The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 Read online

  Severe storms continued into the first years of the eighteenth century, culminating in the great storm of November 26-27, 1703. After at least two weeks of unusually strong winds, a deep low pressure system with a center of 950 millibars passed about 200 kilometers north of London. The pressure in the capital fell rapidly by some 21-27 millibars. Daniel Defoe remarked in an account entitled The Storm that "It had been blowing exceeding hard ... for about fourteen days past. The mercury sank lower than ever I had observ'd ... which made me suppose the Tube had been handled ... by the children."12 Defoe was somewhat of an expert on storms. He had a bad experience during a tempest in 1695 when he barely escaped being decapitated by a falling chimney in a London street. There were numerous casualties on that occasion: "Mr Distiller in Duke Street with his wife, and maid-servant, were all buried in the Rubbish Stacks of their Chimney, which blocked all the doors."13 Distiller perished, his wife and servant were dragged from the ruins.

  The 1703 storm resulted from a low pressure system that had moved northeastward across the British Isles to a position off the coast of Norway by December 6. A much severer depression followed from the southwest and progressed across northeast Britain and the North Sea at about 40 knots. Defoe believed that this storm might have originated in a late season hurricane off Florida some four or five days earlier. He wrote: "We are told they felt upon that coast [Florida and Virginia] an unusual Tem pest a few days before the fatal [day]."14 He was probably right. The gale brought exceptionally strong winds, at the surface in excess of 90 knots, with much more boisterous squalls that may have exceeded 140 knots.

  The great storm traveled steadily across south England on the wings of an unusually strong jet stream. Vicious southwesterly winds blew off house roofs in Cornwall and toppled dwellings. Defoe tells how a small "tin ship" with a man and two boys aboard was blown out of the Helford estuary near Falmouth at about midnight on December 8 by winds estimated to be between 60 and 80 knots. She dashed before the wind under bare poles on a rush of surface water propelled by the gale. Eight hours later, the tiny boat, its crew safe and sound, was blown ashore between two rocks on the Isle of Wight, 240 kilometers to the east. The same night, enormous waves battered the ornate and newly built Eddystone Lighthouse off Plymouth Sound and toppled it, killing the keepers and their families as well as the designer, who happened to be visiting.

  In the Netherlands, Utrecht cathedral was partly blown down. Sea salt encrusted windows in the city, not only those facing the wind, but in the lee as well. Thousands of people perished in sea surges. Dozens of ships foundered on Danish coasts, where the damage inland was "gruesome." Little rain fell despite dark clouds. Fortunately, the storm was followed by a dry spell. Wrote a Mr. Short: "a happy [circumstance] for those whose roofs had been stripped."15

  The cold weather continued. The winter of 1708/9 was of exceptional severity throughout much of western Europe, except for Ireland and Scotland. Even there, severe weather caused major crop failures. Mortality rose sharply in Ireland, where the poor now depended on potatoes. Fortunately, the Irish Privy Council quickly placed an embargo on grain exports, saving thousands of lives. Further east, people walked from Denmark to Sweden on the ice as shipping was again halted in the southern North Sea. Deep snow fell in England and remained on the ground for weeks. Drought and hard frosts in France killed thousands of trees. Provence lost its orange trees, and all vineyards in northern France were abandoned because of the colder weather until the twentieth century. Seven years later, England again suffered through exceptional cold: 1716 brought a cold January, when the Thames froze so deep that a spring tide raised the ice fair on the river by four meters. So many people went to the festival that theaters were almost deserted. Most summers in these decades were unexceptional, but that of 1725 was the coldest in the known temperature record. In London, it was "more like winter than summer."16

  Then, suddenly, after 1730, came eight winters as mild as those of the twentieth century. Dutch coastal engineers found wood-boring teredo worms in their wooden palisades that were the first line of defense against sea surges. It took more than a century to replace them with stone facings. They also found themselves coping with silting problems in major harbors and rivers, as well as drinking-water pollution caused by poor drainage and industrial wastes.

