THE
Hurricane Hunters
BY Ivan Ray Tannehill
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1956
Copyright, © 1955 by Ivan Ray Tannehill
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher
Published November, 1955
Second Printing, February, 1956
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-9480
Printed in the United States of America
by The Cornwall Press, Inc., Cornwall, N. Y.
To my daughter and son-in-law,
Doris and Bill
Acknowledgment
At appropriate places in the book the narrative serves as an acknowledgment by giving the names of a large number of men who furnished information in personal interviews, by correspondence, or in their reports which were included in the voluminous files searched in the last year.
In writing this book I had unstinted cooperation from the Air Weather Service and its Commander, Brigadier General Thomas Moorman, from the Aerological Branch of the Navy Department and its Head, Captain C. J. S. McKillip, and from the Chief of the Weather Bureau, Dr. F. W. Reichelderfer, and his associates in the field and the central office. In particular, Major William C. Anderson and associates in the Office of Information Services of the Air Weather Service and Captain Robert O. Minter of the Fleet Weather Central at Miami and his associates there in Airborne Early Warning Squadron Four at Jacksonville were extremely helpful. Of the associates of these men I wish to mention especially the assistance of Lieutenant Commander R. W. Westover and Air Force Captain Ed Vrable, both of whom are seasoned hurricane hunters.
Others not mentioned in the book who contributed to the warning service and indirectly to the material used here were Isaac M. Cline and Charles L. Mitchell of the Weather Bureau. Their writings supply much of the background for any work on tropical storms.
The Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau kindly supplied official photographs used here, except the wave breaking on the sea wall by the Miami Daily News and the drawings of sailing ships in hurricanes which are credited to Colonel William Reid who published them in 1850 in his book on the “Law of Storms.” The Author
CONTENTS
[1. Monsters of the World of Storms] 1 [2. The Saddler’s Apprentice] 19 [3. At the Bottom of the Sea] 32 [4. Storm Warnings] 45 [5. Radio Helps—Then Hinders] 59 [6. The Eye of the Hurricane] 75 [7. First Flight into the Vortex!] 90 [8. The Hammer and the Highway] 103 [9. Wings against the Whirling Blasts] 117 [10. Kappler’s Hurricane] 132 [11. Tricks of the Trade] 150 [12. Trailing the Terrible Typhoon] 167 [13. Guest on a Hairy Hop] 185 [14. The Unexpected] 202 [15. Fighting Hail and Hurricanes] 224 [16. Carol, Edna, Hazel or Saxby!] 237 [17. The Gears and Guts of the Giant] 250
ILLUSTRATIONS
(Photographic supplement follows [page 50])
[The English warship Egmont in the “Great Hurricane” of 1780.] [The Calypso in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837.] [A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast at the height of a hurricane.] [Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Bennington and drapes it over the bow.] [Winds of hurricane drive pine board through the tough trunk of a palm tree in Puerto Rico, September 13, 1928.] [Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with winds of 15 knots.] [Sea surface with winds of 40 knots.] [Sea surface with winds of 75 knots.] [Sea surface with winds of 120 knots.] [Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane hunting.] [Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting.] [Navy crew of hurricane hunters.] [Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into hurricane.] [Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951.] [Part of a spiral squall band, an “arm of the octopus.”] [Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500 feet below.] [Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane mission.] [Radar operator and navigator.] [Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane mission.] [City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler’s Hurricane in September, 1945.] [Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission.] [Part of scope showing typhoon by radar.] [Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna on September 7, 1954.] [Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951.] [Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot and radar operator.] [The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance.] [The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.] [The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for hurricane reconnaissance.]
THE HURRICANE HUNTERS
1. MONSTERS OF THE WORLD OF STORMS
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
3. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
“Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon:
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.”
—Shakespeare
Two hundred years ago, scientists were beginning to chart the winds over the oceans and the currents that thread their way across the surface of deep waters. Until this work was finished, the mariner was almost completely at the mercy of the atmosphere and the sea. He would come to uncharted places where the winds ceased to blow and sailing vessels might be becalmed for weeks. Day after day, the burning sun climbed slowly toward the zenith and while the unbearable heat tortured the crew, descended with agonizing slowness toward the western horizon. At night, relief came under unclouded skies but the stars gave no indication of better fortunes on the morrow.
In these places it seldom rained. Drinking water, as long as it lasted, became putrid, but the crew preserved it as their most precious treasure, drinking a little when they could go no longer without it—holding their noses. The food became so bad that every man who had the courage to eat it wondered if it wouldn’t be better to starve. This happened often in the North Atlantic in the days when sailing vessels were carrying horses to the West Indies. If they were becalmed and fresh water ran short, the crews had to throw some or all of the horses overboard. In time this region became known as the “horse latitudes.” Because it lay north and northeast of the hurricane belt, a long spell of rainless weather for a sailing ship here could be succeeded suddenly and overwhelmingly by the torrential rains of a tropical storm.
At long intervals, a slight breeze came along, barely enough to extend a small flag, but it gave the ship a little motion and brought hope to the men who were worn out with tugging at the oars. In this circumstance, it might happen that a long, low groundswell would appear. Coming from a great distance, it would raise and then lower the vessel a little in passing. Others would surely follow—low undulations at intervals of four or five to the minute—bringing a warning of a storm beyond the horizon. Here was one of the ironic twists of a sailor’s existence. Even while he prayed for water, the atmosphere was about to give it to him in tremendous quantities, both from above and below. At this juncture the master was in a quandary. For the safety of ship and crew, it was vital that he know exactly what to do at the very instant when the first gusty breezes of the coming storm filled the sails.
