Cloudesley Shovell went to sea when just a lad, and overcame the disadvantages of his silly name to rise rapidly through the British navy. He survived a skirmish with the French near Bantry Bay in 1689, but almost came to grief some years later in a major storm which hit the south of England.
It occurred 297 years ago tomorrow, on November 26th and 27th, 1703, and was of such severity that it is remembered as the Great Storm, and may well have brought with it the strongest winds ever to have affected these islands.
The bulk of our information about the Great Storm comes from Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe had an interest in these matters, and as well as consulting the scientific authorities of the day, he placed advertisements in local newspapers.
As a result, he received a great deal of correspondence about damage and loss of life throughout the country. He published an account of it in 1704 entitled The Storm - or a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which Happened in the Late Dreadful Tempest both by Land and Sea.
Defoe describes the damage caused in Wales, England and the Netherlands, together with north Germany and Denmark. Then - perhaps with a little of the novelist's inventive licence - he goes on speculate on the progress of the storm through "the Baltick Sea, through Finland, Muscovy and parts of Tartary, until at last it must lose itself in the vast Northern Ocean where Man never came and Ship has never sailed".
But most of Defoe's account has a ring of authenticity, and has been subject to corroboration. At least 123 people were killed on land by the Great Storm, including the Bishop of Bath and Wells, a chimney of whose house in Somerset collapsed upon his bed.
The material damage, too, was awesome: over 17,000 trees were blown down in the county of Kent alone; 400 windmills were wrecked, many of them because the intense friction of the rotating blades had caused them to catch fire; and the Eddystone lighthouse on the coast near Plymouth disappeared without a trace with all its occupants.
Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell was one of Defoe's informants. Sir Cloudesley's flagship, the Association, was anchored in the port of Harwich at the time, and he and his crew escaped with their lives only by raising anchor and letting the wind take the ship out into the open sea to ride the tempest. Others were not so lucky; in the course of that night more than 8,000 sailors lost their lives at sea.