Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

  Storm accounts got more and more detailed, kindling the imaginations of countless landlocked boys and providing the first scientific insight into the unique character of hurricanes. One of the most compelling writers of the seventeenth century was William Dampier, an Englishman who split his time between adventuring with buccaneers and patiently recording the natural phenomena he encountered on his far-flung voyages. Isaac considered him one of the great pioneers of meteorology. It was Dampier who gave the world its first detailed description of the lurid atmospheric colors that preceded such storms—the “brick-dust sky” that Isaac looked for but did not find as he scanned the Gulf horizon.

  In 1703 a storm of great power and endurance brought the realities of cyclones to the heart of London itself. In giving England the worst storm of her history, it also advanced the literary career of Daniel Defoe, a forty-three-year-old editor and journalist with a taste for disaster. He knew a good thing when he saw it.

  FOR TWO WEEKS in November 1703, a pod of strong gales paralyzed shipping off the coast of England. Outbound ships had to remain in port; inbound ships had to stay at sea. On Wednesday, November 24, the winds abated; by Thursday, hundreds of ships, including a contingent of Russian warships under ceremonial escort by the British man-of-war Reserve, began to move in a slow and graceful waltz over the rough “old seas” left behind by the storms.

  The Reserve put in off Yarmouth. Her captain, convinced the worst was over, went ashore with his ship’s surgeon and clerk to buy provisions. In Deal, a small town overlooking the treacherous Goodwin Sands near Dover, Mayor Thomas Powell spent the day at his full-time job as “slopseller,” peddling supplies for seamen. In Plymouth, Henry Winstanley and a crew of workmen set out from the Barbican Steps on a fourteen-mile sail to Winstanley’s controversial Eddystone Light to repair its failed beacon. His critics had charged the lighthouse was unsafe, to which Winstanley responded that his one wish was to be inside the structure during “the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of heaven”—one of those moments in history that begged for a burst of ominous music.

  BY NOW BAROMETERS could be found not just in the possession of mariners and scientists, but also in some private homes. Scientists understood too that foul weather tended to be accompanied by falling barometric pressure, although why this should be the case remained a mystery. Late on Friday, November 26, the barometer owners of England saw the level of mercury begin to fall, then plummet.

  The storm struck with such ferocity that Queen Anne was escorted into the basement of the Palace of St. James and there deposited in a wine cellar. Wind stripped the roof off Westminster Abbey and demolished over four hundred windmills, in some cases turning their mill sails so fast that friction set the buildings on fire. The wind hurled roof tiles like cannon shot.

  The storm destroyed seven hundred vessels on the Thames within London, jumbling them into great piles of debris, bowsprits impaling stern cabins. A tangle of rigging and tackle lay over all as if a giant spiderweb had settled upon the wreckage. Along the Severn River, storm waters breached seawalls and drowned fifteen thousand sheep. Salt spray turned leaves white. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the naturalist, wrote how at eight the next morning, “I cast my eye upon my barometer, and observ’d, that I had never seen the quick-silver so low.”

  On land, only 128 people died, many killed by the collapse of fireplace chimneys.

  At sea the story was different. If not for the clamor of wind and surf, what one would have heard that night up and down the coast of England was the thin cry of doomed men, stranded or adrift, many hanging from the tops of masts that now protruded only a few feet from the sea.

  Off Plymouth something happened that most men would have dismissed as impossible. If one could count on anything in Defoe’s time, as in Isaac’s, it was a lighthouse.

  UNTIL SHORTLY AFTER midnight, Friday night, residents along the distant mainland saw the reassuring beaconflash of the Eddystone Light. It proved that Henry Winstanley had succeeded in repairing the lamp despite the hurricane that must have welled up even as the work got under way.

  After midnight, the light ceased to shine. When rescuers at last reached the lighthouse, or rather, the rock on which it had been built, they found nothing. The storm had scoured the light from the face of the earth. Only the barest trace of timber and masonry marked that anything at all had stood there, let alone a lighthouse.

