boat from New York to New Haven. A stranger approached him and began
talking about some papers the professor had published in the _American
Journal of Science_. The stranger said his name was William C. Redfield.
(Actually he had no middle name but used the C for "Convenience," to
keep from being confused with two other William Redfields in the area.)
In the course of the conversation, Redfield talked reservedly about his
ideas regarding West Indian hurricanes. The professor was amazed and
urged him to publish his ideas in the _American Journal of Science_.
Redfield, who was now forty-two years old, began writing on the law of
storms. He wrote well and his ideas were clear and convincingly
expressed. A long series of articles followed his first one in the
_American Journal of Science_. During these years he became a famous
"hurricane hunter." He collected reports of West Indian hurricanes--as
many as he could get from ships caught in storms and from other
sources--and studied them at great length. He inspected the log books of
vessels in port, interviewed many shipmasters, and corresponded with
others. His urgent purpose was to devise a law of storms and a set of
rules to promote the safety of human life and property afloat on the
oceans and to afford some measure of protection for the inhabitants of
cities and towns on the coasts subjected to destructive visits from
these monsters of the tropics.
After the death of Redfield, in 1857, Professor Olmstead summarized his
theory of storms as follows:
"That all violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds, in which the
wind blows in circuits around an axis; that the winds do not move in
horizontal circles but rather in spirals.
"That the direction of revolution is always uniform being from right to
left, or against the sun, on the north side of the equator, and from
left to right, or with the sun, on the south side of the equator.
"That the velocity of rotation increases from the margin toward the
center of the storm. That the whole body of air is, at the same time,
moving forward in a path, at a variable rate, but always with a velocity
much less than its velocity of rotation.
"That in storms of a particular region, as the gales of the Atlantic or
the typhoons of the China Sea, great uniformity exists with regard to
the path pursued by these storms. Those of the Atlantic, for example,
usually come from the equatorial regions east of the West India islands,
moving at first toward the northwest as far as the latitude of 30°, and
then gradually wheeling toward the northeast and following a path nearly
parallel to the American Coast until they are lost in mid-ocean. That
their dimensions are sometimes very great, as much as 1,000 miles in
diameter, while their paths over the ocean can sometimes be traced for
3,000 miles."
These conclusions were in the main correct, but time has proved that
there are many exceptions. At any rate, Redfield's papers became
classics. He had demonstrated by collections of observations on
shipboard that a tropical storm is an organized rotary wind system and
not just a mass of air moving straightaway at high velocities.
It happened that in 1831, the same year in which Redfield's first paper
appeared in the _American Journal of Science_, there was a terrible
hurricane on the island of Barbados. Devastation was so great that the
people on the island firmly believed the storm had been accompanied by
an earthquake. More than 1,500 lives were lost. Property damage,
considering values in that early day, was tremendous for a small
island--estimated at more than seven million dollars.
Barbados had suffered so much that England sent Colonel (afterward
Brigadier-General) William Reid of the Royal Engineers to superintend
the reconstruction of the government buildings. He was appalled by what
he saw.
Reid examined the ruins and made inquiries of many people about the
nature of the hurricane of 1831. He came to the conclusion that there
had not been an earthquake, but all the damage had been caused by the
wind and sea. One of the residents told Reid that when daybreak came,
amidst the roar of the storm and the noise of falling roofs and walls,
he had looked out over the harbor and saw a heaving body of lumber,
shingles, staves, barrels, wreckage of all description, and vessels
capsized or thrown on their beam ends in shallow water. The whole face
of the country was laid waste. No sign of vegetation was seen except
here and there patches of a sickly green. Trees were stripped of their
boughs and foliage. The very surface of the ground looked as if fire had
run through the land.
Reid resolved to study hurricanes and see what he could do to reduce the
consequent loss of life. He wanted to tell sailors how to keep out of
these terrible storms and he thought it might be possible to design
buildings capable of withstanding the winds. Soon afterward, he saw
Redfield's articles in the _American Journal of Science_. He wrote to
the author and they began a friendly correspondence which continued
until the latter's death.
