Galveston Island Directly in the Path of Storms, with No Way of
Escape--What Is the City's Future--All Coast Cities in Danger--New York
Will Be Flooded--Hurricane Foretold--Galveston's Settlement--Storm Will
Recur.
Galveston Island, with a stretch of thirty-five miles, rises only five
feet above the level of high tide. To the south is an unbroken sweep of
sea for 800 miles. Twelve hundred miles away is the nesting place of
storms--storms that rise out of the dead calm of the doldrums and sweep
northward, sometimes with a fury that nothing can withstand. Most of these
storms describe a parabola, with the westward arch touching the Atlantic
coast, after which the track is northeastward, finally disappearing with
the storm itself in the north Atlantic.
But every little while one of these West Indian hurricanes starts
northwestward from its island nest, moving steadily on its course and
entering the gulf itself.
September and October are the months of these storms, and of the two
months September is worse. In the ten years between 1878 and 1887,
inclusive, fifty-seven hurricanes arose in the warm, moist conditions of
the West Indian doldrums. Most of these passed out to sea and to the St.
Lawrence River country, where they disappeared. But the hurricane of
October 11, 1887, came ashore at New Orleans on October 17, and wrought
havoc as it passed up the Eastern States to New Brunswick. The storm of
October 8, 1886, reached Louisiana on the 12th, curving again toward
Galveston on the Texas coast. It was in this storm that Galveston was
flooded with loss of life and property while Indianola was destroyed
beyond recovery.
With these non-recurring storms two conditions favor their passage into
the gulf. A high barometric area lies over the Atlantic coast States,
while a trough of low pressure leads into the gulf and northward into the
region of the Dakotas. The hurricane takes the path of least resistance
always, and it must pass far northward before it can work its natural way
around the tardy high area that hangs over the central coast States. It
was this condition exactly which diverted the recent storm to Galveston
and the Texas coast.
The origin of a hurricane is not fully settled. Its accompanying
phenomena, however, are significant to even the casual observer. A long
swell on the ocean usually precedes it. This swell may be forced to great
distances in advance of the storm and be observed two or three days before
the storm strikes. A faint rise in the barometer may be noticed before the
sharp fall follows. Wisps of thin, cirrus cloud float for 200 miles around
the storm center. The air is calm and sultry until a gentle breeze springs
from the southeast. This breeze becomes a wind, a gale, and, finally, a
tempest, with matted clouds overhead, precipitating rain and a churning
sea below throwing clouds of spume into the air.
Here are all the terrible phenomena of the West Indian hurricane--the
tremendous wind, the thrashing sea, the lightning, the bellowing thunder,
and the drowning rain that seems to be dashed from mighty tanks with the
force of Titans.
But almost in an instant all these may cease. The wind dies, the lightning
goes out, the rain ceases, and the thunder bellows only in the distance.
The core of the storm is overhead. Only the waves of the sea are churning.
There may be twenty miles of this central core, a diameter of only
one-thirtieth that of the storm. It passes quickly, and with as little
warning as preceded its stoppage the storm closes in again, but with the
wind from the opposite direction, and the whole phenomena suggesting a
reversal of all that has gone before.
No storm possible in the elements presents the terrors that accompany the
hurricane. The twisting tornado is confined to a narrow track and it has
no long-drawn-out horrors. Its climax is reached in a moment. The
hurricane, however, grows and grows, and when it has reached to 100 or 120
miles an hour nothing can withstand it.
It is this terrible besom of the Southern seas that so nearly has taken
Galveston off the map. The great storm of 1875 frightened the city. The
fate of Indianola in 1886 and the loss of ten lives and $200,000 worth of
property on Galveston Island has kept Galveston uneasy ever since. To-day,
for it to suggest rebuilding, will meet with the disapprobation of many of
the sympathizing Americans who are giving freely to the stricken people.
But the abandonment of Galveston could not be without a struggle. For
fourteen years its old citizens had been admitting that twice in their
memory the sea had come in on the island, causing death and destruction,
but as sturdily as their conservatism prompted they had insisted that it
never could do so again. They gave no consistent reason for their belief.
The island was no higher; the force of the sea was as boundless as before;
the doldrums of the West Indies still hung over the archipelago in
storm-brooding calm. But their belief spread and the island city grew and
developed as the old settler never had hoped to see it grow when he
squatted there in the sand more than sixty years ago.
