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THE
_Hurricane Hunters_
BY Ivan Ray Tannehill
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1956
Copyright, © 1955 by Ivan Ray Tannehill
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher
Published November, 1955
Second Printing, February, 1956
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-9480
Printed in the United States of America
by The Cornwall Press, Inc., Cornwall, N. Y.
To my daughter and son-in-law,
Doris and Bill
_Acknowledgment_
At appropriate places in the book the narrative serves as an
acknowledgment by giving the names of a large number of men who
furnished information in personal interviews, by correspondence, or in
their reports which were included in the voluminous files searched in
the last year.
In writing this book I had unstinted cooperation from the Air Weather
Service and its Commander, Brigadier General Thomas Moorman, from the
Aerological Branch of the Navy Department and its Head, Captain C. J. S.
McKillip, and from the Chief of the Weather Bureau, Dr. F. W.
Reichelderfer, and his associates in the field and the central office.
In particular, Major William C. Anderson and associates in the Office of
Information Services of the Air Weather Service and Captain Robert O.
Minter of the Fleet Weather Central at Miami and his associates there in
Airborne Early Warning Squadron Four at Jacksonville were extremely
helpful. Of the associates of these men I wish to mention especially the
assistance of Lieutenant Commander R. W. Westover and Air Force Captain
Ed Vrable, both of whom are seasoned hurricane hunters.
Others not mentioned in the book who contributed to the warning service
and indirectly to the material used here were Isaac M. Cline and Charles
L. Mitchell of the Weather Bureau. Their writings supply much of the
background for any work on tropical storms.
The Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau kindly supplied official
photographs used here, except the wave breaking on the sea wall by the
Miami _Daily News_ and the drawings of sailing ships in hurricanes which
are credited to Colonel William Reid who published them in 1850 in his
book on the "Law of Storms."
_The Author_
CONTENTS
1. Monsters of the World of Storms _1_
2. The Saddler's Apprentice _19_
3. At the Bottom of the Sea _32_
4. Storm Warnings _45_
5. Radio Helps--Then Hinders _59_
6. The Eye of the Hurricane _75_
7. First Flight into the Vortex! _90_
8. The Hammer and the Highway _103_
9. Wings against the Whirling Blasts _117_
10. Kappler's Hurricane _132_
11. Tricks of the Trade _150_
12. Trailing the Terrible Typhoon _167_
13. Guest on a Hairy Hop _185_
14. The Unexpected _202_
15. Fighting Hail and Hurricanes _224_
16. Carol, Edna, Hazel or Saxby! _237_
17. The Gears and Guts of the Giant _250_
ILLUSTRATIONS
(_Photographic supplement follows page 50_)
The English warship _Egmont_ in the "Great Hurricane" of 1780.
The _Calypso_ in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837.
A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast at
the height of a hurricane.
Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier _Bennington_ and
drapes it over the bow.
Winds of hurricane drive pine board through the tough trunk of a palm
tree in Puerto Rico, September 13, 1928.
Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with winds of 15
knots.
Sea surface with winds of 40 knots.
Sea surface with winds of 75 knots.
Sea surface with winds of 120 knots.
Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane hunting.
Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting.
Navy crew of hurricane hunters.
Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into
hurricane.
Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951.
Part of a spiral squall band, an "arm of the octopus."
Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500
feet below.
Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane mission.
Radar operator and navigator.
Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane
mission.
City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler's Hurricane in September,
1945.
Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission.
Part of scope showing typhoon by radar.
Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna on September 7, 1954.
Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951.
Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot and radar operator.
The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance.
The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.
The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for hurricane
reconnaissance.
_THE HURRICANE HUNTERS_
_1._ MONSTERS OF THE WORLD OF STORMS
_The hollow winds begin to blow,
The clouds look black, the glass is low._
--E. Darwin
A stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rain across the
Navy airfield. The place was gloomy and deserted, except for one
Privateer standing behind the air station, all other planes having been
evacuated the night before. A tall young airman came out of a building
down at the other side of the field. He looked nervously at the
blackening morning sky as another squall came by, hurried over to the
plane and stood between it and the protecting station. In a few minutes,
eight men followed him. They climbed aboard the craft. The tall airman
was last, taking a final look at the sky over his shoulder as he crawled
in. The roots of his hair felt electrified, his spine tingled and his
knees turned to rubber. In a few moments the plane took off into the
darkening sky.