Neither Redfield nor Reid was actually the first to declare that the
hurricane is a great whirlwind. Many others had suggested this before
them, and in 1828 a German named H. W. Dove had confirmed it, but none
of these had hunted up the data and talked and corresponded with
hundreds of seamen to collect facts to prove their contentions. And none
had presented the facts in a way that would serve as a law of storms for
seamen.
Following the lead of General Reid, an Englishman named Henry
Piddington, on duty at Calcutta in India, became a great hurricane
hunter in the middle of the nineteenth century. He collected information
from every source, talked to seamen of all ranks from admiral down, and
added a great deal to the law of storms. Because of the movement of
violent winds around and in toward the hurricane center, he gave it the
name _cyclone_, which means "coil of a snake." This is the reason why
tropical storms are now called cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.
Piddington, who became President of the Marine Courts of Inquiry at
Calcutta, published numerous memoirs on the law of storms. Of all the
accounts that he collected of experiences of seamen in tropical storms,
the outstanding case, in his estimation, was that of the Brig _Charles
Heddles_, in a hurricane near Mauritius, a small island in the Indian
Ocean, east of Africa. Mauritius is south of the equator, where
hurricane winds blow around the center in a clockwise direction, the
opposite of the whirling motion of storms in the northern hemisphere.
The _Charles Heddles_ was originally in the slave trade but at the time
that she was caught in the hurricane was mostly being employed in the
cattle trade between Mauritius and Madagascar. Only the fastest vessels
were engaged in the cattle trade, and the _Charles Heddles_ was an
exceptionally good ship. Her master was a man named Finck, an able and
highly respected seaman.
On Friday, February 21, 1845, the _Charles Heddles_ left Mauritius and
in the early morning of the twenty-second ran into heavy weather, with
wind and sea gradually increasing. It became squally and the vessel was
laboring greatly by midnight. On the twenty-third it was worse, with a
frightful sea and the wind very high, accompanied by incessant rain. The
seas swept over the decks and the crew was frequently at the pumps.
By this time Captain Finck had determined to keep the brig scudding
before the wind and run his chance of what might happen. The steady
change of the wind around the compass as the day wore on made it
impossible for him to estimate his position, but he was sure he had
plenty of sea room. The crew was unable to clue up the topsail without
risk of severe damage, so round and round they went.
Wind force and weather were always about the same. There was a
terrifying sea, the vessel constantly shipping water, which poured down
the hatchways and cabin scuttle. The fore topsail blew away at 4 P.M.
and they continued scudding under bare poles, the ship's course changing
steadily around the compass. By the twenty-fifth of February, the vessel
was taking water through every seam, the crew was constantly at the
pumps or baling water out of the cabins with buckets. All the provisions
were wet. The seas broke clear over the ship.
On the twenty-sixth, the hurricane winds continued without the least
intermission. The ship was continually suffering damages, which had to
be repaired as quickly as possible by the exhausted crew. The seas were
monstrous, water going through the decks as though they were made of
paper. Still the ship was scudding and steadily changing course around
the compass. By the twenty-seventh, the weather had improved but the
ship persisted in going round and round, veering and scudding before the
wind. After all this travel, Captain Finck succeeded in taking an
observation and found, to his surprise, that he was not far from port in
Mauritius, from which he had set sail before the storm, almost a week
earlier, and on the twenty-eighth he made for port there.
From the log kept by Captain Finck and the observations made on other
ships caught in the same hurricane, Piddington laid down the track of
the storm and the course of the _Charles Heddles_. Now it was clear that
the ship had been carried round and round the storm center, at the same
time going forward as the storm progressed. Its course at sea looked
like a watch spring drawn out--a series of loops extending in an arc
from the north to the west of Mauritius. Here was vivid and undeniable
proof, from the experience of one ship, that hurricanes over the ocean
are progressive whirlwinds, like the storm which Redfield had charted
from trees blown down in Connecticut in 1821.
