Until then, according to the historian G. M. Trevelyan, the only significant battle of the war was the one fought (and lost) against the great November storm, which he described, with characteristic elegance, as ‘no mortal foe’.30

In fact the storm inflicted a double defeat upon the battered English navy, for not only did it destroy a number of valuable ships but it also felled many of the timber oaks needed to replace them. Such a serious loss of trees was an emotive subject, and The Storm has almost as many references to fallen oaks as it does to flying tiles. Defoe claims to have counted 17,000 of them during one short trip through Kent, until he got too tired to carry on counting, ‘tho I have great reason to believe I did not observe one half of the Quantity’, and he was also saddened by the loss of so many apple trees, since ‘we shall want Liquor to make our Hearts merry’ (p. 97). He was not alone in his feelings for the battered trees. The diarist John Evelyn, whose country estate in Wotton, Surrey, lost 2,000 oaks during the night of the storm, was grief-struck by the sight which greeted him the following morning: ‘Methinks I still hear, and am sure feel the dismal Groans of our Forests,’ he wrote, ‘so many thousand of goodly Oaks subverted by that late dreadful Hurricane; prostrating the Trees, and crushing all that grew under them, lying in ghastly Postures, like whole Regiments fallen in Battle.’31 Evelyn had made a lifetime study of trees and forests, and had published a famous volume in 1664 entitled Sylva: A Discourse of Forest Trees. He reissued the book in an updated edition in 1706, using The Storm as one of his sources for the new material, and he dedicated it to the cause of replanting oaks on behalf of the Royal Navy, as well as devoting it to the sylvan memory of all those lost trees of England.

Defoe’s writing career describes an apparent evolution from his early pamphlets and political tracts into the later novels, travel-books and full-length commentaries upon which his reputation as a writer now stands. Yet throughout this long career Defoe maintained a complex and innovative relationship to the written word, and The Storm, in the course of which he describes himself variously as author, editor and the mere ‘Collector of these Sheets’, as well as ‘The Ages Humble Servant’, is a particularly good example of this complexity at work. In fact, as a transitional work between the early pamphlets and the later novels it is a valuable indication of his ambitions as a writer as well as of his preoccupations as a social and political observer, for however much we might suspect him of having written most, if not all, of ‘these Sheets’ himself, he nevertheless sought genuinely to offer equal weight to all manner of eyewitnesses, whether clergyman, farmer, widow or sailor. There is a real attempt, despite his obvious continuing anger at his enemies, to universalize the experience of the storm. He makes the point that its impact was worse than that of the Great Fire of 1666, for ‘that Desolation was confin’d to a small Space, the loss fell on the wealthiest part of the People; but this loss is Universal, and its extent general, not a House, not a Family that had anything to lose, but have lost something by this Storm, the Sea, the Land, the Houses, the Churches, the Corn, the Trees, the Rivers, all have felt the fury of the Winds’, as if England might at last have found some kind of social unity through its recent exposure to catastrophe (p. 109). And The Storm, written as it was for a general audience, and with some of that audience’s own words dispensed throughout its pages, was a sincere attempt to represent and commemorate in written form this experience of temporary unity.

Defoe always liked to introduce the sound of multiple voices on the page, just as he liked to introduce the complexity of multiple points of view, and one of the technical distinctions of The Storm is the way in which these effects are used to suggest the crowded simultaneity of the events it describes. As Paula R. Backscheider has pointed out, ‘The Storm has sections that show simultaneous events vertically and horizontally; in one moment we may know events in a single house, in adjacent houses, in several parts of town, and in neighboring towns. The book locates events so closely together that the sequence seems to be a single event, each discrete part so integral to the whole that it is indistinguishable from the whole except in memory.’32 In contrast to A Journal of the Plague Year, the main events of which take place over several months, the action of The Storm is concentrated instead into a single night of destruction and its aftermath. This is what gives the book such a powerful sense of immediacy and crisis, and, as the picture of a shared catastrophe unfolds before us, Defoe has us listen not only to the sounds of the high wind rising but also to the voices of the eyewitnesses, who clamour for a chance to add their stories and words to the account. Whether these voices were his own creations, or rewritten versions of other people’s testimonies, as accounts of loss and survival they exhibit the same kind of narrative power that characterizes the later tales of Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders, whose various sufferings, whether in storms at sea or in Newgate Prison, echo many of the circumstances from which Defoe’s first book, The Storm, was derived. And the making of this first book, in which many layers of separately narrated but chronologically parallel narratives are presented, required a new creative balance between direct quotation and circumstantial invention, which is something that Defoe pioneered in its pages. By the time he came to write the novels, some fifteen to twenty years later, he had developed this new narrative technique to perfection.

NOTES

1. London Gazette 3975 (13-16 December 1703).

2. Richard Chapman, The Necessity of Repentance Asserted: In Order to Avert those Judgements which the Present War, and Strange Unseasonableness of the Weather at Present, Seem to Threaten this Nation with. In a Sermon Preached on Wednesday the 26th May, 1703 (London: M. Wotton, 1703).

3. Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 62.

4. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 140.

5. The Observator 73 (30 December 1702-2 January 1703).

6. In a letter to the Earl of Nottingham, written on 9 January 1703, in The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed.