Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [19]
The storm destroyed seven hundred vessels on the Thames within London, jumbling them into great piles of debris, bowsprits impaling stern cabins. A tangle of rigging and tackle lay over all as if a giant spiderweb had settled upon the wreckage. Along the Severn River, storm waters breached seawalls and drowned fifteen thousand sheep. Salt spray turned leaves white. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the naturalist, wrote how at eight the next morning, “I cast my eye upon my barometer, and observ’d, that I had never seen the quick-silver so low.”
On land, only 128 people died, many killed by the collapse of fireplace chimneys.
At sea the story was different. If not for the clamor of wind and surf, what one would have heard that night up and down the coast of England was the thin cry of doomed men, stranded or adrift, many hanging from the tops of masts that now protruded only a few feet from the sea.
Off Plymouth something happened that most men would have dismissed as impossible. If one could count on anything in Defoe’s time, as in Isaac’s, it was a lighthouse.
UNTIL SHORTLY AFTER midnight, Friday night, residents along the distant mainland saw the reassuring beaconflash of the Eddystone Light. It proved that Henry Winstanley had succeeded in repairing the lamp despite the hurricane that must have welled up even as the work got under way.
After midnight, the light ceased to shine. When rescuers at last reached the lighthouse, or rather, the rock on which it had been built, they found nothing. The storm had scoured the light from the face of the earth. Only the barest trace of timber and masonry marked that anything at all had stood there, let alone a lighthouse.
Farther along the coast, several ships ran aground on the Goodwin Sands. Survivors hung in the upper masts and rigging of their ships until the tide receded, then climbed down to the now-exposed sands to await rescue, certain that the town they saw through the spindrift soon would send help.
The residents of Deal were aware of the sailors’ plight. Some watched the stranded men through telescopes. “It must have been a sad spectacle,” Defoe wrote, “to behold the poor seamen walking to and fro upon the sands, to view their postures and the signals they made for help, which, by the assistance of glasses, was easily seen from the shore.”
Boats did set out from Deal, but not for rescue. Their occupants ignored the doomed men and instead probed the floating debris for valuable salvage. The men on the sands were fathers, husbands, lovers, and sons, “but nobody concerned themselves for the lives of those miserable creatures.”
When Mayor Powell learned of his town’s behavior, he was appalled. He pleaded with the local customs house to deploy its boats for rescue, but the official in charge refused. Powell tried to raise his own corps of rescuers, offering five shillings for every sailor saved. With the help of a few volunteers Powell seized the customs boat and by his example convinced some of the salvage crews to help. The rescuers saved two hundred men but could not return in time to save the many others still stranded when the tide returned.
In all, the great English cyclone of 1703 killed over eight thousand seamen aboard hundreds of ships. One victim was the man-of-war Reserve. As the storm intensified, her captain, surgeon, and clerk raced back to the wharf in Yarmouth, where all they could do was stand and watch as the seas consumed the ship and all aboard.
Men understood the hazards of hurricanes, but the fundamental engines that drove such weather continued to elude them. Where did wind come from? And what gave it such power?
By the early eighteenth century important pieces of the puzzle were in place. Air pressure could be measured, even at sea. Temperature scales at last allowed precise comparisons of hot and cold.
The most important piece, however, lay unrecognized, even though the underlying principle had been proven long before.
IN 1627, A very brave if melodramatic German mathematician, Joseph Furtenbach, aimed a loaded cannon