Another fact was quite clear to Piddington and he published it with the
hope that all seafaring men would profit by it. He could see now why a
ship could be carried hour after hour and day by day before the wind,
apparently to great distances, and then be cast ashore near the very
place where the ship took to sea.
Inspired by this report of the _Charles Heddles_ in the hurricane,
Piddington suggested, for the first time in history (1845), that ships
be sent out to study hurricanes. He wrote:
"Every man and every set of men who are pursuing the investigation of
any great question, are apt to overrate its importance; and perhaps I
shall only excite a smile when I say, that the _day will yet come when
ships will be sent out to investigate the nature and course of storms
and hurricanes_, as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to
survey pestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service."
The prediction which Piddington put in italics was eventually verified,
though nearly a century later.
"Nothing indeed can more clearly show," Piddington continued, "how this
may, with a well appointed and managed vessel be done in perfect
safety--performed by mere chance by a fast-sailing colonial brig, manned
only as a bullock trader, but capitally officered, and developing for
the seaman and meteorologist a view of what we may almost call the
_internal_ phenomena of winds and waves in a hurricane."
But this was only the beginning. Learning the secrets of the hurricane
proved to be far more difficult than Redfield, Reid and Piddington had
imagined. The world looked in amazement at the tremendous labors of a
few men who collected enormous quantities of reports, interviews, and
observations from mariners and tried to put the bits together, but there
was a prevailing suspicion that the real facts were locked in the minds
of men who had gone to their doom in ships sunk in the centers of these
awful storms and the lucky ones who came back had seen only a part of
their ultimate terrors. In these days of relatively safe navigation at
the middle of the twentieth century, our minds are scarcely able to
grasp the seriousness of this scourge of tropical and subtropical seas
which destroyed so many ships and drove busy men, working long hours for
a living, to such tremendous labors, at night and at odd times, to learn
the truth. We may get some light from the stories of desperate sailors
who, by some strange fate, were thrown exhausted on the rocks that
finally claimed the broken remains of once-proud vessels of trade and
war.
_3._ AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
"_Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon:
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea._"
--Shakespeare
Two hundred years ago, scientists were beginning to chart the winds over
the oceans and the currents that thread their way across the surface of
deep waters. Until this work was finished, the mariner was almost
completely at the mercy of the atmosphere and the sea. He would come to
uncharted places where the winds ceased to blow and sailing vessels
might be becalmed for weeks. Day after day, the burning sun climbed
slowly toward the zenith and while the unbearable heat tortured the
crew, descended with agonizing slowness toward the western horizon. At
night, relief came under unclouded skies but the stars gave no
indication of better fortunes on the morrow.
In these places it seldom rained. Drinking water, as long as it lasted,
became putrid, but the crew preserved it as their most precious
treasure, drinking a little when they could go no longer without
it--holding their noses. The food became so bad that every man who had
the courage to eat it wondered if it wouldn't be better to starve. This
happened often in the North Atlantic in the days when sailing vessels
were carrying horses to the West Indies. If they were becalmed and fresh
water ran short, the crews had to throw some or all of the horses
overboard. In time this region became known as the "horse latitudes."
Because it lay north and northeast of the hurricane belt, a long spell
of rainless weather for a sailing ship here could be succeeded suddenly
and overwhelmingly by the torrential rains of a tropical storm.
At long intervals, a slight breeze came along, barely enough to extend a
small flag, but it gave the ship a little motion and brought hope to the
men who were worn out with tugging at the oars. In this circumstance, it
might happen that a long, low groundswell would appear. Coming from a
great distance, it would raise and then lower the vessel a little in
passing. Others would surely follow--low undulations at intervals of
four or five to the minute--bringing a warning of a storm beyond the
horizon. Here was one of the ironic twists of a sailor's existence. Even
while he prayed for water, the atmosphere was about to give it to him in
tremendous quantities, both from above and below. At this juncture the
master was in a quandary. For the safety of ship and crew, it was vital
that he know exactly what to do at the very instant when the first gusty
breezes of the coming storm filled the sails.
