Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [14]
But the service insisted that its men also know the tried-and-true visual methods of military communication. Isaac learned how to send messages using flags, torches, and the heliograph, which used a mirror to send bursts of light over long distances and was deployed later, in April 1886, during the Army campaign to capture Geronimo. Signal practice was awkward and difficult, especially at night when it required torches. These nocturnal sessions frequently involved “midnight travel in the rain, over muddy roads in black darkness, the horses choosing the proper route, as we could not,” recalled H. C. Frankenfield, who also arrived at Fort Myer in 1882. Two decades later the bureau would assign Frankenfield the task of figuring out where the great hurricane of 1900 had come from.
Isaac became adept at signaling in every medium, but most recruits did not take this aspect of their training very seriously. They did not take much of anything seriously. Often recruits told each other in advance what messages they would send. One lieutenant deliberately marched a squad of new recruits double-time off the edge of a three-foot-high porch. Another officer, seeking to impress a carriage full of young women, suddenly ordered his squad to signal the word asafoetida, a medicinal ingredient that few knew how to spell. This prompted a moment of stunned silence, followed by a great flapping of flags evocative less of an elite signal squad than a flock of startled pigeons.
One morning a recruit named Harrison McP. Baldwin, the clown of his class, raced out in the predawn light for morning rifle drill, and executed without flaw all the required maneuvers.
Without his rifle.
No one noticed.
Years later, Baldwin went to work for Isaac Cline in Galveston. He was an able clown, an abysmal weatherman. It was a failing that Isaac would find intolerable, but one that probably saved Baldwin’s life.
The Storm
Monday, August 27, 1900:
15.3 N, 44.7 W
IT ADVANCED SLOWLY. Eight miles an hour, maybe ten. It moved west and slightly north and covered about two hundred miles a day, roiling the seas and erecting an electric wall of clouds visible to ships far outside its arc of influence. The first formal sighting occurred Monday, August 27. The captain of a ship at latitude 19 N, longitude 48 W, in the open sea below the Tropic of Cancer halfway between Cape Verde and the Antilles, noted in his log signs of unsettled weather. He recorded winds blowing from the east-northeast at Force 4, a “moderate breeze.” Thirteen to eighteen miles an hour. His barometer showed 30.3 inches.
He dismissed the storm as a distant squall.
Fort Myer
What Isaac Knew
BETWEEN bouts of mounted swordplay, Isaac journeyed deep into the mysteries of weather. Meteorology was an emerging science rooted not so much in rigorous research as in stories and adventures, which only enhanced the mystery. By gaslight, with the bells of Washington tolling softly in the summer steam, he immersed himself in the millennial quest to understand wind, and in the hunt for the Law of Storms, one of the driving scientific explorations of the nineteenth century. He found it all as compelling as anything by Verne, a great sweeping saga full of crimson clouds, hundred-foot waves, and strange occurrences. He read how men caught in the fiercest storms found the decks of their ships carpeted with exhausted horseflies and how the survivors of a colonial hurricane emerged to find deer stranded in trees. In the Caribbean, wind had lifted cannon.
Weather was a national obsession and had been for centuries. Countless men, including some of the most prominent of their times, kept daily track of the weather and often for decades on end. Thomas Jefferson kept a lifelong weather journal and on July 4, 1776, despite certain other pressing matters, noted the temperature in Philadelphia to be a lovely 76 degrees. Samuel Rodman Jr., a prominent Massachusetts merchant, and his son Thomas together produced an uninterrupted daily