Simon Winchester has found an excellent subject. While invisible, wind makes itself apparent through its effect on other things. This may mean flying detritus, scudding clouds and the rustle of foliage; or it may mean the ways in which it irresistibly alters and directs larger movements in society and culture. Much of the history of global capitalist exchange was driven by the trade winds, forcing the direction of money and goods into particular cross-continental patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Over the centuries, we have discovered more and more, understanding the westerlies and those high, savage rivers of air, the jet streams.
Many significant events have been settled by wind. The Spanish Armada was defeated not just by the daring and courage of the Tudor navy but by a fortuitous movement of wind that the English understood and the Spanish were experiencing for the first time. D-Day succeeded because a faraway meteorologist realised what the winds would be like on the designated day and persuaded General Eisenhower to delay for 24 hours. Winchester makes a good case that it was the prevailing winds bringing the observable catastrophe of Chernobyl to the free nations of Scandinavia that hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. Winds are out of our control, and we can live by them or perish.
Since earliest times they have not only been identified but characterised. The first cataloguers distinguished four cardinal points of the wind and gave each a distinct attribute. Since then, the points have multiplied, and the differences between each dwelt upon with loving exactitude. Winchester hasn’t found much space here for literature, but even so it’s odd not to mention George MacDonald’s marvellous At the Back of the North Wind. That and many other poetic and imaginative portrayals of individual winds show how they seize the mind with very specific qualities. In a beautiful short story that rather anticipates MacDonald’s great book, the splendid novelist Frederick Marryat writes about a wind that takes female form to seduce a young sailor. The wind, one of 128, called South West and by West three-quarters West, tells him about her sisters:
Our characters are somewhat different. The most unhappy in disposition, and I may say the most malevolent, are the north and easterly winds; the N.W. winds are powerful, but not unkind; the S.E. winds vary, but, at all events, we of the S.W. are considered the mildest and most beneficent.
Individual winds have names in different cultures. The Provençal mistral is so notorious for driving people insane that it has regularly been accepted as a plea of mitigation in domestic murder trials. Much the same might be said of the only other named wind from a long list in Winchester’s book that we’re likely to recognise: the Greek meltemi. (Winchester thinks the Triestine bora is more internationally famous, but nobody who’s got their Greek island holiday timing wrong is likely to forget the meltemi.) Oddly, though in England we have plenty of wind, we don’t have more than a couple with particular names.
At force, winds terrify in distinct ways. I experienced Hurricane Sandy while living on the 34th floor of a Murray Hill apartment block in Manhattan – the savage rocking of the entire horizon and the in-and-out flexing of the floor-to-ceiling windows like belly dancing still haunt my nightmares 13 years on. And then there was the Sudanese haboob, a sandstorm approaching the Khartoum suburb where I happened to be, a colossal, undulating wall of red sand borne by air moving much too fast for comfort, accompanied by a sound I’d rather not think about.
Winchester is a genial and interesting guide to many different wind-related topics, though he sometimes spends too long talking about matters which are nothing really to do with wind. The orchestral oboe makes a handsome sound, but its category of ‘woodwind’ is only a metaphor; and the horrors of nuclear explosion are not always connected clearly enough to the impact of winds, whether natural or artificially driven.
A discussion of some significant artistic and literary expressions of wind would have been more interesting. It is surprising to have so little about visual portrayals of wind. It was a favourite topic of classical Japanese printmakers; and anything about J.M.W. Turner’s paintings of storms at sea would have been welcome, especially given what he endured to understand the force of the wind. A good chapter, too, might have addressed the many vivid musical portrayals of wind, such as the last movement of Debussy’s ‘La Mer’, various tempestuous scenes in Wagner or Emmanuel Chabrier’s ‘Tourbillon’. Art, music and literature are significant means by which we have understood natural phenomena and it is regrettable not to have had more examples here.
The Spanish Armada was partly defeated by a fortuitous movement of wind
There are, however, plenty of enjoyable ventures into curious aspects of the subject, including a miniature history of tumbleweed – which was imported by mistake into the United States in a packet of seeds and is now a serious problem. Many of the men who have dedicated their lives to understanding wind have been somewhat eccentric. Winchester, whose most popular book concerns the incarcerated lunatic who supplied the Oxford English Dictionary with a colossal amount of material, is in his element here. Lyall Watson, the creator of one of the two scales of wind, is noted as ‘arguing that plants could hear the agonised cries of cooking shrimp’. One of the pioneers of wind power evolved a novel theory of gravitation and claimed to have discovered an entirely new gas, which ‘turned out to be a form of steam’.
Others who catch Winchester’s eye are not so much eccentrics as people who have, in passing, endorsed ideas that we are all now supposed to deplore. They include the Victorian social scientist Francis Galton, who investigated the distinctions between races, and Ellsworth Huntington. The latter pursued a theory – not totally baseless – that parts of the world with highly unpredictable and changeable weather conditions driven by wind, such as our own little archipelago, give rise to resourceful and inventive peoples, who in turn create the most resilient civilisations. Winchester is very good at this sort of thing. We can even forgive him an amusing paragraph about the foibles of the biblical scholar Alexander Cruden – merely included on the grounds that his Concordance contains several entries for the word ‘wind’.
The substance of the book concerns the various uses that man has put the wind to, including sailing ships, investigated in a detailed account of sails. The power and speed with which Dutch windmills grind wheat into flour and the considerable dangers of fast-moving millstones are compellingly described. But probably the most pressing subject here is wind-powered electricity. It turns out to be much older than one imagined: the Scottish engineer James Blyth built a wind turbine for his house in 1887. It didn’t start being exploited, however, until the 1960s – and now, of course, the hideous giant objects are all around us, blots on both the landscape and seascape. It is fair to say that Winchester is an enthusiast for wind power, or at any rate recognises its necessary role in combating climate change. But I would have welcomed a serious consideration of the actual costs of generating electricity from wind. When Winchester writes that ‘the wind – free, clean and blowing endlessly above us – could have been employed [to generate electricity]’ much earlier, one has to question the meaning of ‘free’. For something that is said to be free, it seems to be costing all of us a lot of money in government subsidies as well as in electricity bills.
But taking another view of climate change, Winchester also reports that wind is slowing down. Although individual hurricanes remain savage, it may be that ‘the average wind speeds around the world are inexplicably declining. The world is said by some to be in the grip of what they are calling the Great Stilling.’ While we wait for the professional catastrophists to work out why this should be, Winchester’s chatty and informative book will do nicely.
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