A Furious Sky

ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 21, 1743, THE THIRTY-SEVEN-year-old Benjamin Franklin craned his neck to look up at the Philadelphia sky, hoping to observe the predicted eclipse of the moon. Already a rising star in the colonies, lauded for publishing the wildly successful Poor Richard’s Almanack and for clever inventions, such as his eponymous stove, Franklin was sorely disappointed. Heavy cloud cover occluded his view, and then a hurricane sent him scurrying inside.

Since the hurricane’s winds were rushing in from the northeast, Franklin assumed the storm had come from that direction. Thus, he was quite surprised when he learned from newspaper accounts and correspondence that the fair people of Boston, including his brother John, had witnessed the eclipse under clear skies, but that soon thereafter a violent storm with winds from the northeast similarly blocked their view. Franklin concluded that what had at first seemed like two storms was in fact the same storm, and that it had moved from the vicinity of Philadelphia to the northeast, where it hit Boston a few hours later. This conclusion was bolstered by reports that the same hurricane had passed over New York and Newport, Rhode Island, on its way to Boston. Thus, Franklin became the first person to realize that hurricanes had forward movement, and that a hurricane’s winds could blow contrary to the direction in which it was moving. Although Franklin didn’t understand the reason why (hurricanes are whirlwinds that swirl in a counterclockwise direction, and he was on the left side of the hurricane’s eye as it passed), his observation was an important first step forward in deciphering the mysteries of hurricane behavior.

images — Mid-nineteenth-century lithograph of an oil painting of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis in 1779, done while Franklin was in Paris trying to garner support for the American war effort.

Franklin’s insight was not the only meteorological first related to the so-called Eclipse Hurricane of 1743. On the day of the hurricane, John Winthrop, the great-great-grandson of the Massachusetts governor of the same name, was at work in his lab at Harvard University, where he was a professor of mathematics and philosophy. Just the year prior, he had begun keeping a “Meteorologie Diary,” in which he recorded a great range of measurements, including temperature, precipitation, and pressure. This last item was quite unusual. Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercury barometer in 1643, but this ingenious instrument for measuring atmospheric pressure didn’t make its way to the American colonies until 1717, when one was brought to Philadelphia; and only ten years later did Winthrop procure his device.

As the hurricane bore down on Cambridge, Winthrop kept checking his barometer as it dropped; it reached its lowest point of 29.35 inches of mercury at 2:00 p.m. Since a normal barometric reading at sea level is 29.92 inches,††† Winthrop’s reading was not particularly low, indicating a fairly weak hurricane, but then again he was located a bit inland and his barometer might have been poorly calibrated. Nevertheless, his observation made Winthrop the first person ever to measure the barometric pressure of a hurricane—a piece of data that would ultimately become a critical element in determining the intensity of such storms.

Franklin and Winthrop had begun a process of scientific inquiry that would help unlock the secrets of hurricanes. But it was just a rudimentary beginning, and one that would not be built upon in any substantive way until the middle of the next century. This long period of stagnation with respect to hurricane science is quite surprising, given the inquisitiveness that characterized the times.

FRANKLIN AND WINTHROP LIVED in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason as it was often called, which began in the late 1600s and lasted until the early 1800s. It was an intellectually exciting time of ferment and change, during which rational thought and experimentation were celebrated as a means of better understanding the world and improving the human condition by solving problems that had long vexed society. In the realm of science and natural history, it was a period of great discoveries, many of which helped explain, categorize, quantify, and make sense of the laws, forces, and elements that affected life on Earth.

This is when English mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton made seminal contributions to optics and laid the foundations for classical mechanics; Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus introduced binomial nomenclature, the taxonomic system of naming plants and animals by their distinct genus and species; and Scottish geologist James Hutton proved that geological processes such as sedimentation, erosion, and volcanic activity created the Earth’s topography, and that the world was inconceivably old, its age being reflected in geologic layers built up over time.