  The agricultural innovations of the seventeenth century had insulated the English from the worst effects of sudden climatic change, but not from some of the more subtle consequences of food shortages. In late 1739, the NAO swung abruptly to a low mode. Blocking anticyclones shifted the depression track away from its decades-long path. Southeasterly air flows replaced prevailing southwesterlies. The semipermanent high-pressure region near the North Pole expanded southward. Easterly air masses from the continental Arctic extended westward from Russia, bringing winter temperatures that hovered near or below zero. Europe shivered under strong easterly winds and bitter cold for weeks on end.

  For the first time, relatively accurate temperature records tell us just how cold it was. 17 An extended period of below-normal temperatures began in August 1739 and continued unabated until September of the following year. January and February 1740 were 6.2° and 5.2°C colder than normal. Spring 1740 was dry with late frosts, the following summer cool and dry. A frosty and very wet autumn led into another early winter. In 1741 the spring was again cold and dry, followed by a prolonged summer drought. The winter of 1741/42 was nearly as cold as that of two years earlier. In 1742, milder conditions finally returned, probably with another NAO switch. The annual mean temperature of the early 1740s in central England was 6.8°C, the lowest for the entire period from 1659 to 1973.

  In 1739, Britain's harvests were late due to unusually cold and wet conditions that caused considerable damage to cereal crops. In northern England, "much Corn, and the greatest part of Barley [was] lost."18 English grain prices rose 23.6 percent above the thirty-one-year moving average in 1739, partly as a result of the deficient harvest, especially in the west where September storms damaged wheat crops. The cold weather caused exceptionally late grain and wine harvests over much of western Europe. Western Switzerland's cereal harvest did not begin until about October 14, the second latest from 1675 to 1879. Ice halted Baltic shipping by late October and rivers in Germany froze by November 1. All navigation on the River Thames ceased between late December and the end of February. Violent storms, wind, and drifting ice cast lighters and barges ashore. Ice joined Stockholm in Sweden with Abo across the Baltic in Finland. The rock-hard ground bent farmers' plows. Because they could not turn the soil for weeks, winter grain yields were well below normal in many places.

  There was no refuge from the cold, even indoors. Early January 1740 brought savagely cold temperatures. The indoor temperatures in the well-built, and at least partially heated, houses of several affluent householders with thermometers fell as low as YC. Few of the poor could afford coal or firewood, so they shivered and sometimes froze to death, huddled together for warmth in their hovels and huts. Urban vagrants on the streets were worst off, for they had nowhere to go and the rudimentary parish-based welfare system passed them by. Wrote the London Advertiser. "Such Swarms of miserable Objects as now fill our Streets are shocking to behold; many of these having no legal Settlements, have no Relief from the Parish; but yet our fellow Creatures are not to be starved to Death; yet how are they drove about by inhuman Wretches from Parish to Parish, without any Support."19 The Caledonian Mercury in Edinburgh wrote of. "the most bitter frost ever known (or perhaps recorded) in this part of the World, a piercing Nova Zembla Air, so that poor Tradesmen could not work ... so that the Price of Meal, etc. is risen as well as that of Coals."20

  Thomas Short summarized 1840 aptly: "Miserable was the State of the poor of the Nation from the last two severe Winters: Scarcity and Dearth of Provisions, Want of Trade and Money."21 Thousands died, not so much from hunger but from the diseases associated with it, and from extreme cold.

  By 1740, infectious diseases like
bubonic plague were no longer a major cause of death in western Europe. The higher mortality of dearth years resulted primarily from nutritional deficiencies that weakened the immune system, or from social conditions that brought people into closer than normal contact, where they could be infected by various contagions. Everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe, living conditions in both rural and urban areas were highly unsanitary. Chronic overcrowding, desperate poverty, and ghastly living conditions were breeding grounds for infectious diseases at any time, even more so when people were weakened by hunger. In preindustrial England, for example, mortality rates increased more as a result of extreme heat and cold.22

  Most of these deaths came not from chronic exposure, which can affect seamen and people working outside at any time, but from a condition known as accident hypothermia. When someone becomes deeply chilled, blood pressure rises, the pulse rate accelerates, and the patient shivers constantly, a reflex that generates heat through muscle contraction. Oxygen and energy consumption increase, and warm blood flows mainly in the deeper, more critical parts of the body. The heart works much harder. The shivering stops when body temperature falls below 35'C. As the temperature drops further, blood pressure sinks, the heart rate slows. Eventually the victim dies of cardiac arrest.