This settler stock of Galveston Island was of queer characteristics. The
island settlement was of a sort of Captain Streeter origin. The only
variation was that the Colonel Menard who founded it bought the island
and established a town-site company to attract immigration. The mainland,
as flat and desolate almost as the island, was three miles away. But deep
water was there and to the north was an agricultural country that one day
would have cotton to export. So the settlers waited. They held to their
sand lots and traded with the "mosquito fleet" which sailed up and down
the coast from Corpus Christi to New Orleans. This mosquito fleet was the
only means for bringing outside traders to the town. As it grew it
developed that the city's export trade was all it had. It did a wholesale
business that was to its retail business in the proportion of 100 to 1!
In this way Galveston developed in-growing propensities. It scoffed at the
mainland for years after the gulf shore began to be peopled. It was
satisfied with its railroad "bridges," which were mere trestlework mounted
on piling driven into the shallow water of the bay. If the mainland wished
to reach the city let it row out or sail out; the city would not go to the
expense of a wagon bridge.
As a result, Galveston was the most somnolent city in Texas, save on the
wharves where tramp and coastwise ships and steamers loaded. When the
market house closed by law at 10 o'clock in the morning, and when
Galveston's own local population had laid in its supplies for a midday
dinner and for supper and breakfast, Strand street took a nap.
In the '80s, however, a new element had been attracted, which was
dissatisfied with the mossback order of things. It was not satisfied to
make change with a stranger and give or take bits of yellow pasteboard,
representing street car rides, in lieu of nickels.
But these young immigrants were frowned upon by Galveston conservatism.
They were a disturbing element. They kept the staid, mossback citizen
awake in the afternoons and he did not like it. They were clamoring for
sewers and artesian water in mains, whereas the conservative was content
to build his rain water cistern above ground out of doors and strain the
baby mosquitoes out of the water through a cloth.
When a new waterworks and standpipe had been completed in 1889, and when
some new mills had been established under difficulties, affairs had come
to a pass when the new Galvestonian and the old found a great gap between.
The visiting stranger was the confidant of both sides.
"This town isn't what it used to be," sighed the conservative.
"As a matter of fact," the young business man would say, "Galveston needs
to bury about 150 of its 'old citizens' before it can get awake."
This was the situation when the government began to expend money upon the
harbor.
This was the situation, slightly altered by time, when the wagon bridge
was built to the main land, when the government appropriated $6,200,000
for the deepening of the harbor, and when export trade from Galveston
approached the mark of $100,000,000 annually. And this, virtually, was the
Galveston now in ruins.
In rebuilding Galveston, it has been suggested that the bay be dredged of
sand and the island raised to a uniform level of fifteen feet above the
tide. The plan is feasible in every sense, and it is contended that the
value of the city as a port would more than justify the cost.
However the island city may decide, it will have departed from several
notable instances of water-swept cities in rebuilding. In addition to the
abandonment of Indianola, on the mainland of Texas, are the stories of
Last Island in the Gulf of Mexico and of Cobb's Island, a great fishing
resort in Chesapeake Bay.
Last Island was overwhelmed in 1856. Three hundred lives were lost in the
hurricane. Lafcadio Hearn has put the legend of "L'Isle Derniere" into
print and his description of the hurricane that swept in upon it is a
description of the storm that has laid Galveston waste:
"One great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over the world
more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the quicksilver
smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vast motion. First the
whole sea circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon curve
lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and approached--a monstrous
wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water moving swift as a cloud
shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had looked formidable only by startling
contrast with the previous placidity of the open; it was scarcely two feet
high; it curled slowly as it neared the beach and combed itself out in
sheets of woolly foam with a low, rich roll of thunder. Swift in pursuit
another followed--a third, a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a
little and stilled again.
"Irregularly the phenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with
heavier billowings and briefer intervals of quiet, until at last the whole
sea grew restless and shifted color and flickered green--the swells became
shorter and changed form. * * *
"The pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a 'great
blow' somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled, and a splendid surf made
the evening bath delightful. Then just at sundown a beautiful cloud bridge
grew up and arched the sky with a single span of cottony, pink vapor that
changed and deepened color with the dying of the iridescent day. And the
cloud bridge approached, strained and swung round at last to make way for
the coming of the gale--even as the light bridges that traverse the dreamy
Teche swing open when the luggermen sound through their conch shells the
long, bellowing signal of approach.
