Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [53]
Why he did not run can never be known, but it is likely his failure to do so was the product of those eight hundred previous voyages, his own ornery temperament, and the technological arrogance of the time—hell, the Pensacola was made of steel and weighed two million pounds.
Plus, he had an audience. At one point, in a show of bravado, Simmons called his guests to the barometer. “Menard,” Simmons said. “Look at that glass. Twenty-eight point fifty-five. I have never seen it that low. You never have and will in all probability never see it again.”
Simmons ordered all hatches sealed. The waves grew; the wind accelerated. Simmons gauged the wind at one hundred miles an hour.
Foam covered the sea. Spindrift blew in long luminous tentacles that seemed to reach for the bridge. Simmons stopped the engine. He ordered the anchor dropped, along with one hundred fathoms of chain cable, or six hundred feet.
When the anchor caught, the ship swung so that its bow faced head-on into the wind like a kite tethered to a child’s wrist. It “labored heavily,” Menard said, “rising off one tremendous sea and dropping on another, which jarred the vessel and made her tremble all over.” Steel seams howled. The wild tumbling shattered crockery and lamps. Fragments slid in noisy herds back and forth across the deck. The captain’s dog got seasick.
“It looked as if the good ship could not stand such a thumping,” Menard recalled. “It was feared she would strain her plates or break some bolts, if the vessel did not break in two.”
This two-million-pound steel-hulled screw-driven marvel of marine technology was in trouble—suddenly no better off than a square-rigged barkentine. Worse off, in some respects. Steamships could not broach-to the way the old wooden sailing ships could. If knocked on her side, the Pensacola would have sunk like a steel bearing. The pounding was the biggest worry. A ruptured seam, Menard guessed, would drive her to the bottom in five minutes.
Things like this were not supposed to happen. Not anymore. Whether the ship survived or not was now only a matter of luck.
Luck, and maybe a little quiet prayer.
FRIDAY NIGHT, DR. Samuel O. Young, the secretary of the Cotton Exchange, walked from his house to the beach. He lived at the corner of P½ and 25th, one block north of Isaac Cline’s home, in a large two-story house mounted on brick pillars four feet high. On stormy nights, as lightning flashed, Young could see Dr. Cline standing on his second-floor balcony, keeping an eye on the weather. Dr. Cline, no doubt, could also see him.
As Young walked past the weatherman’s house, he saw children outside, leaping about unmindful of the mosquitoes beginning to emerge from the gutters and the moist places left by Tuesday’s thunderstorms.
His own children and his wife were at that moment in the sleeping car of a Southern Pacific train speeding toward Texas from the west, where they had spent the summer away from the heat and mosquitoes.
Ahead, Murdoch’s pier blazed with light. The crests of incoming waves seemed nearly to touch the lamps suspended over the surf. There would be no nude bathing tonight—unlike other nights, when as many as two hundred men would gather in the waves beyond the reach of the lamps and swim frog-naked in the warm water. The thought of joining them had crossed Young’s mind now and then, but he quickly put those inclinations out of his skull. He could see it now: a two-inch item in the next morning’s News about the secretary of the Cotton Exchange tumbling naked among the waves.
The Gulf had grown angrier since Wednesday, when Young first had noticed the unusual height of the waves and the absence of any wind to explain their growth. “Thursday afternoon,” he wrote, “the tide was again high and the water very rough, while the atmosphere had that peculiar hazy appearance that generally precedes a storm.” Now it was Friday night. A robust wind raced past Young toward the Gulf, but did little to dispel the heat. The surf was rough, the tide unusually high, “though as a rule with a north wind