the hollow winds begin to blow,
the clouds look black, the glass is low.
—e. darwin
a stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rain across the navy airfield. the place was gloomy and deserted, except for one privateer standing behind the air station, all other planes having been evacuated the night before. a tall young airman came out of a building down at the other side of the field. he looked nervously at the blackening morning sky as another squall came by, hurried over to the plane and stood between it and the protecting station. in a few minutes, eight men followed him. they climbed aboard the craft. the tall airman was last, taking a final look at the sky over his shoulder as he crawled in. the roots of his hair felt electrified, his spine tingled and his knees turned to rubber. in a few moments the plane took off into the darkening sky.
in those anxious moments as he had glanced upward at the wind-torn clouds with driving rain in his face, many 2 thoughts passed through his mind. in training for this job he had read about aircraft carriers having their flight decks torn up by typhoons, about battered destroyers sunk by hurricanes, big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper stories of brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways through the tough trunks of palm trees. the idea of sending a plane into one of these monsters seemed fantastic. he could imagine the wings being torn off and see vividly in his mind the broken craft rocketing downward into the foam of gale-swept waters far below. he leaned over on the radio table and muttered a prayer, hoping that god could hear him above the tumult of winds, seas and engines. to most of the men this was “old stuff.” flying into hurricanes had been going on for two years. to him it was a strange adventure.
he was the radio man and this was to be his first flight into a hurricane. and it would be no practice ride. this was a bad storm, getting too close to the coast to suit him. he had been told that after nightfall its center would strike inland and there would be widespread damage and some loss of life. he tried to remember other things they had told him in the briefing session and some of the instructions he had been reading for three days now. well, such is life, he thought. his father had been the master of an oil tanker for the last fifteen years. he had told his growing son a lot about these big storms of the caribbean. what would his father say now when he learned that his son was one of the men assigned to the job of flying into them? his thoughts were interrupted by violent agitation of the plane and the roar of the wind. the navigator said something about the turbulence.
he remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “like going over niagara falls in a telephone booth.” he recalled the burly fellow who pointed to the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and how to 3 get to it. in answer to his last question, one of the men had told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown on his ear. now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain had become torrential. the wind was on the port quarter and water was coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. it was pouring on him from above somewhere. rivers were running down his back.
he asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied, “oh, this is the usual thing. sometimes it gets a good deal worse.” well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. maybe the pilot and co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. he hit his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick. finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose his breakfast.
up and down the coast the air force bases were deserted. all planes but one had been flown inland and the last one, a b-17, was poised on morrison field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before nightfall.
in miami, one of the senior men in the weather bureau office was called to the telephone. somebody insisted on talking to him and nobody else. it was long distance. a woman said in a frightened voice that her son had gone out to look after a neighbor’s boat and she wanted to know whether she should try to go out to find him and bring him in. he was only twelve years old. “yes, by all means,” was the answer. the forecaster didn’t know how she was going to reach the boy or how far she had to go, but he recalled that other men and boys had lost their lives doing the same thing. they were having hundreds of calls and they were unable to go into details. he paused just a moment, his mind running regretfully 4 over this poor woman and her problem. then he started a radio broadcast.
down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down on the sidewalk, bossing three men who were nailing frames over his plate glass windows. he went into the store to his telephone and, after dialing for about ten minutes, finally got the forecaster on the line. “what’s the latest on the storm?” he asked in a strained voice. “nothing new,” came the tired voice of the forecaster. “a navy plane went out half an hour ago. we’ll have a report pretty soon now. but the hurricane’s going to hit us, that’s sure. be a bad night.”
three miles south of the city, two fishermen stood looking at a pole on the pier. two red flags with black centers were flapping in the wind. “aw, nuts,” growled the big man. “guess i’ll go home and nail up the windows again. this is the third time this year.” the little man started off, pulling his raincoat up around his ears as a squall came over. “well, we can’t complain, i guess. the other times the flags went up we got storms, didn’t we? looks like this will be the worst of the lot.” by that time the big fellow was running in a dog-trot and disappearing around a building. his father had been drowned in the big storm at key west in 1919.