From the law of storms, the mariner eventually learned--and it was
suicide to forget it at a time like this--that if he could look forward
from the center of the hurricane, along the line of progress, the most
terrible winds and waves would be on his right. Here the raging demons
of the tropical blast outdo themselves. The whirling velocity is added
to the forward motion, for both in these few harrowing hours have the
same direction. All the power of the atmosphere is delivered in this
space, where unbelievable gales try to blast their way into the partial
vacuum at the center. But the atmosphere is held back from the center by
a still greater power, the rotation of the earth on its axis. No
shipmaster should ever be caught between these awful forces with the
huge bulk of the storm drawing toward him.
Here we find horrors that were never disclosed to the early storm
hunters. It is doubtful if any sailing ship or any man aboard survived
in this sector of a really great hurricane. But even more dangerous are
the deceitful motions of the sea surface, which can trap the mariner and
drag his vessel toward the dangerous sector, even while he thinks he is
fighting his way out of it.
In those uneasy hours when the groundswell preceded the winds, the
master had to watch his barometer and the clouds on the horizon, to get
the best estimate of the storm's future course. If it gave signs of
coming toward him or passing a little to the west of him, he had to run
with the wind as soon as it began, every inch of canvas straining at the
creaking masts to get all the headway possible. He would do better than
he thought, for the surface of the sea was moving with the winds and his
vessel was plowing through the waves while the sea was swirling in the
same direction. It was a race for life, and if he was not unlucky, he
would find himself behind the storm, sailing rapidly toward better
weather.
If he made the wrong choice and tried to go around the center on the
east side while the storm moved northward, he might have thought that he
was making headway. But the sea surface was carrying him backward while
the horrible right sector rushed forward to encompass the ship. Now we
see why Redfield, Reid and Piddington, when they came to a realization
of some of these facts in the logs of sailing vessels, were so eager to
give the world a law of storms. Their work was only a beginning, for the
so-called law is not as simple as they imagined. But some shipmasters
took their advice and survived, whereas any other course would have
taken them to the bottom of the sea. And untold numbers had gone down in
big hurricanes.
Among the logs and letters collected by Redfield and Reid in their work
on the law of storms were many which referred to a fierce hurricane in
1780. For more than fifty years it had been talked about as "The Great
Hurricane." But the stories didn't all seem to fit together. The storm
was said to have been in too many places at too many different times to
suit Redfield. When he had finished putting the data from ships' logs on
a map in accordance with his law of storms, he saw that there had been
three hurricanes at about the same time and that they had been confused
and reported as one.
In the year of these big hurricanes there were many warships in the
Caribbean region. The American War of Independence had started with
bloodshed at Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, and by 1780 England was
in a state of war with half the world. Her battle fleets controlled most
of the seas along the American Coast and roamed the waters in and around
the West Indies.
The first of the three hurricanes struck Jamaica on the third of
October. Nine English warships, under the command of Sir Peter Parker,
went to the bottom. Seven of his vessels were dismasted or severely
damaged. From the tenth to the fifteenth of October a second--and even
more powerful hurricane--ravaged Barbados and progressively devastated
other islands in the Eastern Caribbean. This one has been rated the most
terrible hurricane in history by many students of storms. It wreaked
awful destruction on the island of St. Lucia, where six thousand persons
were crushed in the ruins of demolished buildings. The English fleet in
that vicinity disappeared. Neither trees nor houses were left standing
on Barbados. Off Martinique, forty ships of a French convoy were sunk
and nearly all on board were lost, including four thousand soldiers. On
the island itself, nine thousand persons were killed. Most of the
vessels in the broad path of the storm as it progressed farther into the
Caribbean, including several warships, foundered with all their crews.
It drove fifty vessels ashore at Bermuda, on the eighteenth.
Before this terrible storm reached Bermuda another one roared out of the
Western Caribbean, crossed western Cuba and passed into the Gulf of
Mexico, on October 18. Unaware of the approach of this hurricane, a
Spanish fleet of seventy-four warships, under Admiral Solano, sailed
from Havana into the Gulf, to attack Pensacola. They were trapped in the
eastern section of the Gulf and nineteen ships were lost. The remainder
were dispersed, several having thrown their guns overboard to avoid
capsizing. Nearly all the others were damaged, many dismasted. The
Spanish fleet was no longer a fighting force.
