gale.
"Go down and see what is the matter between decks," ordered Sir Hyde in
a lull.
Archer crept below and a marine officer screamed, "We are sinking. The
water is up to the bottom of my cot!"
Archer yelled back, "As long as it is not over your mouth, you are well
off." He put all spare men to work at the pumps. The _Phoenix_ labored
heavily, with scarcely any of her above water except the quarter-deck
and that seldom.
On returning, Archer found Sir Hyde lashed to a mast. He lashed himself
alongside his commander and tried to hear what he was shouting.
Afterward, Archer tried to describe this situation in his letter. "If I
was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of it. A total
darkness above and the sea running in Alps or Peaks of Teneriffe
(Mountains is too common an idea); the wind roaring louder than thunder,
the ship shaking her sides and groaning."
"Hold fast," shouted Sir Hyde as a big wave crashed into the ship. "That
was an ugly sea! We must lower the yards, Archer."
"If we attempt it, Sir, we shall lose them. I wish the mainmast was
overboard without carrying anything else along with it."
Another mountainous wave swept the trembling ship. A crewman brought
news from the pump room. Water was gaining on the weary pumpers. The
ship was almost on her beam-ends. Archer called to Sir Hyde, "Shall we
cut the mainmast away?"
"Ay, as fast as you can," said Sir Hyde. But just then a tremendous wave
broke right on board, carried everything on deck away and filled the
ship with water. The main and mizen masts went, the _Phoenix_ righted a
little but was in the last struggle of sinking.
As soon as they could shake their heads free of the water, Sir Hyde
yelled, "We are gone at last, Archer. Foundered at sea! Farewell, and
the Lord have mercy on us!"
Archer felt sorry that he could swim, for he would struggle
instinctively and it would take him a quarter hour longer to die than a
man who could not. The quarter-deck was full of men praying for mercy.
At that moment there was a great thump and a grinding under them.
Archer screamed, "Sir, the ship is ashore. We may save ourselves yet!"
Every stroke of the sea threatened dissolution of the ship's frame.
Every wave swept over her as she lay stern ashore.
Sir Hyde cried out, "Keep to the quarter-deck, my lads. When she goes to
pieces that is your best chance."
Five men were lost cutting the foremast. The sea seemed to reach for
them as it took the mast overboard and they went with it. Everyone
expected it would be his turn next. It was awful--the ship grinding and
being torn away piece by piece. Mercifully, as if to give the crew
another desperate chance, a tremendous wave carried the _Phoenix_ among
the rocks and she stuck there, though her decks tumbled in.
Archer took off his coat and shoes and prepared to swim, but on second
thought he knew it wouldn't do. As second officer, he would have to stay
with his commander and see that every man, including the sick and
injured, was safely off the ship before he left it. He wrote later that
he looked around with a philosophic eye in that moment and was amazed to
find that those who had been the most swaggering, swearing bullies in
fine weather were now the most pitiful wretches on earth, with death
before them.
Finally, Archer helped two sailors off with a line which was made fast
to the rocks, and most of those who had survived the storm got ashore
alive, including the sick and injured, who were moved from a cabin
window by means of a spare topsail-yard.
On shore, Sir Hyde came to Archer so affected that he was scarcely able
to make himself understood. "I am happy to see you ashore--but look at
our poor _Phoenix_." Weak and worn, the two sat huddled on the shore,
silent for a quarter hour, blasted by gale and sea. Archer actually
wept. After that, the two officers gathered the men together and rescued
some fresh water and provisions from the wreck. They also secured
material to make tents. The storm had thrown great quantities of fish
into the holes in the rocks and these provided a good meal.
One of the ship's boats was left in fair condition. In two days the
carpenters repaired it, and Archer, with four volunteers, set off for
Jamaica. They had squally weather and a leaky boat, but by constant
baling with two buckets, they arrived at their destination next evening.
Eventually, all the remainder of the crew they had left in Cuba were
saved except some who died of injuries after getting ashore from the
_Phoenix_ and a few who got hold of some of the ship's rum and drank
themselves to death.
How many times this drama of death and narrow escape may have been
repeated in the three great hurricanes of 1780 is not disclosed in the
records. But hundreds of ships and many thousands of men were lost. And
at that time no one knew the true nature of these great winds. It was
not until more than fifty years had passed and Redfield and Reid
examined all the reports that these tremendous gales were found to be
parts of three separate hurricanes. This ignorance seems strange, for
nearly three hundred years had passed since Columbus ran into his first
hurricane.
As Reid worked at great length on these old records in logs and letters,
he became confident that Redfield was right about the whirling nature of
tropical storms. There were ten hurricanes in the West Indies in 1837
and these supplied Reid with a great deal of added information. One of
the most exciting was the big hurricane in the middle of August of that
year.