even on the other side of the state the people were worried, and for good reason, for it might be over there tomorrow. the forecaster was wanted again on the telephone. a man said in an anxious tone that he had one thousand five hundred unfenced cattle near the shore and what should he do? without hesitation, the forecaster said, “get them away from the water and behind a fence. this storm will go south of you. there will be strong offshore gales and the cattle will walk with the wind and go right out into the water and drown if there is no fence.”
out in the atlantic, a merchant ship was wallowing in 5 heavy seas, with one hundred miles an hour winds raking her decks. the third mate struggled through the wind and sea and into the radio room. he handed a wet weather message to the radio operator. a hundred miles away, in the bahamas, an old negro was reading his weather instruments and looking at the sky. he was pushed around by furious winds but they had died down a little since early morning. the roof was off his house. trees were uprooted all around him. he went into a small, low-slung radio hut and attempted to send a weather message to nassau. he was badly crowded in the hut. his wife, daughter and two grandchildren were huddled in the corners. his son-in-law had been killed in the night by a big tree that fell on the porch. his daughter and her two children were sobbing. he raised the nassau radio station and sent a message for the forecast office in miami.
all up and down the florida coast, many thousands had heard the radio warnings or had seen the flags flying and wanted to know more. the highways here and there were filling with people, leaving threatened places on the coast. by night the roads would be jammed. out on the privateer, the tall young radioman, sopping wet, raised himself in his chair, and took a soggy message from the weather officer. after the plane settled a little, he put on his head phones and listened to the loud, almost deafening static. he still felt a bit sick. but he began to pound out the weather message, with the hope that somebody would get it and pass it on to the forecaster.
in these and other ways, it has come about that a pair of red flags with black centers strikes fear into the hearts of seafaring men and terrifies people in towns and cities in the line of advance of the big winds. the warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming gales, relatives and 6 friends lost in other great storms that have roared out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. huge rollers break on the beaches with a booming sound. in the distance, a long, low, angry cloud appears on the horizon. if the cloud grows and puts out scud and squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. if the distant cloud is seen to move along the horizon, the tumult of wind and sea on the beaches will subside. the local indications in the sky and the water tell a vital story to the initiated but the warning they give does not come soon enough. it is necessary to know what is going to happen while the hurricane is well out at sea. this depends on the hurricane hunters, and so the messages they send ashore while fighting their way by air into the vortices of these terrible whirlwinds are awaited anxiously by countless people.
tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job, often a dangerous one. but it is not a one-man job; it requires the co-operation of many people. a tropical storm of hurricane force covers such a vast area that all of it cannot be seen by one person. its products—gales with clouds and rain—and its effects—destruction of life and property and big waves on the sea—are visible to people in different parts of the disturbance. but before we know much about it, the little that is seen by each of many people on islands and ships at sea must be put together, like clues in a murder case. the weather observers who get the clues and the experts who put them together are the hurricane hunters.
for at least five hundred years it has been known that these terrible disturbances are born in the heated parts of the oceans. down near the equator, where hot, moist winds are the rule, something causes vast storms to form and grow in violence, bringing turmoil to the ordinary daily round of 7 gentle breezes and showers. they have come to bear the general name of tropical storms, though known locally as hurricanes, typhoons, or cyclones.
most of them occur in the late summer or early fall. at that season, on the islands in the tropics where the natives in other centuries took life easy, depending on nature’s lavish gifts of fruit and other foods, the tropical storm came as an occasional catastrophe. trees went down in howling gales, rain came in torrents, flooding the hilly sections, big waves deluged the coasts, and frail native houses were swept away in an uproar of the elements. the survivors thought they had done something to displease one of the mythical beings who ruled the winds and the waters. in the caribbean region, it was supposed to be the god of the big winds, hunrakan, from which the name hurricane originated. his evil face seemed to leer from the darkening clouds as the elements raged.
in time, europeans settled in the islands and on the southeastern coasts of america. they dreaded the approach of late summer, when copper-colored clouds of a tropical storm might push slowly upward from the southeastern horizon. what they learned about them came mostly from the natives, who had long memories for such frightening things and reckoned the time of other events from the years of great hurricanes. strangely enough, although during the more than four hundred years that have passed since then, man has finally mastered thermo-nuclear reactions capable of permanent destruction of whole islands, he still probes for the secret of storm forces of far greater power.
