by Al Roker
With wind direction now turning in a circular pattern that was unhappily familiar to Captain Halsey, the rain-battered ship continued on its sickening roll.
Then there were the barometer readings. Entering the gulf on Wednesday, Halsey had taken a reading of 29.87 inches: quite normal. Thursday night, the pressure had started falling; now, early Friday morning, the reading was 29.60.
Each tenth of an inch represents a drastic difference in barometric pressure. Halsey’s barometer had dropped nearly three. The greater the speed of the drop, the greater the violence of the weather. This three-point drop had occurred overnight. Readings below what Halsey was getting now were considered anomalous in 1900, signs of great disturbance, and yet his barometer kept falling.
Where they were heading, the lack of pressure must be otherworldly. Chaos must rule.
So Halsey now knew exactly what was happening. He’d steamed directly into the middle of something that he was probably the first U.S. citizen to call by its real name: a hurricane.
Here at sea, hundreds of miles southeast of Galveston, the crew and passengers of the Louisiana were about to experience, more than a full day in advance, what people in the island city still had no idea lay in store for them.
Captain Halsey could not be rattled. That’s in spite of the fact that at 10:00 A.M., while his ship pitched and surfed through the storm, he took another barometer reading and saw that it had dropped to 29.25. That was low pressure of a new order, and it represented a shocking plummet. Only four hours had passed since the previous reading.
At 1:00 A.M., the Louisiana was in the midst of the hurricane. Halsey assessed the winds shaking his great steamship like a toy boat, making it shudder all over as it strained up and down the huge waves. The wind speed, he thought, must have reached 150 miles per hour.
Worse, there was now no single wind direction. The blast shifted crazily from one direction to another, seeming to come from all points on the compass at once, driving sheets of rain against the craft’s steel walls.
Nobody knew how long a ship like this could hold out against such punishment. The bow shot upward against each monstrous wave. The ship hung, then the bow crashed back down. Wave after wave washed across the deck, submerging it.
Then, just as the bow was again diving into an alley between two mountains of water, a wave slammed the ship from behind. The entire steamship went underwater, all at once.
But the ship emerged. And it kept going. Another huge wave, slamming the ship on one side, poured ocean into the ventilators, flooding the engine room. Still, Captain Halsey kept steaming. There was nothing else to do now.
For three hours, Halsey’s crew kept fighting the hurricane. Anyone glancing at the barometer that afternoon would have looked twice. It reached 28.75. In 1900, many meteorologists would have questioned the veracity of such a reading. Moving through a chaotic realm of elemental violence that most people will never see, Halsey just kept going.
When he brought the Louisiana into port at Key West, the storm had finally begun to move on. The cargo had shifted, putting it mildly; Halsey’s ship was in need of attention. But all hands and passengers were fine. The Louisiana soon steamed on to New York.
Days later, pressed by eager New York reporters, Captain Halsey wouldn’t admit that the storm was the worst he’d ever seen. By then everybody knew that it was. For by then the storm was world famous.
Captain Halsey’s voyage into the storm began on Wednesday, September 5. The same day, the Galveston Daily News ran a tiny, twenty-seven-word squib in its weather section.
Buried in a flurry of small print, unorganized headings, and advertising typical of the crammed broadsheets of the day, this notice was datelined “Washington, D.C.,” the previous day, with Isaac Cline’s Galveston station cited as the “observer.”
Washington’s notice in the Galveston paper advised readers of what it called a tropical disturbance in Cuba. The disturbance was moving northward over western Cuba, the notice told readers, and it was eastbound, heading for the south Florida coast.
In other words, it wasn’t a hurricane. And it was heading away from Galveston.
The notice was simply signed “Moore.” That was Willis Moore, director of the Weather Bureau and Isaac Cline’s boss. When he filed that entirely erroneous notice regarding the track of a disturbance coming out of Cuba, Willis Moore was already deeply and strangely involved in what was about to happen to Galveston.
