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

by Erik Larson

  Stockman devoted half his letter to the storm that had come through Cuba earlier that week. A perfect example.

  Nothing much had come of the storm, yet the Cubans had called the storm a cyclone ever since the first sighting in the final days of August. On Wednesday, September 5, Jover had actually called it a hurricane.

  Jover’s forecast had moved Stockman to add a few reassuring words to his own advisory: “No dangerous winds are indicated.”

  Any comparison of U.S. and Cuban forecasts regarding this latest storm, Stockman assured Dunwoody, “will show that the forecasts of this Bureau were verified in every particular; and that the conditions which obtained did not warrant the issuance of a forecast likely to cause any alarms whatsoever.”

  All in all, Stockman felt, it was an excellent letter: muscular, understated, full of detail. Eighteen pages, yes, but every word in those eighteen pages had value. Stockman sealed the letter.

  It was Friday, September 7, and from the look of the latest observations telegraphed from St. Kitts, Barbados, and the other West Indies stations, the weekend would be a peaceful one. The entire season had been peaceful. No hurricanes at all, other than the imaginary ones concocted by Jover and Gangoite. Any rational man could see the need for limiting the telegraphic flow of their reports.

  These people—they saw hurricanes in their sleep.

  FATHER GANGOITE REMAINED troubled by atmospheric signs that suggested the storm, while no longer a threat to Cuba, had undergone a dramatic transformation.

  He saw a large and persistent halo around the moon, which indicated the presence of the high, thin clouds first identified by Father Vines as signs of a hurricane. Gangoite was up at dawn the next day, composing a dispatch for La Lucha. He would have to deliver it by hand.

  “At day-break,” he wrote, “the sky was an intense red, cirrus clouds were moving from the W by N and NW by N, with a focus at these same points; these are clear indications that the storm had much more intensity and was better defined than when it crossed this island. It is, we think, central in Texas, probably at the WSW of San Antonio and northward of the city of Porfirio Diaz.”

  He could not resist tweaking the Americans and their mistaken belief that the storm would cross to the Atlantic, as if storms could behave one way, and one way only.

  “Now some articles have been written saying that the disturbance from the SE had moved by the first quadrant out over the Atlantic; we think however that we still have it in sight as it passes through the Gulf, and that it is at present in the 4th quadrant, between Abilene and Palestine.

  “Who is right?”

  PART III

  Spectacle

  OBSERVATION

  Saturday, September 8: Buford T. Morris, a real-estate agent who lived in Houston but spent weekends in Galveston at his house a few blocks from the wharf, happened to look out his bedroom window at first light.

  “The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl; gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Never had I seen such a beautiful sky.”

  GULF OF MEXICO

  The Pensacola

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING the Pensacola swung from her anchor in seas turned luminous by lightning and exploding rain. Each great swell seemed to bring the ship closer and closer to disintegration. Captain Simmons and his two guests, Menard and Carroll, held tight to rails and bulkheads, trying hard in the manner of the age not to show their fear. All night the ship’s steel beams howled like wolves. Wind keened among the deck rails and boom wires. To the first officer, it seemed as if the ship were caught at the convergence of two storms, a gale from the north and a hurricane from the east, that together produced a tornado. Menard agreed. Only a confluence of storms, he believed, could produce such intensity.

  Dawn brought little relief. Green swells walled the ship. At intervals visibility fell to zero. It was impossible to open one’s eyes against the horizontal rain.

  At 10:30 that morning, the anchor fractured. The ship’s bow pivoted from the oncoming seas like a horse pulled into a sudden turn.

  Captain Simmons ordered his crew to play out two hundred fathoms of nine-inch hawser from the stern, which together with the chain-cable still trailing from the bow had the effect of slowing the ship’s landward drift and stabilizing its motion. The thumping stopped, but the ship now rode parallel to the oncoming crests and slid deep into the troughs between waves, a deadly place.

  Simmons ordered a sounding and found the ship was in twenty fathoms of water, or 120 feet. He estimated its position at about 115 miles southeast of Galveston. The storm seemed to be shoving the Pensacola directly toward the city.

  If Simmons was right, then Galveston lay directly in the great storm’s path. It would arrive, he knew, without warning, and there was nothing he could do to sound the alarm.

  THE BEACH

  Delight

  AT DAWN SATURDAY two men stood on the beach, apparently out of sight of each other. One was Isaac Cline, who stood with his watch cupped in his palm, glancing from its face to the sea and back again. The other was his neighbor, Dr. Young. Both men had come to the beach for essentially the same reason.

  Dr. Young watched the waves attack the streetcar trestle, which through an act of supreme confidence had been built over the Gulf itself. Waves now crashed over the rails and exploded against the pilings in vertical geysers of arctic-white spray.

  Dr. Young stayed only a few moments. The sight was all the confirmation he needed. “I was certain then we were going to have a cyclone.” He walked into the city, and went directly to the Western Union office on the Strand, where he composed a telegram addressed to his wife, still aboard that Southern Pacific train from the west.