In those anxious moments as he had glanced upward at the wind-torn
clouds with driving rain in his face, many thoughts passed through his
mind. In training for this job he had read about aircraft carriers
having their flight decks torn up by typhoons, about battered destroyers
sunk by hurricanes, big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper
stories of brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways through
the tough trunks of palm trees. The idea of sending a plane into one of
these monsters seemed fantastic. He could imagine the wings being torn
off and see vividly in his mind the broken craft rocketing downward into
the foam of gale-swept waters far below. He leaned over on the radio
table and muttered a prayer, hoping that God could hear him above the
tumult of winds, seas and engines. To most of the men this was "old
stuff." Flying into hurricanes had been going on for two years. To him
it was a strange adventure.
He was the radio man and this was to be his first flight into a
hurricane. And it would be no practice ride. This was a bad storm,
getting too close to the coast to suit him. He had been told that after
nightfall its center would strike inland and there would be widespread
damage and some loss of life. He tried to remember other things they had
told him in the briefing session and some of the instructions he had
been reading for three days now. Well, such is life, he thought. His
father had been the master of an oil tanker for the last fifteen years.
He had told his growing son a lot about these big storms of the
Caribbean. What would his father say now when he learned that his son
was one of the men assigned to the job of flying into them? His thoughts
were interrupted by violent agitation of the plane and the roar of the
wind. The navigator said something about the turbulence.
He remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the
hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, "Like going over Niagara
Falls in a telephone booth." He recalled the burly fellow who pointed to
the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and
how to get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men had
told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands
until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office
and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown
on his ear. Now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain
had become torrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water was
coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It was pouring on him
from above somewhere. Rivers were running down his back.
He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied,
"Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets a good deal worse."
Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. Maybe the pilot and
co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. He hit
his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick.
Finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose
his breakfast.
Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted. All planes but
one had been flown inland and the last one, a B-17, was poised on
Morrison Field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before
nightfall.
In Miami, one of the senior men in the Weather Bureau office was called
to the telephone. Somebody insisted on talking to him and nobody else.
It was long distance. A woman said in a frightened voice that her son
had gone out to look after a neighbor's boat and she wanted to know
whether she should try to go out to find him and bring him in. He was
only twelve years old. "Yes, by all means," was the answer. The
forecaster didn't know how she was going to reach the boy or how far she
had to go, but he recalled that other men and boys had lost their lives
doing the same thing. They were having hundreds of calls and they were
unable to go into details. He paused just a moment, his mind running
regretfully over this poor woman and her problem. Then he started a
radio broadcast.
Down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down on the sidewalk,
bossing three men who were nailing frames over his plate glass windows.
He went into the store to his telephone and, after dialing for about ten
minutes, finally got the forecaster on the line. "What's the latest on
the storm?" he asked in a strained voice. "Nothing new," came the tired
voice of the forecaster. "A Navy plane went out half an hour ago. We'll
have a report pretty soon now. But the hurricane's going to hit us,
that's sure. Be a bad night."
Three miles south of the city, two fishermen stood looking at a pole on
the pier. Two red flags with black centers were flapping in the wind.
"Aw, nuts," growled the big man. "Guess I'll go home and nail up the
windows again. This is the third time this year." The little man started
off, pulling his raincoat up around his ears as a squall came over.
"Well, we can't complain, I guess. The other times the flags went up we
got storms, didn't we? Looks like this will be the worst of the lot." By
that time the big fellow was running in a dog-trot and disappearing
around a building. His father had been drowned in the big storm at Key
West in 1919.
Even on the other side of the State the people were worried, and for
good reason, for it might be over there tomorrow. The forecaster was
wanted again on the telephone. A man said in an anxious tone that he had
one thousand five hundred unfenced cattle near the shore and what should
he do? Without hesitation, the forecaster said, "Get them away from the
water and behind a fence. This storm will go south of you. There will be
strong offshore gales and the cattle will walk with the wind and go
right out into the water and drown if there is no fence."
