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At least we knew it was coming.

Before the days of daily weather forecasting it was very different, and storms were much riskier. At sea, skippers kept a wary eye on the weather, but the storms sometimes came up with such appalling speed and ferocity that they were often taken unawares, with occasionally fatal consequences. They had to learn to trust their instincts, and to flee when they could or strike sail when it was too late. I remember a conversation with Fred Crouse, an old Lunenburg seaman who had served as Third Hand on one of the Grand Bankers as a lad, living through the twin hurricanes called The Gales of August of 1926 and 1927. He was off Sable Bank on the schooner Partana when the 1927 hurricane hit:

It was a fine afternoon, couldn't a been nicer. I was with Frank Meisner an' our bait was all [that is, finished]. So he said we'll try to git in Canso see if we kin git squid bait. There was no power then, just sails, and we hoist all the sails. Well there was just wind enough that she went along about three, four miles an hour. Before dark we was all turned in. He [the captain] come down an he said, "Fred, I never seen a sunset like this in my life. I can't believe it but we're goin' a have somethin' of this." He said, "Call the gang out an put the gear off the deck."

We all laughed at him and when we had the gear put in the hold I just said to him for a joke, I said, "What shall we do, batten the hatches?"

He said, "You better do."

"About the sails, how 'bout them?"

He said, "I t'ink you better haul down the mains'l an tie up the jib . . . put the storms'l on."

So we done that an' it was still fine weather. The crew all laughin' at about what in the name a the Lord he was about. Well nine o'clock that evening we wasn't sorry we done it! It come right the same as you emptied it out o' a bag. Oh, it blowed some bad.

The wind blew so hard that night that it ripped off the bait board and hurled it into the Atlantic—and this a two-inch-thick spruce plank nailed tight with sixteen five-inch spikes, torn loose by the wind. The topmasts had sheared off, the canvas was in tatters, their dories had vanished into the deeps, the helmsman was black from bruises. But the vessel survived.

It was fearsome bad when it blew, the old seaman said. If you had time, you could flee into the open ocean and ride it out with just a small kerchief of sail, and you'd likely be okay. Without warning, though, you could be caught in shoal waters, or on the windward of an island, with gear on the deck. That was trouble, big, big trouble. Many a man and many a vessel foundered and were lost.

We had warning of our storm because of those magician meteorologists in their weather bunkers, with their soothsaying devices, the Doppler radars and scatterometers and dropsondes and the rest, giving us the alerts we needed. Even so, despite the fact that we knew it was coming, and were braced for it, and understood what was causing it (warm air from the Gulf of Mexico colliding with cooler Arctic air, the whole system violently stirred and then steered by the jet stream), it was still hard not to feel somehow targeted . . . It really didn't seem fair. Why here? Why now? Why ws? Fred Crouse in 1927 would have had no such warnings except for the canny instincts of his skipper, who had divined a pattern from subtle signals, and how much more arbitrary the storm must have seemed to him. And yet he was sailing in what was essentially the modern age, when radio receivers were already current and the national weather services of several countries were making educated guesses about what was happening in the wider world.

How much more terrifying still would storms have seemed in the prescientific ages, then? To Columbus, the first mariner we know of to survive a Caribbean hurricane. And to his predecessors, the Basques and the Vikings, the Phoenicians and the Greeks, the Chinese and the Arabs, who all ventured into the great emptiness of the ocean knowing nothing whatever of how storms