From the law of storms, the mariner eventually learned—and it was suicide to forget it at a time like this—that if he could look forward from the center of the hurricane, along the line of progress, the most terrible winds and waves would be on his right. Here the raging demons of the tropical blast outdo themselves. The whirling velocity is added to the forward motion, for both in these few harrowing hours have the same direction. All the power of the atmosphere is delivered in this space, where unbelievable gales try to blast their way into the partial vacuum at the center. But the atmosphere is held back from the center by a still greater power, the rotation of the earth on its axis. No shipmaster should ever be caught between these awful forces with the huge bulk of the storm drawing toward him.
Here we find horrors that were never disclosed to the early storm hunters. It is doubtful if any sailing ship or any man aboard survived in this sector of a really great hurricane. But even more dangerous are the deceitful motions of the sea surface, which can trap the mariner and drag his vessel toward the dangerous sector, even while he thinks he is fighting his way out of it.
In those uneasy hours when the groundswell preceded the winds, the master had to watch his barometer and the clouds on the horizon, to get the best estimate of the storm’s future course. If it gave signs of coming toward him or passing a little to the west of him, he had to run with the wind as soon as it began, every inch of canvas straining at the creaking masts to get all the headway possible. He would do better than he thought, for the surface of the sea was moving with the winds and his vessel was plowing through the waves while the sea was swirling in the same direction. It was a race for life, and if he was not unlucky, he would find himself behind the storm, sailing rapidly toward better weather.
If he made the wrong choice and tried to go around the center on the east side while the storm moved northward, he might have thought that he was making headway. But the sea surface was carrying him backward while the horrible right sector rushed forward to encompass the ship. Now we see why Redfield, Reid and Piddington, when they came to a realization of some of these facts in the logs of sailing vessels, were so eager to give the world a law of storms. Their work was only a beginning, for the so-called law is not as simple as they imagined. But some shipmasters took their advice and survived, whereas any other course would have taken them to the bottom of the sea. And untold numbers had gone down in big hurricanes.
Among the logs and letters collected by Redfield and Reid in their work on the law of storms were many which referred to a fierce hurricane in 1780. For more than fifty years it had been talked about as “The Great Hurricane.” But the stories didn’t all seem to fit together. The storm was said to have been in too many places at too many different times to suit Redfield. When he had finished putting the data from ships’ logs on a map in accordance with his law of storms, he saw that there had been three hurricanes at about the same time and that they had been confused and reported as one.
In the year of these big hurricanes there were many warships in the Caribbean region. The American War of Independence had started with bloodshed at Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, and by 1780 England was in a state of war with half the world. Her battle fleets controlled most of the seas along the American Coast and roamed the waters in and around the West Indies.
The first of the three hurricanes struck Jamaica on the third of October. Nine English warships, under the command of Sir Peter Parker, went to the bottom. Seven of his vessels were dismasted or severely damaged. From the tenth to the fifteenth of October a second—and even more powerful hurricane—ravaged Barbados and progressively devastated other islands in the Eastern Caribbean. This one has been rated the most terrible hurricane in history by many students of storms. It wreaked awful destruction on the island of St. Lucia, where six thousand persons were crushed in the ruins of demolished buildings. The English fleet in that vicinity disappeared. Neither trees nor houses were left standing on Barbados. Off Martinique, forty ships of a French convoy were sunk and nearly all on board were lost, including four thousand soldiers. On the island itself, nine thousand persons were killed. Most of the vessels in the broad path of the storm as it progressed farther into the Caribbean, including several warships, foundered with all their crews. It drove fifty vessels ashore at Bermuda, on the eighteenth.
Before this terrible storm reached Bermuda another one roared out of the Western Caribbean, crossed western Cuba and passed into the Gulf of Mexico, on October 18. Unaware of the approach of this hurricane, a Spanish fleet of seventy-four warships, under Admiral Solano, sailed from Havana into the Gulf, to attack Pensacola. They were trapped in the eastern section of the Gulf and nineteen ships were lost. The remainder were dispersed, several having thrown their guns overboard to avoid capsizing. Nearly all the others were damaged, many dismasted. The Spanish fleet was no longer a fighting force.
Within three weeks most of the battle fleets in and around the Caribbean had been put out of commission. Both Redfield and Reid were impressed by the power displayed by these hurricanes. In his search of the records, the former succeeded in getting a copy of a letter written by a Lieutenant Archer to his mother in England, giving an account of the first of these terrible storms. The following story is condensed from Archer’s letter.
Archer was second in command of an English warship named the Phoenix. It was commanded by Sir Hyde Parker. Before the first of these three hurricanes developed, the Phoenix had been sent to Pensacola, where the English were in control. Late in September, she sailed to rejoin the remainder of the fleet at Jamaica. On passing Havana harbor, Sir Hyde looked in and was astounded to see Solano’s Spanish fleet at anchor. He hurried around Cuba into the Caribbean, to take the news to the British fleet.
At Kingston, Jamaica, the crew of the Phoenix found three other men-of-war lying in the harbor and they had a strong party for “kicking up a dust on shore,” with dancing until two o’clock every morning. Little did they think of what might be in store for them. Out of the four men-of-war not one was in existence four days later and not a man aboard any of them survived, except a few of the crew of the Phoenix. And what is more, the houses where the crews had been so merry were so completely destroyed that scarcely a vestige remained to show where they had stood.
On September 30, the four warships set sail for Port Royal, around the eastern end of Jamaica. At eleven o’clock on the night of October 2, it began to “snuffle,” with a “monstrous heavy appearance to the eastward.” Sir Hyde sent for Lieutenant Archer.
“What sort of weather have we, Archer?”
