Part 3

In time, Europeans settled in the islands and on the southeastern coasts of America. They dreaded the approach of late summer, when copper-colored clouds of a tropical storm might push slowly upward from the southeastern horizon. What they learned about them came mostly from the natives, who had long memories for such frightening things and reckoned the time of other events from the years of great hurricanes. Strangely enough, although during the more than four hundred years that have passed since then, man has finally mastered thermo-nuclear reactions capable of permanent destruction of whole islands, he still probes for the secret of storm forces of far greater power.

It is hard to say who was the first hunter of storms. Columbus and his sailors were constantly on the lookout and actually saw several West Indian hurricanes. Luckily, they didn't run into one on their first voyage, or the story of the discovery of America would be quite different, for the ships sailed by Columbus were not able to stand up against these big winds of the tropics. They would have been sunk in deep water or cast ashore as worthless wrecks.

If Columbus had been lost in one of these monstrous storms--and he didn't miss it by very much--it might have been many years before another navigator with a stout heart could have induced men to risk their lives in the uncharted winds of the far places in the Atlantic Ocean. Out there toward the end of the world, where increasing gales dragged ships relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailors who ventured too far would drop off the edge of a flat earth and plunge screaming into eternity--so they thought. Only in Columbus' mind was the earth a sphere.

By the time Columbus had made his third voyage to the West Indies, he had learned a good deal about hurricanes and how to keep out of them. He got this information by his own wits and from talking with the natives in the islands bordering the Caribbean. They told him of storms much more powerful than any that were brewed in European waters. After listening to their tales, he was afraid of them. In 1494 he hid his fleet behind an island while a hurricane roared by. The next year, an unexpected one sank three of his vessels and the others took such a beating that he declared, "Nothing but the service of God and the extension of the monarchy would induce me to expose myself to such dangers."

In 1499, a Spaniard named Francisco Bobadilla was appointed governor and judge of the Colony on Hispaniola (Santo Domingo). He sent false charges back to Spain, accusing Columbus of being unjust and often brutal in his treatment of the natives. Columbus was ordered back to Spain in chains. Here he remained in disgrace until December, 1500. By that time the true nature of Bobadilla's treachery had become known.

By the spring of 1502, Columbus had been vindicated and was on his way back to the West Indies with four ships and 150 men. During his earlier voyages he had become deeply respectful of these big winds of the New World. When he arrived at San Domingo on this last voyage, his observations made him suspect the approach of a hurricane. At the same time, a fleet carrying rich cargoes was instructed to take Bobadilla back to Spain. It was ready to depart. Columbus asked for permission to shelter his squadron in the river and he sent a message, urging the fleet to put off its departure until the storm had passed.

Bluntly, both of Columbus' requests were denied. He found a safe place in the lee of the island but the fleet carrying Bobadilla departed in the face of the hurricane and all but one vessel went to the bottom. Bobadilla went down with them, which seemed to be a fitting end for the scoundrel who had been guilty of hatching up false charges against Columbus.

After the time of Columbus, better ships were built and the fear of storms diminished. Seafaring men today are likely to get the idea that modern ships of war and trade are immune to hurricanes. They have a brush or two with minor storms or escape the worst of a larger one and cease to be afraid of the big winds of the West Indies. Now and then this attitude leads to disaster.

In September, 1944, the Weather Bureau spotted a violent storm in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. It grew in fury and moved toward the Atlantic Coast of the United States. The forecasters called it the "Great Atlantic Hurricane." Being usually conservative, Weather Bureau forecasters seldom use the word "great" when warning of hurricanes and when they do, it is time for everybody to be on guard. In this case, the casualties at sea included one destroyer, two Coast Guard cutters, a light vessel and a mine sweeper. This should have been sufficient evidence of the power of the tropical storm to destroy modern warships, but just three months later a big typhoon caught the Navy off guard in the Pacific and proved the case beyond the slightest doubt.

Typhoons are big tropical storms, just like West Indian hurricanes. They form in the vast tropical waters of the Pacific, develop tremendous power, and head for the Philippines and China, sometimes going straight forward and sometimes turning toward Japan before they reach the coast. Like hurricanes, they are often preceded by beautiful weather, allaying the suspicions of the inexperienced until it is too late to escape from the indraft of the winds and the mountainous seas that precede their centers.

It was hard to keep track of typhoons in World War II. In large areas of the Pacific there are few islands to serve as observation posts for weathermen. Before the war, merchantmen on voyages through this region had reported by radio when they saw signs of typhoons. But many of the weather-reporting vessels had been sent to the bottom by enemy torpedoes and the remainder had been ordered to silence their radios. Thereafter, the only effective means of finding and tracking tropical storms was by aircraft, but reconnaissance by air had just begun in the Atlantic and was not organized in the Pacific until 1945.

Late in 1944, our Third Fleet, said to be the most powerful sea force ever assembled, had drawn back from the battle of Leyte to refuel. The Japanese Navy had received a fatal blow from the big fleet. Nothing more terrible was reserved for the Japanese except the atom bomb. Far out in the Pacific, a typhoon was brewing while valiant oil tankers waited five hundred miles east of Luzon for the refueling operation so vitally needed by our warships after days of ranging the seas against the Japs.

