Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [56]
Dawn brought little relief. Green swells walled the ship. At intervals visibility fell to zero. It was impossible to open one’s eyes against the horizontal rain.
At 10:30 that morning, the anchor fractured. The ship’s bow pivoted from the oncoming seas like a horse pulled into a sudden turn.
Captain Simmons ordered his crew to play out two hundred fathoms of nine-inch hawser from the stern, which together with the chain-cable still trailing from the bow had the effect of slowing the ship’s landward drift and stabilizing its motion. The thumping stopped, but the ship now rode parallel to the oncoming crests and slid deep into the troughs between waves, a deadly place.
Simmons ordered a sounding and found the ship was in twenty fathoms of water, or 120 feet. He estimated its position at about 115 miles southeast of Galveston. The storm seemed to be shoving the Pensacola directly toward the city.
If Simmons was right, then Galveston lay directly in the great storm’s path. It would arrive, he knew, without warning, and there was nothing he could do to sound the alarm.
THE BEACH
Delight
AT DAWN SATURDAY two men stood on the beach, apparently out of sight of each other. One was Isaac Cline, who stood with his watch cupped in his palm, glancing from its face to the sea and back again. The other was his neighbor, Dr. Young. Both men had come to the beach for essentially the same reason.
Dr. Young watched the waves attack the streetcar trestle, which through an act of supreme confidence had been built over the Gulf itself. Waves now crashed over the rails and exploded against the pilings in vertical geysers of arctic-white spray.
Dr. Young stayed only a few moments. The sight was all the confirmation he needed. “I was certain then we were going to have a cyclone.” He walked into the city, and went directly to the Western Union office on the Strand, where he composed a telegram addressed to his wife, still aboard that Southern Pacific train from the west.
It was a measure of the age that Dr. Young had such complete faith in Western Union’s ability to find his wife during the train’s brief stop in San Antonio.
He asked her to wait in San Antonio until he sent word for her to continue to Galveston. “I told her that a great storm was on us.”
Legend holds that the sea convinced Isaac of the same thing—that he raced back to the office, galvanized the station into a flurry of action, then sped back to the beach and warned everyone he saw to flee the city or retreat to the center of town. Later Isaac took personal credit for inciting six thousand people to leave the beach and its adjacent neighborhoods. If not for him, he claimed later, the death toll would have been far higher. Perhaps even double.
But Isaac’s response, and that of his station, was in reality more ambivalent. A few hours after Isaac’s trip to the beach, the Alamo’s Captain Hix made his visit to the station—the visit in which he was told the coming storm was an innocuous “offspur” of one that had struck Florida. At about nine o’clock that morning, Theodore C. Bornkessell, Isaac’s printer, left work to go to his cottage in the city’s west end and passed the home of an acquaintance named E. F. Gerloff, who asked about the storm. Bornkessell replied there was nothing to worry about.
John Blagden, the observer assigned to Galveston on temporary duty, reported spending much of Saturday answering telephone calls from worried civilians, but it is by no means clear that he conveyed to these callers any great sense of danger. He conceded, later, “The storm was more severe than we expected.”
About midmorning, Isaac himself walked to the Strand and there told several wholesale merchants that he expected minor flooding. He advised them to raise their goods three feet off the ground.
Many residents said the storm came utterly without warning. None had the slightest inkling that it might be a hurricane.