The field of meteorology, the roots of which reach all the way back to Aristotle’s treatise Meteorologica, written in 340 BCE, also advanced during the Age of Enlightenment. The increasingly widespread use of accurate barometers, thermometers, and rain gauges transformed many people into weather watchers, who often recorded their observations in journals. The most famous American practitioner was Thomas Jefferson, an amateur meteorologist and inveterate weather observer. The rigors of his diplomatic and political life notwithstanding, for forty-two years, from 1776 to 1818, and possibly longer, he kept an extensive daily diary of the weather at his mountaintop home of Monticello, as well as at other locations where he lived during his illustrious career, including the White House. Jefferson’s hope was that by measuring a wide variety of what he called “the indexes of climate”—precipitation, temperature, the times at which birds migrated and plants flowered—he could contribute to a theory of the climate and how it changes over time. Although such a theory wasn’t developed during his lifetime, Jefferson’s meteorological efforts added to the general understanding of daily weather and broader climatic trends. His work was amplified by thousands of other weather diarists in America and Europe who also kept and shared their assiduously maintained records.

Another amateur meteorologist is credited with the “invention of clouds.” In 1802, thirty-year-old British pharmacist Luke Howard gave a public lecture titled “On the Modification of Clouds,” which he followed soon thereafter with an essay by the same name. Howard took something everyone experienced—ever-shifting clouds overhead—and made sense of them by giving them names. His classification of clouds, based on their characteristics, was simple and elegant. The three basic cloud types were cirrus, cumulus, and stratus—most simplistically defined as, respectively, wispy or feathery clouds, massively towering clouds extending upward from a horizontal base, and clouds that spread horizontally over a great area, creating a covering sheet. Then Howard went one step further by combining the three basic types to create variations on a theme, such as cirrostratus and cumulocirrostratus. Howard’s genius was to create a “language of the skies,” which enabled a richer and deeper conversation about clouds and their effect on the weather.

While progress in meteorology during the Age of Enlightenment was not insignificant, it was not earth-shattering either. As Jefferson wrote in 1822, “Of all the departments of science no one seems to have been less advanced for the last hundred years than that of meteorology.” But at least when it came to the daily and seasonal weather, and the climate and clouds, there was some forward movement. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the understanding of hurricanes. This deficiency was not for a lack of examples to observe and study. Since Franklin’s epiphany during the Eclipse Hurricane, plenty of hurricanes had afflicted America and the Caribbean, and two of the most consequential hit during the American Revolution.

THE FIRST STRUCK AT the beginning of October 1780 and laid waste to Jamaica by flattening buildings, sinking ships, and killing more than a thousand people. Jamaican governor John Dalling described the scene in Savanna-la-Mar, at the southwestern tip of the island, when the hurricane roared ashore: “The sea broke suddenly in upon the town, and in its retreat swept everything away with it, so as not to leave the smallest vestige of man, beast, or house behind.” A former plantation owner on Jamaica remarked that the hurricane “will be ever acknowledged as a visitation that descends but once in a century, and that serves as a scourge to correct the vanity, to humble the pride, and to chastise the imprudence and arrogance of men.” As the storm transited the island and then swept over Cuba, it smashed into a number of British naval ships, sinking four and killing most of their crews. The terrifying ordeal of one of these ships, the Phoenix, was captured in a letter that its first lieutenant, Benjamin Archer, wrote to his mother.

The Phoenix encountered the storm while sailing between Jamaica and Cuba. As the winds rose to hurricane strength, the sailors secured the sails, tied down the guns, and made the ship as snug as possible. In the midst of these preparations, Archer noticed birds literally dropping out of the sky and diving toward the deck, where many of them were knocked unconscious. Upon reviving, they would not leave their haven in the storm, but rather huddled in corners, trying to shield themselves from the wind. The elements brought so much pressure to bear on the hull that all the ship’s seams began to leak. Archer had been through rough weather before, but nothing like this. “My God! To think that the wind could have such force!”

Pumping furiously to keep the lower decks from swamping, the sailors worked nonstop through the night, but the hurricane was gaining. Archer lashed himself to a post on the deck, barking out orders as best he could above the deafening din. “If I was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of” the storm, his letter said—“a total darkness all above, the sea on fire, running as it were the Alps, or pikes of Tenerife; mountains are too common an idea; the wind rising louder than thunder . . . the poor ship very much pressed, yet doing what she could, shaking her sides and groaning at every stroke.”