“It blows a little and has a very ugly look; if in any other quarter, I should say we were going to have a gale of wind.”
They had a very dirty night. At eight in the morning, with close-reefed topsails, the Phoenix was fighting a hard blow from the east-northeast, and heavy squalls at times. Archer said he was once in a hurricane in the East Indies and the beginning of it had much the same appearance as this. The crew took in the topsails and were glad they had plenty of sea-room. On Sir Hyde’s orders, they secured all the sails with spare gaskets, put good rolling tackles on the yards, squared the booms, saw that the boats were all fast, lashed the guns, double-breeched the lower deckers, got the top-gallant mast down on the deck and, in fact, did everything to make a snug ship.
“And now,” Archer wrote, “the poor birds began to suffer from the uproar of the elements and came on board. They turned to the windward like a ship, tack and tack, and dashed themselves down on the deck without attempting to stir till picked up. They would not leave the ship.”
The carpenters were placed by the mainmast with broad axes, ready to cut it away to save the ship. Archer found the purser “frightened out of his wits” and two marine officers “white as sheets” from listening to the vibration of the lower deck guns, which were pulling loose and thrashing around. At every roll it seemed that the whole ship’s side was going.
At twelve it was blowing a full hurricane. Archer came on deck and found Sir Hyde there. “It blows terribly hard, Archer.”
“It does indeed, Sir.”
“I don’t remember its blowing so hard before,” shouted Sir Hyde, striving to get his voice above the roar of the wind. “The ship makes good weather of it on this tack but we must wear her (to turn about by putting the helm up and the stern of the boat to the wind), as the wind has shifted to the southeast and we are fast drawing up on the Coast of Cuba.”
“Sir, there is no canvas can stand against it a moment. We may lose three or four of our people in the effort. She’ll wear by manning the fire shrouds.”
“Well, try it,” said Sir Hyde, which was a great condescension for a man of his temperament to accept the advice of a subordinate. It took two hundred men to wear the ship, but when she was turned about, the sea began to run clear across the decks and she had no time to rise from one sea until another lashed into her. Some of the sails had been torn from the masts and the rest began to fly from the yards “through the gaskets like coachwhips.”
“To think that the wind could have such force!” Archer shouted into the gale.
“Go down and see what is the matter between decks,” ordered Sir Hyde in a lull.
Archer crept below and a marine officer screamed, “We are sinking. The water is up to the bottom of my cot!”
Archer yelled back, “As long as it is not over your mouth, you are well off.” He put all spare men to work at the pumps. The Phoenix labored heavily, with scarcely any of her above water except the quarter-deck and that seldom.
On returning, Archer found Sir Hyde lashed to a mast. He lashed himself alongside his commander and tried to hear what he was shouting. Afterward, Archer tried to describe this situation in his letter. “If I was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of it. A total darkness above and the sea running in Alps or Peaks of Teneriffe (Mountains is too common an idea); the wind roaring louder than thunder, the ship shaking her sides and groaning.”
“Hold fast,” shouted Sir Hyde as a big wave crashed into the ship. “That was an ugly sea! We must lower the yards, Archer.”
“If we attempt it, Sir, we shall lose them. I wish the mainmast was overboard without carrying anything else along with it.”
Another mountainous wave swept the trembling ship. A crewman brought news from the pump room. Water was gaining on the weary pumpers. The ship was almost on her beam-ends. Archer called to Sir Hyde, “Shall we cut the mainmast away?”
“Ay, as fast as you can,” said Sir Hyde. But just then a tremendous wave broke right on board, carried everything on deck away and filled the ship with water. The main and mizen masts went, the Phoenix righted a little but was in the last struggle of sinking.
As soon as they could shake their heads free of the water, Sir Hyde yelled, “We are gone at last, Archer. Foundered at sea! Farewell, and the Lord have mercy on us!”
Archer felt sorry that he could swim, for he would struggle instinctively and it would take him a quarter hour longer to die than a man who could not. The quarter-deck was full of men praying for mercy. At that moment there was a great thump and a grinding under them.
Archer screamed, “Sir, the ship is ashore. We may save ourselves yet!”
Every stroke of the sea threatened dissolution of the ship’s frame. Every wave swept over her as she lay stern ashore.
Sir Hyde cried out, “Keep to the quarter-deck, my lads. When she goes to pieces that is your best chance.”
Five men were lost cutting the foremast. The sea seemed to reach for them as it took the mast overboard and they went with it. Everyone expected it would be his turn next. It was awful—the ship grinding and being torn away piece by piece. Mercifully, as if to give the crew another desperate chance, a tremendous wave carried the Phoenix among the rocks and she stuck there, though her decks tumbled in.
Archer took off his coat and shoes and prepared to swim, but on second thought he knew it wouldn’t do. As second officer, he would have to stay with his commander and see that every man, including the sick and injured, was safely off the ship before he left it. He wrote later that he looked around with a philosophic eye in that moment and was amazed to find that those who had been the most swaggering, swearing bullies in fine weather were now the most pitiful wretches on earth, with death before them.
Finally, Archer helped two sailors off with a line which was made fast to the rocks, and most of those who had survived the storm got ashore alive, including the sick and injured, who were moved from a cabin window by means of a spare topsail-yard.
On shore, Sir Hyde came to Archer so affected that he was scarcely able to make himself understood. “I am happy to see you ashore—but look at our poor Phoenix.” Weak and worn, the two sat huddled on the shore, silent for a quarter hour, blasted by gale and sea. Archer actually wept. After that, the two officers gathered the men together and rescued some fresh water and provisions from the wreck. They also secured material to make tents. The storm had thrown great quantities of fish into the holes in the rocks and these provided a good meal.