  It was a measure of the age that Dr. Young had such complete faith in Western Union’s ability to find his wife during the train’s brief stop in San Antonio.

  He asked her to wait in San Antonio until he sent word for her to continue to Galveston. “I told her that a great storm was on us.”

  Legend holds that the sea convinced Isaac of the same thing—that he raced back to the office, galvanized the station into a flurry of action, then sped back to the beach and warned everyone he saw to flee the city or retreat to the center of town. Later Isaac took personal credit for inciting six thousand people to leave the beach and its adjacent neighborhoods. If not for him, he claimed later, the death toll would have been far higher. Perhaps even double.

  But Isaac’s response, and that of his station, was in reality more ambivalent. A few hours after Isaac’s trip to the beach, the Alamo’s Captain Hix made his visit to the station—the visit in which he was told the coming storm was an innocuous “offspur” of one that had struck Florida. At about nine o’clock that morning, Theodore C. Bornkessell, Isaac’s printer, left work to go to his cottage in the city’s west end and passed the home of an acquaintance named E. F. Gerloff, who asked about the storm. Bornkessell replied there was nothing to worry about.

  John Blagden, the observer assigned to Galveston on temporary duty, reported spending much of Saturday answering telephone calls from worried civilians, but it is by no means clear that he conveyed to these callers any great sense of danger. He conceded, later, “The storm was more severe than we expected.”

  About midmorning, Isaac himself walked to the Strand and there told several wholesale merchants that he expected minor flooding. He advised them to raise their goods three feet off the ground.

  Many residents said the storm came utterly without warning. None had the slightest inkling that it might be a hurricane. One resident, Sarah Davis Hawley, noted that even as late as Saturday afternoon, despite the wind and unusually dark skies, “we weren’t at all apprehensive.” Another survivor, R. Wilbur Goodman, spent Saturday morning swimming and chatting with friends at the YMCA, and went home on what proved to be the last trolley of the day. The car was crowded, but “there was no talk of the storm.”

  Partly this was the fault of th
e Weather Bureau—its forecasters had failed to identify the storm as a hurricane and to recognize that it was not following the rules. The bureau’s West Indies service was so busy trying to downplay the danger and show up the Cubans that it apparently missed whatever signs the Cubans saw that convinced them the storm had suddenly become more violent. And Willis Moore’s obsession with control and public image guaranteed that no one in the Galveston office would even whisper the word hurricane without a formal authorization from Moore himself.

  It was also the fault, however, of the city’s newspapers and the editorial customs of the time. Certainly anyone who read that morning’s Galveston News could be forgiven for not taking the storm too seriously.

  At the turn of the century, newspaper editors expected readers to read everything and packed their pages tight with items that ranged in length from a single sentence to several full columns. They sprinkled news throughout each day’s edition with what late-twentieth-century readers would consider mindless abandon. Late-breaking stories got shoe-horned into whatever space happened to be available, because composers had neither the time nor the will to break apart existing plates of type. On Sunday, September 2, for example, a reporter told in extraordinary detail the story of a well-dressed young man beheaded by a switch locomotive in a freak accident on Galveston’s wharf—how the head had disappeared, and no one knew the man’s identity. The reporter even gave readers the color of the dead man’s underwear. Later that night, at about 3:00 A.M., police found the man’s head (it had been deposited atop an axle housing, hat still in place) and soon afterward identified the victim as an engineer off the steamship Michigan who somehow had stumbled in front of the locomotive. The editors ran both stories, four pages apart.

  In fact, Saturday’s edition of the News was a gold mine of weather information, in the sense that fragments of the story were lodged throughout the paper like nuggets on an abandoned claim. Nearly everyone in Galveston read the News that morning. They found the first weather story on page 2—a report about a storm that had struck the Florida coast. The second item was only one sentence long and appeared on page 3, describing how the same storm was “raging” along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts as of 12:45 A.M. Saturday, the time at which the dispatch was filed.

  On another page, the newspaper published the routine daily weather forecast out of Washington:

  “For western Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Indian territory: Local rains Saturday and Sunday; variable winds.

  “For eastern Texas: Rain Saturday, with high northerly winds; Sunday rain, followed by clearing.”

  The most substantial story appeared on page 10 and reported that the Weather Bureau now believed the tropical storm in the Gulf “instead of moving north, had changed its course,” and was moving toward the northwest. “The early indications were that the storm would probably strike land somewhere east of Texas, and make its way across land westwardly.” The report downplayed the storm. “The weather bureau officials did not anticipate any dangerous disturbance, although they were not in a position to judge just what degree the storm may reach or develop when it strikes Texas.”

  Early Saturday morning, apparently just before deadline, someone at the paper added a paragraph to this story, seeking to pack the paper with the freshest news possible. “At midnight the moon was shining brightly and the sky was not as threatening as earlier in the night. The weather bureau had no late advices as to the storm’s movements and it may be that the tropical disturbance has changed its course or spent its force before reaching Texas.”

