Anniversary of the 1607 killer wave

[Blackleaf]

400 years ago - 30th January 1607 - a tsunami in the Bristol Channel killed 2000 people. It was probably the worst, and costliest, natural disaster to have hit Britain.
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Anniversary of 1607 killer wave

Simon Haslett has researched the cause of the killer wave



A suspected tsunami in the Bristol Channel which killed 2,000 people happened 400 years ago on Tuesday.

Experts believe severe flooding on 30 January 1607 in south west England and south Wales was caused by a tsunami - and not a storm surge or high tides.

It is estimated 200 square miles (520 sq km) of land were covered by water.

Professor Simon Haslett from Bath Spa University said there was currently no tsunami warning system in place.

He said the research was important for informing coastal and risk management plans.


'Worst natural disaster'

The Bristol Channel


The flood of 1607 has been described by experts as the worst natural disaster to hit Britain.

Eyewitness accounts of the disaster told of "huge and mighty hills of water" advancing at a speed "faster than a greyhound can run".

Professor Haslett carried out extensive research into the cause of the flood alongside Australian geologist and tsunami expert Ted Bryant from the University of Wollongong in 2003.

"When I was young, I remember seeing in some books in the library some woodcuts of pictures of people stranded on the top of high roofs, trees and clinging onto the back of sheep - very dramatic scenes," said Professor Haslett.

"You can't really imagine what it must have been like other than the human tragedy of it. Quite catastrophic and how they dealt with it is quite amazing," he said.

In a Timewatch programme shown on BBC 2, Professor Haslett and Dr Bryant revealed evidence around the Severn Estuary which appeared to back their theory.

This included a layer of sand in mud deposits in five different places: Hill in South Gloucestershire, Rumney Wharf in Cardiff, Llangennith Moor in Swansea, Croyde Bay in north Devon and Northam Burrows near Bideford, Devon.

Pebbles and pieces of broken shell were found in these areas.

They claimed these deposits were brought in from the open ocean.

"There's no beach for miles so that's an indication that this stuff has been transported a considerable distance," said Dr Bryant.

"The way some of the flow behaves, it will not break the material, so to find material as fragile as this in this type of deposit shows that it was a tsunami."

Another piece of evidence they believe backs up their theory is an eyewitness account which describes seeing "sparks" coming off the top of the wave - a phenomena unique to tsunamis.

"Whether it is sand on the marsh, or it's pebbles in the clay, or it's erosion on the headland or boulders piled up in key spots, you go for the simplest explanation, and I can put down most of the signs we have seen down to one wave," said Dr Bryant.

Dr Roger Musson, head of seismic hazards at the British Geological Survey, said there are examples of earthquakes in the area caused by an ancient fault off south-west Ireland.

One magnitude 4.5 earthquake was recorded there on 8 February 1980.

"We know from seismological evidence, that we have actually had an earthquake here - so there is a fault and it is moving. It is active."

Dr Musson believes the event was caused by a storm surge but "the idea of putting a large historical earthquake in this spot is not so fanciful."

Dr Kevin Horsburgh, from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, said the disaster was caused by a massive storm surge, formed by a combination of high tides and hurricane winds.

"A storm surge is going to provide some billions of tonnes of water rushing across the flood plain and is more than capable of picking up enormous rocks and large amounts of sediment and depositing them a long way away," he said. Other UK tsunamis include a 70ft (20m) high wave that hit Scotland 7,000 years ago, following a massive landslip in Norway.

A woodcut from a 1607 pamphlet shows the devastation the water caused - people and cattle drowning
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The flood occurred in the South West


The flood reached a speed of 30mph and a height of 25ft

It swept up to four miles inland in north Devon, Pembrokeshire, Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, Cardiff and Somerset.

In low-lying Somerset levels, it reached 14 miles inland

Experts believe a repeat flood would cost £13bn



news.bbc.co.uk

 

[Blackleaf]

THE DELUGE OF 1607

On the clear morning of Tuesday, January 30, 1607, a huge wave backed up from the southwestern English coast, appeared to gather strength, then crashed in, breaking over the shores from Devon up the Bristol Channel and the Severn River, flooding inland as far as fourteen miles and submerging more than thirty villages in England and Wales from Cardiff to Gloucester.2 Four villages in Somerset were "swallowed up" by the waters, according to contemporary accounts. Coastal towns like Weston-super-Mare were hit first, but riverside villages inland, like Congresbury and Wrington, were flooded before alarms could be raised. Towns beyond the constricting narrows of the Bristol Channel were overcome by even higher waves at increasing speeds, as fast as thirty-eight miles an hour. The dead numbered over two thousand when terrified survivors started counting the corpses of lost family members, servants, neighbors, and friends.

