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coast, but not by much. It was too early to say where it would make its U.S. landfall. Much more than twenty-four hours out and the tracks became guesswork. Highly educated guesswork, mind you, but still guesswork. The "normal" recurvature to the northwest and then north—a very common storm path—might not happen. A strong deep-layer anticyclone (another name for a high-pressure center) was hanging about in the atmosphere to the north, which, if it remained in place, as was probable, would prevent Ivan turning at all, in which case . . . what? The center's forecasters consulted their models and reported in a National Hurricane Center bulletin: "There is very good agreement through Day Five, with NOGAPS to the right of the AIDS envelope and the UKMET to the left of the AIDS envelope. The official forecast is slightly to the right of the previous forecast track, and is in very good agreement with GUNS and GUN A." I felt a bit like a kid with a new savings account whose bank manager was blathering on about financial derivative products and bond yields when all I wanted to know was how to take money out and put money in.

I would find out about these models later and how they both reassured forecasters and perversely, complicated their lives. But then the best forecasters, as I would learn, were those people who managed to shade guesswork into intuition, a very different order of information management.

Meanwhile, private yachts scattered into the Caribbean. A few went south, perhaps forgetting the dire lesson of Hurricane Mitch in igg8, which took a strange leftward turn at latitude 130 and slammed into the Honduran coast, trapping dozens of small boats and the tall ship Fantome, lost with all hands.1

By Monday morning, September 6, Ivan was still plowing steadily westward but had weakened some, to the middle ranges of Category 3, with sustained winds somewhere in the 120-mile-an-hour range. But the forecasters weren't happy. They reported that Ivan had "improved his appearance" and was now "better organized"—all of which anthropomorphizing meant that while an earlier concentric eyewall had decayed, a newer eyewall, tighter and clearer, had been formed. The storm was likely to strengthen, perhaps back to a Category 4, but it would now likely pass to the south of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.

It was still being pushed southward by that protective subtropical ridge: The storm couldn't get around it to head north. Not good news for Jamaica or Western Cuba, but good for the Haitians.

I

In December 1703 an extratropical cyclone of immense ferocity hammered England. It was the worst storm in English history, killing more than 8,000 people, toppling the newly built Eddystone Lighthouse and drowning everyone in it, peeling the roof off Westminster Abbey, and damaging scores of cathedrals and church spires, including the sublime Ely. Within the first six hours of the storm, which lasted almost a week, the Royal Navy lost twelve ships and 1,700 men, a fifth of the entire fleet; some 700 vessels moored in the Thames were driven ashore in a massive tangled heap.

In the storm's aftermath, the muckraking journalist Daniel Defoe, who had just been released from several years' imprisonment both for debt and seditious libel, placed a series of ads in the London papers soliciting first-hand accounts of the storm. He published the results in his best-seller called The Storm. He received dozens of eyewitness accounts of massive damage and a few of miraculous escapes. Queen Anne described the damage to the Royal Navy fleet as a "Calamity so Dreadful and Astonishing, that the like hath not been Seen or Felt, in the Memory of any Person Living in this Our Kingdom." The Reverend Joseph Ralton of Oxfordshire, for example, recounted seeing an immense "Spout, or Pillar, very like the trunk of an elephant only much bigger, crossing a field and, meeting with a great old Oak, snapped the body of it asunder, and coming to an old Barn, tumbled it down." Defoe himself counted 17,000 trees down before he grew weary of the tally, and 2,000 brick chimneys