Accurate long-range tracking of hurricanes was hard to come by in 1900, of course. Still, Director Willis Moore’s notice from the Weather Bureau in Washington, placed in the Galveston paper on the fifth, was so exactly wrong, about both the nature of the storm and the storm’s direction, that it seems to suggest that both meteorology and international communications remained in a primitive state. Nobody, one might assume, ever knew anything in advance about a hurricane’s strength or track.
But that’s far from the truth. As early as Sunday, September 3, the storm was under the observation of meteorologists in Cuba. They were perhaps the best in the world—especially when it came to assessing and predicting the tracks of hurricanes.
The storm had grown by then into an unmistakably violent one. The Cuban forecasters knew it was a hurricane and which way it was really heading. And the United States and Cuba were intimately connected.
So how could the U.S. Weather Bureau have lacked good information about the real nature of this storm that it was blithely calling only a tropical disturbance? Or about that storm’s likely track toward the Texas mainland? Why, as late as September 5, was the bureau advising people that a mere disturbance was heading away from the Texas mainland?
The grim answer to those questions has to do with a highly problematic relationship between the United States and Cuba. It reflects the overwhelming self-confidence of the men of the U.S. Weather Bureau. And it throws strange light on the career of the man who signed that notice in the Galveston Daily News: Isaac Cline’s boss, the U.S. Weather Bureau chief, Willis Moore.
As it approached Cuba, the storm that had begun off the Cape Verde Islands and then grew in a fold created by two opposing winds had changed dramatically.
Days earlier, far eastward, two ships’ captains had noted in their logs the unexciting presence of a tropical wave at sea. Yet probably by the time it entered the Caribbean Sea on August 30—crashing with thunder, jagged with lightning, and blowing with force—and certainly by the time it dumped heavy rain on the island of Antigua on September 2, this storm was no longer a single storm. It had grown into a group of storms, tangled up with one another. It was now what meteorologists call a tropical depression.
A tropical wave is unorganized. Its zone of low pressure travels on east-to-west winds across the ocean. It can be dissipated by other forces.
A tropical depression, by contrast, is a well-organized system of storms, circling around a central point. Much less susceptible to being broken up—since it’s a revolving circle, resisting entry—a depression fosters low pressure in its center, and it grows rather than dissipates.
Caught up in one another, unable to let go, the multiple storms that made up this depression weren’t like those afternoon storms that arise daily in the summer on the African grasslands. They draw moisture from the earth and then release it all back as rain on that same ground. This storm system, by contrast, was drawing energy from a variety of places all at once—hot air from the sea, the winds at its back, the winds it was creating—and it was dispersing energy—buckets of rain, claps of noise, jagged lightning—in many directions. On the move for many days, it wasn’t about to stop now.
The system’s rotation was counterclockwise. It was twirling in response to the rotation of the Earth. Thanks to centrifugal force, any object may veer to the left or right when traveling across a spinning surface, and in this case the object was a storm system; the spinning surface was that of the Earth, including the Earth’s atmosphere. On the upper half of our globe, the Northern Hemisphere, ob
jects responding to the Earth’s rotation—when few other factors are in play—tend to turn counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, they tend to turn clockwise.
So it was that this tropical depression came circling into the sky above the Caribbean. It brought hard winds, torrential rain, and thunder and lightning. A depression like this is only the weakest of three kinds of tropical cyclone. The next strongest we call a tropical storm.
After that: hurricane.
On September 3, Antiguans came outside. The drenching storm system had passed. High winds had died. The air grew still but did not clear and dry out.
A heavy, still humidity prevailed. That’s one effect of the passage of a tropical depression.
Then, in Jamaica, miles of railway roadbed were washed out.
The storm marched on. Next in its path: Cuba.