Out in the Atlantic, a merchant ship was wallowing in heavy seas, with
one hundred miles an hour winds raking her decks. The third mate
struggled through the wind and sea and into the radio room. He handed a
wet weather message to the radio operator. A hundred miles away, in the
Bahamas, an old Negro was reading his weather instruments and looking at
the sky. He was pushed around by furious winds but they had died down a
little since early morning. The roof was off his house. Trees were
uprooted all around him. He went into a small, low-slung radio hut and
attempted to send a weather message to Nassau. He was badly crowded in
the hut. His wife, daughter and two grandchildren were huddled in the
corners. His son-in-law had been killed in the night by a big tree that
fell on the porch. His daughter and her two children were sobbing. He
raised the Nassau radio station and sent a message for the forecast
office in Miami.
All up and down the Florida coast, many thousands had heard the radio
warnings or had seen the flags flying and wanted to know more. The
highways here and there were filling with people, leaving threatened
places on the coast. By night the roads would be jammed. Out on the
Privateer, the tall young radioman, sopping wet, raised himself in his
chair, and took a soggy message from the weather officer. After the
plane settled a little, he put on his head phones and listened to the
loud, almost deafening static. He still felt a bit sick. But he began to
pound out the weather message, with the hope that somebody would get it
and pass it on to the forecaster.
In these and other ways, it has come about that a pair of red flags with
black centers strikes fear into the hearts of seafaring men and
terrifies people in towns and cities in the line of advance of the big
winds. The warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming
gales, relatives and friends lost in other great storms that have roared
out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollers break on the
beaches with a booming sound. In the distance, a long, low, angry cloud
appears on the horizon. If the cloud grows and puts out scud and
squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the
big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. If the
distant cloud is seen to move along the horizon, the tumult of wind and
sea on the beaches will subside. The local indications in the sky and
the water tell a vital story to the initiated but the warning they give
does not come soon enough. It is necessary to know what is going to
happen while the hurricane is well out at sea. This depends on the
hurricane hunters, and so the messages they send ashore while fighting
their way by air into the vortices of these terrible whirlwinds are
awaited anxiously by countless people.
Tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job, often a dangerous
one. But it is not a one-man job; it requires the co-operation of many
people. A tropical storm of hurricane force covers such a vast area that
all of it cannot be seen by one person. Its products--gales with clouds
and rain--and its effects--destruction of life and property and big
waves on the sea--are visible to people in different parts of the
disturbance. But before we know much about it, the little that is seen
by each of many people on islands and ships at sea must be put together,
like clues in a murder case. The weather observers who get the clues and
the experts who put them together are the hurricane hunters.
For at least five hundred years it has been known that these terrible
disturbances are born in the heated parts of the oceans. Down near the
equator, where hot, moist winds are the rule, something causes vast
storms to form and grow in violence, bringing turmoil to the ordinary
daily round of gentle breezes and showers. They have come to bear the
general name of tropical storms, though known locally as hurricanes,
typhoons, or cyclones.
Most of them occur in the late summer or early fall. At that season, on
the islands in the tropics where the natives in other centuries took
life easy, depending on nature's lavish gifts of fruit and other foods,
the tropical storm came as an occasional catastrophe. Trees went down in
howling gales, rain came in torrents, flooding the hilly sections, big
waves deluged the coasts, and frail native houses were swept away in an
uproar of the elements. The survivors thought they had done something to
displease one of the mythical beings who ruled the winds and the waters.
In the Caribbean region, it was supposed to be the god of the big winds,
Hunrakan, from which the name hurricane originated. His evil face seemed
to leer from the darkening clouds as the elements raged.
In time, Europeans settled in the islands and on the southeastern coasts
of America. They dreaded the approach of late summer, when
copper-colored clouds of a tropical storm might push slowly upward from
the southeastern horizon. What they learned about them came mostly from
the natives, who had long memories for such frightening things and
reckoned the time of other events from the years of great hurricanes.
Strangely enough, although during the more than four hundred years that
have passed since then, man has finally mastered thermo-nuclear
reactions capable of permanent destruction of whole islands, he still
probes for the secret of storm forces of far greater power.
It is hard to say who was the first hunter of storms. Columbus and his
sailors were constantly on the lookout and actually saw several West
Indian hurricanes. Luckily, they didn't run into one on their first
voyage, or the story of the discovery of America would be quite
different, for the ships sailed by Columbus were not able to stand up
against these big winds of the tropics. They would have been sunk in
deep water or cast ashore as worthless wrecks.
If Columbus had been lost in one of these monstrous storms--and he
didn't miss it by very much--it might have been many years before
another navigator with a stout heart could have induced men to risk
their lives in the uncharted winds of the far places in the Atlantic
Ocean. Out there toward the end of the world, where increasing gales
dragged ships relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailors
who ventured too far would drop off the edge of a flat earth and plunge
screaming into eternity--so they thought. Only in Columbus' mind was the
earth a sphere.
