Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [43]
“It was at first very difficult to interest the various peoples in the warning service,” Stockman wrote to Moore in a voluminous June 1899 report on the Indies service’s first full year of operation, “as the inhabitants of the islands are very very conservative and it is most difficult to get them to adopt any measures that radically differ from those pursued by their forebears, and forecasting the approach of storms, etc., and displaying warning signals or issuing advisory statements relative thereto, was a most radical change—the inhabitants being accustomed to hear of these phenomena only upon their near approach to a place or after it had passed in the vicinity.”
It was as if Father Vines had never lived, and the Belen Observatory had ceased to exist. Eventually Belen’s Father Gangoite discovered Stockman’s remarks. By then, however, the corpses floating in the hot seas off Galveston had freighted Stockman’s words with a brutal, unintended irony.
Stockman was a ponderous bureaucrat, given to writing immense reports about tiny things. When he filed his second annual report on July 31, 1900, even the professors and clerks at the Central Office rebelled, and these were men accustomed to levels of tedium that would have driven ordinary men to suicide. Internal memos flew from department to department, politely recommending that Stockman be muzzled. On August 15, Professor E. B. Garriott, one of the bureau’s most senior scientists, wrote to the chief clerk: “I am loth to criticize the work of a man who has shown commendable zeal in the prosecution of that work. Nevertheless I am constrained to say that if the Official in Charge at Havana could curb a tendency toward verbosity and avoid iterations and reiterations in successive communications of matter that is irrelevant and immaterial to the subject heads, a great deal of time and labor would be saved both at Havana and the Central Office.”
Willis Moore’s recommendation was a bit less florid: “Kindly tell him to save himself much work.”
In most other respects, however, Stockman was a good man to have in Havana. He shared Moore’s obsession with control and reputation, as did the men Stockman placed in charge of the hurricane stations on outlying islands. Like Moore, Stockman worried about the damage likely to occur through the issuance of unwarranted storm alerts. In the Indies service, however, this concern took on a colonial cast. The poor, ignorant natives were too easily panicked. Restraint was the white weatherman’s burden. It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing “unnecessary alarm among the natives.”
He saw conspiracy everywhere. The Cubans, he believed, were trying to steal the bureau’s weather observations to improve their own forecasts. He spent a good part of August 1900 investigating a man who called himself Dr. Enrique del Monte and claimed to be a professor at the University of Havana. In April, del Monte had published a well-received essay, “The Climatology of Havana,” in the bureau’s own Monthly Weather Review. Briefly, del Monte had even worked for Stockman. But now Stockman believed del Monte to be a fraud, perhaps even an agent of the Belen Observatory.
Stockman composed a nine-page letter to Willis Moore, dated August 10, which he devoted entirely to del Monte. He parsed del Monte’s article. In the essay, the doctor had described his observatory and the shelter that housed its instruments, and told readers it was located on a particular train line in Havana. Ah—but no such observatory existed! Stockman checked. “The shelter described for the exposure of the thermometers exactly describes the structure used for said purpose by the Belen College Observatory.”