  Farther along the coast, several ships ran aground on the Goodwin Sands. Survivors hung in the upper masts and rigging of their ships until the tide receded, then climbed down to the now-exposed sands to await rescue, certain that the town they saw through the spindrift soon would send help.

  The residents of Deal were aware of the sailors’ plight. Some watched the stranded men through telescopes. “It must have been a sad spectacle,” Defoe wrote, “to behold the poor seamen walking to and fro upon the sands, to view their postures and the signals they made for help, which, by the assistance of glasses, was easily seen from the shore.”

  Boats did set out from Deal, but not for rescue. Their occupants ignored the doomed men and instead probed the floating debris for valuable salvage. The men on the sands were fathers, husbands, lovers, and sons, “but nobody concerned themselves for the lives of those miserable creatures.”

  When Mayor Powell learned of his town’s behavior, he was appalled. He pleaded with the local customs house to deploy its boats for rescue, but the official in charge refused. Powell tried to raise his own corps of rescuers, offering five shillings for every sailor saved. With the help of a few volunteers Powell seized the customs boat and by his example convinced some of the salvage crews to help. The rescuers saved two hundred men but could not return in time to save the many others still stranded when the tide returned.

  In all, the great English cyclone of 1703 killed over eight thousand seamen aboard hundreds of ships. One victim was the man-of-war Reserve. As the storm intensified, her captain, surgeon, and clerk raced back to the wharf in Yarmouth, where all they could do was stand and watch as the seas consumed the ship and all aboard.

  Men understood the hazards of hurricanes, but the fundamental engines that drove such weather continued to elude them. Where did wind come from? And what gave it such power?

  By the early eighteenth century important pieces of the puzzle were in place. Air pressure could be measured, even at sea. Temperature scales at last allowed precise comparisons of hot and cold.

  The most important piece, however, lay unrecognized, even though the underlying principle had been proven long before.

  IN 1627, A very brave if melodramatic German mathematician, Joseph Furtenbach, aimed a loaded cannon into the sky in preparation for an experiment he hoped would provide the first real-world test of another of Galileo’s theories: that the earth rotated on a fixed axis. This was high-wire science. If Galileo was right—and Furtenbach fervently hoped he was—a cannon ball fired straight into the sky would fall back to earth somewhere to the west of the cannon, while the earth’s rotation carried Furtenbach safely east. If Galileo was wrong, the ball would fall to earth exactly at the point where it rose from the cannon, and Furtenbach would be dead.

  He fired the cannon. As the ball soared into the sky, he hurried to the muzzle and sat on it. Skeptics in the audience no doubt stepped back a respectful distance, wary not only of the descending ball but also of the likely splash of viscera. How the seconds must have dragged as that ball whined into its descent, the smile on Furtenbach’s face growing fixed, the more squeamish members of the audience raising their hands to cover their eyes but peeking of course through the latticework of fingers.…

  Thwump.

  Silence.

  Furtenbach slid from the muzzle, his head and smile intact. To the west—a small crater. Proof at last. The earth did spin.

  It was Edmund Halley, of comet fame, who recognized that this rotation might have a powerful effect on the earth’s weather. Seeking to explain the trade winds, Halley argued that the
sun’s rays fell most consistently upon the equator. As the sun moved over the earth, it caused successive parcels of air to rise. Other, cooler air rushed in to fill the space and followed the sun around the globe in a steady rush of wind.

  A compelling theory, but it had a significant hole: It could not explain why the prevailing easterlies of the trade belt suddenly gave way north of the Horse Latitudes to winds blowing in exactly the opposite direction.

  What Halley failed to take into account was the shape of the earth: the fact that the world moves more slowly in New York City—although no New Yorker would ever concede it—than in Key West. In 1735, George Hadley, often confused with Halley, crafted an explanation of the trades that was so compellingly simple it remained the accepted theory even through Isaac Cline’s Saturday.

  HADLEY RECOGNIZED THAT an object anchored near the north pole and another near the equator traveled through space at different speeds: Both objects, being attached to the same planet, had to complete one rotation within the same period of time, but the object at the equator had to cover a much greater distance and therefore had to move a lot faster. The air at each location, Hadley saw, also moved at these differing velocities.