it is hard to say who was the first hunter of storms. columbus and his sailors were constantly on the lookout and actually saw several west indian hurricanes. luckily, they didn’t run into one on their first voyage, or the story of the discovery of america would be quite different, for the ships 8 sailed by columbus were not able to stand up against these big winds of the tropics. they would have been sunk in deep water or cast ashore as worthless wrecks.
if columbus had been lost in one of these monstrous storms—and he didn’t miss it by very much—it might have been many years before another navigator with a stout heart could have induced men to risk their lives in the uncharted winds of the far places in the atlantic ocean. out there toward the end of the world, where increasing gales dragged ships relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailors who ventured too far would drop off the edge of a flat earth and plunge screaming into eternity—so they thought. only in columbus’ mind was the earth a sphere.
by the time columbus had made his third voyage to the west indies, he had learned a good deal about hurricanes and how to keep out of them. he got this information by his own wits and from talking with the natives in the islands bordering the caribbean. they told him of storms much more powerful than any that were brewed in european waters. after listening to their tales, he was afraid of them. in 1494 he hid his fleet behind an island while a hurricane roared by. the next year, an unexpected one sank three of his vessels and the others took such a beating that he declared, “nothing but the service of god and the extension of the monarchy would induce me to expose myself to such dangers.”
in 1499, a spaniard named francisco bobadilla was appointed governor and judge of the colony on hispaniola (santo domingo). he sent false charges back to spain, accusing columbus of being unjust and often brutal in his treatment of the natives. columbus was ordered back to spain in chains. here he remained in disgrace until december, 1500. by that time the true nature of bobadilla’s treachery had become known.
9
by the spring of 1502, columbus had been vindicated and was on his way back to the west indies with four ships and 150 men. during his earlier voyages he had become deeply respectful of these big winds of the new world. when he arrived at san domingo on this last voyage, his observations made him suspect the approach of a hurricane. at the same time, a fleet carrying rich cargoes was instructed to take bobadilla back to spain. it was ready to depart. columbus asked for permission to shelter his squadron in the river and he sent a message, urging the fleet to put off its departure until the storm had passed.
bluntly, both of columbus’ requests were denied. he found a safe place in the lee of the island but the fleet carrying bobadilla departed in the face of the hurricane and all but one vessel went to the bottom. bobadilla went down with them, which seemed to be a fitting end for the scoundrel who had been guilty of hatching up false charges against columbus.
after the time of columbus, better ships were built and the fear of storms diminished. seafaring men today are likely to get the idea that modern ships of war and trade are immune to hurricanes. they have a brush or two with minor storms or escape the worst of a larger one and cease to be afraid of the big winds of the west indies. now and then this attitude leads to disaster.
in september, 1944, the weather bureau spotted a violent storm in the atlantic, northeast of puerto rico. it grew in fury and moved toward the atlantic coast of the united states. the forecasters called it the “great atlantic hurricane.” being usually conservative, weather bureau forecasters seldom use the word “great” when warning of hurricanes and when they do, it is time for everybody to be on guard. in this case, the casualties at sea included one destroyer, two coast guard cutters, a light vessel and a mine sweeper. this 10 should have been sufficient evidence of the power of the tropical storm to destroy modern warships, but just three months later a big typhoon caught the navy off guard in the pacific and proved the case beyond the slightest doubt.
typhoons are big tropical storms, just like west indian hurricanes. they form in the vast tropical waters of the pacific, develop tremendous power, and head for the philippines and china, sometimes going straight forward and sometimes turning toward japan before they reach the coast. like hurricanes, they are often preceded by beautiful weather, allaying the suspicions of the inexperienced until it is too late to escape from the indraft of the winds and the mountainous seas that precede their centers.
it was hard to keep track of typhoons in world war ii. in large areas of the pacific there are few islands to serve as observation posts for weathermen. before the war, merchantmen on voyages through this region had reported by radio when they saw signs of typhoons. but many of the weather-reporting vessels had been sent to the bottom by enemy torpedoes and the remainder had been ordered to silence their radios. thereafter, the only effective means of finding and tracking tropical storms was by aircraft, but reconnaissance by air had just begun in the atlantic and was not organized in the pacific until 1945.
