Hail, Cake and the French Revolution

• Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the 2006 Movie

The weather in England is unseasonably cold at the moment and for the first time in my life I find myself with hay fever; I am allergic to tree pollen, driving through squalls of hail and sleet in the car, and huddling in front of the fire in the evening for warmth!

England's weather is notoriously unpredictable but this spring has been particularly cold with the wind blowing from the north for days on end. Historians and archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware of the influence of weather on the world’s great events and as someone who has been researching life in 18^th century Britain and France I was amazed to find that the weather could be said to one of the causes of the French Revolution.

The summer of 1788 was a particularly warm one in London that year. As temperatures soared in the capital the incidence of Scarlet fever and Typhus spread through the city and in August over 1000 deaths were attributed to fever alone but as Londoners sweltered the French baked. The spring and summer of the year before the Revolution were characterised by searing drought.

The French were not particularly good farmers at the time, the aristocracy and major land owners were not interested applying of developing improvements to agriculture and food production unlike their British counterparts and food production was already pretty poor. At the end of this unprecedented dry period the skies opened and hail the size of fists fell bashing the fruit from the trees and the smashing the crops in the fields to smithereens so when the French entered the winter of 1788-9 food stocks were at an all time low.

To make matters worse the disastrous harvest was followed by months of freezing weather. The temperature barely rose above freezing for three months through November, December and January. In London the river Thames froze but in France the effect of frozen earth meant that root crops had to be chiselled out of the ground.

So when Marie Antoinette reportedly said on hearing there was no bread to be had in Paris, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," it was because of the weather.

The Unfortunate Captain Peirce: When is a Hero not a Hero?

The wreck of the 'Halsewell', Indiaman, 1786, Thomas Stothard

Two and twenty years ago the merchant marine got its first hero; Captain Richard Peirce of the ill-fated East Indiaman the Halsewell. The ship which left Gravesend docks on the first day of January 1786 with a manifest of 240 people and was wrecked six days later of the Dorset coast with the loss of over 170 lives. The tragedy rocked the nation to its core and the ship’s captain became a national hero with stories and eulogies[1] appearing the London press and magazines like The Gentleman and The European praising his self-sacrifice for the sake of his family. The ship was not the first to go down and it certainly was not the last but this wreck captured the nation’s imagination for some reason.

Built by Wells of Blackwall in 1778 the 758 ton ship was on route to Madras armed with 12 cannon and carrying a cargo of 53 chests of small arms, 25 tons of copper plate, 500 tons of lead for shot, and general merchandise including pitch, grindstones, tar, chains and bellows but the main consignment was the men of the 2^nd Battalion and the 42^nd Regiment of the East India Company’s army who were being sent to replace men lost in Company’s war with the last mogul emperor with any clout, Hydra Ali, three years earlier.

 In addition to these soldiers the Haleswell has civilian passengers, including the two daughters Eliza and Mary-Ann; and two nieces of the captain Amy and Mary Paul, a Miss Elizabeth Blackburn,a  Miss Mary Haggard, a Miss Ann Mansell and a Mr John Shultz. The first mate, Thomas Burston, was a member of the Peirce family and was also lost in the incident. None of the women were able to escape and were among about 170 who died in the ship, which disintegrated within two hours of striking the rocky promontory. 

The Loss of the Haleswell, J.M.W Turner.

Accounts[2] given by two surviving officers Meriton and Rogers said that Peirce heroically remained with them and is shown on the right of the painting above, seated between and comforting his daughters. Meriton and Rogers stand on the left, on the point of departure, as calm observers of the group.

During the eighteenth century a number of men achieved the status of national hero, the most famous of them being the legendary Captain James Cook (1728-1779), the man who spent his life exploring and mapping; Newfoundland, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand for the British Crown.

During the Seven Years' War, Cook served in North America as master of Pembroke (1757) In 1758 he took part in the major amphibious assault that captured the Fortress of Louisbourg from the French, after which he participated in the siege of Quebec City and then the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. He showed a talent for surveying and cartography, and was responsible for mapping much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege, thus allowing General Wolfe to make his famous stealth attack on the Plains of Abraham.

In 1766, Admiralty engaged Cook to command a scientific voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of the voyage was to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun for the benefit of Royal Society inquiry into a means of determining longitude. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened his sealed orders and started the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis. He sailed around New Zealand and landed on Australian soil on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline. 

Two years later as the commander of HMS Resolution with his companion ship HMS Adventure he circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773.

On his last great voyage Cook was charged with looking for a north-west passage around the American continent. He sailed via Cape Horne and into the Pacific Ocean stopping off at Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands. Cook sailed as far north as Vancouver Island than turned back and was killed in an altercation with the local Hawaiian chief on 14 February 1779.

The Death of Captain James Cook,  Johann Zoffany, circa 1795.

So, how was it that Captain Peirce of the East India Company could be compared with the heroic Cook? 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century as tariffs were lowered on tea, brandy and other luxury goods the amount of smuggling along the coast was at last beginning to fall. Wrecks too were becoming less attractive to looters. The rescuers of the survivors were hailed by the King and the Company provided a reward of 50 guineas for their efforts. The survivors who were mainly crew had to walk all the way back to London through snow and rain, there was no reward for them. In fact the crew were lambasted[3] in some sections of the London press for failing to do their duty and for disobeying their captain and it became a commonly held view that the reason for the disaster was the lax attitude of the crew and their failure to follow their captain’s orders.

Thompson[4] argues that placing Peirce in the company of a man like Cook elevated him to an example of the national character, the embodiment of British courage and virtue in war. But Pierce was not at war and neither was he a servant of the state like Cook and other heroes such as Wolfe and Andre he was engaged in trade and a lucrative one at that. On a successful voyage a captain like Pierce could expect to make £10,000, and extra-ordinary amount of money compared to his pay which would have been something in the order of £300 a year and he was hoping to marry his daughters and nieces to rich officers or merchants along the way. But for a nation hungry for commercial success and wealth Pierce was their man, a jewel in their social crown and an example of familial loyalty and enterprise in the area of the world they were most interested in, India. “In death, Peirce becomes implicitly iconic not only for British courage and manly virtue but also the East India Company’s paternalism and its mission to form stronger bonds of affection and sociability both within British society and between Britain and its colonial dominions.

However, the legal implications of the commonly held view that the crew was the chief cause of the disaster were to have lasting significance for seamen who found themselves under the control of brutal officers, as both commercial owners and the British Crown were able to cite the example of the Halsewell as a reason for the maintenance of strict order, by force if necessary by officers on the lower orders.

The story of the Haleswell (renamed the Sherwell) inspired the beginning of my up- coming novel, Sinclair which will be available later this year.

[]] Monody, On the death of Captain Peirce, 1786.

[2] A circumstantial narrative of the loss of the Halsewell, East-Indiaman .Henry Meriton (second mate of the Halsewell.), John Rogers (third mate of the alsewell.)http://www.responsites.co.uk/halsewell/

[3]The London Recorder, January 15^th, 1786.

[4] Ship Wreck in Art and Literature, Carl Thompson, Routledge, 2013