Within three weeks most of the battle fleets in and around the Caribbean
had been put out of commission. Both Redfield and Reid were impressed by
the power displayed by these hurricanes. In his search of the records,
the former succeeded in getting a copy of a letter written by a
Lieutenant Archer to his mother in England, giving an account of the
first of these terrible storms. The following story is condensed from
Archer's letter.
Archer was second in command of an English warship named the _Phoenix_.
It was commanded by Sir Hyde Parker. Before the first of these three
hurricanes developed, the _Phoenix_ had been sent to Pensacola, where
the English were in control. Late in September, she sailed to rejoin the
remainder of the fleet at Jamaica. On passing Havana harbor, Sir Hyde
looked in and was astounded to see Solano's Spanish fleet at anchor. He
hurried around Cuba into the Caribbean, to take the news to the British
fleet.
At Kingston, Jamaica, the crew of the _Phoenix_ found three other
men-of-war lying in the harbor and they had a strong party for "kicking
up a dust on shore," with dancing until two o'clock every morning.
Little did they think of what might be in store for them. Out of the
four men-of-war not one was in existence four days later and not a man
aboard any of them survived, except a few of the crew of the _Phoenix_.
And what is more, the houses where the crews had been so merry were so
completely destroyed that scarcely a vestige remained to show where they
had stood.
On September 30, the four warships set sail for Port Royal, around the
eastern end of Jamaica. At eleven o'clock on the night of October 2, it
began to "snuffle," with a "monstrous heavy appearance to the eastward."
Sir Hyde sent for Lieutenant Archer.
"What sort of weather have we, Archer?"
"It blows a little and has a very ugly look; if in any other quarter, I
should say we were going to have a gale of wind."
They had a very dirty night. At eight in the morning, with close-reefed
topsails, the _Phoenix_ was fighting a hard blow from the
east-northeast, and heavy squalls at times. Archer said he was once in a
hurricane in the East Indies and the beginning of it had much the same
appearance as this. The crew took in the topsails and were glad they had
plenty of sea-room. On Sir Hyde's orders, they secured all the sails
with spare gaskets, put good rolling tackles on the yards, squared the
booms, saw that the boats were all fast, lashed the guns,
double-breeched the lower deckers, got the top-gallant mast down on the
deck and, in fact, did everything to make a snug ship.
"And now," Archer wrote, "the poor birds began to suffer from the uproar
of the elements and came on board. They turned to the windward like a
ship, tack and tack, and dashed themselves down on the deck without
attempting to stir till picked up. They would not leave the ship."
The carpenters were placed by the mainmast with broad axes, ready to cut
it away to save the ship. Archer found the purser "frightened out of his
wits" and two marine officers "white as sheets" from listening to the
vibration of the lower deck guns, which were pulling loose and thrashing
around. At every roll it seemed that the whole ship's side was going.
At twelve it was blowing a full hurricane. Archer came on deck and found
Sir Hyde there. "It blows terribly hard, Archer."
"It does indeed, Sir."
"I don't remember its blowing so hard before," shouted Sir Hyde,
striving to get his voice above the roar of the wind. "The ship makes
good weather of it on this tack but we must wear her (to turn about by
putting the helm up and the stern of the boat to the wind), as the wind
has shifted to the southeast and we are fast drawing up on the Coast of
Cuba."
"Sir, there is no canvas can stand against it a moment. We may lose
three or four of our people in the effort. She'll wear by manning the
fire shrouds."
"Well, try it," said Sir Hyde, which was a great condescension for a man
of his temperament to accept the advice of a subordinate. It took two
hundred men to wear the ship, but when she was turned about, the sea
began to run clear across the decks and she had no time to rise from one
sea until another lashed into her. Some of the sails had been torn from
the masts and the rest began to fly from the yards "through the gaskets
like coachwhips."