One of the ship’s boats was left in fair condition. In two days the carpenters repaired it, and Archer, with four volunteers, set off for Jamaica. They had squally weather and a leaky boat, but by constant baling with two buckets, they arrived at their destination next evening. Eventually, all the remainder of the crew they had left in Cuba were saved except some who died of injuries after getting ashore from the Phoenix and a few who got hold of some of the ship’s rum and drank themselves to death.
How many times this drama of death and narrow escape may have been repeated in the three great hurricanes of 1780 is not disclosed in the records. But hundreds of ships and many thousands of men were lost. And at that time no one knew the true nature of these great winds. It was not until more than fifty years had passed and Redfield and Reid examined all the reports that these tremendous gales were found to be parts of three separate hurricanes. This ignorance seems strange, for nearly three hundred years had passed since Columbus ran into his first hurricane.
As Reid worked at great length on these old records in logs and letters, he became confident that Redfield was right about the whirling nature of tropical storms. There were ten hurricanes in the West Indies in 1837 and these supplied Reid with a great deal of added information. One of the most exciting was the big hurricane in the middle of August of that year.
This was a vicious storm which was first observed by the Barque Felicity in the Atlantic, far east of the Antilles, on August 12, 1837. The chances are that it came from the African Coast, near the Cape Verde Islands, as many of the worst of them do. By the time these faraway disturbances have crossed the Atlantic and approached the West Indies, they are usually major hurricanes, capable of wreaking great destruction. This one was no exception, but its path lay a little farther to the northward than usual and its most furious winds were not felt on land, even on the more northerly islands in the group.
Ships in its path reported winds which appeared to be of a “rotatory” nature when Reid plotted them on maps. On the fifteenth, the storm passed near Turk’s Island and on the sixteenth, was being felt on the easternmost Bahamas.
At this stage, the ship Calypso became involved in the storm and was unable to escape. The master, a man named Wilkinson, wrote an account to the owners, from which the following is taken:
“During the night the Winds increased, and day-light found the vessel under a close-reefed main-topsail, with royal and top-gallant-yards on deck, and prepared for a gale of wind. At 10 A.M. the wind about north-east, the lee-rail under water, and the masts bending like canes. Got a tarpaulin on the main rigging and took the main topsail in. The ship laboring much obliged main and bilge-pumps to be kept constantly going. At 6 P.M. the wind north-west, I should think the latitude would be about 27°, and longitude 77°W. At midnight the wind was west, when a sea took the quarter-boat away.
“At day-dawn, or rather I should have said the time when the day would have dawned, the wind was southwest, and a sea stove the fore-scuttle. All attempts to stop this leak were useless, for when the ship pitched the scuttle was considerably under water. I then had the gaskets and lines cut from the reefed foresail, which blew away; a new fore-topmast-studding-sail was got up and down the fore-rigging, but in a few seconds the bolt-rope only remained; the masts had then to be cut away.”
By this time the wind was even more furious and the seas so high none expected the Calypso to survive. The master continued his story:
“My chief mate had a small axe in his berth, which he had made very sharp a few days previous. That was immediately procured; and while the men were employed cutting away the mizenmast, the lower yard-arms went in the water. It is human nature to struggle hard for life; so fourteen men and myself got over the rail between the main and mizen rigging as the mast-heads went into the water. The ship was sinking fast. While some men were employed cutting the weather-lanyards of the rigging, some were calling to God for mercy; some were stupified with despair; and two poor fellows, who had gone from the afterhold, over the cargo, to get to the forecastle, to try to stop the leak, were swimming in the ship’s hold. In about three minutes after getting on the bends, the weather-lanyards were cut fore and aft, and the mizen, main, and foremasts went one after the other, just as the vessel was going down head foremost.
“The ship hung in this miserable position, as if about to disappear (as shown in the accompanying reconstruction of the scene by an artist who worked under the direction of the master of the Calypso) and then by some miracle slowly righted herself.
“On getting on board again, I found the three masts had gone close off by the deck. The boats were gone, the main hatches stove in, the planks of the deck had started in many places, the water was up to the beams, and the puncheons of rum sending about the hold with great violence. The starboard gunwale was about a foot from the level of the sea, and the larboard about five feet. The sea was breaking over the ship as it would have done over a log. You will, perhaps, say it could not have been worse, and any lives spared to tell the tale. I assure you, Sir, it was worse; and by Divine Providence, every man was suffered to walk from that ship to the quay at Wilmington.”
From such accounts the hurricane hunters gathered the facts which led to a better “law of storms” and made life at sea safer for the officers and men who struggled with sails and masts in tropical gales. But it is most likely that the experiences of the crews of those sailing ships that were caught in the worst sectors of fully developed hurricanes in the open sea were never told. It is not probable that any survived the calamitous weather on the right front of the storm center, where the sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth, and the forward motion of the hurricane are combined in a frenzy of destructive power.
In one sense, all of the men who survived these terrors at sea were hurricane hunters. They had to be. Those who lived were the men who were always alert to the first signs in sea and sky, who knew when one of the big storms of the tropics was just beyond the horizon. They were learning and passing the knowledge along to others. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mariner had a “law of storms” that kept countless ships out of the most dangerous parts of tropical disturbances.
4. STORM WARNINGS
“I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than of the entire Spanish Navy.” —McKinley
Strangely enough, government weather bureaus were not set up for the purpose of giving warnings of tropical storms. Maybe there was a feeling in the years before radio that nothing could be done for the sailor on the open sea except to teach him the law of storms. And for the landsman the case looked hopeless until the telegraph came in sight. At any rate, most of the men who began to fly into hurricanes during World War II were astonished to find that, up to that time, the prediction of tropical storms had been a kind of side issue.
