Part 4

"Before these whirlwinds come on," wrote Dampier, "there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward the upper part is a dull reddish color." To him, this cloud was frightful and alarming. He went on to say that it was sometimes seen twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. The tempest came with great violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.

These stories by Dampier and others might have cleared up some of the mysteries of these furious storms, especially those that "turned around and came back." They might have explained the fact that sailors were carried long distances and then cast ashore near the places from which they started--for they were huge whirlwinds, as Dampier suspected--but nobody seemed to be able to put "two and two together" and prove it. For one thing, no one knew then that weather moves from place to place. Everybody seemed to have a vague belief that the weather developed right at home and blew itself out without going anywhere. With these ideas in vogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there was no useful law of storms. But we can put William Dampier down as one of the first "hurricane hunters."

As cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grew in population, storm catastrophes became more numerous. Now and then, a hurricane seemed to appear from nowhere and caused terrible destruction on land. New Orleans was devastated in 1722 and again in 1723. Charleston and other coastal cities were hit repeatedly. Coringa, on the Bay of Bengal, was practically wiped out by a furious storm in December, 1789, and there was another disaster at the same place in 1839.

Tropical storms that form in the Bay of Bengal and strike the populous coasts of India are known as cyclones. They are the same kind of storms as West Indian hurricanes and the typhoons of the Pacific. The worst feature is the overwhelming flood of seawater that comes in big waves into the harbors as the center of the storm arrives. If there is insufficient warning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.

Coringa is a coastal city of India which had a population of about 20,000 in 1789. In December, there was a strong wind, "seeming like a cyclone." The tide rose to an unusual height and the wind increased to great fury from the northwest. The unfortunate inhabitants saw three huge waves coming in from the sea while the wind was blowing with its greatest violence. The first wave brought several feet of water into the city. All the able-bodied ran for higher ground or climbed to the rooftops to keep from drowning. The second wave flooded all the low parts of the city and the third overwhelmed everything and carried the buildings away. All the inhabitants, except about twenty, disappeared.

In cases of this kind, a warning less than an hour in advance would have saved the lives of thousands, but disasters like this were repeated here and in other parts of the world dozens of times before the hunters, trackers and forecasters of hurricanes learned to cheat these terrible storms of their toll of death and injury. Progress was slow in the nineteenth century, which saw some of the world's worst storm disasters. In 1881, three hundred thousand people died in one typhoon on the coast of China.

We now come to the stories of the men who tried to do something about it--the storm hunters. At first, early in the nineteenth century, the hunters were men engaged in some other work for a living. They put in their spare time gathering information, getting reports from sailors who had survived these terrible storms at sea and from landsmen who had seen them come roaring across harbors and beaches, to lay waste to the countryside. We go with some of them through these awful experiences. Then, after the middle of the century, first under Emperor Napoleon III of France and later under President Grant in America and Queen Victoria in England, storm hunting became a government job and spread slowly around the world.

Here we see a bitter uphill battle. The hurricane proved to be an enormous whirlwind, hidden behind dense curtains of low-flying clouds, tremendous rains, and the thick spray of mountainous seas torn by earth-shaking forces of the monster. Its mysteries were challenging. Out of this work a warning system grew, and slowly the losses of life were reduced from thousands to hundreds, and then to dozens. We go with the storm hunters into Congress and the White House, to argue about it. Then we come to World War II and the desperate need for information while submarines attack shipping and hurricanes threaten airfields and naval bases.

And here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flying into the centers of these furious storms. In these stories we go along. We see what the weather crews saw and learn what they learned. And we see how the hurricane warning service works today--far better than a few years ago--but with a part of the great mystery still unsolved. So we go with the hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface of the sea to the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for the final answers to this great puzzle of the centuries.

2. THE SADDLER'S APPRENTICE

"All violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds." --Redfield

In recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarming duty of flying into hurricanes and they began to study the old records, one question bothered them very much. Why did it take so long to prove without doubt that these big tropical storms are whirlwinds? The main reason, of course, is the huge size of the wind circulation. The winds spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles. It was like the curvature of the earth. Any circle around the full body of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat.

The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see changes of the wind as they go along. They have no reason to question it. In earlier times, there was no means of travel fast enough to get the facts in this way. Then, too, there was no means of sending messages fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the same instant in different parts of the storm. Also, the entire wind system was in motion and if the various reports were not sent at the same time, the results, when they were charted, failed to make sense. This fact alone was the cause of much confusion, even as late as the first part of the nineteenth century.

A definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenly and unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner.

In the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walking through the woods of central Connecticut with his inquiring mind on scientific matters of the day when he discovered a strange fact that led to the first "law of storms" and eventually made him the most illustrious of the hurricane hunters. His name was William Redfield. His ideas were first published in 1831 and, together with the work of a few men who followed on his trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormy weather for nearly a hundred years.

