it rained for thirty-six consecutive hours at
Birmingham, and an awful flood was the consequence.
Nottingham was overflowed, and a quantity of
damage done; Lancashire and Cheshire were
snowed up; and much about the same time, in
the Havannah, four thousand and forty-eight
houses and public buildings were destroyed, and
above a thousand inhabitants perished. And in
December of the same year pretty nearly the
whole of England lay, more or less, under
water.

Seventeen hundred and seventy-five was a
terrible year for storms. On the 1st of February
Greenwich and Deptford were in a very
tempestuous condition, whereat the people were in
great alarm, for a certain crazy prophet had
prophesied earthquakes and general destruction
to come off about this time, and the inhabitants
fled in all directions. Portsmouth and
Cowes suffered severely from stress of weather;
and Saint Columb, in Cornwall, thought the end
of the world was surely at hand. A flash of
lightning tore down the east pinnacle of the old
church: and stones of three hundred weight and
more were flung by force of wind above three
hundred yards. Another storm in the April of
the same year unroofed houses and killed many
people. In London, during the panic caused by
the tempest, thieves entered the house of
Mr. Berry, of Roll's-buildings, and carried off
plate and valuables to the value of two thousand
pounds. A storm in May, at Murcia, gave the
Spanish world a present of hailstones like
oranges: some pieces weighing half a pound or
twenty ounces, but for the most part averaging
eight ounces. The Montem festival at Eton, in
the June following, was interrupted by a
hailstorm, where the stones were like marbles, and
where the fine lords and ladies got wet to the
skin, and looked as if they had been dragged
through a river. In September, still the same
year, the sea at Newfoundland rose suddenly
thirty feet, and seven hundred boats with eleven
ships, all manned, were lost. The sea and
harbour were dragged for many days, and twenty
and thirty bodies at a time were brought to
land in those awful nets. In October, a
tremendous storm raged for thirty-six hours at
Leeds, and throughout all Yorkshire. People
would not go to bed, but sat up waiting for the
judgment to come. The cloth was wrenched
from the tenters, the pavement of the streets
was torn up, walls were blown down, dyers'
vats and stacks of hay and grain were washed
away, and much live stock was destroyed. Ships
and coasters were lost by dozens; and four
Dublin packets foundered in mid seas. Earl
Charlemont's brother was on board of one, with
his wife; and their death seems to have created
an immense sensation—almost as great as that
caused by the hecatomb lately offered up in the
Royal Charter. The Hague, and indeed the
whole of Holland, was devastated by a fearful
storm in the November following; but one
Jurrien Jurrenson hit upon a wonderful plan of
salvation. Meeting with the tempest, he
bethought him of sundry barrels of oil on board:
these he flung out, whereupon the waves were
stilled, the ship answered to her helm, and they
all came safely into port(?).

Lieutenant Maury, in his "Physical
Geography of the Sea," speaks of a storm in 1780
—the "great storm" of Barbadoes—when the
trees were stripped of their bark, and the very
depths and roots of the sea forced up; and when
"the waves rose to such a height that forts
and castles were washed away, and their great
guns carried about in the air like chaff; houses
were razed, ships were wrecked, and the bodies
of men and beasts lifted up in the air, and
dashed to pieces in the storm. Not less than
twenty thousand persons lost their lives, two
men of war went down at sea, and fifty sail
were driven on shore at the Bermudas."
Another storm once forced the Gulf stream back to
its sources, and piled up the waters to the height
of thirty feet. "The Ledbury Snow attempted
to ride it out. When it abated she found
herself high up on the dry land, and discovered
that she had let go her anchor among the treetops
on Elliott's Key." The scene in the Gulf
Stream was appalling and sublime. "The
water thus dammed up is said to have rushed
out with wonderful velocity against the fury of
the gale, producing a sea that beggared description."
At Surat, in the East Indies, there was
a storm, in April, 1782, which killed seven
thousand people; and in the May of the same
year London was visited by a phenomenon that
made many a heart quake with fear. A light,
like a flaming spear, was visible for about five
minutes in the west, when it disappeared, and
the firmament became beautifully illuminated
by an immense number of rays spreading out
like a fan. In some places the fan appeared
like a vortex whirling about with infinite
velocity. A tremendous storm followed. In the
Borough-road the lightning forced off a roof,
split some stacks of chimneys, twisted the
ironwork of a casement into a peculiar shape, and
lifted the door of a room off its iron hinges; and
a waterspout burst on Clapham-common. There
was a frightful tempest at Portsmouth,
Plymouth, and all the south-east coast, on September
6, 1784, when the seafaring population and
bathers were terrified at a fish, which they had
taken to be only a larger kind of dog-fish, but
which certain gentlemen pronounced to be the
true "tiger shark" (squalus) from the West
Indies, sent hither by the storm. The next
year a hurricane laid waste a hundred and
thirty-one villages and farms in France; and
nine years after this almost all England was
"tempest-tossed." The year had gone on
pretty well up to July, when a storm at Malden,
in Essex, set fire to a farm called "The
Mountains Farm," near Tiptree Heath. At Ludlow
three horses were killed; and at Hereford,
Goderich, and Salisbury, affairs went very ill for
farmers and travellers.

In 1800 Bonaparte returned from Egypt, and
the "temple of Janus was shut." Things went
on calmly enough until July, when Oxfordshire
had a storm of thunder, rain, lightning, hail, and