This was a vicious storm which was first observed by the Barque
_Felicity_ in the Atlantic, far east of the Antilles, on August 12,
1837. The chances are that it came from the African Coast, near the Cape
Verde Islands, as many of the worst of them do. By the time these
faraway disturbances have crossed the Atlantic and approached the West
Indies, they are usually major hurricanes, capable of wreaking great
destruction. This one was no exception, but its path lay a little
farther to the northward than usual and its most furious winds were not
felt on land, even on the more northerly islands in the group.
Ships in its path reported winds which appeared to be of a "rotatory"
nature when Reid plotted them on maps. On the fifteenth, the storm
passed near Turk's Island and on the sixteenth, was being felt on the
easternmost Bahamas.
At this stage, the ship _Calypso_ became involved in the storm and was
unable to escape. The master, a man named Wilkinson, wrote an account to
the owners, from which the following is taken:
"During the night the Winds increased, and day-light found the vessel
under a close-reefed main-topsail, with royal and top-gallant-yards on
deck, and prepared for a gale of wind. At 10 A.M. the wind about
north-east, the lee-rail under water, and the masts bending like canes.
Got a tarpaulin on the main rigging and took the main topsail in. The
ship laboring much obliged main and bilge-pumps to be kept constantly
going. At 6 P.M. the wind north-west, I should think the latitude would
be about 27°, and longitude 77°W. At midnight the wind was west, when a
sea took the quarter-boat away.
"At day-dawn, or rather I should have said the time when the day would
have dawned, the wind was southwest, and a sea stove the fore-scuttle.
All attempts to stop this leak were useless, for when the ship pitched
the scuttle was considerably under water. I then had the gaskets and
lines cut from the reefed foresail, which blew away; a new
fore-topmast-studding-sail was got up and down the fore-rigging, but in
a few seconds the bolt-rope only remained; the masts had then to be cut
away."
By this time the wind was even more furious and the seas so high none
expected the _Calypso_ to survive. The master continued his story:
"My chief mate had a small axe in his berth, which he had made very
sharp a few days previous. That was immediately procured; and while the
men were employed cutting away the mizenmast, the lower yard-arms went
in the water. It is human nature to struggle hard for life; so fourteen
men and myself got over the rail between the main and mizen rigging as
the mast-heads went into the water. The ship was sinking fast. While
some men were employed cutting the weather-lanyards of the rigging, some
were calling to God for mercy; some were stupified with despair; and two
poor fellows, who had gone from the afterhold, over the cargo, to get to
the forecastle, to try to stop the leak, were swimming in the ship's
hold. In about three minutes after getting on the bends, the
weather-lanyards were cut fore and aft, and the mizen, main, and
foremasts went one after the other, just as the vessel was going down
head foremost.
"The ship hung in this miserable position, as if about to disappear (as
shown in the accompanying reconstruction of the scene by an artist who
worked under the direction of the master of the _Calypso_) and then by
some miracle slowly righted herself.
"On getting on board again, I found the three masts had gone close off
by the deck. The boats were gone, the main hatches stove in, the planks
of the deck had started in many places, the water was up to the beams,
and the puncheons of rum sending about the hold with great violence. The
starboard gunwale was about a foot from the level of the sea, and the
larboard about five feet. The sea was breaking over the ship as it would
have done over a log. You will, perhaps, say it could not have been
worse, and any lives spared to tell the tale. I assure you, Sir, it was
worse; and by Divine Providence, every man was suffered to walk from
that ship to the quay at Wilmington."
From such accounts the hurricane hunters gathered the facts which led to
a better "law of storms" and made life at sea safer for the officers and
men who struggled with sails and masts in tropical gales. But it is most
likely that the experiences of the crews of those sailing ships that
were caught in the worst sectors of fully developed hurricanes in the
open sea were never told. It is not probable that any survived the
calamitous weather on the right front of the storm center, where the
sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth, and the forward motion
of the hurricane are combined in a frenzy of destructive power.
In one sense, all of the men who survived these terrors at sea were
hurricane hunters. They had to be. Those who lived were the men who were
always alert to the first signs in sea and sky, who knew when one of the
big storms of the tropics was just beyond the horizon. They were
learning and passing the knowledge along to others. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, the mariner had a "law of storms" that kept
countless ships out of the most dangerous parts of tropical
disturbances.
_4._ STORM WARNINGS
"_I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than of the entire
Spanish Navy._"
--McKinley
Strangely enough, government weather bureaus were not set up for the
purpose of giving warnings of tropical storms. Maybe there was a feeling
in the years before radio that nothing could be done for the sailor on
the open sea except to teach him the law of storms. And for the landsman
the case looked hopeless until the telegraph came in sight. At any rate,
most of the men who began to fly into hurricanes during World War II
were astonished to find that, up to that time, the prediction of
tropical storms had been a kind of side issue.
