266
NOTES AND QUERIES. m s. ix. APRIL *, wu.
NAPOLEON AND A SEA CAPTAIN AT ST.
HELENA. I have temporary possession of
, very interesting letter, lent by a friend,
concerning Napoleon. It was written on
3 May, 1817, by a Capt. Thos. Cook, master
of a " storeship," from St. Helena when
Napoleon was resident there. The postage -
mark on the cover shows that the letter
was charged 12c?., being "1 oz. at 14/
.per oz." [? lb.]. It was addressed to
'" Messrs. Cook, Son & Leopard, Navy Agents,
No. 1 James-st., Adelphi, London."
" When I see you I shall have a long account to give you about Bonaparte. I was more fortunate than most part of the people that visits St. Helena, for it is very few indeed that the Great Man will see.
" I was introduced to him by Marshall Ber- trand, and was in conversation with him for about three quarters of an hour. He asked many questions, which is too numerous to mention in this letter. They will afford us a little amuse- ment when we meet.
" One of the questions was, if I was a married man. I said I had been married twenty years. He asked if I had any children. I said no. He then asked what I had been about all that time not to get any. I said I could not tell as I had done my best endeavours ; but perhaps it was the same with me as it was with him and his first wife. He laughed very heartily at my reply.
" You may put that in the papers if you please, as I was very proud at seeing the Great Man." WILLIAM CUBBON.
Douglas Public Library.
REV. THOMAS GALE : HURRICANE AT HORNSEA, 1732. (See ante, p. 188.) In compliance with the wish expressed in the editorial note at the above reference, I send the following account, entered in the Parish Register, under 1787, by the Rev. W. Whytehead, then curate, with some slight additions given in Poulson's
- History of Holderness.'
The storm, which occurred on 23 Dec., 1732,
- ' arose from the Mere in a direction towards the
sea, destroying and unroofing 24 houses, 14 barns, and other outhouses standing near the market cross, or within 150 yards on each side of it, besides the damage which the Church sustained ; it blew down the east end of the vicarage house and took off its roof ; and though Mr. Gale, the curate, and his numerous small family were then in their beds, not one received the least injury ; one of my neighbours tells me that, immediately after the storm, he, the curate, Avent running over to their house with a young child in his shirt- lap, saying, ' This is all I have left ! ' supposing the others to have been killed. The hurricane, in its progress towards the sea, overturned the windmill irf the field called the Dales, not far from the foot- path leading from the Church to the Beck, and, what was very extraordinary, the millstones were carried 150 yards from the mill. Sheets of lead
were blown from the Church, and wrapped round
two sycamore trees now standing in Hall Garth.
A woman and child, who were in bed together in
a chamber of one of the unroofed houses, were
blown into the street with the bed under them,
and received little, if any, bodily harm ; a beam
was blown from a house on the west side of the
street into the garret window of a house on the
other side of the street. Mrs. Moore (the then
child) is now living here ; the old woman, her
aunt, she says, did not live many weeks, but
whether her death was accelerated by the fright,
she could not say. I was then here with my
grandfather Ogle (in my fourth year), who lived
in Eastgate ; he did not perceive there was any
violent wind, nor was there any damage done in
all that street."
The hurricane lasted only three minutes, and must have pursued a very narrow course. Hornsea Mere, covering between 400 and 500 acres, is about half a mile from the sea, the town lying between the two.
The writer of the above account says that the parish clerk was hiding smuggled goods in the crypt of the church, and that the fright brought on a paralytic stroke. He (Mr. Whytehead) was Vicar of Atwick and Mapleton, villages north and south of Hornsea, of which last place he was at the same time curate-in-charge, 1756-1803. He was a great antiquary, and has been com- pared to Gilbert White of Selborne. Many interesting particulars respecting him and Yorkshire people and customs are contained in a book, ' Records of an Old Vicarage ' (John Long), written by his great-grandson, the Rev. R. Y. Whytehead, Rector of Law- ford, Essex. E. L. H. TEW,
Vicar of Hornsea 1872-97.
Upham Rectory, Hants.
THE ADVENT OF SCOTSMEN IN ENGLAND. All Scots genealogists are familiar with a type of family bearing a Scots surname, long resident in England, and unable to account for its presence on this side of the Border. May I suggest that some of these families are to be accounted for by soldiers in Scots regiments which were disbanded during the end of the eighteenth century, and which dropped batches of the men on the march back to Scotland, where the regi- ment was formally and finally reduced ? Two sets of papers at the Public Record Office may be consulted on this point : the Pay Rolls (W.O. 12 and 13) and the Marching Orders (W.O. 5). The final pay- sheets often give the dates when men were discharged, and the marching orders show where the regiment was at this particular time. For instance, the 81st Regiment, raised in Aberdeenshire, left Hillsea Barracks 19, 20, and 21 Feb., 1783, and reached