Although hurricanes are nearly always destructive and other kinds of storms—the “lows” on the weather map—are generally mild, once in a long time one of these others results in a catastrophe. Starting as a low which is spread weakly over a wide area, with cloudy weather, rain or snow, and gentle winds, now and then the exceptional storm suddenly fills newspaper headlines. Gales and winds of hurricane force bring a blizzard, tornado, bad hailstorm, or torrential rain and a damaging flood. If it really is a bad one, it finds its way into the pages of history. In times past, these storms often struck populous districts, while hurricanes, in early centuries, hit on thinly settled islands or coasts.
So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the British Isles was one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. It was entirely unexpected, as were most of the big gales in England in the old days. Surprise was one of the elements of danger. The weather is seldom fine in the British Isles, over the English Channel or in the North Sea. Gloom, with fog or low-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best days, a damp haze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirty window pane. Into this background of gloom many a big storm stole its way eastward from the Atlantic. The record-breaker tore up the docks, wrecked shipping and crumbled buildings in the year 1703.
Houses were ruined and big trees were blown down. Whole fleets were lost and more than nine thousand seamen were drowned. The most violent winds came at night. Startled by the roar of the storm, Queen Anne got out of bed and found a part of the palace roof had been torn away. One prelate, Bishop Kidder, was buried beneath the ruins of his mansion. Awakened by the giant gusts, he put on his dressing gown and made for the door, but a chimney stack crashed through the ceiling and dashed out his brains. His wife was crushed in her bed. After the gales subsided, London and other cities looked like they had been sacked by an enemy. All over the south of England, the lead roofs of churches were rolled up by the wind or blown away in large sheets.
Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in later years, it was more than a century before the storm hunters made much progress. Not long after 1800, several men with an inquiring mind began to get results. Redfield was one, but he studied hurricanes and not the storms of higher latitudes, such as the one which devastated the British Isles.
Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of faster means of travel and communications and they were destined to be a vital factor in weather forecasting. In 1816 a “hobby-horse” with wheels was displayed in Paris by an inventor named Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two sitting on it and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing, it went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claims were made about its possibilities. At about the same time, several men were working on devices like the telegraph.
Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused the intense curiosity of a young professor, William Heinrich Brandes, of the University of Breslau, in Germany. He began a study in 1816, to see if the weather moved from place to place and if it would be possible to send predictions ahead by means then available. Everybody at that time knew that storms moved but it was the general belief that ordinary changes in the weather didn’t go anywhere. Brandes collected newspapers from many places and searched them for remarks about the weather, which he put on maps. Here he was amazed to see that all kinds of weather seemed to be constantly in motion, quite generally from west to east. But the newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes and he couldn’t be too sure about the rate of travel.
Brandes knew that the French had set up weather stations and collected observations for maps as early as 1780, but the terrible French Revolution had brought an end to this work and the data were lying in disuse. After some delay, he obtained copies of the observations for 1783 and put them on maps. Sure enough, after he had drawn many daily maps, he saw clearly how the weather moved just as he had suspected it did from the newspaper reports. But at the same time he saw that it was hopeless. The weather moved so rapidly that there was no way of sending the reports ahead fast enough for making predictions of what was coming. The quickest way of sending the reports ahead was by horse or a good man on foot, and the weather would easily outrun them. In 1820, Brandes wrote an article about weather maps for publication and then put his maps and newspapers in the trash. But in time his idea got around the world and as the years passed more and more scientists began drawing maps and trying to predict the weather. And so it came about that the government weather services in different parts of the world were set up to predict storms of higher latitudes rather than hurricanes.
Redfield was mapping storms after 1830, but he was not trying to make weather forecasts. He wanted only to learn about hurricanes in order to give the mariner a law of storms by which he could judge the weather for himself. Nobody worried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those days that a man on land could get his weather out of an almanac or by watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars, or the rise and fall of the barometer. Scientists who believed that it would be possible to predict the ordinary changes in the weather were decidedly in the minority. One of these was James Pollard Espy, who became known as the “Old Storm King” of America.
James Espy was born in Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Harrisburg, but his father moved the family to Kentucky while James was an infant. It has been said in biographies of Espy that the boy had no education and was seventeen years old before he learned to read, but this was denied by relatives who survived him. It seems that the elder Espy soon went to the Miami Valley in Ohio, to get established in business, and left James with an older sister in Kentucky. At eighteen James registered at Transylvania University, in Lexington, where he was much interested in science. In any event, at various times he was a schoolteacher in Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, until he became fully occupied in the study of weather.
In 1820, Espy joined the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, to teach languages and work on the weather. In an amazingly short time, he became an authority on meteorology. He was a pleasant, easygoing man, but very persistent in two matters. First, he was determined to have a government bureau established to predict storms; and, second, he disagreed with Redfield in the latter’s whirlwind theory of hurricanes. At times the two carried on a violent controversy in the press. Espy argued that the winds blow directly toward the center of a storm or toward a line through the center. He was right with respect to storms of middle and higher latitudes, as everybody knows today. He anticipated the modern idea of fronts, and he and other scientists of his day sometimes referred to these lines as “like a line of battle.” In a way, Redfield also was right, for the typical hurricane in the tropics has no fronts.
In his efforts to set up a government weather bureau, Espy was successful in a small way. In 1842, he was appointed by Congress for five years as “Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” and assigned to the Surgeon General, where he worked for five years. This rather strange appointment was due to the fact that the Surgeon General had been taking weather observations at Army posts since 1819 and had much data for study.