By the time Columbus had made his third voyage to the West Indies, he
had learned a good deal about hurricanes and how to keep out of them. He
got this information by his own wits and from talking with the natives
in the islands bordering the Caribbean. They told him of storms much
more powerful than any that were brewed in European waters. After
listening to their tales, he was afraid of them. In 1494 he hid his
fleet behind an island while a hurricane roared by. The next year, an
unexpected one sank three of his vessels and the others took such a
beating that he declared, "Nothing but the service of God and the
extension of the monarchy would induce me to expose myself to such
dangers."
In 1499, a Spaniard named Francisco Bobadilla was appointed governor and
judge of the Colony on Hispaniola (Santo Domingo). He sent false charges
back to Spain, accusing Columbus of being unjust and often brutal in his
treatment of the natives. Columbus was ordered back to Spain in chains.
Here he remained in disgrace until December, 1500. By that time the true
nature of Bobadilla's treachery had become known.
By the spring of 1502, Columbus had been vindicated and was on his way
back to the West Indies with four ships and 150 men. During his earlier
voyages he had become deeply respectful of these big winds of the New
World. When he arrived at San Domingo on this last voyage, his
observations made him suspect the approach of a hurricane. At the same
time, a fleet carrying rich cargoes was instructed to take Bobadilla
back to Spain. It was ready to depart. Columbus asked for permission to
shelter his squadron in the river and he sent a message, urging the
fleet to put off its departure until the storm had passed.
Bluntly, both of Columbus' requests were denied. He found a safe place
in the lee of the island but the fleet carrying Bobadilla departed in
the face of the hurricane and all but one vessel went to the bottom.
Bobadilla went down with them, which seemed to be a fitting end for the
scoundrel who had been guilty of hatching up false charges against
Columbus.
After the time of Columbus, better ships were built and the fear of
storms diminished. Seafaring men today are likely to get the idea that
modern ships of war and trade are immune to hurricanes. They have a
brush or two with minor storms or escape the worst of a larger one and
cease to be afraid of the big winds of the West Indies. Now and then
this attitude leads to disaster.
In September, 1944, the Weather Bureau spotted a violent storm in the
Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. It grew in fury and moved toward the
Atlantic Coast of the United States. The forecasters called it the
"Great Atlantic Hurricane." Being usually conservative, Weather Bureau
forecasters seldom use the word "great" when warning of hurricanes and
when they do, it is time for everybody to be on guard. In this case, the
casualties at sea included one destroyer, two Coast Guard cutters, a
light vessel and a mine sweeper. This should have been sufficient
evidence of the power of the tropical storm to destroy modern warships,
but just three months later a big typhoon caught the Navy off guard in
the Pacific and proved the case beyond the slightest doubt.
Typhoons are big tropical storms, just like West Indian hurricanes. They
form in the vast tropical waters of the Pacific, develop tremendous
power, and head for the Philippines and China, sometimes going straight
forward and sometimes turning toward Japan before they reach the coast.
Like hurricanes, they are often preceded by beautiful weather, allaying
the suspicions of the inexperienced until it is too late to escape from
the indraft of the winds and the mountainous seas that precede their
centers.
It was hard to keep track of typhoons in World War II. In large areas of
the Pacific there are few islands to serve as observation posts for
weathermen. Before the war, merchantmen on voyages through this region
had reported by radio when they saw signs of typhoons. But many of the
weather-reporting vessels had been sent to the bottom by enemy torpedoes
and the remainder had been ordered to silence their radios. Thereafter,
the only effective means of finding and tracking tropical storms was by
aircraft, but reconnaissance by air had just begun in the Atlantic and
was not organized in the Pacific until 1945.
Late in 1944, our Third Fleet, said to be the most powerful sea force
ever assembled, had drawn back from the battle of Leyte to refuel. The
Japanese Navy had received a fatal blow from the big fleet. Nothing more
terrible was reserved for the Japanese except the atom bomb. Far out in
the Pacific, a typhoon was brewing while valiant oil tankers waited five
hundred miles east of Luzon for the refueling operation so vitally
needed by our warships after days of ranging the seas against the Japs.
