the North Sea, where they dispersed, to the advantage of the victorious British.
21 the Downs: The sea off the east Kent coast, bounded by the Goodwin Sands.
CHAPTER III
Of the Storm in General
1 our Barometers: Like many of his contemporaries Defoe owned and occasionally consulted an indoor barometer. His tutor at the Newington Green Academy, Charles Morton (1627-98), encouraged his students in natural philosophy and equipped the school laboratory with an impressive array of equipment, including barometers.
