An Ocean of Air

by Gabrielle Walker

  What he really needed was land. And this he found, famously, in the early morning of Friday, October 12. Seaman Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the Pinta, was the first to spot the cliffs of San Salvador and cried out, "Tierra! Tierra!" Like every other crewman, he was hoping for the reward of ten thousand maravedis—a decent annual salary for an able seaman—which the queen had promised in perpetuity to the first to sight new lands. Columbus, however, maintained that he had seen a light "like a wax candle moving up and down" some hours earlier, and claimed the reward for himself.

  With the morning light, Columbus and his companions became the first Europeans to step onto a new world. Although nothing he saw on land bore any resemblance to Marco Polo's descriptions, Columbus always believed that he had found the Indies. But he had to revise his ideas of sophisticated treasures, focusing on the aspects of the world that were riper for exploitation: the cotton, the wood, the spices, and the surprisingly gentle people. These seemed almost as if they came from Eden before the fall. They were naked, open, curious, and—so Columbus noted in his diary—had so little idea of weapons that when he showed them a sword, they picked it up by the blade and cut their hands on it. "It appears to me that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants," he wrote, "and I am of the opinion that they would very readily become Christians."

  Still in search of riches to justify his voyage, on October 23, Columbus decided to head for an island the natives called Cuba, where he hoped at least to find "much profit ... in spices." Cuba did indeed yield plants that would provide people in the future with great profit. The natives there had the peculiar habit of rolling up herbs inside dried leaves and setting them alight, which turned out to be more pleasurable than it looked. Las Casas, Columbus's friend and the transcriber of his journal, wrote his own account of this practice: "[The herbs] are dry, and fixed in a leaf also dry, after the manner of those paper tubes which the boys in Spain use at Whitsuntide: having lighted one end they draw the smoke by sucking at the other, this causes a drowsiness and sort of intoxication, and according to their accounts relieves them from the sensation of fatigue." Prefiguring later attitudes to this newfound weed, Las Casas himself was censorious, adding sternly: "I do not see what relish or benefit they could find in it."

  By early January, Columbus decided he had enough gold artifacts, and specimens of exotic spices and woods—not to mention natives—to impress his royal patrons, and he decided he should head for home. His ship, the Santa María, had accidentally run aground, so Columbus decided to leave her and a handful of men, to begin a colony. He claimed the Niña for himself, and on Wednesday, January 16, the two caravels began for Spain.

  Immediately they faced the problem that had been so feared by Columbus's crew on the outward journey. The winds that had taken them so steadily to the "Indies" were now blowing in their faces. Against these headwinds, how would they ever get home?

  The Pinta and Niña were forced to beat against the prevailing trades, creeping ever northward so they could edge their way east. Farther and farther north they crept until, out of nowhere, came a miracle. On January 31, the wind swung. Suddenly a gale filled the sails of the two caravels and pointed their prows toward Europe. The ships found themselves running before a wind that seemed to be urging them homeward, hour after hour, day after day, their sails taut, racing over the ocean at giddy speeds: nine, ten, even eleven knots.

  Once again, Columbus had made a discovery to rival that of the Americas. For this new wind was another part of the global conveyer belt, and the natural complement to the easterly wind that had borne him there. He had stumbled across the mighty Earth-encircling westerlies. Like the trades, they, too, appear in each hemisphere. The southern ones are responsible for the famous "roaring forties" around 40 degrees latitude, and the infamous storms that have long plagued sailors around Cape Horn.

  The northern ones have also claimed plenty of victims, for the westerlies are nothing like the gentle steady trade winds. They are fierce and furious. At first, Columbus's ships gamely weathered their buffeting, their crews thrilled to be moving so rapidly homeward. But on February 14, the winds let rip. They worked themselves up to a frenzy, whipping up the water and slamming it into the leaking wooden hulls of the two small ships. "The sea was terrible," Columbus wrote, "the waves crossing and dashing against one another, so that the vessel was overwhelmed."