It was December 17 when the refueling began. By that time, the winds and
seas in the front of the typhoon were being felt in force. Battleships,
cruisers, destroyers and a host of other vessels rode big waves as the
wind increased. The typhoon drew nearer and the smaller ships were
bounced around so violently that it became impossible to maintain hose
connections to the oilers. Before nightfall, the refueling had stopped
completely and the fleet was trying to run away from the typhoon.
It was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describe the desperate
movements of a great battle fleet. Messages flew back and forth,
changing the ships' courses as the wind changed. They ran toward the
northwest, then toward the southwest, and finally due south, in a last
effort to escape the central fury of the great typhoon. But all this did
no good.
The lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such, top-heavy
with armament and equipment and with little oil for ballast, began the
struggle for life. Each hour it seemed that the height of the storm had
come, but it grew steadily worse. Writhing slopes of vast waves dipped
into canyon-like depths. The crests were like mountains. The wind came
in awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour. The tops of
the waves were torn off and hurled with the force of stone. Ships were
buried under hundreds of tons of water and emerged again, shuddering and
rolling wildly.
On the eighteenth of December, one after another of the ships of the
Third Fleet lost control and wallowed in the typhoon. Time and again
thousands of men faced death and escaped by something that seemed a
miracle. There was no longer any visible separation between the sea and
the atmosphere. Only by the force with which the elements struck could
the men aboard distinguish between wind-driven spume and hurtling water.
Steering control was lost; electric power and lights failed; lifeboats
were torn loose; stacks were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard;
three destroyers rolled too far over and went to the bottom of the
Pacific.
Altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck or blown into the
sea and lost. Cruisers and carriers suffered badly. Battleships lost
planes and gear. The surviving destroyers had been battered into
helplessness. Almost eight hundred men were dead or missing. As the
typhoon subsided, the crippled Third Fleet canceled its plans to strike
against the enemy on Luzon and retreated to the nearest atoll harbor to
survey its losses. More men had died and more damage had been done than
in many engagements with the Japanese Navy.
A Navy Court of Inquiry was summoned. It was said that this typhoon of
1944 was the granddaddy of all tropical storms. But a study of the
records shows that it was just a full-grown typhoon. There have been
thousands of hurricanes and typhoons like this one. Down through the
centuries, these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs across
tropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles to grasp
thousands of ships and send them to the bottom. Pounding across populous
coasts, with mountainous seas flooding the land, they have drowned
hundreds of thousands of people, certainly more than a million in the
last three centuries, and untold thousands before that.
After the typhoon disaster, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet
declared that his officers would have to learn forthwith about the law
of storms. Really there was nothing new in that idea. It had been voiced
by navigators of all maritime countries of the world from the earliest
times. The so-called "law of storms" is merely the total existing
knowledge about storms at sea--how to recognize the signs of their
coming and how to avoid their destructive forces--and it has taken four
and a half centuries to develop our present understanding of hurricanes.
This experience of the Third Fleet made it plain that a sailing vessel
had very little chance of survival in the central regions of a fully
developed tropical storm. The only hope was that the master would see
the signs of its coming and manage to keep out of it. Once he became
involved, the force of the wind was likely to be so great that his
vessel soon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. The gales seemed
to have unlimited power. Even today, we don't know accurately the speed
of the strongest winds. It seems likely that the highest velocities are
between two hundred and two hundred and fifty miles per hour.
Wind-measuring instruments are disabled or carried away and the towers
or buildings which support them are blown down.
Long after the time of Columbus, it was generally believed that a storm
was a large mass of air moving straight ahead at high velocities. A ship
might be caught in these terrible winds and be carried along with them,
to be dashed on shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. Every
mariner wanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangely enough,
few wanted to avoid them altogether. If a sailing vessel circled around
a storm, it took longer to get to the port of destination and how could
the master explain the time lost to his bosses when he got home, if he
had no record of a storm in the log book to account for the delay?
From this point of view, some of the things that happened seemed very
strange. Two or three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a
sailing ship to be caught in a hurricane and scud for hours or days
under bare poles in high winds and seas, and finally come to rest near
the place where it first encountered the storm. A sailor on board would
imagine he had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might survive the
wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashore near the place where he
started!
Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of
these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be
accounted for. For example, it was often claimed that "the storm came
back." After blowing in one direction with awful force until great
damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the
opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that
had not been destroyed in the first blow. To add to the mystery, many
ships were never heard from again. They became involved in hurricanes
and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind.
