The Beaufort scale

Sir Francis Beaufort is best remembered as the originator of the Beaufort scale, describing wind strengths. However, there was more to the man than that. He was the author of a guide to the coastline of Asia Minor, and it may well have been Beaufort who suggested Charles Darwin to Fitzroy as the ‘scientific gentleman’ to accompany the second voyage of The Beagle. He was a naval hero, having been wounded in 1800 and again in 1812, and he slept with his sister Harriet.

This isn’t the stuff of idle gossip. Francis Beaufort kept journals, written in code, which were deciphered after his death. Nor were he and Harriet a pair of unruly teenagers, experimenting behind the handcart sheds. Their affair took place after the death of Francis's first wife, Alicia, in 1834, when Francis was sixty. His unmarried sister Harriet was only some three years younger than him, and in a letter to their sister Frances in 1838, she wrote, "My face has become so wrinkled and odious." In the same letter she says of her 'dear Master', "You know in days of yore I used to be called his slave, and so I am still if it be called slavery, to wish to oblige so dear and so kind a friend - who certainly never unreasonable in his demands - and to whose tenderness and affection it is but due to try to please him in small as well as large things." She calls him 'my dear Francis', too.

The whole thing is rather touching, but it wasn't to last. Later in 1838, Francis Beaufort married Honora Edgeworth, Frances's stepdaughter. He was knighted in 1848, and he died in Hove in 1857. Harriet died in 1865.

On the Beaufort scale from nun to Fred West, Francis and Harriet shouldn’t create enough of a stir to rustle a puritan’s skirts, so it's sad that Francis was apparently tormented by guilt. How much nicer it would have been if he and Harriet had lived happily ever after, breezing gently together through their twilight years.