STANDING ON a handy headland looking out across Bantry Bay, it’s difficult not to feel that but for a jammy wind on the shortest day of the year in 1796 things could have been a lot different. Sacrebleu, we might all be speaking French in Ireland today; possibly even Irish.
On December 21of that year a French fleet of 43 anchored in Bantry Bay at the behest of Theobald Wolfe Tone. The armada’s voyage, beset by problems from the outset, had become separated from the flagship carrying General Lazarre Hoche. His second in command delayed the fleet to wait for him — a fatal blunder. By the time the French arrived mob-handed, a gale had blown up preventing the force from landing. The mission was aborted, the invasion scuppered. The history of Europe changed irrevocably.
Had the weather not intervened, the French, with the help of the sympathetic locals, could easily have overpowered the badly stretched English garrison in Cork. A successful back door assault on a badly stretched and war-weary England could well have proved decisive. A wind had affected the entire course of European affairs.
It’s a similar climatic story gazing towards El Cabo de Trafalgar. But for a lucky wind that helped Nelson to a surprise away result, today they’d be feeding the pigeons in La Plaza de Trafalgar and not Trafalgar Square.
Considering that Ireland is one of the windiest places in Europe it’s surprising that we dn’t have names for our winds as many nations do — the Mistral, the Föhn, the Undertaker’s Wind in Jamaica, the Chinook in the Rockies, the Levant in Spain and France.
But at least we can hold our head up high when it comes to naming strength of winds. Francis Beaufort from Navan (born December 17, 1857) came up with the idea of empirically calibrating wind speeds – “Force 7, moderate gale; whole trees in motion” type of thing.
Beaufort was and admiral in the navy, in charge of the hydrology department — which helped make maritime charts.
A device for accurately measuring the wind didn’t emerge until the mid-19th century — and it too was an Irish invention. The anemometer, still in use today, was devised at Armagh Observatory by a Dubin man, Rev Thomas Romney Robinson in 1850. The first one to be erected in a public place was in Dun Laoghaire, and Robinson himself has been honoured by having a crater on the moon named after him.
Poor old Francis Beaufort had something of an unfortunate private life, or at least one part of it was: he enjoyed an incestuous relationship with his sister Harriet. Well, ‘enjoy’ may not be the correct word — but it seems that the liaison give him little pleasure. When Beaufort was widowed in 1834, his devoted sister Harriet left the family home in Ireland and came to London to help him run his the household. Intimacy, it seems, ensued. “Fresh horrors with Harriet” records the admiral in his ciphered diary in November 1835. “Oh Lord forgive us both.” Two months later the entry reads: “Again I employed Harriett. O Lord take pity on my soul and strengthen my resolve.” In all there are 13 explicit allusions in the journals to this liaison, ending only with Beaufort’s second marriage to Honora Edgeworth in November 1838. After which Francis was presumably able to concentrate on the wind again.
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