The discussion of wind-patterns is not the province of this corner of the newspaper, but before Christmas you will be hearing and reading a lot about it. For we are approaching the bicentenary of the attempted French invasion of Ireland at Bantry Bay. And, as everybody learns at school (you hope), after entering the Bay with 25 ships and ten thousand soldiers, on December 23rd 1796, with Wolfe Tone, adjutant-general on board the Indomptable, a gale blew up and, in short, scattered the fleet, which a few days after "limped back to France".
The Cosantoir for November has an article by Captain Dan Harvey, curator of the Military Museum. at Collins Barracks, Cork, which concludes that if the French had, landed, such was the incompetence of the occupying army that "it is difficult to envisage how a rebellion could have failed." He packs a lot into one page, including the information that the French expeditionary army was numerically the largest French force that had left her shores since the Crusaders, exactly five and a quarter centuries before. Read it. He also gives several useful references.
All of you can fantasise now on this: if the French had succeeded, would they have stayed on as conquerers? Tone obviously thought not. But if they had, there is one thing you can be sure of. We would all now be French-speakers - as the first language. Great cultural imperialists, our friends the French.
Back to those winds. History Ireland, that most valuable quarterly, has an article: "Weather and Warfare, Bantry 1796 Revisited," which displays three maps with weather indications, and the maps first remind us how close to Brest, from which the fleet departed, is Bantry and give us a fine perspective on the whole affair. The author, John Tyrrell, tells us that from "data contained in ships logbooks, Tone's diary and from weather observations made at Armagh Observatory, Dublin, Manchester, Edinburgh and Rutland, weather maps have been reconstructed for each day between 1 December 1796 and 5 January 1797". Whew.
We think we suffer from annoyingly changeable weather conditions. John Tyrrell shows that December 1796 was characterised by a wide range "from almost summer-like calm, dissunny weather to the most severe storms and intensely cool, snowy weather". Same here now, though not so much of the almost summer-like etc.