Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [15]
But with God at least partly out of the way, the mystery only deepened. The first “scientific” definition of wind, by Anaximander, a Greek natural philosopher, would have seemed laughably primitive to Isaac, but for its time six centuries before the birth of Christ, it was a wonder of ingenuity. He called it “a flowing of air.”
But what was air?
The first person to show conclusively that air had substance was Philo of Byzantium during the third century B.C. He attached a tube to a glass globe, then inserted the open end of the tube into a dish of water. When he placed the globe in shadow, the water rose within the tube. When he exposed the globe to sunlight, the level fell. “The same effect,” he wrote, “is produced if one heats the globe with fire.”
He did not know it, but he had stumbled upon the fundamental engine that drove the world’s weather and that two thousand years later would power the ships of Columbus and his peers briskly over and with dismaying regularity under the seas. He had missed the broader question: If heat could cause a small volume of air to drive water up and down a tube, what could it do to the vast sea of air that covered the world?
Aristotle proved beyond doubt that air had mass when he demonstrated that a container filled with air could not also be filled with water. Did this mean that air had weight?
Aristotle flattened an airtight leather bag and weighed it, then filled the bag with air and weighed it again. Nothing changed. He concluded, erroneously, that air was weightless.
The world tumbled forward. Over the next fifteen centuries, the definition of wind did not advance very far beyond Anaximander’s “flowing of air.” In A.D. 1120, before Europe rediscovered the great works of the Greeks, Adelard of Bath, an English monk, thought he had stumbled upon something new.
With the sobriety of a man humbled by his own genius, he wrote: “I think that wind is a species of air.”
AS MEN VENTURED beyond the bounds of their accustomed territory, goaded by riches and glory, they encountered strange new meteorological phenomena. Early mariners discovered the miraculous trade winds that blew their ships toward the Indies. But they also discovered the doldrums at the equator and, just north of the trades, another realm of stillness that they named the Horse Latitudes, where half-dead crews becalmed for weeks cast their horses overboard to conserve drinking water.
Early captains learned also that these new seas harbored the exact opposite of doldrums, monster storms with cunning lulls during which the sun would shine and the winds cease, seducing unwary crews into believing the worst was over. Isaac learned that the first European to encounter such storms was the ever-charmed Columbus, and how the weather of the Indies revealed itself to him gradually, as if to prepare him for his first true hurricane. That storm occurred during his fourth and final voyage with such discriminating ferocity it sparked accusations that he had conjured it through magic—a not-unreasonable charge given the mysticism of the age, and the storm’s result.
COLUMBUS SET off on his first voyage on August 3, 1492, from Palos, Spain, with a fleet of three tiny caravels, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. By nineteenth-century standards, the three vessels hardly qualified as ships. They were large boats crewed skimpily with a few experienced sailors and adventure-hungry boys. Not only did Columbus and his captains have no means of determining the exact location of their ships in the featureless blue of the ocean, they also carried none of the meteorological tools that mariners in Isaac’s time took for granted.
After overcoming a few