In January 1709, with the whole country locked in frost, a fowler of Welney goes out on the frozen washes after duck and does not come home. That night his widow finds his pattens hanging wet on the nail inside her door. Nathaniel Gedge, a writer for the London booksellers, fen-born and five weeks behind with his rent, is sent down to get the wonder from her own mouth for a guinea. He finds it, and finds besides a boy unsure of how many lights he saw, a neighbour's wife who swears too soon, and a partner who will not answer. Written as the plain confession of the man who made the relation, Daniel Defoe, Simulacrum, tells a story about what a circumstantial account may hide.
by Daniel Defoe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Being the true account of how a True Relation was made, in the great frost of the year 1709, by the man who was paid to make it; with the things he left out of it, here put in
Mr. Gideon Starling, bookseller, at the Three Keys in Little Britain, paid me one pound one shilling for a relation of a wonder at Welney, in the Isle of Ely, which he printed in February of the year 1709, on a sheet and a half, with a cut, at threepence; and I am now to write the relation that should have been printed in its place. Nobody will pay me for this one. I do not expect it.
I was then a writer for the booksellers, and had been for nine years, and lodged in White Cross Street, over a cutler's, at two shillings and sixpence the week, of which I owed five weeks on the 24th of January, the frost having put a stop to most things in London, and to the trade in paper as much as any. People do not buy pamphlets when coals are at the price they were that winter; they buy coals. I had written in my time a life of a highwayman who was hanged at Tyburn, from his own mouth, in the Press Yard; an account of a fire at Wapping, which I saw; a dying speech, which I did not hear; two sermons for a Dissenting minister who could not write them himself; and a great many advertisements for a pill. I tell this so that it may be understood what kind of hand is keeping this account, and that it was not a clean one when it began.
I was born at March, in the Isle of Ely, Nathaniel Gedge, of the Gedges there, who are most of them in the churchyard; and was bred there till I was fourteen, and I could still talk with a fenman in his own way, which is the reason Mr. Starling sent for me and not another.
He had a letter from his brother, a grocer at Downham, which he read me in his back shop with his gloves on. A fowler of Welney, Robert Lound, had gone out on the ice of the Hundred Foot Washes on his pattens, on the evening of Friday the 14th of January, to the open water by the bank, where the duck lie in a frost, with his gun; and had not come home. The ice had let him in. He was found two days after, under it, a furlong from the open water, by men who cut down to him with an axe. And his widow said that on the night he drowned, while she sat up for him, his pattens came home without him and hung themselves on the nail inside the door, where he always hung them, wet.
That was the letter. Mr. Starling said the whole of Downham had it, and Lynn would have it by now, and he would have it in London before anybody, if I would go down and get it from the woman's mouth, with the circumstances. He said he would give me a guinea for a sheet, and forty shillings for the journey, there and back, and would pay the guinea when the copy was in his hand. He said, as he let me out, that he did not want a drowning. There was a drowning in every frost. He wanted the pattens.
I went down by the Cambridge coach on the 26th, which was two days on the road in place of one, for the ruts were frozen as hard as iron and the coachman would not go above a walk on them; and from Cambridge to Ely on a carrier's cart; and from Ely I did what I had not done in twenty years, which was to hire a pair of pattens at a shop by the river for sixpence, and a pair of old boots to screw them to for another sixpence, and go down the Ouse on the ice to Littleport, and from there across. It is above a dozen miles. I was a boy on the ice and had not forgot it, though my legs had, and I came into Welney a little before dark on the 28th, with nineteen shillings of Mr. Starling's forty spent, and two blisters on each heel as broad as a shilling.
The washes, for anyone who has not seen them, are a strip of low land between two great cuts, the Old Bedford River and the Hundred Foot, which were dug by the Dutchmen in my grandfather's time to carry off the water from the upland; and in winter the water is let out of the rivers upon the land between, so that there is a sheet of it a mile across and twenty long, and no deeper in most places than a man's thigh. In a frost the whole of it freezes, and the fen people go upon it as upon a road. But the rivers on either side run under the ice, and where the current comes near the bank the ice is thin, or there is none, and that is where the duck sit, for they will have open water; and that is where a fowler goes, with a long gun, lying flat, to get within shot. Every child in the Isle knows where the ice is bad. Robert Lound had been a fowler on the washes thirty years.
The widow's name was Susan. She was a woman of about forty, in a house of one room and a loft, built of clay and stud, and thatched with reed, at the north end of the village, on the bank; and she had three children, the eldest a girl of eleven. I gave her a shilling before I asked her anything, which I set down because it was Mr. Starling's shilling and it bought the story, and I knew that when I gave it.
She told it me by her fire, which was turf, and I wrote it down while she told it, on my knee.
