Description
Abstract Three violent eighteenth-century storms that ravaged the North Sea area
(1703), western central Europe (1739) and Portugal (1739) are investigated from
the point of view of their meteorological setting, their socio-economic impact,
and whether and by what means they secured an enduring place in the cultural
memory. The evidence draws on individual narrative sources such as chronicles
and poems, and institutional sources such as ship’s logbooks and state-organised
‘windthrow’ inventories of tree loss. Each of the three storms had socio-economic
impacts that could be described as ‘war-like’ in the damage caused to buildings
and the destruction of forests. The “Great Storm” of December 1703 jeopardized
English naval supremacy in the War of the Spanish Succession by sinking a number
of Royal Navy ships and taking the life of more than 8000 seamen. In January
1739 two similarly destructive storms swept over mainland Europe. The cultural
memory of the three events here considered was however strikingly different. The sequence of storms in January 1739 though being the most protracted of the last
centuries, and well-chroniceled, did not persist in the collective memories of those
in France, Switzerland and elsewhere who experienced them. Likewise, the “Great
Storm” was quickly forgotten on the continent, whereas its memory remained deeply
rooted in England through the writings of Defoe (1704). In Portugal the 1739 storm
won a lasting place in the country’s cultural memory owing to two poems that it
inspired. Furthermore, it was recorded in the Kingdom’s official newspaper, in the astronomical prognoses and in written records of the Old Regime’s cultural elite.
; Garnier, Emmanuel 