  Most accidental hypothermia victims are either elderly or very young, caught in situations where they are unable to maintain their normal body temperature. Fatigue and inactivity, as well as malnutrition, can hasten the onset of the condition. Few houses in the Europe of 1740 had anything resembling good heating systems. Even today, hypothermia can kill the elderly in dwellings without central heating when indoor temperature falls below 8°C. As many as 20,000 people a year died in Britain from this condition in the 1960s and 1970s, almost all of them elderly, many malnourished. Conditions were unimaginably worse in 1740, even in the finest of houses, where warmth was confined to the immediate vicinity of hearths and fireplaces. The newspapers of 1740-41 carry many stories of death from the "Severity of the Cold."23

  At the same time, the sharp temperature changes brought increases in pneumonia, bronchitis, heart attacks, and strokes. The elderly in particular have a reduced ability to sense changes in temperature, and thermal stress can also lower resistance to infectious diseases. The London Bills of Mortality for the first five months of 1740 show a 53.1 percent rise in the number of registered deaths over the same period in the previous year. A breakdown of the mortality data shows climbs in all age groups, with the largest increase (over 97 percent) in the group over sixty years of age.

  Many of the hungry were also killed by famine diarrhea, a condition resulting from prolonged malnutrition and pathological changes in the intestines that upset the water and salt balance in the body. The diarrhea often began after the victims ate indigestible food or the rotting flesh of dead animals. As starvation persisted and they continued to lose water through their bowels, the sufferers lost weight until they died in a state of extreme emaciation. Famine diarrhea was common in World War II concentration camps. Long periods of food dearth also produce many cases of what is sometimes called "bloody flux," owing to the passing of blood in the victim's watery stools.

  Cycles of colder, wetter, or drier years with their bad harvests had a direct health effect. Any serious food shortage penetrated to the heart of rural and urban communities, throwing thousands onto the inadequate eighteenth-century equivalents of the welfare rolls. The hungry would often abandon their homes and villages and congregate in hospitals or poorhouses, where sanitary conditions were appalling. Crowded prisons were also hotbeds of infection, as were billets used by military units. Under these conditions, epidemics of louse-borne typhus infections, relapsing fever, and typhoid fever flared up, especially in colder climates, where malnourished people huddled together in crowded lodgings for warmth. When the destitute died or sold their possessions, their clothing, and even underwear, were passed on to others, together with the infections that lay within them.

  Unemployment, hunger, and war nourished typhus in particular. A fierce epidemic raged in Plymouth in southwestern England in early 1740, reaching a peak during the summer months. By 1742, the disease had spread throughout the country. Devonshire in the west suffered worst. Physician John Huxham observed the epidemic at firsthand and wrote: "Putrid fevers of a long Continuence ... were very rife among the lower Kind of People.... Some were attended with a pleurisy, but those destroyed the Patients much sooner." Another physician, John Barker, at tributed the epidemic to the bad weather and harvest shortfalls, exactly the same conditions, he remarked, as those during the outbreak of 1684/85.24 Typhoid and typhus fever killed hundreds of the poor in County Cork, elsewhere in southern Ireland, and in Dublin.

  Even in normal times, bacillary dysentery, easily spread by dirty fingers, poor water, or infected food, was endemic throughout eighteenthcentury Europe. Hunger merely accentuated already high mortality rates among the poor. During food dearths, when standards of personal hygiene deteriorated even further as people deserted their homes, the number of cases exploded. During the long summer droughts of 1740-41, dust carried dysentery bacteria everywhere.

