The Storm

On the evening of November 26, 1703, a hurricane from the north Atlantic hammered into Britain: it remains the worst storm the nation has ever experienced. Eyewitnesses saw cows thrown into trees and windmills ablaze from the friction of their whirling sails—and some 8,000 people lost their lives. For Defoe, bankrupt and just released from prison for his seditious” writings, the storm struck during one of his bleakest moments. But it also furnished him with material for his first book, and in this powerful depiction of suffering and survival played out against a backdrop of natural devastation we can trace the outlines of Defoe’s later masterpieces, A Journal of the Plague Yearand Robinson Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe (1660-û1731), though best remembered for his fiction, including the novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, also wrote on economics, history, biography, and crime and is considered the founder of British journalism.

Richard Hamblyn is the author of Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.