It was December 17 when the refueling began. By that time, the winds and seas in the front of the typhoon were being felt in force. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers and a host of other vessels rode big waves as the wind increased. The typhoon drew nearer and the smaller ships were bounced around so violently that it became impossible to maintain hose connections to the oilers. Before nightfall, the refueling had stopped completely and the fleet was trying to run away from the typhoon.

It was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describe the desperate movements of a great battle fleet. Messages flew back and forth, changing the ships' courses as the wind changed. They ran toward the northwest, then toward the southwest, and finally due south, in a last effort to escape the central fury of the great typhoon. But all this did no good.

The lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such, top-heavy with armament and equipment and with little oil for ballast, began the struggle for life. Each hour it seemed that the height of the storm had come, but it grew steadily worse. Writhing slopes of vast waves dipped into canyon-like depths. The crests were like mountains. The wind came in awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour. The tops of the waves were torn off and hurled with the force of stone. Ships were buried under hundreds of tons of water and emerged again, shuddering and rolling wildly.

On the eighteenth of December, one after another of the ships of the Third Fleet lost control and wallowed in the typhoon. Time and again thousands of men faced death and escaped by something that seemed a miracle. There was no longer any visible separation between the sea and the atmosphere. Only by the force with which the elements struck could the men aboard distinguish between wind-driven spume and hurtling water. Steering control was lost; electric power and lights failed; lifeboats were torn loose; stacks were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard; three destroyers rolled too far over and went to the bottom of the Pacific.

Altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck or blown into the sea and lost. Cruisers and carriers suffered badly. Battleships lost planes and gear. The surviving destroyers had been battered into helplessness. Almost eight hundred men were dead or missing. As the typhoon subsided, the crippled Third Fleet canceled its plans to strike against the enemy on Luzon and retreated to the nearest atoll harbor to survey its losses. More men had died and more damage had been done than in many engagements with the Japanese Navy.

A Navy Court of Inquiry was summoned. It was said that this typhoon of 1944 was the granddaddy of all tropical storms. But a study of the records shows that it was just a full-grown typhoon. There have been thousands of hurricanes and typhoons like this one. Down through the centuries, these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs across tropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles to grasp thousands of ships and send them to the bottom. Pounding across populous coasts, with mountainous seas flooding the land, they have drowned hundreds of thousands of people, certainly more than a million in the last three centuries, and untold thousands before that.

After the typhoon disaster, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet declared that his officers would have to learn forthwith about the law of storms. Really there was nothing new in that idea. It had been voiced by navigators of all maritime countries of the world from the earliest times. The so-called "law of storms" is merely the total existing knowledge about storms at sea--how to recognize the signs of their coming and how to avoid their destructive forces--and it has taken four and a half centuries to develop our present understanding of hurricanes.

This experience of the Third Fleet made it plain that a sailing vessel had very little chance of survival in the central regions of a fully developed tropical storm. The only hope was that the master would see the signs of its coming and manage to keep out of it. Once he became involved, the force of the wind was likely to be so great that his vessel soon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. The gales seemed to have unlimited power. Even today, we don't know accurately the speed of the strongest winds. It seems likely that the highest velocities are between two hundred and two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Wind-measuring instruments are disabled or carried away and the towers or buildings which support them are blown down.

Long after the time of Columbus, it was generally believed that a storm was a large mass of air moving straight ahead at high velocities. A ship might be caught in these terrible winds and be carried along with them, to be dashed on shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. Every mariner wanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangely enough, few wanted to avoid them altogether. If a sailing vessel circled around a storm, it took longer to get to the port of destination and how could the master explain the time lost to his bosses when he got home, if he had no record of a storm in the log book to account for the delay?

From this point of view, some of the things that happened seemed very strange. Two or three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a sailing ship to be caught in a hurricane and scud for hours or days under bare poles in high winds and seas, and finally come to rest near the place where it first encountered the storm. A sailor on board would imagine he had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might survive the wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashore near the place where he started!

Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be accounted for. For example, it was often claimed that "the storm came back." After blowing in one direction with awful force until great damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that had not been destroyed in the first blow. To add to the mystery, many ships were never heard from again. They became involved in hurricanes and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind.

Men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships and men that were never seen again. And yet it is amazing to find how near some of these men came to the right answer. There were seafaring men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whose operations were centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. They were English, Dutch, Portuguese and French, all at one time or another opposed to Spanish control in the Carribbean. On various occasions they seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements.

During these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. Doubtless, there were many more not recorded. A great number of vessels went down in the seas and harbors around St. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where the buccaneers sought haven from the Spaniards.

One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was William Dampier. He was born in England in 1652, became an orphan at an early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he made a voyage to Newfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies and then fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year he went to Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiar with the harbors, bays, inlets and other features of the Carribbean coasts and islands. At times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the South American coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, they raided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed the Pacific to Guam, and then to the East Indies.

At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately took him over most of the world. But he died poor, just three years before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars' worth of prize money.

Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguished himself from the other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific facts in a clear and easy style. In his writings, we find our earliest good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good. Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Sea that "typhoons are a sort of violent whirlwinds." He said they were preceded by fine, clear and serene weather, with light winds.