Ultimately, the Phoenix plowed into the shore, stern first, about 10 miles east of Cuba’s Cape Cruz. The waves forced her so high onto the rocks that she hardly moved from that spot. When the fury of the hurricane had passed, the ship was a total loss, yet it was still in one piece. Only five men had been killed, when they were washed overboard by a breaking wave. Taking in the scene, with many injured men lying about, Archer “was surprised to find [that] the most swaggering, swearing bullies in fine weather, were now the most pitiful wretches on earth, when death appeared before them.”

As the storm slowly subsided, the officers and crew of the Phoenix clambered higher up on the shore, away from the pounding surf. In the coming days, Archer and four other men sailed the ship’s cutter to Montego Bay, where they enlisted three serviceable vessels to ferry the Phoenix’s remaining crew back to Jamaica. Meanwhile, after leaving Cuba behind, the hurricane continued its northward march. Tracking hundreds of miles from the shores of the American colonies, it greatly damaged two separate British naval fleets, forcing many of the ships into port for repairs.

Less than a month later the Caribbean would be hit by a storm of such magnitude that it came to be known as the Great Hurricane of 1780. Its trajectory took it past the Leeward Islands and between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. It then curved sharply to the east, dying out over the mid-Atlantic after delivering Bermuda a serious blow. But it had its most devastating impact on Barbados, Martinique, and St. Eustatius, with estimates of the deaths on these islands alone totaling roughly 17,000.

British admiral Lord George Brydges Rodney, commander in chief of the Leeward Islands Station, was on a ship off the coast of New York at the time the hurricane hit, but when he returned to Barbados a few weeks later, he wrote a letter in which he expressed his shock and dismay at the vista that unfolded before him. “It is impossible to describe the dreadful scene [the hurricane] has occasioned at Barbados, and the condition of the miserable inhabitants. . . . The whole face of the country appears one entire ruin; and the most beautiful island in the world has the appearance of a country laid waste by fire and sword, and appears to the imagination more dreadful than it is possible for me to find words to express.”

The hurricane also gravely damaged the British and French navies, both of which used Caribbean ports as staging areas for their forces fighting in the American Revolution. The British lost eight ships to the storm, and almost all of their crews, while the French lost more than forty transport vessels, along with the thousands of soldiers on board. The overall death toll of the hurricane is estimated to have reached 22,000, with some sources placing it higher still. In either case, this staggering loss of life earned this storm the title of the deadliest hurricane ever in the Atlantic.

The two hurricanes that slammed the Caribbean in October 1780 raise the question of whether these singular weather events affected the course of the Revolutionary War.‡‡‡ According to historian Nathaniel Philbrick, the hurricanes had a decisive impact because they caused France, America’s ally in the war, to reevaluate its stance vis-à-vis sending ships north to fight the British. “The lesson [of the hurricanes] was impossible to ignore,” Philbrick argues. The French concluded that remaining in the Caribbean during hurricane season was too dangerous. “Up until this point, France had viewed a naval expedition to the north on the behalf of the United States a possibility but hardly a priority. After that horrendous October, a different attitude prevailed.”

Given their newfound appreciation for the destructive power of hurricanes, the French spent the winter of 1781 in the Caribbean repairing their ships and strengthening their hold on the French colonies there, then sent most of their forces north to the American colonies, both to avoid tangling with any more hurricanes and also to aid the Americans. Thus, by following this course of action the French played a key role in the crucial Battle of the Chesapeake and the ultimate American victory over the British in the Battle of Yorktown, which ended when Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781—an event so profound that when the British prime minister, the imperious Lord North, learned of the surrender he wailed, “Oh God, it is all over!” He was correct. The surrender effectively ended the war and soon led to peace negotiations, resulting in the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783.

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THE WAR AGAINST THE British was over, the Constitution ratified, and the business of running a new nation well on its way. And yet, the forces of nature continued to plague the infant republic. Twin hurricanes hit North Carolina in 1795. The Great Louisiana Hurricane of 1812 destroyed nearly all of the low-lying soil and sand levees that bordered the Mississippi River, as well as most of the houses in New Orleans and surrounding areas. Then, three years later, the Great September Gale of 1815, which was just a hurricane by another name, zipped over the tip of Long Island and delivered a deadly blow to New England.

