Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

The following is Messrs. Brownlow, Pearson, and Company’s table of exports from the port of Hull, from January 1st to November 26th, 1851:

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

Sterling? Why to 26 November? Multiannual series to include e.g. Crimean War? It’s two years prior, and if this is typical then a loss of Russian trade wasn’t serious – or did a lot of it go through Hamburg?

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Amsterdam (1) W/G ·
• Antwerp (2) W/G ·
• Baltic Sea (6) W/G ·
• Belgium (7) W/G ·
• Bremen (1) W/G ·
• Denmark (7) W/G ·
• Germany (25) W/G ·
• Humber (21) W/G ·
• International trade (17) W/G ·
• Kampen (1) W/G ·
• 📌Kingston upon Hull (74) W/G ·
• Netherlands (9) W/G ·
• North Sea (20) W/G ·
• Norway (4) W/G ·
• 📌Port of Hull (19) W/G ·
• Rotterdam (2) W/G ·
• Russia (8) W/G ·
• Saint Petersburg (2) W/G ·
• Sweden (6) W/G ·
• Trade (4) W/G ·
• Zwolle (1) W/G ·

All tags.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

Sterling? Why to 26 November? Multiannual series to include e.g. Crimean War? It’s two years prior, and if this is typical then a loss of Russian trade wasn’t serious – or did a lot of it go through Hamburg?

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Similar

19 October 1775: Mayor Joseph Outram lays the first stone of Hull’s first dock and customs quay, dooming the town’s walls and commencing its great expansion

17 February 1801: Recent international arrivals and departures at the port of Hull

1 July 1840: The opening of the Hull and Selby Railway terminates the threat to Hull’s port from Goole, Scarborough and Bridlington

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

3 July 1837: The Swan, a Hull whaler, returns from the dead (the ice of the Davis Strait) bearing three whales

11 July 1787: Advertisement for The Commercial and Mathematical Academy, Hull

30 July 1798: The homeward-bound Greenland whaler Blenheim fights off a Royal Navy press gang in Hull harbour, killing two boarders

1 September 1651: Robinson Kreutznaer sails from Hull, and soon wishes he hadn’t

17 August 1778: Civil engineers John Smeaton and John Wooler explain how to use the River Hull to flush the dock which has replaced the northwest section of the city walls

23 January 1640: Andrew Marvell’s father drowns in the Humber at Hull

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

Andrew Junior left to look after himself.

The manner of his father’s death, and the fact that the poet himself was born in reclaimed Holderness, should give pause to those who take offence at his lines on Holland:

How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground,
Building their watery Babel far more high,
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky!
Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid,
And oft at leap-frog o’er their steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what’s their mare liberum.
A daily deluge over them does boil;
The earth and water play at level coil.
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest (Marvell 1665).

I must find out more about Mrs. Skinner of Thornton, North Lincolnshire, who adopted him.

Marvell was not the only person with reason to dislike the crossing:

There are some good towns on the sea-coast; but I include not Barton, which stands on the Humber, as one of them, being a straggling mean town, noted for nothing but an ill-favoured dangerous passage, or ferry, over the Humber to Hull; where, in an open boat, in which we had about 15 horses, and 10 or 12 cows, mingled with about 17 or 18 passengers, we were about 4 hours tossed about on the Humber, before we could get into the harbour at Hull. Well may the Humber take its name from the noise it makes; for in an high wind it is incredibly great and terrible, like the crash and dashing together of ships (Defoe 1748).

In “To a Coy Mistress” Marvell laments his lover’s absence in the lines “I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain” (Marvell 1898), which inspired Angela Leighton to a rather excellent poem, “By the Tide of Humber” (Leighton 2023) which I hope I’ll be allowed to use.

I haven’t managed to access Nicholas von Maltzahn’s “Death by Drowning: Marvell’s ‘Lycidas’.”

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