He went out about three o'clock, when the light was beginning to go, it being the best time for duck; with his gun, a powder-horn, a bag of shot, a bit of bread, and his pattens hung round his neck by the straps, for he put them on at the bank and not in the house. He said he would be in by seven. At seven he was not in. At nine she went out on the bank with a lantern and called, and nobody answered, and she was afraid to go on the ice in the dark with the lantern, for he had always said a light on the ice at night brings nobody but fools. She came in and sat up by the fire. About midnight she slept, sitting on the stool. She woke with the cold, and the fire was nearly out, and the door was standing open about a hand's breadth, which she was sure she had latched; and the pattens were on the nail.
I asked her to show me the nail. It is a great square nail driven into the door-post on the inside, on the left as you come in, about the height of a man's shoulder, and a piece of leather has been wrapped round it so that the iron of the pattens should not rust against the iron of the nail. I asked her to show me the pattens, and she took them down and put them in my hand. They are fen pattens of the ordinary make: a footstock of beech, a blade of iron let into it, curling up at the toe, a screw at the heel to go into the boot, and two straps of leather with brass buckles. When she found them, she said, they were wet through; the straps were black with the wet, and there was water dropping from the blades upon the floor, and a little pool of it, which was beginning to skim over with ice where it ran away from the hearth. Both straps were buckled, each in the hole he always used, which was worn bigger than the others.
I asked her whether she had touched them that night. She said no. She sat and looked at them till it was light, with the children asleep in the loft, and did not touch them, nor shut the door; and in the morning she went out and roused the neighbours.
I asked her who had come in at the door. She said, nobody.
I am to say now what I found besides, in three days, by going about the village and asking, as a man does who is paid by the sheet; and I will set it down in the order I found it.
The body was found on Sunday the 16th, by four men with an axe and a pole: a furlong, as I said, from the open water, and towards the village, not away from it, which they said was strange, for the stream under the ice there sets the other way. I could not prove the stream. I have only their word for it, and they were fenmen and ought to know. He was lying on his back, under the ice, they said, with his eyes open. He had his boots on. He had not his pattens, nor his gun, nor his powder-horn. The gun was never found. The bag of shot was round his neck still, on its cord. The heel of each boot had the screw-hole in it where the patten went, and the holes were empty.
The coroner came over from Downham on the Monday and sat on him in the widow's house, and found him drowned by misadventure, and was home again before dark. The sexton was two days at the grave, with a pick and a fire of turf laid on the ground to soften it, and they buried him on the Tuesday.
The curate of the chapel, a young man who came over from Upwell, would not say anything to me about the pattens, except that the widow was an honest woman, and that God's providence could do what it pleased, and that he did not desire to be printed.
A boy of nine or ten, called Amos Rule, who had been on the bank at the south end that Friday at dusk, minding a neighbour's cow, told me that he saw a light go out on the ice towards the Hundred Foot, about six o'clock, low down, as if it were carried by a man stooping; and then, when I asked him again, said that it might have been two lights. I asked him a third time, the next day, and he said one. I gave him a penny for it, which was mine and not Mr. Starling's, and I do not know which of the two he said for the penny.
The nearest neighbour to the widow, and the man who had carried her turf in from the stack every morning since, was Matthew Sharman, a fowler like her husband, and his partner in a punt and in a gun these twenty years. He had not gone out on the Friday. He had a cough, his wife said, and was in bed by eight o'clock, and she would swear to it. She said that before I had asked her; I had asked her only whether the two men were often out together.
I went to Sharman himself on the 30th. He was cutting reed on the bank with a long hook, coughing, a big quiet man, yellow in the face with the ague, as they mostly are there. I asked him whether he had been on the ice on the Friday night, and he did not answer. I asked him what he thought of the pattens. He went on cutting for some time. Then he said, "Write what you like, master. She has three children, and the parish gives her eighteen pence a week." And he went on cutting, and did not say anything more, though I stood there till I was cold.
I asked about the village whether Lound had any enemy, or owed money, or had words with anyone, and could not hear that he had. I asked whether Sharman had a pair of pattens, and was told that every man in Welney had a pair of pattens. I asked whether any man had been seen that Saturday with wet clothes, or a cut hand, or had been sick after; and they looked at me as if I were a constable, and I left off asking.
I came back to London on the 3rd of February, by the same road, and sat down in White Cross Street with a pound of candles, which Mr. Starling advanced me against the copy, and wrote the relation in two nights.
Here is what I did with it, made out no better than it was, nor worse.