Men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were
tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there
was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of
storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come
only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships
and men that were never seen again. And yet it is amazing to find how
near some of these men came to the right answer. There were seafaring
men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none
of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a
convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whose operations were
centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. They were
English, Dutch, Portuguese and French, all at one time or another
opposed to Spanish control in the Carribbean. On various occasions they
seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from
which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements.
During these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty
hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. Doubtless,
there were many more not recorded. A great number of vessels went down
in the seas and harbors around St. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where
the buccaneers sought haven from the Spaniards.
One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was
William Dampier. He was born in England in 1652, became an orphan at an
early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he
made a voyage to Newfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies
and then fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year he went to
Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiar with the harbors,
bays, inlets and other features of the Carribbean coasts and islands. At
times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the South American
coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, they
raided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed the Pacific to
Guam, and then to the East Indies.
At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately
took him over most of the world. But he died poor, just three years
before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars' worth of prize
money.
Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the
ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguished himself from the
other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific
facts in a clear and easy style. In his writings, we find our earliest
good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good.
Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Sea that "typhoons
are a sort of violent whirlwinds." He said they were preceded by fine,
clear and serene weather, with light winds.
"Before these whirlwinds come on," wrote Dampier, "there appears a heavy
cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward
the upper part is a dull reddish color." To him, this cloud was
frightful and alarming. He went on to say that it was sometimes seen
twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. The tempest came with great
violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm
succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned
around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.
These stories by Dampier and others might have cleared up some of the
mysteries of these furious storms, especially those that "turned around
and came back." They might have explained the fact that sailors were
carried long distances and then cast ashore near the places from which
they started--for they were huge whirlwinds, as Dampier suspected--but
nobody seemed to be able to put "two and two together" and prove it. For
one thing, no one knew then that weather moves from place to place.
Everybody seemed to have a vague belief that the weather developed right
at home and blew itself out without going anywhere. With these ideas in
vogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there was no useful law
of storms. But we can put William Dampier down as one of the first
"hurricane hunters."
As cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grew in population,
storm catastrophes became more numerous. Now and then, a hurricane
seemed to appear from nowhere and caused terrible destruction on land.
New Orleans was devastated in 1722 and again in 1723. Charleston and
other coastal cities were hit repeatedly. Coringa, on the Bay of Bengal,
was practically wiped out by a furious storm in December, 1789, and
there was another disaster at the same place in 1839.
Tropical storms that form in the Bay of Bengal and strike the populous
coasts of India are known as cyclones. They are the same kind of storms
as West Indian hurricanes and the typhoons of the Pacific. The worst
feature is the overwhelming flood of seawater that comes in big waves
into the harbors as the center of the storm arrives. If there is
insufficient warning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.
Coringa is a coastal city of India which had a population of about
20,000 in 1789. In December, there was a strong wind, "seeming like a
cyclone." The tide rose to an unusual height and the wind increased to
great fury from the northwest. The unfortunate inhabitants saw three
huge waves coming in from the sea while the wind was blowing with its
greatest violence. The first wave brought several feet of water into the
city. All the able-bodied ran for higher ground or climbed to the
rooftops to keep from drowning. The second wave flooded all the low
parts of the city and the third overwhelmed everything and carried the
buildings away. All the inhabitants, except about twenty, disappeared.
In cases of this kind, a warning less than an hour in advance would have
saved the lives of thousands, but disasters like this were repeated here
and in other parts of the world dozens of times before the hunters,
trackers and forecasters of hurricanes learned to cheat these terrible
storms of their toll of death and injury. Progress was slow in the
nineteenth century, which saw some of the world's worst storm disasters.
In 1881, three hundred thousand people died in one typhoon on the coast
of China.
We now come to the stories of the men who tried to do something about
it--the storm hunters. At first, early in the nineteenth century, the
hunters were men engaged in some other work for a living. They put in
their spare time gathering information, getting reports from sailors who
had survived these terrible storms at sea and from landsmen who had seen
them come roaring across harbors and beaches, to lay waste to the
countryside. We go with some of them through these awful experiences.
Then, after the middle of the century, first under Emperor Napoleon III
of France and later under President Grant in America and Queen Victoria
in England, storm hunting became a government job and spread slowly
around the world.