In the meantime, Espy had visited England and France, where he was received with honor by renowned scientific associations. On returning to the United States, he published a book, The Philosophy of Storms, in 1841. His weather maps and storm reports were now famous and by this time he was widely known as the “Old Storm King.” When his term as “Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” expired, he secured an appointment as meteorologist under the Secretary of the Navy, to work with the Smithsonian Institution, where he made an annual report to the Navy until 1852.
During these years, Espy was continually after Congress to do more about storm hunting. In Washington, he earned the title of the “Half Baked Storm Hunter” and in Congress he was known as the “Old Storm Breeder.” In 1842 he was granted hearings and members of an appropriation committee said that he was a “monomaniac” and his “organ of self-esteem was swollen to the size of a goiter.” They told him that they were not impressed just because “the French had indorsed all his crack-brained schemes.” Espy kept insisting for several years and was looked upon as a nuisance in Congress until he died in 1860, having had very little success in getting the government to do anything about it, except to give him an appointment to study the weather himself.
As it finally worked out, Congress in 1870 established a weather service, to study storms on the Great Lakes and the seacoasts of the United States. This proved to be such a tough job that, for the time being, the hurricane work, which had been neglected during and after the War between the States, was dropped into second place.
The disturbances that kept the government service busy after 1870 are those that begin in higher latitudes and move generally from west to east—the lows of the weather map—called extratropical to distinguish them from hurricanes and other tropical storms. If they were as regular in their shapes and movements as the tropical variety, the forecasting job would be much easier. But the extratropical kind takes odd forms, elongated or in the shape of a trough, sometimes with two or more centers. Their movements are irregular. Rarely does one of them become extremely violent, but there is always danger of it and so the forecasters must always be on the alert.
The English warship Egmont in the “Great Hurricane” of 1780.
The Calypso in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837, showing the crew climbing over the rail as the mastheads go into the water.
USWB—Miami Herald Staff Photo
A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast at the height of a hurricane.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Bennington and drapes it over the bow.
Wind of hurricane drive pine board (10 feet by 1 inch by 3 inches) through the tough trunk of a palm tree in Puerto Rico, September 13, 1928.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with wind of 15 knots (17 miles an hour).
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Sea surface with winds of 40 knots (46 miles an hour).
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Sea surface with winds of 75 knots (86 miles an hour).
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Sea surface with winds of 120 knots (138 miles an hour). Tops of big waves are torn off and carried away in a white boiling sheet.
Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane hunting.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Navy crew of hurricane hunters.
Air Force Photo
Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into hurricane.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951.
In the foreground, part of a spiral squall band, an “arm of the octopus.”
Photographed by McClellan Air Force Base
Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500 feet below.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane mission.
Official Defense Department Photograph
Radar operator in foreground; navigator in background.
Official Defense Department Photograph
Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane mission.
USWB—Miami Daily News
City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler’s Hurricane in September, 1945.
Official Defense Department Photocopy
Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission.
AFT ENTRANCE HATCH RADIO OPERATOR RIGHT SCANNER (CREW CHIEF) RADIOSONDE OPERATOR LEFT SCANNER (DROPSONDE OPERATOR) ENGINEER COPILOT WEATHER OBSERVER NAVIGATOR RADAR OPERATOR FORWARD ENTRANCE HATCH PILOT
Part of scope showing typhoon by radar. Eye is above center at right with spiral bands showing. Radar is located at center of picture with surrounding clouds showing as dense white mass due to heavy nearby echo return. Echo from opposite side of typhoon is faint.
Official U. S. Navy Photograph
Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna (foreground) on September 7, 1954.
U. S. Air Force Photo
Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951.
Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot (left) and radar operator.
Official Photo U. S. A. F.
The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance.
The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.
Official Defense Department Photograph
Official Photo U. S. A. F.
The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for hurricane reconnaissance.
Some of the most dangerous of the extratropical storms begin as small companions or secondary centers of huge disturbances, generally on the south side, where they grow rapidly in fury and merge with the original cyclones to produce winds of tremendous destructive power. This often happens in the so-called “windy corners” of the world. One of these, and a good example, is Cape Hatteras, on the eastern coast of North Carolina. It is a sort of way station for both the tropical and extratropical varieties. Hurricanes heading northwestward from the Caribbean and curving to follow the coastline, sweep over the Cape, which juts into the ocean at the point where the northward-moving storms still retain great force. In winter, big extratropical cyclones passing eastward across the region of the Great Lakes tend to produce small companions or secondaries in the southeastern states and some of them develop gales of hurricane force by the time they reach Hatteras. Here the cold air masses of the continent, guided by storm winds, are thrown against the warm, moist air from the Gulf Stream. In the reaction, there are towering seas and hazardous gales that are well known to seamen.
As these big storms roar past Cape Hatteras, the winds shift to northwest and the sky clears, unless you happen to be on shipboard and the tops of big waves are being torn off by the wind and thrown into the air, to pass overhead in streaks or splatter on the decks. In the days of the sailing ship, the master was not surprised when he got into trouble in the area between Bermuda and Hatteras. Here many merchantmen from far places passed, en route to or from New York or other Atlantic ports. Slowed by cross seas and dirty weather hatched over the Gulf Stream, they were soon reduced to storm stay-sails. As the gales mounted, the crews could see other ships rising on the billows in one instant before slithering into a great trough where, in the next instant, they could see nothing but jagged peaks of water and a welter of foam. On the Hatteras side, especially, the master could get into a rendezvous with death, for he often had only two choices. He could run full tilt toward the west and try to get around the front of a hurricane moving northward, but this maneuver would take him toward Hatteras, where he might find company in the wrecks of countless other ships that had failed in the effort and had been thrown against the coast. The other choice was no better. He could make such progress as was possible toward the east and hope that he would not be caught in the dangerous sector of the oncoming hurricane, a course which more likely than not would lead to disaster.
