Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [18]
It never completely stabilized, however. Torricelli observed that it crept up and down at different points during the day and under differing atmospheric conditions. He did not come to this easily. Before he settled on mercury, he tried water. To get any observable effect, he had to use a glass tube sixty feet long, not exactly a device likely to win favor among mariners headed for Shakespeare’s “vexed Bermoothes.”
The term barometer arrived a decade or so later when Robert Boyle coined the name to describe his own air-weighing device, an instrument that so delighted the Royal Society, it resolved in 1668 to have a collection of Boyle’s barometers built and dispatched to the far limits of the world. The proposal was never enacted, but by Isaac’s time the barometer had become so well accepted as a meteorological tool that it wound up in all those places anyway.
Storm accounts got more and more detailed, kindling the imaginations of countless landlocked boys and providing the first scientific insight into the unique character of hurricanes. One of the most compelling writers of the seventeenth century was William Dampier, an Englishman who split his time between adventuring with buccaneers and patiently recording the natural phenomena he encountered on his far-flung voyages. Isaac considered him one of the great pioneers of meteorology. It was Dampier who gave the world its first detailed description of the lurid atmospheric colors that preceded such storms—the “brick-dust sky” that Isaac looked for but did not find as he scanned the Gulf horizon.
In 1703 a storm of great power and endurance brought the realities of cyclones to the heart of London itself. In giving England the worst storm of her history, it also advanced the literary career of Daniel Defoe, a forty-three-year-old editor and journalist with a taste for disaster. He knew a good thing when he saw it.
FOR TWO WEEKS in November 1703, a pod of strong gales paralyzed shipping off the coast of England. Outbound ships had to remain in port; inbound ships had to stay at sea. On Wednesday, November 24, the winds abated; by Thursday, hundreds of ships, including a contingent of Russian warships under ceremonial escort by the British man-of-war Reserve, began to move in a slow and graceful waltz over the rough “old seas” left behind by the storms.
The Reserve put in off Yarmouth. Her captain, convinced the worst was over, went ashore with his ship’s surgeon and clerk to buy provisions. In Deal, a small town overlooking the treacherous Goodwin Sands near Dover, Mayor Thomas Powell spent the day at his full-time job as “slopseller,” peddling supplies for seamen. In Plymouth, Henry Winstanley and a crew of workmen set out from the Barbican Steps on a fourteen-mile sail to Winstanley’s controversial Eddystone Light to repair its failed beacon. His critics had charged the lighthouse was unsafe, to which Winstanley responded that his one wish was to be inside the structure during “the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of heaven”—one of those moments in history that begged for a burst of ominous music.
BY NOW BAROMETERS could be found not just in the possession of mariners and scientists, but also in some private homes. Scientists understood too that foul weather tended to be accompanied by falling barometric pressure, although why this should be the case remained a mystery. Late on Friday, November 26, the barometer owners of England saw the level of mercury begin to fall, then plummet.
The storm struck with such ferocity that Queen Anne was escorted into the basement of the Palace of St. James and there deposited in a wine cellar. Wind stripped the roof off Westminster Abbey and demolished over four hundred windmills, in some cases turning their mill sails so fast that friction set the buildings on fire. The wind hurled