Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [32]
Moore proposed the creation of a hurricane-warning service with stations in Mexico, Barbados, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. McKinley approved. He told Moore, “Get this service inaugurated at the earliest possible moment.”
For that instant, at least, Captain Howgate was forgotten, the Blizzard of ’88 forgiven.
The establishment of these hurricane-listening posts was too weighty a task for rank-and-file bureaucrats. Moore chose only trusted officers of the bureau. For the West Indies network, he picked Dunwoody. For the Mexican stations, he chose Isaac.
It was during this Mexican venture that Isaac encountered his first hurricane—at sea, no less. For many people, it would have been the defining event of a lifetime, the story told and retold every Thanksgiving until the waves were taller than Pikes Peak, the winds strong enough to knock a man clear to Halifax.
For Isaac, however, it had a different effect.
THE WEATHER WAS hot and still, the Gulf smooth as mica, but now and then despite the lack of wind a great hill of water slid silently under the ship and levered it high above mean sea level.
The sky at the horizon turned copper. Isaac had never seen such color in the atmosphere. Could this, he wondered, be the “brick-dust” sky he had read about in mariners’ accounts of tropical cyclones?
His fellow passengers were unconcerned. At breakfast, one hundred men, women, and children crowded the ship’s dining room, “all in a jolly mood.”
Soon the sky darkened. Rain hammered the deck. The wind, by Isaac’s reckoning, accelerated to hurricane force. The ship rocked and pitched in heavy seas. At lunchtime, Isaac found himself alone in the ship’s dining room. Seasickness and fear had felled everyone else. He prided himself on his resilience. He made a show of it, no doubt, just as he had at Fort Myer, where he had raced his horse as fast as he possibly could while the city boys hugged their mounts and cursed his soul.
The storm continued through the day. At dinnertime not even Isaac appeared in the dining room. “I was so sick,” he wrote, “that I did not care if the ship went to the bottom of the Bay of Campeche.”
The ship survived. Isaac survived. He had met the most feared of all meteorological phenomena, yet had lived through it with only a case of seasickness. The experience had to have influenced his appraisal of the survivability of hurricanes. On some level, perhaps, he came to believe that hurricanes were not quite as awful as Piddington, Redfield, and Dampier had depicted. Or he assumed that technology—in this case, the modern steamship—had stripped hurricanes of their power to surprise and destroy. Indeed, in that same hurricane season of 1898 a naval architect from Pleasantville, New Jersey, named Simon Lake survived a particularly intense cyclone off Florida by submerging his submarine to a depth below the influence of the waves, exactly as Captain Nemo had done thirty years earlier in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Jules Verne,” Lake wrote, “was the director-general of my life.”
Against the hubris of the age, what was a mere hurricane?
As THE YEARS passed, Galveston got bigger and more glamorous. Its future as a deep-water port seemed assured. In May 1900, the Galveston News published a plan for the “Improvement of Galveston,” devised by Col. H. M. Robert, divisional engineer, U.S. Army. Robert, famous by now for his Rules of Order, proposed an elaborate plan that would fill in the wetlands surrounding Pelican Island in Galveston Bay to produce an expanse of land eight feet above sea level called Pelican Territory. A harbor channel was then to be dredged between the territory and Galveston Island, and this was to serve as a portal to a new harbor basin with a surface area of seven thousand acres. The plan promised sure victory over Houston in the race to dominate the Gulf.