Here we see a bitter uphill battle. The hurricane proved to be an
enormous whirlwind, hidden behind dense curtains of low-flying clouds,
tremendous rains, and the thick spray of mountainous seas torn by
earth-shaking forces of the monster. Its mysteries were challenging. Out
of this work a warning system grew, and slowly the losses of life were
reduced from thousands to hundreds, and then to dozens. We go with the
storm hunters into Congress and the White House, to argue about it. Then
we come to World War II and the desperate need for information while
submarines attack shipping and hurricanes threaten airfields and naval
bases.
And here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flying into the
centers of these furious storms. In these stories we go along. We see
what the weather crews saw and learn what they learned. And we see how
the hurricane warning service works today--far better than a few years
ago--but with a part of the great mystery still unsolved. So we go with
the hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface of the sea to
the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for the final answers to
this great puzzle of the centuries.
_2._ THE SADDLER'S APPRENTICE
"_All violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds._"
--Redfield
In recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarming duty of
flying into hurricanes and they began to study the old records, one
question bothered them very much. Why did it take so long to prove
without doubt that these big tropical storms are whirlwinds? The main
reason, of course, is the huge size of the wind circulation. The winds
spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no
noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles.
It was like the curvature of the earth. Any circle around the full body
of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men
were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat.
The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a
hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see
changes of the wind as they go along. They have no reason to question
it. In earlier times, there was no means of travel fast enough to get
the facts in this way. Then, too, there was no means of sending messages
fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the same instant in
different parts of the storm. Also, the entire wind system was in motion
and if the various reports were not sent at the same time, the results,
when they were charted, failed to make sense. This fact alone was the
cause of much confusion, even as late as the first part of the
nineteenth century.
A definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenly and
unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner.
In the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walking through the woods of
central Connecticut with his inquiring mind on scientific matters of the
day when he discovered a strange fact that led to the first "law of
storms" and eventually made him the most illustrious of the hurricane
hunters. His name was William Redfield. His ideas were first published
in 1831 and, together with the work of a few men who followed on his
trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormy weather for nearly a
hundred years.
Hurricanes were not only extremely dangerous to the sailing ships of
that day but were becoming more destructive to the growing cities along
the American coast. In the first quarter of the century, the population
of the country doubled. In 1800, there were five million people. In
spite of the War of 1812, which lasted for three years, and the
temporary drop it caused in immigration, the population increased
rapidly, mostly on and near the Atlantic Coast. The United States began
to take a place in the forefront of the world's commerce. But now and
then a great storm from the tropics swept the entire seaboard and took a
grievous toll of ships and men and harbor facilities.
Up to that time, no one had learned enough about storms to give warnings
in advance. There were no really useful rules to guide seamen around or
out of a tropical storm. Weather prediction was not accepted as
scientific work. Storm disasters were called "acts of God" and the ways
of the atmosphere were thought to be beyond human understanding.
Occasionally, a mariner with an inquiring mind like Dampier came to the
conclusion that tropical storms are huge whirlwinds which move from
place to place. But none of these inquirers came up with any real proof.
After 1800, the destruction from hurricanes grew steadily worse. The
summer of 1815 was remarkable for furious storms all along the Atlantic
Coast. Newspapers were filled with the details of storm disasters and
the destruction of life and property on shore and at sea. The crowning
catastrophe was caused by a furious West Indian hurricane which struck
New England on September 23 of that year. In the violence of its winds
and the height of its tides, this storm was about equal to the New
England hurricane of 1938. Although the country was far less populous in
1815, and the buildings, ships, and wharves subjected to its fury were
much less numerous than in 1938, the destruction was so great and the
loss of life so heavy that the newspapers did not have space enough to
give all the details of the marine disasters in this instance.
At Providence, there was terrible destruction. The tide rose more than
seven feet above the highest stage previously recorded. Five hundred
buildings were destroyed; the loss of life was never fully determined,
but it was excessive. The same sort of tragic story came from New
Bedford and other towns on the coast. Many buildings and a tremendous
number of trees were blown down in the interior.
The most treacherous feature of these big storms was their resemblance
in the initial stages to the ordinary "northeasters" which came at about
the same time of year--late August or September--and blew fitfully for a
day or two. They brought rain and high tides along the coast and finally
died out without much damage. Tropical storms, like the big one in 1815,
begin much the same way in New England, but suddenly become violent.