  The crew did the only thing left to them: They prayed. And among their prayers they made many vows, private and public, as to what they would do if saved. Some of the promises were extraordinarily specific. They cast lots using a hat filled with dried peas, one for each crew member, to decide who should swear to make a pilgrimage to St. Mary of Guadalupe carrying a wax candle five pounds in weight. Columbus himself drew the pea clumsily marked with a cross, and immediately made his vow. There were more lots, more pilgrimages promised, and every crew member swore to go in procession, "clothed in penitential garments," to the first church dedicated to Our Lady that they should encounter.

  Columbus's preparations were practical as well as metaphysical. Fearing that should they perish, all record of their journey would be lost, he braced himself against the lurching ship long enough to write a secret account of his adventures, to be delivered, if found, to the king of Spain. This he rolled in a wax cloth and placed inside a wooden cask before hurling it into the sea, an act that his crew took to be another, albeit bizarre, sign of devotion.

  In the end, of course, the westerlies had mercy. After a few more hours of horrors, the storm finally abated and Columbus limped back to Spain. The tales he took with him were to change both Europe and America immeasurably, though not many of the people who had made this first contact would benefit from it. Separated from the Niña by this great February storm, the treacherous captain of the Pinta tried to race Columbus to the king and queen, to be the first with the news. But he arrived just too late. He took immediately to his bed, crushed with disappointment, and died within the month. Columbus fared a little better—his is the name that survives in the history books and memorial days. But even he didn't long hold onto the titles and wealth with which the monarchs showered him; his unsuccessful attempts to govern the people he had discovered would turn the Spanish crown against him, and his final return from the "Indies" two voyages later would be in chains. The gentle natives he had encountered, meanwhile, would gradually learn the true horrors to be found at the hands of these men whom they thought had come from Heaven.

  But while Columbus's New World changed through its contact with the old, the gentle trades and boisterous westerlies that had carried him blew steadily on. They still do so today, and, as long as Earth has air to feed them, they always will. And as they do so, they transform our world.

  Nobody in Columbus's time had the slightest notion how far-reaching the winds he had stumbled across would prove to be. It would be some time before mariners even realized that they encircled the globe, and longer still before the first tentative suggestions emerged for why they should exist. But the full explanation of their powers would have to wait four hundred years, for a shy farm-boy genius, scratching out a living in the dirt of the continent that Columbus once claimed for Spain.

  ***

  SPRING 1831

  BERKELEY COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA

  In many ways the farm was a good thing. William Ferrel's father had bought it two years ago, and life there was more settled than the erratic lumber trade. Also, there was plenty of space for the young Ferrel to slip away and think. In his boisterous family of six brothers and two sisters, he could easily remain unnoticed, the quiet one in the corner, lost in his own thoughts.

  The problem was that there was nothing for him to read. Ferrel was fourteen. For the past two years he had picked up what he could of reading, writing, counting, and grammar, huddled together with the other farm children in the freezing school hut. Perhaps it would have been pleasant in the summer, but then the daylight hours were too long and precious to be wasted on learning, when
even the youngest children were needed in the fields. Studying was for the winter, when an icy wind slipped beneath the white oil paper that was tacked over the windows in place of glass, and crept through the gaps in the cabin's rough-hewn logs.

  The cold hadn't bothered Ferrel much. What he minded more was that school was now over for him. It was time to get on with the farm. And yet his mind wouldn't stop working. He was desperate for something, anything, to read. The family received a tiny local newspaper, the Virginia Republican, which was published every week in the nearby town of Martinsburg. Ferrel pounced on this the moment it arrived, scouring it in search of some rare article that might let his mind work.

  Then he saw a copy of a book that he immediately coveted. It was called Parks Arithmetic, and it contained enticing diagrams for how to calculate the circumferences of shapes and their sizes, too. He wanted it desperately.