"Then the wind began to blow from the northeast, clear, cool. * * * Clouds
came, flew as in a panic against the face of the sun, and passed. All that
day, through the night, and into the morning again the breeze continued
from the northeast, blowing like an equinoctial gale. * * *
"Cottages began to rock. Some slid away from the solid props upon which
they rested. A chimney tumbled. Shutters were wrenched off; verandas
demolished. Light roofs lifted, dropped again, and flapped into ruin.
Trees bent their heads to earth. And still the storm grew louder and
blacker with every passing hour. * * *
WORK OF THE STORM.
"So the hurricane passed, tearing off the heads of prodigious waves to
hurl them a hundred feet in air--heaping up the ocean against the
land--upturning the woods. Bays and passes were swollen to abysses; rivers
regorged; the sea marshes changed to roaring wastes of water. Before New
Orleans the flood of the mile-broad Mississippi rose six feet above
highest water mark. One hundred and ten miles away Donaldsonville trembled
at the towering tide of the Lafourche. Lakes strove to burst their
boundaries. Far-off river steamers tugged wildly at their
cables--shivering like tethered creatures that hear by night the
approaching howl of destroyers. * * *
"And swift in the wake of gull and frigate bird the wreckers come, the
spoilers of the dead--savage skimmers of the sea--hurricane-riders wont
to spread their canvas pinions in the face of storms. * * * There is
plunder for all--birds and men. * * * Her betrothal ring will not come
off, Guiseppe; but the delicate bone snaps easily; your oyster-knife can
sever the tendon. * * * Over her heart you will find it, Valentio--the
locket held by that fine, Swiss chain of woven hair * * * Juan, the
fastenings of those diamond eardrops are much too complicated for your
peon fingers; tear them out. * * *
"Suddenly a long, mighty silver trilling fills the ears of all; there is a
wild hurrying and scurrying; swiftly, one after another, the overburdened
luggers spread wings and flutter away. Thrice the great cry rings through
the gray air and over the green sea, and over the far-flooded shell reefs
where the huge white flashes are--sheet lightning of breakers--and over
the weird wash of corpses coming in.
"It is the steam-call of the relief boat, hastening to rescue the living,
to gather in the dead.
"The tremendous tragedy is over."
GALVESTON BUILT UPON THE SAND.
Galveston is built upon the sand. According to Professor Willis L. Moore,
Chief of the United States Weather Bureau at Washington, not only
Galveston was insecurely built upon the flat sands of the island, but
other cities on the gulf and Atlantic coasts, lying at tide, are subject
to the same dangers. The West Indian hurricane may strike almost anywhere
from the southern line of North Carolina, on down the coast, around the
peninsula of Florida, and anywhere within the great arc described by the
western shores of the Gulf of Mexico. These storms, perhaps 600 miles
wide, have a vortex of twenty to thirty miles in diameter. It is in this
vortex that the land is laid waste.
It is this fact that will lead more strongly than any other to the
rebuilding of Galveston. With an export business of $100,000,000 annually,
the great West will bring pressure to bear upon the maintenance of the
port. There is an island type of man in its population that will not be
driven from that little ridge of sand three miles out in the gulf. There
are 1,500 miles of gulf coast on which the vortex of such a storm may
waste itself without touching Galveston, and both conservatism and
commercialism will take the risk that a score of other cities at the tide
level are taking.
At the same time there are those who see for Galveston only a commercial
existence. It never can grow as it has grown; it never can be the home of
people whose fortunes are not tied up in the island.
For fourteen years the city has had to contend with the fears of the
incomer. The growth between 1890 and 1900 shows that these fears had been
allayed in great measure, following the destruction in 1886. But years
will not wipe out the black record of the last week. Hundreds will leave
the island as a place of residence; thousands have been killed there and
cremated in the sands or buried in the treacherous sea. A death rate of
200 in a population of 1,000 drove Indianola from the map of Texas. Five
thousand or more deaths of the 35,000 population of Galveston must have
its influence upon the living.
For with the assurances of the United States Weather Bureau, it is
recognized that in natural phenomena there are cycle periods in which
extremes are repeated from nature's great laboratory. Observation has put
this period of repetition at twenty years. According to this, in the case
of hurricanes, the range of maximum and minimum will be within such a
period. Without question Galveston is in the track of a certain abnormal
but not infrequent West Indian hurricane which fails to be deflected from
the Georgia and Florida coasts. It keeps to its northwestward course and
strikes the Louisiana, Texas or Mexico coasts, according to its impulse.