As has been noted, however, it was the tragic losses caused by extratropical cyclones that induced governments to take over the job of hunting storms and issuing warnings. In France, the first country to take positive action, the immediate cause was the catastrophe which struck the allied fleets in the harbor at Balaclava in 1854, during the Crimean War. Ships of England and France were caught in this desperate position because of jealousies and hatreds which have abounded in Europe for centuries. In this case, the Tsar of Russia seized a pretext to try to gain control of a part of Turkey. This was not unexpected. Russia always has looked with covetous eyes at the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which lead through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. On this score Europe is perpetually uneasy. France and England, who had been enemies, now joined forces and planned a campaign against Russia.
It was July, 1853, when the Tsar, Nicholas I, mobilized his armies. As his first overt act, he occupied the part of Turkey which lay north of the Danube River. Soon afterward, the Russian fleet destroyed a Turkish squadron in the Black Sea. Now the Tsar became more cautious because of the threat of action by England and France, and especially because of indications that Russia’s ally, Austria, would desert her. The Tsar took no further action. Now it required a long time in those days to get a campaign under way, and it was a whole year later, July, 1854, when the allies were ready to start the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. Meanwhile, Russia had withdrawn her troops from Turkey and there was no real cause for conflict. But tempers had flared, the vast machinery of war had been put in motion, and the allies drew stubbornly nearer to disaster. They knew quite well that the time might be too short to finish the campaign before the bitterly cold weather of the Russian winter would creep out over the Peninsula. In fact, the Tsar had said that his best generals were January and February, and that remark should have carried ample warning.
Actually, the allied attack began in September, 1854. The British had taken possession of the harbor at Balaclava and, in the beginning, the invasion seemed to promise success. But in October the heroic but ill-fated “Charge of the Light Brigade,” made immortal by Tennyson, marked the turning point. It was clear then that the campaign would have to be resumed in the spring of 1855. By November, cold weather had arrived, land action had ceased, and the allies were faced with the problem they had hoped so earnestly to avoid—that of keeping their fighting forces intact during winter in a hostile climate.
To understand the dire predicament of the allies when the big storm struck, it is important to note that the harbor at Balaclava had proved to be too small for a supply base. Many ships had to be anchored outside and there was delay and confusion in moving in and out of the harbor. Not only was there a difficult supply problem but the sick and wounded were being transported across the Black Sea to Scutari, near Constantinople, where hospital conditions were abominable. By October, the plight of the army had become a scandal in England. Florence Nightingale was sent to Scutari with authority over all the nurses and a guarantee of co-operation from the medical staff. She arrived on November 4. The remainder of her story is well known as one of the bright pages of history.
Now the stage was set for catastrophe. An obscure winter storm blew its way across Europe without anything happening until its southern center crossed the Black Sea, on November 14. Suddenly, as secondaries often do, it came to life. There was rain turning to snow as the disturbance burst forth in gales of hurricane force. The congestion grew while the signs of the storm intensified. The ghostly mountains around Balaclava disappeared in the gloom, the near-by shore lines next were blotted out, and impenetrable darkness settled down on the shuddering and grinding of the battered remnants of the helpless fleet. Wreckage was strewn along the coast and around the harbor. All the men-of-war survived, although damaged, but nearly all of the vessels with essential stores were lost.
Misery, disease, and horror followed during the bitter winter. The death rate in the hospitals reached forty-two per cent in February. Meanwhile, in France, Napoleon III received news of the terrible gales at Balaclava and brooded over the catastrophe. He determined to learn where this deadly storm had originated, the path it followed, and to set up a plan for tracking and predicting others of its kind in the future. And so he called in the famous astronomer Leverrier and asked him to carry out the investigation.
Urbain Leverrier, then forty-three years old, was known throughout the world as the discoverer of the planet Neptune, in 1846. He knew of the works of Redfield and Reid on hurricanes and by 1854 had noted the efforts of other Americans and Britishers to track extratropical storms. With their ideas in mind, he called on scientists in all European countries to send him observations of the weather on the days from November 12 to 16, preceding and following the day of the disaster at Balaclava. Information moved slowly between countries in those days and, though many scientists co-operated, it was February, 1855, before Leverrier had gathered the data he needed. In developing his plan, he was encouraged by the invention and spread of the electric telegraph in the United States, and he hoped that the extension of lines in Europe would provide fast-moving messages for his purpose.
Before the end of February, Leverrier handed his report to Napoleon III and recommended that a system of weather messages and of issuing warnings be established at once. The Emperor approved this within twenty-four hours. Soon the French government was mapping the weather and looking for storms. The British followed suit. Already Joseph Henry, in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was trying a similar plan, but it was not until February, 1870, that the Congress of the United States appropriated funds and established a government weather service in the Signal Corps of the Army.
The immediate reason for this legislation in the United States was similar to that in France. At that time there was a rapidly growing commerce on the Great Lakes, but storm disasters were all too frequent. In 1869, nearly two thousand vessels were beached or sunk by gales on the Lakes. On the seacoasts, the situation was almost equally bad. The new service was soon in operation. The first storm warning by the United States government was sent out in November, 1870.
During the next twenty years, blizzards, hail storms, tornadoes and sudden wind storms of other kinds gave the new weather service a great deal of trouble. They brought a vivid realization of the great variety of surprises that lay in wait for the storm hunters. No sooner had they found rules for the issuance of warnings than a new kind of peril came along. The service had been in the Signal Corps of the Army, but in 1891 it was turned over to the Department of Agriculture because of its value to the farmers. The desperate struggle against storms continued, with many experienced weathermen feeling very discouraged about the whole business. And then on February 15, 1898, the Battleship Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor and war with Spain loomed on the horizon.