  There was other news, of course. The Galveston News, like most papers of the day, gave extensive coverage to foreign events. On Saturday, the Boxer Rebellion in China dominated the front page. But the News also covered the most insignificant stories. It reported the newest arrivals at the Hotel Grand and the Tremont Hotel, and the general comings and goings of Galveston’s citizens. Saturday’s paper noted, for example, that a boy named Louis Becker had left town on Friday to attend school in Carthage, Missouri. The Reverend W. N. Scott of the First Presbyterian Church returned on Friday from a summer away in cooler Virginia. And W. L. Norwood departed Friday night for Buffalo to attend the National Association of Undertakers and Embalmers convention set to begin on September 11. He took his wife and his young daughter along.

  In just a few hours, these reports of Friday’s arrivals and departures would take on an entirely different cast, and be seen instead as stories of miraculous escape and tragic bad timing.

  If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far. “Galveston has cause to feel proud in having grown 30 percent in ten years,” the News reported. “That is a good record to start out with on the new decade, when the prospects are bright even to surpass it.”

  AT THE COMPETING Galveston Tribune, editor Clarence Ousley spent Saturday morning writing his editorials for the Sunday edition. He looked out the window at the harsh sky. Patches of blue still showed, but mostly he saw clouds as black and low as any he had ever seen. The storm seemed a good subject for comment. Off and on that morning he had called home for reports from his family on the condition of the surf, which his wife and children could watch from the windows of the second floor. It was very exciting—storms always were—but he did not think this one would be terribly different from any other.

  “There have been high waters before, when the effect was mainly discomfort and the destruction of fences,” he typed. No flood could ever exceed the high-water marks already noted on landmarks around town, he argued. “Physical geographers”—mainly Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury—“argue plausibly, with the support of experience, that the high-water records have been the maximum of possibility because the beach at Galveston slopes so gently to the ocean depths that destructive waves will be broken and their force dissipated before reaching the shore.”

  He struck a reassuring note: “An inundation might be wasteful and damaging, to be sure, but there is no possibility of serious loss of life.”

  The Tribune never published the editorial. The storm flooded the presses. Many decades later, Ousley’s daughter Angie would describe the flooding as an event “which did much to preserve my father’s reputation for editorial profundity.”

  CHILDREN FOUND THE storm nothing but delightful. Henry C. Cortes of Houston was eight years old when he came to Galveston on Saturday, September 8. Early that morning his father made the impulsive decision to take the family to visit Grandmother Cortes on her birthday. Henry dressed for the day in high-laced black boots, black cotton stockings with elastic black garters, white starched linen pants that ended just below the knees, a sailor-style blouse, and a stiff hat known as a straw katy. The trip took ninety minutes. Immediately after Henry and his family left the station, they got slapped by a powerful gust of wind that lifted Henry’s hat off his head. It disappeared forever. When he reached his grandmother’s house around lunchtime he found the yard under two and a half feet of water. “Even so,” he said, “the neighboring kids were out playing in washtubs or homemade rafts.”

  Throughout the city, children danced in the waters, built rafts, teased pets into leaping off porches. They converged on the beach. The surf rocketing into the sky off the streetcar trestle was easily as good as a fireworks display. That morning Mrs. Charles Vidor got a call from her cousin, excitedly telling her of the marvelous sights and urging her to bring her son down for a look. The boy had the lofty name of King. Later, after he had become one of Hollywood’s most important directors, King Vidor wrote a fictional account of a hurricane for Esquire magazine grounded on his experience in Galveston. “I remember now that it seemed as if we were
in a bowl looking up toward the level of the sea. As we stood there in the sandy street, my mother and I, I wanted to take my mother’s hand and hurry her away. I felt as if the sea was going to break over the edge of the bowl and come pouring down upon us.”

  LOUISE HOPKINS WAS just seven years old, and found double delight in Saturday morning. It had been such a hard week. School had started. Having just turned seven, she had become eligible for first grade, a prospect that had excited her no end but also gave her nightmares and made sleeping next to impossible. Not that anyone could ever sleep well with all that heat and the huge mosquitoes that blew in through the open windows in clouds as thick as dust. The first day of school had been the worst of all. “I left home, nervously holding the hand of my big sister, my brand new lunch basket and a second-hand first-grade reader in the other.” But now that particular nightmare was behind her. It was Saturday. No school. The weekend. And what a weekend it was shaping up to be. There was the delicious threat of a storm. The wind was up. Best of all, the air was cool—almost chilly. It felt so good after the long, murderously hot summer. She had heard talk from her mother and from the medical students who boarded at her house of children in other places who had actually died from the heat.

  Rain threatened. She raced to her closet and threw on her “Saturday” dress—the one that could become dirty without bringing down buckets of trouble. From her porch she bellowed for her best-ever friend, Martha, across the street, and soon, like magic, Martha did emerge, clothed in her own rough-time dress. Louise’s mother emerged too, scowling, shushing Louise lest her shrieking wake the herd of young doctors who had just moved in upstairs for the start of the new year of medical school.