Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [22]
A hurricane set the hunt in motion.
ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1821, a hurricane moving up the coast from Cape Fear made landfall near New York City, and continued north well into New England. Soon after the storm a thirty-two-year-old saddler named William Redfield, son of a long-dead sailor, took a trip on horseback through Connecticut and happened to notice something unusual in the landscape around him. Near Canaan, in northernmost Connecticut, the trees had fallen in a direction exactly opposite that of the toppled trees he had seen farther south.
After his return home, Redfield made a careful study of the hurricane. He collected fragments of detail about the storm from newspapers, letters, ships’ logs, and other sources, and in the process became the first man to track a hurricane from first sighting to last. His interest expanded to include other hurricanes, which he pursued with equal zeal. His first paper, “On the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast,” appeared in 1831 in the American Journal of Science, and quickly became a classic of meteorology. He concluded there could be only one explanation for the changing pattern of damage he had encountered: “This storm was exhibited in the form of a great whirlwind.”
Redfield’s meticulous research caught the attention of a British naval officer, Lt. Col. William Reid, who had been dispatched by King William IV to Barbados to supervise the reconstruction of British interests there in the wake of yet another disastrous hurricane, this the great “Barbados-to-Louisiana Hurricane” of 1831, which killed over fifteen hundred people. Reid too became obsessed with hurricanes. After his return to England, he adopted Redfield’s tracking techniques and in turn ignited the storm-watching passions of a countryman, Henry Piddington, who applied the same techniques to the unfathomably deadly storms of the Bay of Bengal. It was Piddington who coined the word cyclone, from the Greek for “coils of a snake,” and it was his research that resonated most darkly within Isaac Cline on Saturday, September 8, 1900.
Piddington reconstructed a cyclone that struck the bay town of Coringa in December 1789. “The unfortunate inhabitants of Coringa saw with terror three monstrous waves coming in from the sea, and following each other at short distances. The first, sweeping everything in its passage, brought several feet of water into the town. The second augmented these ravages by inundating all the low country, and the third overwhelmed everything.” The three waves killed at least twenty thousand people, although the final toll was beyond tally. “The sea in retiring left heaps of sand and mud, which rendered all search for the property or bodies impossible.”
Isaac read Piddington’s work. It would come back to him years later on the beach at Galveston. “I had studied the meagre information available relative to tropical cyclones,” Isaac wrote. “I had read of the Calcutta cyclone, October 5, 1864, which caused a storm tide 16 feet deep over the delta of the Ganges and drowned 40,000 persons, and the Backergunge cyclone of October 31, 1876, which caused an unprecedented storm tide ranging in depth from 10 feet to nearly 50 feet over the eastern edge of the delta of the Ganges, and drowned at the lowest estimates 100,000 persons.” At that point, however, he was only thinking in terms of waves. He still had no appreciation of how similar the undersea landscape, or bathymetry,