Hurricanes were not only extremely dangerous to the sailing ships of that day but were becoming more destructive to the growing cities along the American coast. In the first quarter of the century, the population of the country doubled. In 1800, there were five million people. In spite of the War of 1812, which lasted for three years, and the temporary drop it caused in immigration, the population increased rapidly, mostly on and near the Atlantic Coast. The United States began to take a place in the forefront of the world's commerce. But now and then a great storm from the tropics swept the entire seaboard and took a grievous toll of ships and men and harbor facilities.

Up to that time, no one had learned enough about storms to give warnings in advance. There were no really useful rules to guide seamen around or out of a tropical storm. Weather prediction was not accepted as scientific work. Storm disasters were called "acts of God" and the ways of the atmosphere were thought to be beyond human understanding.

Occasionally, a mariner with an inquiring mind like Dampier came to the conclusion that tropical storms are huge whirlwinds which move from place to place. But none of these inquirers came up with any real proof. After 1800, the destruction from hurricanes grew steadily worse. The summer of 1815 was remarkable for furious storms all along the Atlantic Coast. Newspapers were filled with the details of storm disasters and the destruction of life and property on shore and at sea. The crowning catastrophe was caused by a furious West Indian hurricane which struck New England on September 23 of that year. In the violence of its winds and the height of its tides, this storm was about equal to the New England hurricane of 1938. Although the country was far less populous in 1815, and the buildings, ships, and wharves subjected to its fury were much less numerous than in 1938, the destruction was so great and the loss of life so heavy that the newspapers did not have space enough to give all the details of the marine disasters in this instance.

At Providence, there was terrible destruction. The tide rose more than seven feet above the highest stage previously recorded. Five hundred buildings were destroyed; the loss of life was never fully determined, but it was excessive. The same sort of tragic story came from New Bedford and other towns on the coast. Many buildings and a tremendous number of trees were blown down in the interior.

The most treacherous feature of these big storms was their resemblance in the initial stages to the ordinary "northeasters" which came at about the same time of year--late August or September--and blew fitfully for a day or two. They brought rain and high tides along the coast and finally died out without much damage. Tropical storms, like the big one in 1815, begin much the same way in New England, but suddenly become violent. Then, as now, they blew gustily from the northeast in the beginning but went around the compass and ended with shattering on-shore gales which drove engulfing floods into the harbors. Everybody was caught off guard.

This storm and another which came six years later in the same region set men to thinking seriously about ways to avoid these disasters. The violent hurricane of 1821 crossed Long Island and New England, leaving a path of destruction which lay somewhat to the westward of the hurricane path of 1815. Again enormous numbers of trees were blown down, this time mostly in Connecticut. And here is where we come to the story of the saddler's apprentice.

In September, 1802, a sailor named Peleg Redfield, of Middletown, Connecticut, died, leaving a widow and six children in very poor circumstances. The eldest child, William, thirteen years of age, had attended common school and learned about reading, writing and arithmetic, but when his father died, he had to be taken out of school.

The next year William was apprenticed to a local saddle and harness maker. Boys as well as men worked long hours in those days, and William Redfield was no exception. After he had finished the day's work and had done the chores around the Redfield home, he had only a small part of his evening to himself. Even then, he had a lot of discouragement--no books and no light to read by. The family could not afford candles. Nevertheless, William was so interested in science that he studied by the light of the wood fire, reading intently anything on scientific subjects that he could get his hands on.

A year later, William's mother married a widower with nine children of his own, and in 1806 the couple moved to Ohio, taking his nine children and five of hers, but leaving William behind to look out for himself. He continued his study of science, but with no indication that he would eventually find some of the answers so vitally needed in the fight against hurricanes. His father, being a sailor, had told him about storms at sea and the boy was unable to get this out of his mind.

Fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in the village of Middletown, William Tully, who had a good library and made it available to young Redfield. The first book the physician handed to William was a very difficult volume on physics. The boy brought it back so soon the doctor thought he had been unable to understand it, but he was pleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughly and had come back for more technical works of the time. Soon William gained such an understanding of scientific matters that an intimate friendship with the physician developed. During this time, however, young Redfield felt an increasing urge to visit his mother. But she lived more than seven hundred miles from Middletown and he had very little money. So in 1810 he walked all the way to Ohio.

At that time, Ohio had a very small population; it was less than 50,000 at the beginning of the century. The territory intervening between Ohio and Connecticut was pretty wild, with settlements only here and there. William followed primitive roads and trails and at last reached the shores of Lake Erie, where Cleveland and other cities stand today. The next year he walked back to Connecticut.

Redfield was now past twenty-one. He had thought deeply of many things while he trudged those lonely trails. He had a vision of a great railway extending from Connecticut to the Mississippi River. Also, his mind kept running back over the stories of storms his father had told him. From his thoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed a plan for a line of barges which operated between New York and Albany.

But when he arrived in Middletown, he had no course for the time being except to go into business in his trade of saddler and harness maker. To supplement his poor income, he peddled merchandise in the region around Middletown, trudging through the woods and stopping in the villages here and there. The years went by and he kept on studying science in his spare moments.