Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1879 — SEVERE WINTERS IN EUROPE. [ARTICLE]

SEVERE WINTERS IN EUROPE.

What passes in England and Continental Europe for “a severe winter” would be regarded in the Northern States and Canada as a comparatively mild and open season. “Forty-six degrees of frost,” as the London papers shiveringly put it when recalling the hard winter of 1860, lose much of their importance when translated into our “14 below zero,” and, since the invention of the thermometer, it is doubtful if the mercury has gone in England below 20 deg. Memorable severe winters there have been in Europe, not a few of which have had interest in history. In 401 the Black Sea is said to have been frozen over for twenty days, and between October, 763, and February, 761, such a frost prevailed at Constantinople that the seas are spoken of as frozen for a hundred miles from shore. It is certain that two centuries before, in 559, Zabergan, King of the Huns, crossed the Danube on the ice, and, routing the troops of Justinian, spread over Thrace to the very walls of Constantinople, this being the first incursion of the Bulgarians, who are next week to choose a Prince and regain their autonomy. In 1622 ice covered the Hellespont. In 1294 the Cattegat was frozen over; in 1323 the Baltic was passable to travelers for six weeks; again in 1402 it was frozen from Pomerania to Denmark, and twen-ty-four winters later its surface would bear a rider from the Lubeck to the shore of Prussia, In 1460 horsemen

rode from Denmark to Sweden, and in 1548 sledges drawn by oxen traveled on the sea from Rostock to Denmark. In 1658 Charles X., with his army, horse and foot, and his artillery trains and the Little Belt from Holstein to Denmark, to lay siege to Copenhagen. The German chronicles contain as many records of severe seasons. In 1433 flic large fowls of the air sought shelter in the towns of Germamanv; in 1468 and n"tiu id 1544 wine iiroivuauts in Flanders cut their wines —champagne frappe with a vengeance, only champagne was still a thing corked up and wired in the bottle of the future—with hatchets and sold them in lumps. In 1565 the lazy Scheldt was frozen so hard that it sustained the weight of loaded wagons: again, iff! 1594, it and the Rhine were irOzenover; in the great cold of 1622 the Zuyder Zee was ice-bound, and in 1691 the winter brought the wolves into the streets of Vienna, where they attacked horsts and even men. The cold seasons of modern England have been most carefully noted, with an abundance of interesting details. On Midsummer Day, 1035, it is said that the frost destroyed all the fruits of the earth; in 1076-7—after the period of forty-one years that the writer in the Gardener's Chronicle has been figuring out—there were dreadful frosts from November to April, and in 1407 all the small birds perished. The Thames was frozen from London Bridge to Gravesend, from Nov. 24, 1484, till Feb. 10, 1435. and in 1515—after the long cycle of eighty years had been fulfilled—it was again crossed by vehicles!between Lambeth and Westininster. In 1564 and 1607 the river was the scene of bonfires and diversions, elaborately described on later occasions by writers whose passages r.re as familiar to English readers of this day as the stories of the Great Plague and Great Fire. Some Shakespearean commentators think they have found in this unwonted sight of fire upon ice the source of the inspiration of some of the Bard of Avon’s images, and would use this as evidence to settle the date of the composition of a play. The winter of 1683-4 was terribly cold. * ‘ The foresttrees and even the oaks split by the frost; most of the hollies were killed; the Thames was covered with' ide eleven inohee thiekf and nearly all the birds