  Still, Ferrel was too shy to ask his father for the money—for a book, of all things. Instead, he waited until he managed to earn fifty cents by helping at a neighbor's farm during harvest, and then headed off to the book shop in Martinsburg. The book, it turned out, cost sixty-two cents, but the kindly storekeeper let him have it anyway.

  Parks Arithmetic was the unlikely beginning of Ferrel's lifelong love affair with books. He devoured the text, working eagerly through its problems and delighting at each answer that he found. Arithmetic came easily to Ferrel. It was theoretical, even perhaps imaginary, and held no apparent connection to the natural world that he lived and breathed on the farm. But he loved it the way crossword addicts love their puzzles. Give him the problem, and he would find the solution.

  Then, on the morning of July 29, 1832, something important happened to connect this solving of puzzles to the world around him. Ferrel was on his way to the fields when he saw an eclipse of the sun. He hadn't expected it, but he realized that somebody must have known it was coming. The moon was perpetually floating over his head, and once in a while it must get between Earth and the sun and briefly block the view. A lunar eclipse had to be the same sort of thing, except that the moon's view of the sun was being blotted out by our shadow. In each case, the cosmic do-si-do of the planets had to be predictable.

  Of course, Ferrel had never studied astronomy. He didn't know the shape of the moon's orbit, and in any case hadn't learned enough geometry to be able to calculate its path. But he could look for patterns. If he worked hard enough, with the only tools he could find—an elementary geography book containing information about the globe, and a farmers' almanac predicting the positions of the sun and moon at different times of the year—perhaps he could work out the times and dates of future eclipses.

  This was a fabulous new puzzle, one that appealed to his practical streak as well as to the theoretician in him. He worked every moment that he could spare from his chores, day and night, carefully inscribing his efforts in a notebook. (At one point, he almost gave up in despair. He had wrongly assumed that Earth's shadow would always be the same diameter as Earth itself, whereas in fact it gets steadily smaller as you move farther away. With this error in place, his geometry simply wouldn't make sense. Then, one evening on the threshing floor, he noticed that a shadow cast by a wooden plank was thinner than the plank itself, and he raced back to redo his calculations.)

  After two years of hard labor, Ferrel finally had his predictions: The following year, 1835, would have one solar eclipse and two lunar ones. He had no need to wait for the specified dates and times to find out if he were right—the calendar for 1835 would have the answers. And when it arrived, Ferrel was triumphant. The three eclipses were due exactly as he'd predicted, and his times were accurate to within a few minutes.

  Now Ferrel was hooked. A neighboring youth told him about a book he had seen that contained "a great many diagrams" and was on a subject called trigonometry. Back at the Martinsburg book shop, Ferrel bought the nearest thing he could find—a surveying text—and began studying it avidly.

  He had hardly any spare time that summer—he was supposed to be working all the hours of daylight on the threshing floor, separating wheat from its chaff. Luckily the building had large doors at either end, made of wide planks of soft poplar wood. With this at hand, Ferrel had no need of a blackboard or of paper and pen. He drew his diagrams on the doors, making circles with the prongs of a pitchfork and straight lines with a single prong, using a small piece of board as a ruler. (The lines he had carved survived wind and weather for several decades, and even after he had become an exalted scientist, each time he returned to visit the farm he went to look at them.)

  That winter, Ferrel borrowed another geometry text from an old surveyor who lived in the mountains and studied it by the feeble light of a tallow candle, or more often by firelight. He had a stock of light wood, and each log that he threw in would encourage the fire to flare up, though only for a few minutes at a time. The next winter, he rode for two days through the snow to buy a copy of Playfair's Geometry from Hagerstown in Maryland. The more he learned, the hungrier he became.

  Ferrel wasn't simply studying to know what others had already figured out. He now felt an urge to discover things, to explain the Earth in ways that hadn't been explained before. Thanks to his work on the eclipses, his favorite puzzles had become the ones that truly existed, in the real world that he sensed around him.

