Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [21]
A twentieth-century audience would have shot Isaac dead.
HADLEY’S THEORY DID little to advance man’s immediate understanding of storms in general and hurricanes in particular. Meanwhile, the danger grew. Ship traffic increased. Nations deployed battle squadrons to protect their interests. No single period highlighted the threat to national defense more than the wild hurricane season of 1780, during which three intense hurricanes scoured the Caribbean in a period of two weeks and impartially ravaged the forces of France, Spain, and Britain, even as these nations harried one another in the war-convulsed seas of the Americas.
The first hurricane arrived October 3 and leveled the Jamaican town of Savanna-la-Mar, and in the process overtook scores of British warships. Hundreds of seamen simply vanished. “Who can attempt to describe the appearance of things upon deck?” wrote Lt. Benjamin Archer, who survived the foundering of the forty-four-gun Phoenix. “If I was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of it—a total darkness all above; the sea on fire, running as it were in Alps, or Peaks of Teneriffe; (mountains are too common an idea;) the wind roaring louder than thunder (absolutely no flight of imagination,) the whole made more terrible, if possible, by a very uncommon kind of blue lightning.”
The second hurricane, called simply the Great Hurricane, struck Barbados on October 10 and 11, killing 4,326 people on that island alone. The toll throughout the Indies reached 22,000. Britain’s Sir George Rodney, deeply shaken by the disaster, described what remained of Barbados: “The most beautiful island in the world has the appearance of a country laid waste by fire, and sword, and appears to the imagination more dreadful than it is possible for me to find words to express.”
The storm lurched into French territory next and sank at least forty ships in a French convoy off Martinique, with a loss of five thousand soldiers.
The third hurricane struck just as Spain’s Admiral Don Jose Solano was leading a force of six dozen ships and four thousand soldiers for a surprise attack against the British at Pensacola. The storm so damaged and dispersed the fleet, the admiral called off the attack. In keeping with the early custom of naming storms after prominent victims, the hurricane became known as Solano’s Storm.
Together the three hurricanes did so much damage to Britain’s Caribbean forces that the Admiralty canceled a secret plan to seize Puerto Rico from the Spanish.
No navy could have made such short work of the military might of the world’s greatest powers. Clearly hurricanes posed a greater menace than any single nation’s forces. But what could one do? Captains could not even measure the velocity of the winds they encountered, for no effective means existed of measuring wind from a rolling, heaving ship. Sir Francis Beaufort tried to solve that problem by devising a wind scale that allowed mariners to gauge the intensity of wind by the look of seas and sails. Force 0 meant winds so light a ship could not move. Force 12 was a hurricane, when no sail could be exposed. Beaufort’s intent was to bring uniformity, and with it comparability, to weather observations made at sea. His scale included no actual wind velocities—these were added much later. The first captain to use the scale in an official log did so on December 22, 1831, the first day of a voyage of exploration. The captain was Robert Fitzroy; his ship’s company included a naturalist named Darwin.
Hurricanes, once such a surprise to Columbus, became lodged firmly in