"Nor'easter" -- missing definition? and an antedating

[Joel S. Berson]

1)  What is a "Northeaster"?  The OED, as of last month, claims that
it is merely "A wind blowing from the north-east" (or, very rarely,
"A waterproof hat or cap").  I say a nor'easter is also, these days,
a *storm* whose winds come from the northeast (and, as Ben Franklin
deduced, which arrives from the southwest).  As in "the nor'easter
dumped 6 inches of snow on Boston yesterday".

What say all ye other Northeasterners?

2)  Google Books turns up 205 instances of "northeaster storm",
claiming the earliest to be from 1889, in The Magazine of American
history with notes and queries, Volume 21 - Page 209 (full view; this
quotation is from No. 3, March, 1889 [see page 177]):

"Many years later, and about the year A.D. 1000, another northeaster
storm caught a son of this Erik and hurried him past some islands far
off in the farther southwest, that had not gone under in the
catastrophe of Atlantis."

One could, I suppose, take this and perhaps other "northeaster"s in
"northeaster storm" to mean merely "its winds came from the northeast".

3)  But what did Samuel Griswold Goodrich mean by the following
sentence in his 1836 "new edition, carefully adapted to youth", of
_Robinson Crusoe_?   "After passing the line, being in about 7
degrees 22 minutes north latitude, a violent tornado or hurricane,
which settled into a regular nor'easter, ..." -- a storm, or a
wind?  The OED concedes that tornados and hurricanes are storms; I
think by "nor'easter" Goodrich also meant a storm.

4)  The OED, as of last month, has 1770 as its earliest citation  for the wind.

 From 1753: Boston Post-Boy; Date: Nov 12, 1753; Issue: 984; Page: 2/1:

"Cap. Savage had a strong North-Easter some Hours before, about 8
Leagues S. W. of the Cape [Florida], in which he carried away his
Boltsprit, but happily recover'd it again."

Joel

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