  With money made from teaching, and some donated by his bemused but supportive father, Ferrel attended college, where he studied algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. (Finding this didn't fully occupy his intellectual energy, he also picked up Latin and Greek grammar on the side.) In 1844, after a hiatus to earn more money for fees, Ferrel finally graduated, age twenty-seven. He had gone from farmer to mathematician, but there were still few academic options for a poor boy from West Virginia. He returned to his day job of teaching, and devoted his evenings and all his spare time to research. Always, he was seeking the next subject that would fire his imagination with the fervor he could scarcely control.

  A decade passed, Ferrel working at this and that in between his teaching. And then, in 1855, at the age of thirty-eight, he came across a book called The Physical Geography of the Sea, by Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Navy. The book was a curious one. It contained tables and tables of data on winds, currents, and air pressures collected from around the world. But it was also full of what seemed to be odd theories about how these numbers connected. Ferrel bought the book and took it home for closer study.

  Ferrel didn't know it, but Maury was already famous, or more accurately infamous, in the nation's capital. He was an ambitious, bombastic military man with apparently limitless energy to promote himself. He had made his name through the undoubtedly excellent idea of collecting logbooks from ocean-going vessels, tracing their routes and collating their wind records so that he could publish maps of the prevailing winds. The resulting Charts of Winds and Currents had been an immediate hit. Unfortunately, it had also fed Maury's already considerable ego into believing that he was a great scientist. He was convinced he was now qualified to speak with scientific authority on every imaginable subject. And when, in spite of having no background whatsoever in astronomy, he managed to get himself appointed superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1844, he became insufferable.

  Although he wasn't an easy man to like, you could feel sorry for Maury. He wanted nothing more than to be one of the scientific gang. But his problem was that he simply wasn't very good at science. His theories were wild. He invoked random magnetic forces to explain phenomena that he couldn't begin to understand, and when that failed, he resorted to thundering passages from the Old Testament to justify his "scientific" claims.

  Others in Ferrel's day were either scornful of or downright alarmed by Maury, especially when he began claiming to be an expert in meteorology and urging Congress to accept him as head of a new, and highly dubious, system for predicting America's weather. By 1856, the burgeoning scientific community had already begun openly referring to him as a "hu
mbug." Maury was just as insulting in his ripostes. When he was criticized at a scientific meeting at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, he responded by declaring that John Smithson, the institution's otherwise illustrious founder, had been born a bastard (a fact that everybody knew but nobody ever mentioned). The city's principal newspaper, the Washington Star, then took up the cudgels, describing Maury's work as "one of the most remarkable and successful careers of unblushing charlatanism known in the world's history."

  Ferrel was sublimely unaware of all this Washington name-calling and wouldn't have paid attention to it anyway. But he was intrigued by what he read in Maury's book The Physical Geography of the Sea. In this book, Maury had set out much of the data that he had collected from records of wind currents and pressures. But, in a bid to seem more scientific, he had also filled the book with his bizarre theories of how the winds work. What Ferrel read set the circles turning in his head. Somehow there had to be a way to make the connection between all the disparate winds that Maury was describing, one that Maury himself clearly hadn't found. It seemed a shame to waste such valuable data on such feeble ideas. What's more, Ferrel was sure the answer would involve his favorite subject—geometry.

  He decided to take the book to one of his best friends in Nashville, a medic from the college named Dr. William Bowling. Ferrel had no family here in the city, and not many friends. He was far too shy to socialize with strangers, but the few people who had managed to break down his barriers had become very close to him. Bowling was one of these, and he especially loved talking to Ferrel about science. He was the publisher of the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and had been trying for years to give this journal some intellectual clout of the sort that Ferrel always seemed to carry with him. Ferrel explained his interest in Maury's data and his disquiet about the conclusions in the book. When Bowling heard this he was gleeful. Write me a review for the journal, he demanded. "Pitch into him."