Although hurricanes are nearly always destructive and other kinds of
storms--the "lows" on the weather map--are generally mild, once in a
long time one of these others results in a catastrophe. Starting as a
low which is spread weakly over a wide area, with cloudy weather, rain
or snow, and gentle winds, now and then the exceptional storm suddenly
fills newspaper headlines. Gales and winds of hurricane force bring a
blizzard, tornado, bad hailstorm, or torrential rain and a damaging
flood. If it really is a bad one, it finds its way into the pages of
history. In times past, these storms often struck populous districts,
while hurricanes, in early centuries, hit on thinly settled islands or
coasts.
So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the British Isles was
one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. It was entirely
unexpected, as were most of the big gales in England in the old days.
Surprise was one of the elements of danger. The weather is seldom fine
in the British Isles, over the English Channel or in the North Sea.
Gloom, with fog or low-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best
days, a damp haze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirty
window pane. Into this background of gloom many a big storm stole its
way eastward from the Atlantic. The record-breaker tore up the docks,
wrecked shipping and crumbled buildings in the year 1703.
Houses were ruined and big trees were blown down. Whole fleets were lost
and more than nine thousand seamen were drowned. The most violent winds
came at night. Startled by the roar of the storm, Queen Anne got out of
bed and found a part of the palace roof had been torn away. One prelate,
Bishop Kidder, was buried beneath the ruins of his mansion. Awakened by
the giant gusts, he put on his dressing gown and made for the door, but
a chimney stack crashed through the ceiling and dashed out his brains.
His wife was crushed in her bed. After the gales subsided, London and
other cities looked like they had been sacked by an enemy. All over the
south of England, the lead roofs of churches were rolled up by the wind
or blown away in large sheets.
Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in later years, it was
more than a century before the storm hunters made much progress. Not
long after 1800, several men with an inquiring mind began to get
results. Redfield was one, but he studied hurricanes and not the storms
of higher latitudes, such as the one which devastated the British Isles.
Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of faster means of
travel and communications and they were destined to be a vital factor in
weather forecasting. In 1816 a "hobby-horse" with wheels was displayed
in Paris by an inventor named Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two
sitting on it and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing, it
went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claims were made about
its possibilities. At about the same time, several men were working on
devices like the telegraph.
Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused the intense
curiosity of a young professor, William Heinrich Brandes, of the
University of Breslau, in Germany. He began a study in 1816, to see if
the weather moved from place to place and if it would be possible to
send predictions ahead by means then available. Everybody at that time
knew that storms moved but it was the general belief that ordinary
changes in the weather didn't go anywhere. Brandes collected newspapers
from many places and searched them for remarks about the weather, which
he put on maps. Here he was amazed to see that all kinds of weather
seemed to be constantly in motion, quite generally from west to east.
But the newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes and he
couldn't be too sure about the rate of travel.
Brandes knew that the French had set up weather stations and collected
observations for maps as early as 1780, but the terrible French
Revolution had brought an end to this work and the data were lying in
disuse. After some delay, he obtained copies of the observations for
1783 and put them on maps. Sure enough, after he had drawn many daily
maps, he saw clearly how the weather moved just as he had suspected it
did from the newspaper reports. But at the same time he saw that it was
hopeless. The weather moved so rapidly that there was no way of sending
the reports ahead fast enough for making predictions of what was coming.
The quickest way of sending the reports ahead was by horse or a good man
on foot, and the weather would easily outrun them. In 1820, Brandes
wrote an article about weather maps for publication and then put his
maps and newspapers in the trash. But in time his idea got around the
world and as the years passed more and more scientists began drawing
maps and trying to predict the weather. And so it came about that the
government weather services in different parts of the world were set up
to predict storms of higher latitudes rather than hurricanes.
Redfield was mapping storms after 1830, but he was not trying to make
weather forecasts. He wanted only to learn about hurricanes in order to
give the mariner a law of storms by which he could judge the weather for
himself. Nobody worried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those
days that a man on land could get his weather out of an almanac or by
watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars, or the rise and
fall of the barometer. Scientists who believed that it would be possible
to predict the ordinary changes in the weather were decidedly in the
minority. One of these was James Pollard Espy, who became known as the
"Old Storm King" of America.
James Espy was born in Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Harrisburg, but
his father moved the family to Kentucky while James was an infant. It
has been said in biographies of Espy that the boy had no education and
was seventeen years old before he learned to read, but this was denied
by relatives who survived him. It seems that the elder Espy soon went to
the Miami Valley in Ohio, to get established in business, and left James
with an older sister in Kentucky. At eighteen James registered at
Transylvania University, in Lexington, where he was much interested in
science. In any event, at various times he was a schoolteacher in Ohio,
Maryland, and Pennsylvania, until he became fully occupied in the study
of weather.
