‘Storms’ reprint tells tales of New England weather

HISTORIC STORMS OF NEW ENGLAND, by Sidney Perley, Commonwealth Edition, Beverly, Mass. 2001, $14.95.

This handsome edition of an 1891 classic is sure to find regiments of readers. After all, who among us New Englanders is not concerned with the weather. It’s a Yankee preoccupation that has fueled the success of almanacs and predictions ever since Paul Revere checked the wind and the skies before he saddled up.

Perley has a particular interest in the region’s weather extremes and all manner of celestial phenomena. This interest is without limits and includes dark days, comets, aurora borealis and earthquakes along with cold winters, hot summers, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, cyclones, great rains and more. And his geographic sweep is just as all encompassing.

If you belong to the region, part of the fun you’ll have is searching these pages for the name of the town where you live. You are quite likely to find it. Bangor is here, as is Kennebunk, Brewer, Swans Island, Portland, and every major Maine river.

God, of course, in the days of Cotton Mather, John Calvin and his Puritan counterparts, was believed to play a major role as the director and producer of weather extravaganzas. His is a presence often acknowledged by Perley, especially in his reports of early 18th century natural catastrophes. Writing about the great earthquake of 1727, he reports, “The people of New England were affected by this earthquake as they had never been before, being fearful of divine judgements for their sins and lax responsiveness to the call of their religious duties. The clergy taught them it was a loud call to the whole land to repent …”

But as Perley proceeds toward the start of the 20th century, divine attribution plays a lesser part as disaster’s originator – although the Lord’s hand is never fully withdrawn. Nor is its presence without occasional irony. During the great drought of 1762, for example, on July 7, a fast was celebrated in the churches of Falmouth, Maine. But the services, we are told, “… were scantily attended, as the men were busy in putting out the numerous fires that prevailed all through the locality because of the dryness of the earth and vegetation.”

Maine is given a great deal of ink in these pages; as all of us know, this is the New England state where weather rules with its firmest hand. Perley also knows this, and the reader will find much to relate to in his reports of floods brought on by the Penobscot’s monumental ice jams, the snows that buried barns, and the roaring northeast gales that drove so many a good ships ashore.

This book is charged with mayhem. The details of doom rattle from every page as lives are lost, property destroyed and entire cities reduced to rubble. Take Providence, for example, during the great gale (most probably a tropical hurricane) of Sept. 23, 1815, when “… many valuable citizens were carried with their houses into the water and others were crushed to death between planks and vessels.” Perley’s Calvinism shows through, however, as he very shortly writes, “Providence profited, however, by the great calamity in the general improvement of the town. In place of dilapidated warehouses, spacious brick buildings arose … and an elegant and much larger church occupied the site of that which had been destroyed. Four years after the storm the greatly improved appearance of the place indicated an era of prosperity, rather than loss and disaster.”

While I’m not sure the storm’s survivors would have agreed with Perley’s assessment of its value, his cheery logic does temper the disaster’s fury. It’s that sort of book. While you learn on almost every page of tragedy’s minutiae, such as bodies found in trees, or a child snuffed by a gale-blown timber, there is also a kind of stubborn humor that refuses to be totally extinguished, as if the author realizes he simply can’t go on any longer with his grim tallies of lost life and property. It is this candle of levity, flickering as it does among the darkness of these pages of quaint 18th century prose, that gives the book the character that warrants its reprinting after all these years.

Consider this bit of verse, written by a poet who lost his wardrobe, that concludes the account of that 1815 gale:

I have had many happy years

And tailors kind and clever,

But those young pantaloons have gone

Forever and forever!

And not till fate has cut the last

Of all my earthly stitches,

This aching heart shall cease to mourn

My loved; my long-lost breeches!