perished.” “The frost,” according to a citizen's diary, “began in thebeginning of December. The people kept trades on the Thames as in a fair till Feb. 4, 1684. About forty coaches daily plied on the Thames as on dry land. Bought this book at a shop upon the ice in the middle! of the Thames.” In the winter of 1709 there was a tkreemonths’ frost, with heavy snow, and in 1716 a fair was held on the Thames and oxen were roasted whole upon the ice. “Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from other stairs to and fro as in the streets, so that it setmed to me a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water, while it was a severe judgment on the land,” Again, in the famous “ hard winter of 1740, there was another Frost Fair on the Thames, which lasted for nine weeks, during whicji period coaches plied regularly on the frozen surface, and the usual amusements were enjoyed. It waa in this winter that the famous icepalace, with all its furniture of Nature’s crystal, was built on the ice at St. Petersburg. In 1766 there was a season of intense cold, lasting from Christmas Day to the 22d of January, and ten years later, Gilbert White, of Sei borne, recorded the only severe winter that he seems to have encountered in his thirty-eight years’ residence. Jan. 7, “the snow was driving all the day,” and on the 12th “ a prodigious mass overwhelmed all the works of men, drifting over the tops of gates and filling the hollow lanes.” “ The company at Bath that wanted to attend the Queen’s Birthday was strangely incommoded.” “ The cold was so penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm chambers, and in the day the *vind was so keen that persons of robust constitution could scarcely endure to face it.” “Tamed by the season, skylarks settled in the streets of towns because they saw the ground was bare.” ‘ “ The thrushes and blackbirds were mostly destroyed, and the partridges were so thinned that few remained to breed the following year.” Four of Gilbert White’s own parishioners suffered from frost-bite, ana, he adds, “the frost killed all the firs and most of the ivy, and in many places stripped the hollies of all the leaves.” From this minute description of a severe winter in a country parish in England, the rural reader- of the World can infer that an exceptional winter there docs not differ materially from an average winter in our own Northern States. In 1789 a cold wave swept all over Europe; and from November to January people crossed the Thames at the Custom-House on the ice. Again from Christmas Eve, *1794, to Feb. 14, 1795, England experienced a season of intense cold, only intermitted for one day, Jan. 23. December, 1796, was also remarkably cold; on Christmas Day the thermometer in London marked 16 deg. below zero, the greatest cold registered up to that time. On the 13th of January, 1810, the quicksilver was frozen solid at Moscow. The winter of 1812, during which Napoleon’s Army struggled home from Russia, leaving 450,000 dead men to mark the track it had taken, was a very cold one. “ This is pleasanter than Moscow,” said the Emperor, rubbing his hands over a fire in the palace he had regained after posting across Europe; the soldiers he left bening were literally frozen stiff in circles as they lay or sat round their bivouac fires. In 1814, England endured a winter of exceptional severity. A writer in a London paper wrote a few days ago that he that winter walked on the Thames from Horseferry road to London bridge and back. The Portreeve of Tavistock set out to take the oath of office at the quarter sessions, thirty-two miles away, and, as the “ Annual Register” records, was stopped by snow and ice after proceeding twenty-one miles and imprisoned in a little hamlet for twenty-six days without communication with the outer world. Soldiers marching from town to town were frozen to death on the road. The snow drifted in the streets to such a height that all the shops were closed; by the middle of January London bridge was blocked, but that made no difference, for the Tnames was completely frozen over a few days later, when a I rost Fair was opened on the river and a bullock roasted whole. For many days there were no mails, though the Postoffice put forth all its powers to compel overseers and parochial authorities to clear the highways, and sent agents down into the country to dig toads along which toiled mail coaches drawn by ten horses. No coal could get to London, and when the householder’s supply of fuel gave out there was nothing for him but to shiver and wait. It was difficult even to reach the butcher’s shop, where there were neither fowls nor vegetables to be had. The children had to be kept warm and amused within doors, where all day long the lamps were lit, for the snow-drifts shrouded the panes. The water-pipes were all frozen, and people had to melt snow pails within the fenders. The Solway was frozen over for the first time within the memory of living men, and the crews of coasters and fishing-boats starved and perished of cold at sea, being unable from the accumulations of ice to make port. In the Scandinavian peninsulas tne winter of 1849 was a most severe one; in various parts of Norway, on the 2d of January, the mercury froze and “ persons exposed to the atmosphere lost their breath.” Five years and a day after the thermometer in London registered —8 deg.; the railroads and rivers were blocked, coal rose to an enormous price, and the metropolis was threatened with darkness from the inability of the gas companies to procure a fresh supply. The next winter, when the allied forces were shivering in the Crimea, was to the full as severe. On the 20th of January, 1855, the lakes Were frozep over; on the ,22d of February fires were made on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and in the fens in Lincolnshire was established a traffic on the ice thirty-five miles long. The spring was late, and there was cold weather till the 26th of June. In 1860, England experienced probably her coldest weather. From the 28d to the 30th of December the cold waa intense. At Torquay the mercury went down to 20 deg. below zero. .In Hyde Park it was 17 deg., and a letter in the Times recorded that ahorse had been seen “with icicles at its nose three inches in length and as thick as three fingers,” a sight by ng means uncommon in Lower Canada. The Thames was partially frozen in its tidal reaches, ana from Teddlngtoir Lock to its most remote sources was. covered with Ice from six to ten or even twelve inches in thickness. Skating parties were arranged for journeys from Oxford to Loudon and back, and the year in question will always be memorable among skaters as the one in which round-heeled irons finally superseded all others. On the 9th of January, 1861, there were bonfires and grand displays of fireworks on. the ioe Tn anatKeother parts: Jan-’ uary, 1867, was another cold month,

snow and ice practically suspending traffic at London for several days, though people offered cabmen fares of .fifteen and twenty shillings a mile. It was on the 15th that the ice in Regent’s Park gave way beneath some 600 skaters, of whom forty-ohe were drowned. Still another cold swon w&s the winter of 18704, during which the poor people of Paris and the illy-equipped Republican levies of Gambetta suffered so severely.— N. K World.