  Thomas Burtt, an English gentleman traveling in Scotland in 1741, commented on the poor state of young children, "miserable objects indeed and are mostly overrun with that distemper [diarrhea] which some of the old men are hardly ever freed of from their infancy. I have seen them come out of their huts early in a cold morning, stark naked, and squat themselves down (if I might decently use the comparison) like dogs on a dunghill."25 It did not help that contaminated house middens, sited close to dwellings, leaked bacteria back into the earth and contaminated the soil. The middens were a valuable source of field manure.

  Under subsistence conditions, tens of thousands would have died from a general famine in 1740-41, as they did in 1315. This time the killers were cold, the social conditions of the day, and cold- and hunger-related diseases. The suffering was mitigated to some degree by a sharp break from the tyranny of subsistence agriculture.

  Every time I visit the National Gallery in London, I pause for a moment in front of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews, a 1751 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. The young squire in a jaunty tricorn hat leans against a garden bench, flintlock musket in hand, dog at his heels. His wife sits placidly beside him, her light summer dress flaring over the seat. But my eyes are always drawn to the ordered countryside in the background: rolling Suffolk hills, neatly stacked corn stooks in a field that has been carefully planted in neat rows, a wooden gate leading to a green meadow where fat sheep graze, cattle chewing the cud beside newly constructed barns. One gazes over an agricultural utopia oddly devoid of the harvesters, shepherds, carters, and dozens of other farm workers who created this fertile landscape. The Andrews portrait epitomizes the profound changes in English agriculture during the eighteenth century.26

  The Andrewses were comfortable landed gentry, one of the 20,000 or so families who owned about three-quarters of England's agricultural land. There were still many smaller farms of less than 40 hectares, but their numbers dwindled throughout the eighteenth century. The logic of enclosure, of larger farms and fields, was too strong to be resisted. More and more open-field landscapes vanished as the English countryside began to assume something of its modern appearance. The medieval farmer had usually cultivated grain alone, leaving animal husbandry to communities living on natural pasture land. Enclosed farms in the hands of enlightened owners and, increasingly, landlords combined cereals and stockraising and used fodder crops such as clover to keep their beasts fat during the winter. Books and newsletters like John Houghton's Collection ofLetters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, which appeared between 1691 and 1702, helped overcome old prejudices and spread new ideas. Powerful interests, including the scientific elite of London's Royal Society, backed efforts to increase food production and large-scale commercial agriculture.

  Commercial farming first took hold in lighter soiled areas like East Anglia and parts of the we
st, where the open-field system had never flourished and farms were relatively close to urban centers like Bristol, London, or Norwich. Much of the impetus for change came from the demands of city markets and from a growing export trade across the North Sea. Corn and malting barley for brewers flowed to Holland from East Anglian ports, with clover and turnip seed traveling back in the same ships.

  A nucleus of improving landlords spearheaded the revolution. Their experiments and extensive demonstrations, built on earlier advances, attracted widespread attention. Landowner Jethro Tull earned such a reputation for innovation that he was named "the greatest individual improver." Tull farmed at Howbery near Crowmarsh in Oxfordshire, and later at Prosperous Farm, by Shalbourne in Berkshire. Defying both his laborers and conservative neighbors, he worked hard to improve his soil, especially after a visit to observe the methods used by wine growers in southern France. "The more the iron is given to the roots, the better for the crops," he wrote in The New Horse Hoeing Husbandry, published in 1731.27 Tull advocated deep plowing, the better to turn and clean the soil, careful spacing of the seed in laid out rows, and the use of a horsedrawn hoe to weed between the rows of growing crops.

  Viscount "Turnip" Townshend was a contemporary of Tull and a landowner at Raynham in Norfolk. Townshend first became a politician, found himself in violent disagreement with his brother-in-law, the powerful minister Sir Robert Walpole, and soon left politics for agriculture. He embraced the ancient Norfolk practice of marling, treating the soil with a mixture of clay and carbonate of lime. Townshend had a passion for turnips, which he grew in large fields, rotating them with wheat, barley, and clover in the famous Norfolk four-course rotation. He sold his wheat and barley for bread or brewing and fed turnips and clover hay to his animals. His methods made eminent good sense to his neighbors and were soon copied, especially because they provided ample winter feed for cattle, thereby eliminating the need to slaughter most of one's stock in the fall.