In the Galveston storm a new maximum seems to have been established, yet
its repetition may be looked for within the next twenty-year period. As a
matter of fact, indeed, the average period between the recurrence of these
maximum storms has been less than fifteen years.
Lyman E. Cooley, one of the original engineers in marking the route of the
drainage canal, is an observer of periodic natural phenomena, and his
theory holds in great measure with the observations of the United States
weather service.
"It is a general proposition," said Mr. Cooley. "It means just this much:
Suppose that Chicago has a snow storm on June 15. Within a twenty-year
period we may expect another phenomenon of the kind in the same calendar
month. It may not snow in Chicago itself; the storm may be ten, twenty or
thirty miles away, on any side of it. But in the same general territory,
about the same time of the phenomenon, it will be repeated.
"Suppose a terrible rain or wind storm develops, its repetition may be
looked for in the same period. So with extremes of temperature, influences
on lake levels, and all the other phenomena of nature's forces. They have
their cycles, and the twenty-year period covers most of them."
But in the case of Galveston, one of its great hurricanes was experienced
in 1875, another in 1886, and the last only fourteen years later. These
historic facts tend to confirm Mr. Cooley's observations.
Galveston's destruction and that of other towns similarly situated had
been predicted. Writing in the Arena in 1890, Professor Joseph Rodes
Buchanan said:
"Every seaboard city south of New England that is not more than fifty feet
above the sea level of the Atlantic coast is destined to a destructive
convulsion. Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, St. Augustine, Savannah and
Charleston are doomed. Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia,
Newark, Jersey City and New York will suffer in various degrees in
proportion as they approximate the sea level. Brooklyn will suffer less,
but the destruction at New York and Jersey City will be the grandest
horror.
"The convulsion will probably begin on the Pacific coast, and perhaps
extend in the Pacific toward the Sandwich Islands. The shock will be
terrible, with great loss of life, extending from British Columbia down
along the coast of Mexico, but the conformation of the Pacific coast will
make its grand tidal wave far less destructive than on the Atlantic shore.
Nevertheless, it will be calamitous. Lower California will suffer severely
along the coast. San Diego and Coronado will suffer severely, especially
the latter.
"It may seem rash to anticipate the limits of the destructive force of a
foreseen earthquake, but there is no harm in testing the prophetic power
of science in the complex relations of nature and man.
"The destruction of cities which I anticipate will be twenty-four years
ahead--it may be twenty-three. It will be sudden and brief--all within an
hour and not far from noon. Starting from the Pacific coast, as already
described, it will strike southward--a mighty tidal wave and earthquake
shock that will develop in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. It will
strike the western coast of Cuba and severely injure Havana. Our sister
republic, Venezuela, bound to us in destiny, by the law of periodicity
will be assailed by the encroaching waves and terribly shaken by the
earthquake. The destruction of her chief city, Caraccas, will be greater
than in 1812, when 12,000 were said to be destroyed. The coming shock will
be near total destruction.
"From South America back to the United States, all Central America and
Mexico are severely shaken; Vera Cruz suffers with great severity, but the
City of Mexico realizes only a severe shock. Tampico and Matamoras suffer
severely; Galveston is overwhelmed; New Orleans is in a dangerous
condition--the question arises between total and partial destruction. I
will only say it will be an awful calamity. If the tidal wave runs
southward New Orleans may have only its rebound. The shock and flood pass
up the Mississippi from 100 to 150 miles and strike Baton Rouge with
destructive force.
"As it travels along the gulf shore Mobile will probably suffer most
severely and be more than half destroyed; Pensacola somewhat less.
Southern Florida is probably entirely submerged and lost; St. Augustine
severely injured; Charleston will probably be half submerged, and Newbern
suffer more severely; Port Royal will probably be wiped out; Norfolk will
suffer about as much as Pensacola; Petersburg and Richmond will suffer,
but not disastrously; Washington will suffer in its low grounds, Baltimore
and Annapolis much more severely on its water front, its spires will
topple, and its large buildings be injured, but I do not think its grand
city hall will be destroyed. Probably the injury will not affect more than
one-fourth. But along the New Jersey coast the damage will be great.
Atlantic City and Cape May may be destroyed, but Long Branch will be
protected by its bluff from any severe calamity. The rising waters will
affect Newark, and Jersey City will be the most unfortunate of large
cities, everything below its heights being overwhelmed. New York below the
postoffice and Trinity Church will be flooded and all its water margins
will suffer."