And as it came toward Cuba, the storm was confronted by Father Lorenzo Gangoite, a Jesuit priest. Father Gangoite, one of Cuba’s great weathermen, knew exactly what he was seeing. Soon he would know exactly where the storm was heading. He would try to give urgent warning to the Gulf Coast of the United States.
But Willis Moore of the U.S. Weather Bureau disdained the Cuban priest and his ilk. In that emotion lay the seeds of a disaster for Galveston that now lay only days away.
As the head of the Belen Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory in Havana, Father Gangoite knew pretty much all there was to know about how tropical depressions develop into hurricanes. And when this depression hit the southwest coast of Cuba on September 3, 1900, he had a lot riding on his observations of it, and on what he could predict it might do. Gangoite hadn’t yet shown he could nail such a prediction. He’d only taken over the observatory in 1893, and he had big shoes to fill.
In Cuba, the science of meteorology had been brought to a fine point by Gangoite’s predecessor, Father Benito Viñes.
Meteorology, like much other science in Cuba, was the province of Jesuit priests. They’d developed an advanced body of knowledge and interpretation regarding bad weather. The Belen Observatory, founded by Father Viñes in Havana in 1858, was an extension of a Jesuit preparatory school, itself founded only four years earlier. At both the school and the observatory, Cuban priests under Father Viñes carried on the long Jesuitical tradition of inquiry, experimentation, publishing, and teaching.
There couldn’t have been a better place from which to study and learn to forecast bad weather than the city of Havana. Its tropical vegetation, wrought-iron balconies, and painted stucco houses and porches were routinely subjected to violent downpours and torrents of destructive wind. One year, a hurricane removed the observatory’s entire zinc roof.
Meteorology had thus became one of Cuba’s most important sciences. The Jesuit observatory was perhaps the most advanced in the world. Father Viñes enjoyed celebrity for the amazing accuracy of his predictions.
Like Isaac Cline in Texas, Father Viñes in Cuba hoped not only to advance meteorological science but also to aid the progress of humankind. He soon made the small Havana observatory the hub of a forecasting network for the entire Caribbean Sea. He started a storm notebook full of descriptions of clouds, cross-referenced to instrument readings. He jotted down snippets of conversations with ship captains. He brought in telegraph reports and newspaper clippings.
From these data, Viñes created a system for understanding storm formation and making predictions. He published it all in newspapers so that ordinary people could understand and respond.
But his real genius lay in interpreting the meaning of clouds and how they related to hurricanes. Cirrostratus clouds are high and gauzy and are composed of ice crystals. They give a kind of cover through which a haloed moon may be seen or from which hazy sunshine emanates. Viñes realized hurricanes tend to produce these cirrostratus clouds—but only on the outer edges of a system. He therefore began to suspect that those clouds are created by winds flowing off a hurricane system miles high.
So if you were to see cirrostratus clouds in the tropics, Father Viñes deduced, you might really be seeing the farthest outer edge of a hurricane, which you wouldn’t otherwise have any idea was out there. Because hurricanes are so massive—hundreds of miles across—the far outer edge that you’re viewing may lie many days’ travel away from the storm’s deadly eye.
You know a hurricane is coming. And you still have time to act.
But not all forms of cirrostratus cloud signal the approach of a distant hurricane. The clouds must come in a certain specific shape: plumiform. That is, they appear to spread across the sky, fanning upward in plumes that seem to be reaching out from a central point. The bottoms of these elongations, Viñes further deduced, are pointing directly at the eye of the hurricane that produces them.
So now you also know the direction from which the hurricane is coming.
Using those theories, Father Viñes built a model by which meteorologists could ascertain that a hurricane had formed, calculate roughly how far away it was, gauge how fast it was moving, and even closely track its path. Then, like Isaac Cline in Texas, the priest put his method to the test.
In September 1875, Viñes issued a public hurricane warning based on telegraph reports from Puerto Rico passed on by the Spanish navy. Ships must not sail east or north from Havana, the priest advised.