  He agreed with Halley that as the sun heated the equator, it caused air to rise, and cooler air flowed in to take its place. But Hadley proposed that the cool replacement air would retain its polar velocity. The farther south it went, the slower it would seem to travel relative to the ground below. Anyone encountering this slow-moving mass of air would experience it as a wind that veered to the right of its direction, or toward the west. These were the trade winds.

  Conversely, Hadley saw, air migrating north would seem to accelerate relative to the ground. As it cooled, it would descend but retain its faster equatorial speed. Observers on the ground would perceive this as a wind blowing toward the east, or veering to the right of its northward course. This wind, Hadley argued, produced the steady breeze north of the Horse Latitudes that blew the explorers back home.

  A century later, a French mathematician, Gaspard Coriolis, worked out the mathematics of all this, to prove that any object moving over the northern hemisphere would seem to veer to the right, while any object moving over the southern hemisphere would appear to veer left. Isaac, in his 1891 talk to the Galveston YMCA, gave a cruelly detailed explanation of the Coriolis effect. The crowd listened with iron concentration. “… At latitude 30 degrees the velocity of the earth eastward is 897 miles per hour, and at 45 degrees it is 732 miles per hour, or 165 miles less. Now, if a mass of air in a quiescent state were transferred instantly from the thirtieth parallel to the forty-fifth parallel it would be found to have a relative motion eastward of 165 miles per hour greater than that of the parallel arrived at, and if it had been transferred from 45 degrees to 30 degrees, with the motion which it had at 45, it would be 165 miles slower than the earth at the thirtieth parallel, and this would give a relative velocity westward of 165 miles per hour.”

  A twentieth-century audience would have shot Isaac dead.

  HADLEY’S THEORY DID little to advance man’s immediate understanding of storms in general and hurricanes in particular. Meanwhile, the danger grew. Ship traffic increased. Nations deployed battle squadrons to protect their interests. No single period highlighted the threat to national defense more than the wild hurricane season of 1780, during which three intense hurricanes scoured the Caribbean in a period of two weeks and impartially ravaged the forces of France, Spain, and Britain, even as these nations harried one another in the war-convulsed seas of the Americas.

  The first hurricane arrived October 3 and leveled the Jamaican town of Savanna-la-Mar, and in the process overtook scores of British warships. Hundreds of seamen simply vanished. “Who can attempt to describe the appearance of things upon deck?” wrote Lt. Benjamin Archer, who survived the foundering of the forty-four-gun Phoenix. “If I was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of it—a total darkness all above; the sea on fire, running as it were in Alps, or Peaks of Teneriffe; (mountains are too common an idea;) the wind roaring louder than thunder (absolutely no flight of imagination,) the whole made more terrible, if possible, by a very uncommon kind of blue lightning.”

  The second hurricane, called simply the Great Hurricane, struck Barbados on October 10 and 11, killing 4,326 people on that island alone. The toll throughout the Indies reached 22,000. Britain’s Sir George Rodney, deeply shaken by the disaster, described what remained of Barbados: “The most beautiful island in the world has the appearance of a country laid waste by fire, and sword, and appears to the imagination more dreadful than it is possible for me to find words to express.”

  The storm lurched into French territory next and sank at least forty ships in a French convoy off Martinique, with a loss of five thousand soldiers.

  The third hurricane struck just as Spain’s Admiral Don Jose Solano was leading a force of six dozen ships and four thousand soldiers for a surprise attack against the British at Pensacola. The storm so damaged and dispersed the fleet, the admiral called off the attack. In keeping with the early custom of naming storms after prominent victims, the hurricane became known as Solano’s Storm.

  Together the three hurricanes did so much damage to Britain’s Caribbean forces that the Admiralty canceled a secret plan to seize Puerto Rico from the Spanish.