Then, as now, they blew gustily from the northeast in the beginning but
went around the compass and ended with shattering on-shore gales which
drove engulfing floods into the harbors. Everybody was caught off guard.
This storm and another which came six years later in the same region set
men to thinking seriously about ways to avoid these disasters. The
violent hurricane of 1821 crossed Long Island and New England, leaving a
path of destruction which lay somewhat to the westward of the hurricane
path of 1815. Again enormous numbers of trees were blown down, this time
mostly in Connecticut. And here is where we come to the story of the
saddler's apprentice.
In September, 1802, a sailor named Peleg Redfield, of Middletown,
Connecticut, died, leaving a widow and six children in very poor
circumstances. The eldest child, William, thirteen years of age, had
attended common school and learned about reading, writing and
arithmetic, but when his father died, he had to be taken out of school.
The next year William was apprenticed to a local saddle and harness
maker. Boys as well as men worked long hours in those days, and William
Redfield was no exception. After he had finished the day's work and had
done the chores around the Redfield home, he had only a small part of
his evening to himself. Even then, he had a lot of discouragement--no
books and no light to read by. The family could not afford candles.
Nevertheless, William was so interested in science that he studied by
the light of the wood fire, reading intently anything on scientific
subjects that he could get his hands on.
A year later, William's mother married a widower with nine children of
his own, and in 1806 the couple moved to Ohio, taking his nine children
and five of hers, but leaving William behind to look out for himself. He
continued his study of science, but with no indication that he would
eventually find some of the answers so vitally needed in the fight
against hurricanes. His father, being a sailor, had told him about
storms at sea and the boy was unable to get this out of his mind.
Fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in the village of
Middletown, William Tully, who had a good library and made it available
to young Redfield. The first book the physician handed to William was a
very difficult volume on physics. The boy brought it back so soon the
doctor thought he had been unable to understand it, but he was
pleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughly and had
come back for more technical works of the time. Soon William gained such
an understanding of scientific matters that an intimate friendship with
the physician developed. During this time, however, young Redfield felt
an increasing urge to visit his mother. But she lived more than seven
hundred miles from Middletown and he had very little money. So in 1810
he walked all the way to Ohio.
At that time, Ohio had a very small population; it was less than 50,000
at the beginning of the century. The territory intervening between Ohio
and Connecticut was pretty wild, with settlements only here and there.
William followed primitive roads and trails and at last reached the
shores of Lake Erie, where Cleveland and other cities stand today. The
next year he walked back to Connecticut.
Redfield was now past twenty-one. He had thought deeply of many things
while he trudged those lonely trails. He had a vision of a great railway
extending from Connecticut to the Mississippi River. Also, his mind kept
running back over the stories of storms his father had told him. From
his thoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed a plan
for a line of barges which operated between New York and Albany.
But when he arrived in Middletown, he had no course for the time being
except to go into business in his trade of saddler and harness maker. To
supplement his poor income, he peddled merchandise in the region around
Middletown, trudging through the woods and stopping in the villages here
and there. The years went by and he kept on studying science in his
spare moments.
And then, on the third of September, 1821, the center of that vicious
hurricane which crossed the eastern part of Connecticut brought its dire
evidence to the very door of the man who was still trying to master the
sciences in his spare moments. As Redfield trudged the countryside with
his wares, he passed among hundreds of big trees felled by the furious
winds. Near Middletown, he found that the trees lay with their branches
toward the northwest and he remembered that the gale there had begun
from the southeast. Less than seventy miles away, he found the trees
lying with their heads toward the southeast and here the winds evidently
had begun from the northwest.
Making inquiries as he went along, Redfield learned the directions from
which the winds had blown at various times during the storm. It became
quite clear that the hurricane had been a huge whirlwind which had
traveled across the country from south to north. He gathered a lot of
evidence to prove it.
But Redfield was now past thirty years of age. Because he had not gone
very far in school, he did not see how he could undertake to demonstrate
these facts about hurricanes to men of scientific learning. He kept
turning the idea over in his mind at intervals as the months and years
went by. In the meantime, he had become interested in navigation on the
Hudson River and had made a reputation as a marine engineer. By 1826, he
was superintendent of a line of forty or fifty barges and canal boats.
But whenever he read of a bad storm on the coast, he thought about the
hurricane of 1821 and the trees thrown down in different directions by
the opposing winds of a great whirling storm.