late in 1944, our third fleet, said to be the most powerful sea force ever assembled, had drawn back from the battle of leyte to refuel. the japanese navy had received a fatal blow from the big fleet. nothing more terrible was reserved for the japanese except the atom bomb. far out in the pacific, a typhoon was brewing while valiant oil tankers waited five hundred miles east of luzon for the refueling operation so vitally needed by our warships after days of ranging the seas against the japs.
it was december 17 when the refueling began. by that 11 time, the winds and seas in the front of the typhoon were being felt in force. battleships, cruisers, destroyers and a host of other vessels rode big waves as the wind increased. the typhoon drew nearer and the smaller ships were bounced around so violently that it became impossible to maintain hose connections to the oilers. before nightfall, the refueling had stopped completely and the fleet was trying to run away from the typhoon.
it was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describe the desperate movements of a great battle fleet. messages flew back and forth, changing the ships’ courses as the wind changed. they ran toward the northwest, then toward the southwest, and finally due south, in a last effort to escape the central fury of the great typhoon. but all this did no good.
the lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such, top-heavy with armament and equipment and with little oil for ballast, began the struggle for life. each hour it seemed that the height of the storm had come, but it grew steadily worse. writhing slopes of vast waves dipped into canyon-like depths. the crests were like mountains. the wind came in awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour. the tops of the waves were torn off and hurled with the force of stone. ships were buried under hundreds of tons of water and emerged again, shuddering and rolling wildly.
on the eighteenth of december, one after another of the ships of the third fleet lost control and wallowed in the typhoon. time and again thousands of men faced death and escaped by something that seemed a miracle. there was no longer any visible separation between the sea and the atmosphere. only by the force with which the elements struck could the men aboard distinguish between wind-driven spume and hurtling water. steering control was lost; electric power and lights failed; lifeboats were torn loose; stacks 12 were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard; three destroyers rolled too far over and went to the bottom of the pacific.
altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck or blown into the sea and lost. cruisers and carriers suffered badly. battleships lost planes and gear. the surviving destroyers had been battered into helplessness. almost eight hundred men were dead or missing. as the typhoon subsided, the crippled third fleet canceled its plans to strike against the enemy on luzon and retreated to the nearest atoll harbor to survey its losses. more men had died and more damage had been done than in many engagements with the japanese navy.
a navy court of inquiry was summoned. it was said that this typhoon of 1944 was the granddaddy of all tropical storms. but a study of the records shows that it was just a full-grown typhoon. there have been thousands of hurricanes and typhoons like this one. down through the centuries, these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs across tropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles to grasp thousands of ships and send them to the bottom. pounding across populous coasts, with mountainous seas flooding the land, they have drowned hundreds of thousands of people, certainly more than a million in the last three centuries, and untold thousands before that.
after the typhoon disaster, the commander-in-chief of the pacific fleet declared that his officers would have to learn forthwith about the law of storms. really there was nothing new in that idea. it had been voiced by navigators of all maritime countries of the world from the earliest times. the so-called “law of storms” is merely the total existing knowledge about storms at sea—how to recognize the signs of their coming and how to avoid their destructive forces—and 13 it has taken four and a half centuries to develop our present understanding of hurricanes.
this experience of the third fleet made it plain that a sailing vessel had very little chance of survival in the central regions of a fully developed tropical storm. the only hope was that the master would see the signs of its coming and manage to keep out of it. once he became involved, the force of the wind was likely to be so great that his vessel soon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. the gales seemed to have unlimited power. even today, we don’t know accurately the speed of the strongest winds. it seems likely that the highest velocities are between two hundred and two hundred and fifty miles per hour. wind-measuring instruments are disabled or carried away and the towers or buildings which support them are blown down.
long after the time of columbus, it was generally believed that a storm was a large mass of air moving straight ahead at high velocities. a ship might be caught in these terrible winds and be carried along with them, to be dashed on shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. every mariner wanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangely enough, few wanted to avoid them altogether. if a sailing vessel circled around a storm, it took longer to get to the port of destination and how could the master explain the time lost to his bosses when he got home, if he had no record of a storm in the log book to account for the delay?
