Part 3
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.
In 1831, Professor Denison Olmstead of Yale College was traveling by 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?"