Most captains followed instructions. The one who didn’t was the captain of a U.S. steamer. He tried to beat the storm into the Straits of Florida. All hands on that ship went down when the eye of the storm passed northeast of Havana—exactly where and when Viñes had said it would.
The next year, Viñes repeated the trick—but this time he predicted a hurricane by using only his observations of cloud formation and his readings of barometric pressure. The storm blew in right on schedule.
Soon he had a telegraphic network of storm observers working the entire Caribbean, integrating reports from Cuban train operators, consular officials on colonial islands, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, scattered throughout the region (the U.S. service was then still part of the Signal Corps). Viñes upgraded Belen, traveling to England to buy and calibrate new high-quality instruments at Kew Observatory. By the late 1880s, his telegraphic network integrated reports from every kind of colonial and independent government: Spanish, British, French, Danish, Dutch, Dominican, Venezuelan, and American. Everything about Caribbean weather went through Father Viñes in Havana.
When Father Gangoite took over the observatory in 1893, his new directorship coincided with a climax of political turbulence for Cuba—and especially for the island’s relationship with its gigantic neighbor just ninety miles to the north. That political turbulence would have a strange impact on Cuban forecasting. And it would have deadly ramifications for Galveston in 1900.
The year before Father Gangoite took over Belen, José Martí, the Cuban writer and revolutionary, took his lifelong struggle for Cuban independence from Spain to a climax. Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which brought together a wide range of radical groups that hadn’t been able to work together before. As in Mexico eighty years earlier, the moment seemed ripe for a move in Cuba against the Spanish colonial rulers.
Some of the Cuban revolutionaries looked—if with mixed feelings—to the United States for help in gaining independence. And Americans, in turn, gazed—if sometimes greedily—on the feisty little island. Americans related Cubans’ desire for independence to the heady days of the American founding. They also saw much economic potential in Cuba.
This suggested to some that the United States should simply annex the island. It was an old idea. As early as 1805, President Thomas Jefferson had considered taking Cuba. In 1823, President James Monroe included Cuba in the Monroe Doctrine, where U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere was first proclaimed. Some early private “filibusters” had tried and failed to capture Cuba. In 1891, the Detroit Free Press put it this way:
Cuba would make one of the finest states in the Union, and if American wealth, enterprise and genius once invade
d the superb island, it would become a veritable hive of industry. . . . We should act at once and make this possible.
While the Cuban revolutionary Martí feared annexation, he admired the liberties set out in the U.S. Constitution. He believed that by helping Latin American independence movements, the United States might redeem what he condemned as its inherent racism and political corruption.
In Key West and Tampa, Martí raised both money and revolutionary troops. He called for a multiracial uprising in Cuba. He wanted to place blacks, whites, and natives on equal terms, ending slavery and adopting civil liberties.
Two years after Father Gangoite became the chief meteorologist at Belen, the insurrection broke out in Cuba. Martí, the great voice of Cuban liberty, was killed in that war. Yet so successful was the uprising he inspired that, by 1897, Spain began trying to come to terms with the Cubans by liberalizing the colonial government. By then the revolutionaries were in control of much of the island. There was an autonomous Cuban government in charge of Havana, where Father Gangoite went on watching the skies and seas.
No deal, the revolutionaries said. Spain must go.
Public opinion in America, meanwhile, was excited about revolution in Cuba. Old ideas about straight-up annexation were mingling with new notions about expanding American influence, if not literal sovereignty, into the Caribbean. Intervening in the Cuban revolution, and opposing Spain in support of democratic change, became a war cry among some in Congress and the press.
At first, President McKinley refused to intervene. He demanded only that the Spanish colonial government stop driving Cubans from their homes and start negotiating with the rebels. That frustrated the U.S. interventionists.
But they got a new chance when Spanish loyalists rioted against the new government in Havana. That’s when the United States sent its battleship USS Maine into Havana harbor. Ostensibly, the ship was there to protect the lives of Americans living in that city.