A pamphlet of the time described "mighty hilles of water tombling over one another in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds. Sometimes it dazzled many of the spectators that they imagined it had bin some fogge or mist coming with great swiftness towards them and with such a smoke as if mountains were all on fire, and to the view of some it seemed as if myriads of thousands of arrows had been shot forth all at one time." Professors Simon Haslett and Ted Bryant, in 2002, recognized this event would now be called a tsunami. Images of the Asian tsunami of 2004 astonish us with the staggering force of what we name "nature." In 1607, people who understood minor unexpected occurrences as unnatural events with portentous power were certain that this destructive wave was the punishing hand of God.

"God's warning to His people of England, by the great overflowing of the waters or floudes lately hapned in South-wales, and many other places," was how William Jones interpreted the event in his description published in London that year.3 "Lamentable newes out of Monmouthshire in VVales Contayning, the wonderfull and most fearefull accidents of the great ouerflowing of waters in the saide countye, drowning of infinite numbers of cattell of all kinds, as sheepe, oxen, kine and horses, with others: together with the losse of many men, women and children, and the subuersion of xxvi parishes in Ianuary last 1607" was the title of another, anonymous, pamphlet also issued in London, where news of the disaster had arrived by mid-February (Due to the absence of TV, telephone, email etc news travelled slowly in those days. A huge disaster struck but other parts of the country know nothing about it until weeks after the event).4

Small signs of mercy were discovered in tales of miraculous survival. A baby placed high on a roof beam in an attempt to save it from the flooding filling the house survived the cold of the night because a chicken flew up to the same perch and provided warmth. A cat saved another infant by rocking the floating cradle they shared so that the waves did not swamp the little vessel. But others in the devastated region found only death — death of people, of livestock, of the idea that all was well with their part of the world.

Alexander Carpenter and his family left Wrington before the flooding, but as an exile he must have pondered the destruction of his former home when news reached the English community in Amsterdam.5 We meet the Carpenter family later in Leiden, as members of John Robinson's congregation that had tried to flee to the Low Countries in 1607 and succeeded by the summer of 1608. But in 1607 people had to attempt to understand why God had punished England.

John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs (first published in 1559 in Latin and translated, emended, and reprinted continuously), succinctly stated the prevailing opinion of how such disasters were related to religious experience: "accordying to [th]e state of the Churche, the dispostition of the common wealthe commonly is guyded, either to be with aduersitie afflicted or elles in prosperitie to flourishe."6

Scrooby, Parish Church
of St. Wilfrid

Earlier warnings were recognized. 33,000 people had died of the plague in London in 1603.7 Villages near Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, where the Pilgrim movement was beginning, also recorded unusually high numbers of deaths at about the same time. At Sutton-cum-Lound, for example, thirty-one burials occurred in 1602, more than twice the number in the previous year, and more than three and a half times as many as two years earlier.8 Next to Scrooby at the tiny village of Mattersey, there were 14 deaths in 1603, preceded by three years with 2, 4, and 9, and followed by years with 5, 5, 4, 5, 6, 8, and then 14 burials in 1610. In the village of Everton, also adjacent to Scrooby, 29 people died in 1602, while in other years the number was no more than half that.9 At Blyth the year with the highest mortality at this time was 1607, when 47 people died. There had been 40 deaths in 1601, but in the other years from 1600 to 1610 the numbers were usually much lower.10 East Retford saw 31 people die in 1602, with far fewer in other years.11 These are the villages in the area near Scrooby, where the Pilgrim congregation formed by covenant around 1605-1606. Unfortunately, records of burials in Scrooby itself are not preserved from this time.

Scrooby, the parish church
where William Brewster
preached in 1598.


Repentence was required, and a renewed attempt to lead a godly life, but the signs of impending judgement did not cease. The summer of 1607 was unusually hot and dry, with resulting crop failures.12 Then, beginning in mid-September, a comet appeared in the western sky, seen in Germany, the Low Countries, and England. The tail pointed east, as the star appeared at midnight, bright at first but gradually diminishing until it faded away in October.13 Some important change was expected. (Comets had signalled the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Later it would be discovered that this was the same comet, now called Haley's Comet.) But in the early years of the seventeenth century, scientific analysis was absent and people thought that the signs of God's displeasure continued. The sickness that had returned to Blyth in 1607 was noticed again in London towards the end of the year, and people living in infected places were forbidden to come to the Court.14 By 1608, the plague returned to the capital city in epidemic strength.

http://www.sail1620.org/discover_fe...of_plymouth_plantation_chapter_1_page_1.shtml

 

[hermanntrude]

if this was a tsunami, i wonder where the epicentre of the earthquake was and what magnitude it was

 

[Blackleaf]

It would probably have occured somewhere in the Irish Sea. According to the British Geological Survey there is an ancient fault of the South West coast of Ireland.

 

[hermanntrude]

do you suppose that's the one responsible for the recent earthquakes in birmingham? or was that the scottish great glen?