from this point of view, some of the things that happened seemed very strange. two or three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a sailing ship to be caught in a hurricane and scud for hours or days under bare poles in high winds and seas, and finally come to rest near the place where it first encountered the storm. a sailor on board would imagine he had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might 14 survive the wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashore near the place where he started!
up until about 1700 a.d., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be accounted for. for example, it was often claimed that “the storm came back.” after blowing in one direction with awful force until great damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that had not been destroyed in the first blow. to add to the mystery, many ships were never heard from again. they became involved in hurricanes and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind.
men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships and men that were never seen again. and yet it is amazing to find how near some of these men came to the right answer. there were seafaring men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a convincing manner. they were the buccaneers whose operations were centered in the caribbean sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. they were english, dutch, portuguese and french, all at one time or another opposed to spanish control in the carribbean. on various occasions they seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from which to prey on spanish shipping and settlements.
during these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. doubtless, there were many more not recorded. a great 15 number of vessels went down in the seas and harbors around st. kitts, martinique and jamaica, where the buccaneers sought haven from the spaniards.
one of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was william dampier. he was born in england in 1652, became an orphan at an early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he made a voyage to newfoundland. afterward, he sailed to the east indies and then fought in the dutch war in 1673. the next year he went to jamaica and became a buccaneer. soon he was familiar with the harbors, bays, inlets and other features of the carribbean coasts and islands. at times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the south american coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. eventually, they raided the mexican and californian coasts and crossed the pacific to guam, and then to the east indies.
at intervals, dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately took him over most of the world. but he died poor, just three years before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars’ worth of prize money.
being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the ability to put this in writing, dampier distinguished himself from the other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific facts in a clear and easy style. in his writings, we find our earliest good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good. among other things, he said of a typhoon in the china sea that “typhoons are a sort of violent whirlwinds.” he said they were preceded by fine, clear and serene weather, with light winds.
“before these whirlwinds come on,” wrote dampier, “there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward the upper part is a dull reddish color.” to him, this cloud was frightful and alarming. he 16 went on to say that it was sometimes seen twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. the tempest came with great violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. this lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.
these stories by dampier and others might have cleared up some of the mysteries of these furious storms, especially those that “turned around and came back.” they might have explained the fact that sailors were carried long distances and then cast ashore near the places from which they started—for they were huge whirlwinds, as dampier suspected—but nobody seemed to be able to put “two and two together” and prove it. for one thing, no one knew then that weather moves from place to place. everybody seemed to have a vague belief that the weather developed right at home and blew itself out without going anywhere. with these ideas in vogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there was no useful law of storms. but we can put william dampier down as one of the first “hurricane hunters.”
as cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grew in population, storm catastrophes became more numerous. now and then, a hurricane seemed to appear from nowhere and caused terrible destruction on land. new orleans was devastated in 1722 and again in 1723. charleston and other coastal cities were hit repeatedly. coringa, on the bay of bengal, was practically wiped out by a furious storm in december, 1789, and there was another disaster at the same place in 1839.
tropical storms that form in the bay of bengal and strike the populous coasts of india are known as cyclones. they are the same kind of storms as west indian hurricanes and the typhoons of the pacific. the worst feature is the overwhelming 17 flood of seawater that comes in big waves into the harbors as the center of the storm arrives. if there is insufficient warning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.
coringa is a coastal city of india which had a population of about 20,000 in 1789. in december, there was a strong wind, “seeming like a cyclone.” the tide rose to an unusual height and the wind increased to great fury from the northwest. the unfortunate inhabitants saw three huge waves coming in from the sea while the wind was blowing with its greatest violence. the first wave brought several feet of water into the city. all the able-bodied ran for higher ground or climbed to the rooftops to keep from drowning. the second wave flooded all the low parts of the city and the third overwhelmed everything and carried the buildings away. all the inhabitants, except about twenty, disappeared.
in cases of this kind, a warning less than an hour in advance would have saved the lives of thousands, but disasters like this were repeated here and in other parts of the world dozens of times before the hunters, trackers and forecasters of hurricanes learned to cheat these terrible storms of their toll of death and injury. progress was slow in the nineteenth century, which saw some of the world’s worst storm disasters. in 1881, three hundred thousand people died in one typhoon on the coast of china.
