Part 4

"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."

"To think that the wind could have such force!" Archer shouted into the 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.