A fair wind, and a prosperous voyage? – not on 22 December 1684

Abstract

A midnight encounter in the English Channel, just off Calais, on the night of 22/23 December 1684 caused the sinking of the ‘Francis’ mail‐laden Pacquet‐boat headed to Dover after a collision with a 70t Dutch ship heading home to Zealand and driven by tempestuous northerly winds. Weather conditions surrounding the incident are reconstructed from contemporary diarists such as John Gadbury, Robert Boyle, Elias Ashmole (all in London), Robert Plot (Oxford), and Sir John Wittewronge (Rothamstead).

John Gadbury's errant wind

“…Transcribing Wittewronge, I found good agreements for notably eventful daily weather descriptions matched with Gadbury, quite often with identical phrases, for example: ‘cool’, 17 and ‘hard frost’. A striking example of coherent agreement amongst several records is described in Tinkler (2021) concerning an overnight maritime collision near Calais on 22/23 December 1684 and interpreted using daily weather records by Gadbury, Ashmole, Boyle, Plot and Wittewronge.…”