In 1820, Espy joined the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, to teach
languages and work on the weather. In an amazingly short time, he became
an authority on meteorology. He was a pleasant, easygoing man, but very
persistent in two matters. First, he was determined to have a government
bureau established to predict storms; and, second, he disagreed with
Redfield in the latter's whirlwind theory of hurricanes. At times the
two carried on a violent controversy in the press. Espy argued that the
winds blow directly toward the center of a storm or toward a line
through the center. He was right with respect to storms of middle and
higher latitudes, as everybody knows today. He anticipated the modern
idea of fronts, and he and other scientists of his day sometimes
referred to these lines as "like a line of battle." In a way, Redfield
also was right, for the typical hurricane in the tropics has no fronts.
In his efforts to set up a government weather bureau, Espy was
successful in a small way. In 1842, he was appointed by Congress for
five years as "Meteorologist to the U. S. Government" and assigned to
the Surgeon General, where he worked for five years. This rather strange
appointment was due to the fact that the Surgeon General had been taking
weather observations at Army posts since 1819 and had much data for
study.
In the meantime, Espy had visited England and France, where he was
received with honor by renowned scientific associations. On returning to
the United States, he published a book, _The Philosophy of Storms_, in
1841. His weather maps and storm reports were now famous and by this
time he was widely known as the "Old Storm King." When his term as
"Meteorologist to the U. S. Government" expired, he secured an
appointment as meteorologist under the Secretary of the Navy, to work
with the Smithsonian Institution, where he made an annual report to the
Navy until 1852.
During these years, Espy was continually after Congress to do more about
storm hunting. In Washington, he earned the title of the "Half Baked
Storm Hunter" and in Congress he was known as the "Old Storm Breeder."
In 1842 he was granted hearings and members of an appropriation
committee said that he was a "monomaniac" and his "organ of self-esteem
was swollen to the size of a goiter." They told him that they were not
impressed just because "the French had indorsed all his crack-brained
schemes." Espy kept insisting for several years and was looked upon as a
nuisance in Congress until he died in 1860, having had very little
success in getting the government to do anything about it, except to
give him an appointment to study the weather himself.
As it finally worked out, Congress in 1870 established a weather
service, to study storms on the Great Lakes and the seacoasts of the
United States. This proved to be such a tough job that, for the time
being, the hurricane work, which had been neglected during and after the
War between the States, was dropped into second place.
The disturbances that kept the government service busy after 1870 are
those that begin in higher latitudes and move generally from west to
east--the lows of the weather map--called extratropical to distinguish
them from hurricanes and other tropical storms. If they were as regular
in their shapes and movements as the tropical variety, the forecasting
job would be much easier. But the extratropical kind takes odd forms,
elongated or in the shape of a trough, sometimes with two or more
centers. Their movements are irregular. Rarely does one of them become
extremely violent, but there is always danger of it and so the
forecasters must always be on the alert.
[Illustration: _The English warship _Egmont_ in the "Great Hurricane"
of 1780._]
[Illustration: _The _Calypso_ in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837,
showing the crew climbing over the rail as the mastheads go into the
water._]
[Illustration: _USWB--Miami Herald Staff Photo_
_A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast
at the height of a hurricane._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier _Bennington_
and drapes it over the bow._]
[Illustration: _Wind of hurricane drive pine board (10 feet by 1 inch by
3 inches) through the tough trunk of a palm tree in Puerto Rico,
September 13, 1928._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with wind of 15
knots (17 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 40 knots (46 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 75 knots (86 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 120 knots (138 miles an hour). Tops of big
waves are torn off and carried away in a white boiling sheet._]
[Illustration: _Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane
hunting._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Navy crew of hurricane hunters._]
[Illustration: _Air Force Photo_
_Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into
hurricane._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951._]
[Illustration: _In the foreground, part of a spiral squall band, an "arm
of the octopus."_]
[Illustration: _Photographed by McClellan Air Force Base_
_Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500
feet below._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane
mission._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photograph_
_Radar operator in foreground; navigator in background._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photograph_
_Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane
mission._]
[Illustration: _USWB--Miami Daily News_
_City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler's Hurricane in September,
1945._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photocopy_
_Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission._]
AFT ENTRANCE HATCH
RADIO OPERATOR
RIGHT SCANNER (CREW CHIEF)
RADIOSONDE OPERATOR
LEFT SCANNER (DROPSONDE OPERATOR)
ENGINEER
COPILOT
WEATHER OBSERVER
NAVIGATOR
RADAR OPERATOR
FORWARD ENTRANCE HATCH
PILOT