  No navy could have made such short work of the military might of the world’s greatest powers. Clearly hurricanes posed a greater menace than any single nation’s forces. But what could one do? Captains could not even measure the velocity of the winds they encountered, for no effective means existed of measuring wind from a rolling, heaving ship. Sir Francis Beaufort tried to solve that problem by devising a wind scale that allowed mariners to gauge the intensity of wind by the look of seas and sails. Force 0 meant winds so light a ship could not move. Force 12 was a hurricane, when no sail could be exposed. Beaufort’s intent was to bring uniformity, and with it comparability, to weather observations made at sea. His scale included no actual wind velocities—these were added much later. The first captain to use the scale in an official log did so on December 22, 1831, the first day of a voyage of exploration. The captain was Robert Fitzroy; his ship’s company included a naturalist named Darwin.

  Hurricanes, once such a surprise to Columbus, became lodged firmly in the public psyche as just another hazard of venturing upon the sea—acts of God, still, and against which one could do nothing. With tragic regularity, captains sailed their ships right into the worst storms that ever danced upon the earth. Seamen resigned themselves to the inevitability of hurricanes and prayed they would never have to experience their full fury. But others were not so willing to surrender. They began an earnest search for the elusive “Law of Storms,” the physical code that scientists hoped would help mariners predict and avoid—perhaps even profit from—the hurricanes and typhoons that so threatened the welfare of nations.

  A hurricane set the hunt in motion.

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1821, a hurricane moving up the coast from Cape Fear made landfall near New York City, and continued north well into New England. Soon after the storm a thirty-two-year-old saddler named William Redfield, son of a long-dead sailor, took a trip on horseback through Connecticut and happened to notice something unusual in the landscape around him. Near Canaan, in northernmost Connecticut, the trees had fallen in a direction exactly opposite that of the toppled trees he had seen farther south.

  After his return home, Redfield made a careful study of the hurricane. He collected fragments of detail about the storm from newspapers, letters, ships’ logs, and other sources, and in the process became the first man to track a hurricane from first sighting to last. His interest expanded to include other hurricanes, which he pursued with equal zeal. His first paper, “On the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast,” appeared in 1831 in the American Journal of Science, and quickly became a classic of meteorology. He concluded there could be only one explanation for the changing pattern of damage he h
ad encountered: “This storm was exhibited in the form of a great whirlwind.”

  Redfield’s meticulous research caught the attention of a British naval officer, Lt. Col. William Reid, who had been dispatched by King William IV to Barbados to supervise the reconstruction of British interests there in the wake of yet another disastrous hurricane, this the great “Barbados-to-Louisiana Hurricane” of 1831, which killed over fifteen hundred people. Reid too became obsessed with hurricanes. After his return to England, he adopted Redfield’s tracking techniques and in turn ignited the storm-watching passions of a countryman, Henry Piddington, who applied the same techniques to the unfathomably deadly storms of the Bay of Bengal. It was Piddington who coined the word cyclone, from the Greek for “coils of a snake,” and it was his research that resonated most darkly within Isaac Cline on Saturday, September 8, 1900.

  Piddington reconstructed a cyclone that struck the bay town of Coringa in December 1789. “The unfortunate inhabitants of Coringa saw with terror three monstrous waves coming in from the sea, and following each other at short distances. The first, sweeping everything in its passage, brought several feet of water into the town. The second augmented these ravages by inundating all the low country, and the third overwhelmed everything.” The three waves killed at least twenty thousand people, although the final toll was beyond tally. “The sea in retiring left heaps of sand and mud, which rendered all search for the property or bodies impossible.”

  Isaac read Piddington’s work. It would come back to him years later on the beach at Galveston. “I had studied the meagre information available relative to tropical cyclones,” Isaac wrote. “I had read of the Calcutta cyclone, October 5, 1864, which caused a storm tide 16 feet deep over the delta of the Ganges and drowned 40,000 persons, and the Backergunge cyclone of October 31, 1876, which caused an unprecedented storm tide ranging in depth from 10 feet to nearly 50 feet over the eastern edge of the delta of the Ganges, and drowned at the lowest estimates 100,000 persons.” At that point, however, he was only thinking in terms of waves. He still had no appreciation of how similar the undersea landscape, or bathymetry, of Galveston Bay was to that of the Bay of Bengal. That would come later.