On April 25, the United States declared war. The Spanish fleet left the Cape Verde Islands for Cuba and American warships departed for the West Indies, to prepare the way for the movement of troops for the coming campaign in Cuba. It was June 29, however, before the transports arrived at Santiago, carrying seventeen thousand officers and men to support the United States fleet. By that time, the commanders on both sides had begun to worry about storms, for the first hurricanes had appeared as early as June in some years, bringing destructive winds and torrential rains to some parts of Cuba and the surrounding area.
Willis Moore was Chief of the Weather Bureau. He had been a sergeant in the Signal Corps, transferred when the service was put in the Department of Agriculture. He knew very well the difficulties of tracking storms and especially in the West Indies, where only scattered weather reports could be obtained by cable from some of the islands. A bad hurricane could easily sneak up on the American forces through the broad waters of the Caribbean, a predicament likely to arise if the Weather Bureau depended on cable messages from native observers.
Moore carried his worries to James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, who decided that they should go to the President. At the White House, they soon had an audience with McKinley, and Wilson presented the case. Moore had maps, charts and data on hurricanes and the disasters they had caused in the West Indies. Also, he had sketched a plan for a cordon of storm hunters on islands around the Caribbean, to protect the American fleet. He said that armadas had been defeated, not by the enemy, but by the weather. He thought it probable that as many warships had been sent to the bottom by storms as by the fire of the enemy. The President listened respectfully at first, then with impatience at the lengthy discussion. He had made up his mind. Interrupting Moore, he got up, sat on the corner of his desk and declared:
“Wilson, I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy. Get this service started at the earliest possible moment.”
Moore ventured to say, “Yes, indeed, Mr. President, but the Weather Bureau will need the authority of Congress to organize a weather service on foreign soil.”
The President told Wilson: “Report to Chairman Cannon of the Appropriations Committee at once. They are preparing a bill to give me all necessary powers to conduct the war and this authority can be included.”
It was soon done. As a part of the plan, a fast cruiser was stationed at Key West, to carry the news to the fleet immediately, in case the Weather Bureau predicted a hurricane. In that event, the fleet might have abandoned the blockade, to get sea room and avoid the center of the storm.
With this authority, the Weather Bureau moved swiftly to station men and equipment on the islands. Letters had to be written to European countries for permission to send observers into their possessions. But although the bill containing the authority only passed Congress on July 7, observers arrived as follows: July 21—Kingston, Santiago, Trinidad, San Domingo, St. Thomas; August 11—Barranquilla; August 12—Barbados; August 18—St. Kitts; August 29—Panama.
Land fighting continued in the West Indies until August 12, but the Spanish fleet was destroyed on the morning of July 3. They made a desperate effort to escape from the harbor at Santiago, were shelled by American warships, and all were disabled or beached. Up to that time there had been no tropical disturbances in the region. A small one hit near Tampa on August 3. Another small but vicious hurricane swept the coast of Georgia on August 31. The first big one of the 1898 season raked Barbados, St. Vincent and St. Lucia on September 10 to 11, and disappeared east of the Bahamas.
The stations set up by the storm hunters in 1898 formed the backbone of the hurricane warning service which exists today as a greatly improved system, including squadrons of aircraft that fly into tropical storms to obtain essential data for the forecasters. Before storm hunting could be operated on a practical basis, however, it was necessary to find new means of communication. Dependence on messages by cable from scattered islands was not good enough.
5. RADIO HELPS—THEN HINDERS
“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again.” —F. D. R.
In the 1930’s there was a strange turn of affairs in hurricane hunting. It had long been the purpose to keep ships out of trouble, first by giving the mariner a law of storms and then by sending warnings by radio. One morning in August, 1932, an indignant citizen came into a Weather Bureau office on the Gulf Coast and wanted to know where the hurricane was. The weatherman told him that there were no ship reports in the area but the center seemed to be somewhere in the central Gulf.
“What’s the matter with the radio reports from boats?” he asked.
“Because of the warnings we issued yesterday, all the ships got out of the area and apparently there are no ships close enough this morning to do any good,” the weatherman explained.
“Say, what kind of a deal is this?” demanded the citizen. “The only way we can tell where the center is located is to get radio reports from boats out there and you fellows chase all the boats away from the storm.”
“Well, that’s our business,” replied the Weather Bureau man in astonishment. “We are required by law to give warnings to shipping.”
“I don’t see it. I’m going to write to my Congressman and to the White House, if necessary, to get this straightened out. What we ought to do is send boats out there to give reports when we need them,” was the final declaration by the citizen who had one time been a shipmaster himself. And he did write to Congress and the White House. Others joined him. The argument over legislation began.
Long before the use of radio on shipboard, the location, intensity, and movement of hurricanes over the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf, and along the coasts and between the islands in the West Indies had been judged by careful observations of the wind, sea and sky. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the storm hunters had become quite expert at it. Among the best were the Jesuits in the West Indies and in the Far East. They watched the high clouds moving out in advance of the tropical storm, the sea swells that are stirred up by the big winds and travel rapidly ahead, and, finally, as the storm center drew near, they studied the winds in the outer edges when they began to be felt locally. One of the pioneers in this work in the West Indies was Father Benito Viñes, at Havana. He began giving out warnings as early as 1875 and by the end of the century was an authority on the precursory signs of hurricanes, both for land observers and for men on shipboard. By that time many of the Weather Bureau men along the coasts had become experts and, after the Spanish War, they began work on the islands in the West Indies.