I did not write one thing in it that was false. Every circumstance in that relation is true, so far as I could learn it, and I had it from the persons I name. The hour he went out; the gun; the pattens round his neck by the straps; the lantern; the stool; the door a hand's breadth open; the nail with leather round it; the water on the floor beginning to skim over with ice; the straps buckled in the worn hole; the body found towards the village and against the stream, with the screw-holes empty; the grave dug with a fire. I put down the weather by the day, and the depth of the water on the washes, and the price of turf at Welney, which was more than it had been at March in my boyhood, and the name of the shop at Ely where I hired my own pattens, so that any man who doubted might go there. I put in the curate's words, that the widow was an honest woman and that God's providence could do what it pleased, without his name, as he desired. I put in at the end a short exhortation to the reader to consider his latter end, which is the custom of the trade, and which Mr. Starling said he would have added himself if I had not.
And I left four things out. I did not put in the boy who saw one light, or two. I did not put in Sharman's wife swearing before she was asked. I did not put in Sharman on the bank with his reed-hook. And I did not put in that I had given the widow a shilling before she told me a word of it.
Without those four, a reader has the pattens coming home by themselves, wet, to the nail, on the night a man drowned; and every other line in the sheet set down so particularly, with the day and the price and the name of the shop, that he can find no place to put his doubt. With them in, the reader has a fowler who was not alone on the ice, and who may have been with his partner when the ice went, and who may have got back to the bank himself and could not get the other out, and who may have brought home the pattens, because they were his partner's and worth money and he could not bear to keep them, or could not bear that the widow should not have them; and who had said nothing since, for fear of what would be said of a man who came home and left his partner under the ice, or of what a second inquest would say of it; and who carried her turf in every morning.
I do not say it was so. I did not know it was so, and I do not know it now. I had one boy who could not count to two, one wife who swore too soon, and one man who would not answer. Writers have hanged men in print upon less; I have done it myself, to a highwayman, though the hangman was there before me. But it was in my book, and I took it out.
I took it out for three reasons, and I will enter them all, in the order of their weight, and not of their credit.
The first was that Mr. Starling had said he would give a guinea for the pattens and nothing for a drowning, and I owed twelve shillings and sixpence in White Cross Street.
The second was that the relation was the better for it. I knew that the moment I had struck the four things through. A wonder with no way out of it, kept as close as a merchant's day-book, is a thing that a reader will believe in spite of himself; and I was proud of it, and am still, which I set down against myself.
The third was what Sharman said on the bank. If the sheet went about the country as a wonder, people would come to Welney to see the nail, and would give the widow something, as people do; and if it went about as a drowning with a question in it, the coroner might be made to sit again, and it would be Sharman who was taken up, and there would be nobody to carry in the turf. I believed that was what he meant by it. I do not know that it was. I let it weigh with me, all the same, because it made the first reason look better than it was.
Mr. Starling paid me the guinea on the 7th of February, and printed it, under a title of his own, which used the word Apparition, though I had not used it, and there was nothing in the sheet that called for it. He had a cut made by a man in Shoe Lane of a cottage door with a pair of pattens hanging on a nail, and water falling from them in drops like tears; I told the cutter about the leather round the nail, and he put it in. It sold, I was told, eighteen hundred in the first month, and was printed again in the summer, and pirated at Norwich.
I heard in the April, by Mr. Starling's brother, that gentlemen had come over from Ely and from Cambridge, and one from Lynn in a coach as far as the coach could go, to see the nail; and that there had been given the widow by Lady Day above four pounds, besides what was given her in kind; and that she would not take the pattens down for any of them, and would not sell them, though she was offered ten shillings by a clergyman from Wisbech, who wished to write about them to the Royal Society. I have entered that four pounds, and I enter it again here, because it is the only sum in this business that I am sure was well laid out, and it was not mine.
What I did not hear, and have tried to hear since, is anything of Matthew Sharman. I wrote once to Mr. Starling's brother to ask, and he answered that Sharman was alive, and fowling, and still carried the widow's turf; and that was in the year 1712, and is the last I know.
I should not be writing this, I think, if it had stopped there.
In the October of the year 1724 I was turning over the books on a stall in Moorfields, in the rain, and found a thick octavo, bound in calf, called a Collection of Remarkable Providences and Apparitions, for the Confutation of Atheists, printed for a bookseller in the Poultry, at five shillings. I opened it where it fell open, and it fell open at Welney. My relation was in it entire, word for word, with the four things still out of it, and the exhortation at the end left in. Above it the compiler had written that he gave it the first place among the modern instances, because no relation he had met with was so full of circumstance, nor so plainly the work of an honest plain man who had been upon the spot, and that no atheist who read it attentively would be able to say where the cheat lay, if there were one.
I paid fourpence for that book, the stall-keeper having no notion what it was worth, and I have it on the table by me now, open at the cut. The cutter in Shoe Lane got the leather round the nail.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Daniēle Dēfoe, simulācrō, per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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