Barreling north at an estimated speed of nearly 50 mph, this hurricane not only battered coastal areas but also spread its path of destruction far inland before petering out. Famed lexicographer Noah Webster, writing in his diary from his farm in Amherst, Massachusetts, called the storm “a proper hurricane, like those experienced in the West Indies.” The sea spray carried aloft by the storm could be tasted in the rain and left a salty glaze on windows and leaves throughout the region. Along with the spray came flocks of seagulls, some of which were blown all the way to Worcester, about 45 miles from the ocean.

Some of the greatest damage occurred in Providence, Rhode Island, where terrific winds coming from the south propelled a gathering bore of water up Narragansett Bay and into the narrower confines of the Providence River, where it violently washed over the city. Wharves collapsed under the onslaught, and forty vessels ripped from their moorings careened into bridges and shot like missiles through the streets, demolishing anything in their way. Roofs flew into the air, chimneys toppled, fences were flattened, and the roiling waters, 15 feet above the highest of high tides, scraped buildings from their foundations. “Destruction and desolation were everywhere,” wrote one eyewitness. Amazingly, only two lives were lost, one of which was an elderly woman who, it was claimed by her neighbors, had been baking bread in her house and refused to leave until it was done. Before the bread rose, the house was swept away by the flood.

The hurricane seared itself into the memory of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who was only seven years old at the time and would become one of America’s most celebrated essayists and poets. Recalling the storm many years later, he noted, “The wind caught up the waters of the bay and of the river Charles, as mad shrews tear the hair from each other’s heads.” Holmes’s 1836 poem titled “The September Gale” humorously recounted the passing of the hurricane over his Cambridge home, in one of its stanzas telling of the storm’s dramatic effect on his wardrobe:

It chanced to be our washing-day,

And all our things were drying;

The storm came roaring through the lines,

And set them all a flying;

I saw the shirts and petticoats

Go riding off like witches;

I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,—

I lost my Sunday breeches!

Despite all of these hurricanes, and many more that pounded the Caribbean and the coast of America during the late 1700s and early 1800s, after Franklin’s contribution the well of knowledge about the meteorology of hurricanes remained largely unfilled until William C. Redfield arrived on the scene.

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BORN TO A POOR family in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1789, Redfield overcame his modest upbringing and rudimentary education to become a voracious autodidact and successful businessman. When he was thirteen his father died at sea, and the following year his mother sent him off to be a harness maker’s apprentice in Middletown Upper-Houses (now Cromwell), the adjoining village, which hugged the western shore of New England’s longest river, the gently flowing Connecticut. Four years later, Redfield’s mother remarried and moved to Ohio with all of his siblings, leaving him behind to fend for himself. Despite a grueling apprenticeship, his thirst for knowledge gave Redfield the drive and energy to form a local debating society and seek other opportunities for intellectual growth. Fortuitously, a nearby physician, Dr. Tully, took an interest in Redfield, and opened up his considerable library to the young man. Thus began Redfield’s lifelong habit of insatiably consuming books, especially scientific ones. After finishing his apprenticeship, Redfield settled down in Cromwell, and by 1821 he had become a respected merchant, running a general store and a saddler’s shop.

In early October of that year, Redfield left his home in a horse-drawn wagon. His mission was a depressing one. He was traveling to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to tell his in-laws that their daughter had died just a few weeks after giving birth to a son, who followed her in death a couple of days later. But in the midst of his anguish, Redfield remained the keen and insightful observer he had always been. It was the trees that caught his attention.

A month earlier, a powerful hurricane had come in off the Atlantic and torn across the Connecticut Valley up through Massachusetts and beyond. It had left behind a ravaged landscape with great stands of trees blown down. During his journey to Stockbridge, Redfield looked at the way those trees had fallen and noticed something peculiar. In and around Cromwell, all of the downed trees were lying with their crowns facing toward the northwest, but in the vicinity of Stockbridge, some 70 miles away and slightly to the west, the downed trees were facing in the opposite direction, to the southeast.

The strange manner in which the trees had fallen greatly puzzled Redfield. The mystery deepened when he began inquiring of people along the route, only to learn that at around 9:00 p.m. on the night of the hurricane, the winds in Cromwell had been from the southeast, while those in Stockbridge were blowing out of the northwest. As Redfield’s son John later recalled, “These facts at first seemed” to his father “irreconcilable.” He couldn’t believe it was “possible that two winds of such violence should be blowing directly against each other at a distance of only seventy miles.” Having dismissed this possibility, Redfield landed on the only other logical explanation he could devise—namely, that the hurricane was a great whirlwind, its winds revolving around a central axis. Cromwell had been on one side of the hurricane, and Stockbridge on the other.

