Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [52]
At 7:00 A.M., Captain Simmons ordered the crew to raise steam and make for the Bolivar Roads, the channel at the east end of Galveston Island that connected the bay to the Gulf. A left turn would have taken him toward Houston. He turned right and entered the Gulf.
The weather was clear but hot. Excessively hot, especially considering the early hour. Simmons pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face. By habit he checked the weather display tower at the island’s east end for a storm flag. He saw nothing.
He did note, however, that the Pensacola was alone in the Roads.
AT 9:35 A.M. Galveston time, two and a half hours after the Pensacola’s departure, Willis Moore telegraphed Isaac with an order to hoist a conventional storm warning. The telegram reached Isaac at 10:30. Five minutes later, Isaac raised the flag.
The bureau’s forecasters in Washington had changed their minds, and now believed the storm would not reach the Atlantic after all. They still considered it a storm of only moderate energy, but now seemed to think it was still in the Gulf, moving toward the northwest.
The Atlantic theory had been a compelling one, however—so much so that a vestige of it survived at the Galveston station well into Saturday morning, despite Isaac’s experience on the beach. Shortly after nine o’clock Saturday morning, Capt. George B. Hix, master of the Alamo, walked to the Levy Building to inquire personally about the weather, as captains often did whenever the atmosphere seemed unsettled. Since dawn, Hix had watched the silvery shaft of mercury in his barometer get shorter and shorter.
In the weather office, an observer told him there was “no cause for uneasiness.” A storm was indeed approaching, but it was only an “offspur” of a storm that had struck the Florida coast a few days earlier.
“Well, young man,” Hix snorted. “It’s going to be the damnedest offspur you ever saw.”
Young man.
Not Isaac, surely. He was thirty-eight years old, which in 1900 qualified him as middle-aged. More likely the observer was Joseph Cline or the newly arrived John Blagden.
Regardless, it was a telling encounter. It suggests that Isaac had not told his fellow observers about his predawn trip to the beach, or at least had not revealed to them the depth of his concern. Or else he simply was not as worried as he later claimed.
Hix, however, hurried back to the wharf and readied the Alamo for storm.
BY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, a few sea captains and their crews were still the only men who knew the storm’s true secret—that it had grown into a monster. Some lived; some did not. In Tampa earlier, storm flags went up, but the schooner Olive set sail anyway for Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, she was missing. Two ships ran aground off Florida, their crews feared lost. The storm caught other ships as well—the El Dorado out of New Orleans, and the Concho and Hyades, both out of Galveston. Captain Halsey struggled to keep the Louisiana upright in waves whose backs were planed almost smooth by the intense wind.
By noon, the Pensacola was well into the Gulf. Captain Simmons checked his barometer and saw the mercury at 29.9. Over the next two hours, pressure fell nearly an inch. The wind reached gale force.
Captain Simmons stayed on course, the ship’s bow aimed roughly toward the Mississippi Delta, where the state of Louisiana