The Storm Read Online

The 450-line poem, an irregular Pindaric ode composed in rhyming couplets addressed directly to the wooden pillory itself, suggests that it is the judges, not Defoe, who rightly belong on its platform, and that his only crime was to have written and published the truth:

Tell them it was because he was too bold,
And told those truths, which should not ha’ been told.
      Extol the justice of the land,
Who punish what they will not understand.

By publicly flouting the no-publications clause of his sentence Defoe was demonstrating a remarkable nerve, and it was partly this that ensured his safety on the stand, for nothing was thrown at him during the entire three days except laughter and the occasional flower. A mid nineteenth-century painting by Eyre Crowe shows Defoe’s last day in the pillory at Temple Bar, complete with a basket of roses provided by his admirers. Although it is a later, and highly idealized, artist’s impression of the scene, it nevertheless represents the real good humour of the reception given to the by then notorious Defoe, whose courage and convictions had served to win the crowds over to his side. His enemies, of course, were furious, complaining that his printed works were ‘Hauk’d and Publickly Sold about the Pillory, while he stood upon it (in Triumph!) for Writing them. And Writes on still’,14 as though Defoe were not a prisoner with his head in the stocks but a tradesman doing business at his stall. Defoe, writing on still, in spite of his sentence, and in the face of open persecution, had survived the most fearful event of his life so far.

Defoe spent the next four months in Newgate Prison, writing and publishing a number of tracts and pamphlets, as well as corresponding with those government ministers with whom he hoped to negotiate his release. Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House of Commons, took over from the Earl of Nottingham as Defoe’s main contact, and the two men, despite their obvious political differences, were eventually able to arrive at an understanding. Although he was a Tory, Harley’s origins, like Defoe’s, were Dissenting, and in many ways he understood and possibly even respected Defoe’s outlook and resilience. But he made Defoe wait for his deliverance, knowing that his fear and hatred of prison would make him more receptive to Harley’s influence. Defoe’s earlier letter, with its offer to help Queen Anne ‘with my hand, my Pen, or my head’, had been kept on file, and Harley was planning to take him up on the offer, but only when the time was right. As the weeks and months in Newgate went by, Defoe’s anxiety and depression increased, while Harley kept a secret watch over his mood. Harley, after all, who was carefully grooming Defoe for his future role as a government propagandist, wanted him suitably softened up for use. ‘Foe is much oppressed in his mind,’ he noted on 20 September, and since his wish was that Defoe be rendered desperate and compliant rather than broken beyond repair, he began the negotiations that would lead to his release. Defoe, ‘friendless and distress’d’, as he later described it, ‘my Family ruin’d, and my self without Hope of Deliverance’, was finally released from prison in the first week of November 1703, and was returned to his long-suffering wife, who, together with their six children, and five months pregnant with their seventh, had moved back in with her mother in Newington Green.15 ‘Whoever Sir Are the Principalls in this Favour,’ as Defoe wrote to Robert Harley later that week, ‘I Can Not but Profess my Self a Debtor wholly to your Self…I Take The Freedome to Repeat the Assurance of A Man Ready to Dedicate my Life and all Possible Powers to the Intrest of So Generous and So Bountifull Benefactors, Being Equally Overcome with the Nature as well as the Vallue of the Favour I have Receiv’d.’16

The outcome, in other words, was just as Harley had planned. Defoe’s release was secured at the price of his convictions, and he was now in the pay of the new regime which he would go on to serve, with energy, devotion and apparent approval of its political aims, for the next ten years of his life.

It was only a few days after his release from prison that Defoe began to notice the increased agitation of the wind. As was described at the beginning of the introduction, these strong November gales continued to blow across the British Isles for ten days or more, rattling windows and shaking trees, until the night of Friday the 26th when the storm itself arrived on the scene, its ferocity undiminished by its long voyage across the Atlantic. It raged until dawn, and nobody that morning who saw the carnage left behind was ever likely to forget it. Defoe, still dazed by his experiences of Newgate, was struck by the impact that the storm had wrought, not just upon the mood of his immediate neighbours but upon the mood of the nation as a whole. It was as if he had stepped out of the half-life of prison into the furious vitality of the wind, and he described the effect of the transformation in his Essay on the Late Storm:

What tho’ to Seven Years sleep thou art confin’d,
      Thou well may’st wake with such a Wind,

which is why he decided that the first major task of his post-prison career would be to create what he hoped would prove a lasting memorial to the transient terrors of the storm (p. 211).

So a few days after the storm had passed, Defoe placed an advertisement in both the Daily Courant and the London Gazette (the same newspaper that had carried the wanted notices for his arrest), in which he requested that first-hand observations of the storm be sent to him, care of one of his regular publishers, near Stationers’ Hall on Ludgate Hill:

To preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest, an exact and faithful Collection is preparing of the most remarkable Disasters which happened on that Occasion, with the Places where, and Persons concern’d, whether at Sea or on Shore. For the perfecting so good a Work, ’tis humbly recommended by the Author to all Gentlemen of the Clergy, or others, who have made any Observations of this Calamity, that they would transmit as distinct an Account as possible, of what they have observed, to the Undertakers, directed to John Nutt, near Stationers-hall, London. All Gentlemen that are pleas’d to send any such Accounts, are desired to write no Particulars but that they are well satisfied to be true, and to set their Names to the Observations they send, which the Undertakers of this Work promise shall be faithfully Recorded, and the Favour publickly acknowledged.17

What stands out from the wording of this notice, which was copied almost word-for-word from an earlier appeal in the Athenian Gazette requesting eyewitness testimonies of providential events, is the strength of its emphasis upon truth. The barrage of terms such as ‘exact’, ‘faithful’, ‘distinct’ and ‘true’, although part of the everyday currency of the journalist, leaves no doubt that the author intends to compile an account that is to be read as chronicle rather than legend. As Defoe outlined in the Preface to The Storm, his desire was not ‘to forge a Story’ or to ’sin against Truth’, but to offer an exact narration of the events of the night, for which he required a stock of reliable evidence (p. 4).

Defoe’s generation of journalists and reporters was the first to respond to the late-seventeenth-century rise of the empirical sciences, and they did so by emphasizing the need to gather first-hand evidence in support of a story; yet there remains something uniquely defensive about Defoe’s protestations in the Preface to The Storm. ‘If a Man tells a Lye in Print,’ he declares, ‘he abuses Mankind, and imposes upon the whole World, he causes our Children to tell Lyes after us, and their Children after them, to the End of the World’; he promises, therefore, ‘to be careful of his Words, that nothing pass from him but with an especial Sanction of Truth’ (p. 3). Ever since his release from Newgate, Defoe wrote as if he expected to be hauled before the magistrates at any moment, and his main concern here seems to be making absolutely sure that the kind of misunderstanding that saw him pilloried and imprisoned could never happen again. As both the call for contributions and the Preface to The Storm made clear, this was intended to be a thoroughly unironic and uninvented production, written not to support the view of a particular religious or political group, but written, instead, ‘to preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest’ on behalf of the nation as a whole.

Whether or not Defoe managed to stick to this agenda is a matter for a later paragraph, but in the meantime the first written responses to the newspaper advertisements had begun to arrive at his publishers. As Defoe sorted through these letters, sent from every corner of the storm-battered land, and began the task of organizing the various sections of the book, he must have felt that he was finally getting back on course following the setbacks of the previous twelve months.