Creative History

  “I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the modern memory of man.”  The words of Anglican clergyman William Derham when describing the winter of 1709 as he witnessed it in London. William Derham was both a minister and a natural scientist who lived in a suburb of London over three hundred years ago at a time when religion and science weren’t necessarily constantly at war with one another.  Today, Derham is best remembered as the person who first came up with an accurate way to measure the speed of sound, but while he was alive, in addition to giving thundering sermons from the church pulpit, Derham was also an enthusiastic meteorologist who kept detailed records of weather conditions and who beginning in 1697 and stretching all the way to 1735 religiously recorded the temperature several times a day--no pun intended. One such day when William Derham recorded the temperature was January 5, 1709, and on that day, he recorded...

In late August of 1485 the streets of London were packed with thousands of people awaiting the coronation of King Henry VII.  On the 22nd of that month King Henry’s Tudor army had defeated the last remaining forces loyal to the House of York and King Richard III at Bosworth Field thereby bringing an end to the bloody Wars of the Roses and making Henry the new King of England. Soon thousands of victorious soldiers and vanquished prisoners of war would arrive in London and swell this teeming mass of humanity, which already numbered perhaps in the tens of thousands, even further.  And already, even prior to the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field, many soldiers on both sides had been deemed too sick to fight on account of a new and mystifying disease that both armies  simply dubbed, “The Sweat”. “The Sweat” first arrived and struck without warning during the heat of high summer and it painfully killed thousands that it infected within a mere matter of hours.  It mowe...

  It is Sunday October 21, 1638 and approximately 300 worshippers are packed into St. Pancras church in the English village of Widecombe-in the-moor during the early afternoon.   The worshippers represent almost the entire able-bodied population of Widecombe.  Only a few idle church dodgers, whose souls are sure to go to Hell anyway, everyone in St. Pancras’ church believes, choose to spend their Sabbath day drinking and gambling at a tavern just a few miles outside the village.    The faithful are there in church, as they are every Sunday, to listen to the sermon of  their Anglican minister, George Lyde and to hear the Word of the Lord.  Lyde stands at the altar, as he does each week, with his faithful wife sitting attentively in the first pew only a few feet away at the very front of the church.  Little does he, or anyone else in St. Pancras that fateful afternoon know, but many there that day have only moments left to live. St. Panc...

  Famous for its unpredictable high tides and majestic cliffs, Canada’s Bay of Fundy straddles the border between the two northeastern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The world’s fifth largest bay in terms of  square miles, the Bay of Fundy also shares a border with the American state of Maine. The shifting tides in the Bay of Fundy are considered fierce and treacherous by even the most experienced mariners in the world.  And the weather in Nova Scotia, particularly along the shoreline can be fickle and in the winter downright frigid, with large floes and pack ice a not uncommon sight in the open waters of the Bay of Fundy throughout much of the year. On December 16, 1735 residents of the tiny rural fishing village of Chebogue, located along the northern shoreline of the Bay of Fundy, awoke on a cold winter’s morning to see a most unusual, even a haunting sight meet their eyes. Docked in the small harbor of their village that December morning was a t...