we now come to the stories of the men who tried to do something about it—the storm hunters. at first, early in the nineteenth century, the hunters were men engaged in some other work for a living. they put in their spare time gathering information, getting reports from sailors who had survived these terrible storms at sea and from landsmen who had seen them come roaring across harbors and beaches, to lay waste to the countryside. we go with some of them through these awful experiences. then, after the middle of the century, first under emperor napoleon iii of france and 18 later under president grant in america and queen victoria in england, storm hunting became a government job and spread slowly around the world.
here we see a bitter uphill battle. the hurricane proved to be an enormous whirlwind, hidden behind dense curtains of low-flying clouds, tremendous rains, and the thick spray of mountainous seas torn by earth-shaking forces of the monster. its mysteries were challenging. out of this work a warning system grew, and slowly the losses of life were reduced from thousands to hundreds, and then to dozens. we go with the storm hunters into congress and the white house, to argue about it. then we come to world war ii and the desperate need for information while submarines attack shipping and hurricanes threaten airfields and naval bases.
and here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flying into the centers of these furious storms. in these stories we go along. we see what the weather crews saw and learn what they learned. and we see how the hurricane warning service works today—far better than a few years ago—but with a part of the great mystery still unsolved. so we go with the hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface of the sea to the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for the final answers to this great puzzle of the centuries.
2. the saddler’s apprentice
“all violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds.” —redfield
in recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarming duty of flying into hurricanes and they began to study the old records, one question bothered them very much. why did it take so long to prove without doubt that these big tropical storms are whirlwinds? the main reason, of course, is the huge size of the wind circulation. the winds spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles. it was like the curvature of the earth. any circle around the full body of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat.
the crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see changes of the wind as they go along. they have no reason to question it. in earlier times, there was no means of travel fast enough to get the facts in this way. then, too, there was no means of sending messages 20 fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the same instant in different parts of the storm. also, the entire wind system was in motion and if the various reports were not sent at the same time, the results, when they were charted, failed to make sense. this fact alone was the cause of much confusion, even as late as the first part of the nineteenth century.
a definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenly and unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner.
in the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walking through the woods of central connecticut with his inquiring mind on scientific matters of the day when he discovered a strange fact that led to the first “law of storms” and eventually made him the most illustrious of the hurricane hunters. his name was william redfield. his ideas were first published in 1831 and, together with the work of a few men who followed on his trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormy weather for nearly a hundred years.
hurricanes were not only extremely dangerous to the sailing ships of that day but were becoming more destructive to the growing cities along the american coast. in the first quarter of the century, the population of the country doubled. in 1800, there were five million people. in spite of the war of 1812, which lasted for three years, and the temporary drop it caused in immigration, the population increased rapidly, mostly on and near the atlantic coast. the united states began to take a place in the forefront of the world’s commerce. but now and then a great storm from the tropics swept the entire seaboard and took a grievous toll of ships and men and harbor facilities.
up to that time, no one had learned enough about storms to give warnings in advance. there were no really useful rules to guide seamen around or out of a tropical storm. weather prediction was not accepted as scientific work. 21 storm disasters were called “acts of god” and the ways of the atmosphere were thought to be beyond human understanding.
occasionally, a mariner with an inquiring mind like dampier came to the conclusion that tropical storms are huge whirlwinds which move from place to place. but none of these inquirers came up with any real proof. after 1800, the destruction from hurricanes grew steadily worse. the summer of 1815 was remarkable for furious storms all along the atlantic coast. newspapers were filled with the details of storm disasters and the destruction of life and property on shore and at sea. the crowning catastrophe was caused by a furious west indian hurricane which struck new england on september 23 of that year. in the violence of its winds and the height of its tides, this storm was about equal to the new england hurricane of 1938. although the country was far less populous in 1815, and the buildings, ships, and wharves subjected to its fury were much less numerous than in 1938, the destruction was so great and the loss of life so heavy that the newspapers did not have space enough to give all the details of the marine disasters in this instance.
at providence, there was terrible destruction. the tide rose more than seven feet above the highest stage previously recorded. five hundred buildings were destroyed; the loss of life was never fully determined, but it was excessive. the same sort of tragic story came from new bedford and other towns on the coast. many buildings and a tremendous number of trees were blown down in the interior.
