"A large whale was taken betwixt my land butting on the Thames and Greenwich, which drew an infinite concourse to see it by water, horse, coach, and on foote, from London and all parts. It appear'd first below Greenwich at low water, for at high water it would have destroyed all ye boates; but lying now in shallow water encompass'd with boates, after a long conflict it was kill'd with a harping yron, struck in ye head, out of which spouted blood and water by two tunnells, and after an horrid grone it ran quite on shore and died. Its length was 58 foote, height 16; black skin'd like coach leather, very small eyes, greate tail, onely 2 small finns, a picked snout, and a mouth so wide that divers men might have stood upright in it: no teeth, but suck'd the slime onely as thro' a grate of that bone which we call whale-bone; the throate yet so narrow as would not have admitted the least of fishes. The extreames of the cetaceous bones hang downewards from the upper jaw, and was hairy towards the ends and bottom within side: all of it prodigious, but in nothing more wonderfull then that an animal of so greate a bulk should be nourished onely by slime thro' those grates." Having disposed of this matter, I shall now turn my attention to the great storm that immediately preceded the death of that "arch rebell Oliver Cromwell, cal'd Protector," which, be it remembered, took place on Friday the 3rd of September, 1658. "Toss'd in a furious hurricane, Did Oliver give up his reign." So saith the witty author of _Hudibras_; and to these lines his editor, Grey, adds the note-- "At Oliver's death was a most furious tempest, such as had not been known in the memory of man, or hardly ever recorded to have been in this nation. (See Echard's _History of England_, vol. ii.) Though most of our historians mention the hurricane at his death, yet few take notice of the storm in the northern counties on that day the House of Peers ordered the digging up his carcase with other regicides. (See _Mercurius Publicus_, No. 51. p. 816.)" Cotemporaneous proof of the occurrence is afforded by S. Carrington in prose, and by Edmund Waller in verse. "Nature itself," says Carrington, "did witness her grief some two or three days before by an extraordinary tempest and violent gust of weather, insomuch that it might have been supposed that herself had been ready to dissolve ... all which is so lively set forth by the quaintest wit of these times (E. Waller), who expresseth it more elegantly and copiously than my rough prose can possibly reach to." "_Upon the late Storm, and his Highness' Death ensuing the same._[6]