the most treacherous feature of these big storms was their resemblance in the initial stages to the ordinary “northeasters” which came at about the same time of year—late august or september—and blew fitfully for a day or two. they brought rain and high tides along the coast and finally died out without much damage. tropical storms, like the big one 22 in 1815, begin much the same way in new england, but suddenly become violent. then, as now, they blew gustily from the northeast in the beginning but went around the compass and ended with shattering on-shore gales which drove engulfing floods into the harbors. everybody was caught off guard.
this storm and another which came six years later in the same region set men to thinking seriously about ways to avoid these disasters. the violent hurricane of 1821 crossed long island and new england, leaving a path of destruction which lay somewhat to the westward of the hurricane path of 1815. again enormous numbers of trees were blown down, this time mostly in connecticut. and here is where we come to the story of the saddler’s apprentice.
in september, 1802, a sailor named peleg redfield, of middletown, connecticut, died, leaving a widow and six children in very poor circumstances. the eldest child, william, thirteen years of age, had attended common school and learned about reading, writing and arithmetic, but when his father died, he had to be taken out of school.
the next year william was apprenticed to a local saddle and harness maker. boys as well as men worked long hours in those days, and william redfield was no exception. after he had finished the day’s work and had done the chores around the redfield home, he had only a small part of his evening to himself. even then, he had a lot of discouragement—no books and no light to read by. the family could not afford candles. nevertheless, william was so interested in science that he studied by the light of the wood fire, reading intently anything on scientific subjects that he could get his hands on.
a year later, william’s mother married a widower with nine children of his own, and in 1806 the couple moved to ohio, taking his nine children and five of hers, but leaving 23 william behind to look out for himself. he continued his study of science, but with no indication that he would eventually find some of the answers so vitally needed in the fight against hurricanes. his father, being a sailor, had told him about storms at sea and the boy was unable to get this out of his mind.
fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in the village of middletown, william tully, who had a good library and made it available to young redfield. the first book the physician handed to william was a very difficult volume on physics. the boy brought it back so soon the doctor thought he had been unable to understand it, but he was pleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughly and had come back for more technical works of the time. soon william gained such an understanding of scientific matters that an intimate friendship with the physician developed. during this time, however, young redfield felt an increasing urge to visit his mother. but she lived more than seven hundred miles from middletown and he had very little money. so in 1810 he walked all the way to ohio.
at that time, ohio had a very small population; it was less than 50,000 at the beginning of the century. the territory intervening between ohio and connecticut was pretty wild, with settlements only here and there. william followed primitive roads and trails and at last reached the shores of lake erie, where cleveland and other cities stand today. the next year he walked back to connecticut.
redfield was now past twenty-one. he had thought deeply of many things while he trudged those lonely trails. he had a vision of a great railway extending from connecticut to the mississippi river. also, his mind kept running back over the stories of storms his father had told him. from his thoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed 24 a plan for a line of barges which operated between new york and albany.
but when he arrived in middletown, he had no course for the time being except to go into business in his trade of saddler and harness maker. to supplement his poor income, he peddled merchandise in the region around middletown, trudging through the woods and stopping in the villages here and there. the years went by and he kept on studying science in his spare moments.
and then, on the third of september, 1821, the center of that vicious hurricane which crossed the eastern part of connecticut brought its dire evidence to the very door of the man who was still trying to master the sciences in his spare moments. as redfield trudged the countryside with his wares, he passed among hundreds of big trees felled by the furious winds. near middletown, he found that the trees lay with their branches toward the northwest and he remembered that the gale there had begun from the southeast. less than seventy miles away, he found the trees lying with their heads toward the southeast and here the winds evidently had begun from the northwest.
making inquiries as he went along, redfield learned the directions from which the winds had blown at various times during the storm. it became quite clear that the hurricane had been a huge whirlwind which had traveled across the country from south to north. he gathered a lot of evidence to prove it.
but redfield was now past thirty years of age. because he had not gone very far in school, he did not see how he could undertake to demonstrate these facts about hurricanes to men of scientific learning. he kept turning the idea over in his mind at intervals as the months and years went by. in the meantime, he had become interested in navigation on the hudson river and had made a reputation as a marine 25 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, 26 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 27 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 28 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. 29 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 30 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 31 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.