At the time, this was just a working hypothesis, and Redfield made no effort to publicize it. Instead, he kept his epiphany to himself for a full decade, during which time he did what he had always done when a topic excited him: he studied it. For him, this meant gathering further information on the hurricane of 1821, as well as reading anything and everything about meteorology and hurricanes that he could lay his hands on—all in the hope of turning his hypothesis into an established fact. While pursuing self-directed meteorological studies in his free time, Redfield proceeded to become a wealthy man, establishing a successful business building steamboats that transported growing numbers of people up and down America’s vast network of rivers, as well as along the coast.

Finally, in early 1831, a serendipitous encounter brought Redfield’s hurricane insights into the open. While traveling on one of his steamboats from New York to New Haven, he met Denison Olmsted, the Yale professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, who happened to be on board that day. Thirty-nine years old, Olmstead was already famous for his teaching and research in meteorology and astronomy, and Redfield was familiar with some of his work. In particular, Redfield had read Olmsted’s provocative theory on the creation of hailstones, and he had a question about it, which he posed to the professor.

In the course of their discussion, Olmsted quickly realized that he was in the company of someone who knew a great deal about meteorology. When Redfield began to share his ideas on hurricane formation and structure, Olmsted was transfixed. He had never heard such musings and thought they were both novel and important—so much so that Olmsted strongly encouraged Redfield to publish his findings in the American Journal of Science and Arts.§§§ Redfield, both modest and fearful that his lack of formal scientific training might cause people to discount his work, demurred. Olmsted kept pressing until Redfield agreed, but on one condition. Redfield said he would write the paper as long as Olmsted promised to revise the piece as needed and oversee its submittal to the journal. The deal struck, the paper was published in the journal’s July 1831 issue.

Titled “Remarks on the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast, of the North American States,” the somewhat dense article detailed much of what was known about hurricanes, including Franklin’s observation, and then offered up Redfield’s own conclusions. His central finding, now bolstered by extensive data, was his original surmise—namely, that hurricanes took the “form of a great whirlwind.”

But Redfield was not the first person to make this suggestion. When famed English explorer and perceptive observer of natural history William Dampier sailed through typhoons in the China Sea during his around-the-world voyage in 1697, he noted that they were “a sort of violent whirlwind.” During one typhoon, in which his vessel entered and exited the eye, Dampier noticed that at first the winds came from the northeast, followed by a period of calm, and then a shift in the wind, which now came from the southwest. Similarly, in the early 1800s, both Colonel James Clapper, of the East India Company, and German professor Heinrich Dove identified the whirlwind nature of hurricanes. While these earlier observers had merely hinted at the rotary nature of hurricanes, Redfield marshaled a mountain of data, thus fully demonstrating his clear right to the credit for proving that hurricanes were indeed “violent whirlwinds.” Redfield’s discovery is all the more impressive because he knew nothing of the limited findings on this topic that preceded his observations.

In subsequent years, Redfield published other articles that, through additional analysis, further refined his conclusions. All together, they painted a much fuller picture of the structure and progression of hurricanes. Besides characterizing hurricanes as whirlwinds, Redfield noted that the winds blow in circles around an axis, and that the direction of revolution is counterclockwise north of the equator, and clockwise to the south. He also determined that the velocity of the winds increases dramatically as one moves from the outer edge of the hurricane toward its center, and that the entire hurricane moves forward at a variable rate, but always much more slowly than it rotates.

The difference in internal velocity compared to forward velocity means that the part of the hurricane directly to the right of the eye will have the strongest winds, because the speed of the rotating hurricane is added to the speed at which the hurricane is advancing (thus, if the hurricane’s sustained winds are 80 mph and the entire hurricane is moving at 30 mph, the actual speed of the wind on the right side is the sum, or 110 mph). By the same token, the winds on the left side of the eye will be the weakest because the advancing speed of the hurricane must be subtracted from the speed of the hurricane’s winds (in our example, the calculation is 80 mph minus 30 mph, so the wind speed in the left half of the hurricane is only 50 mph).

Despite Redfield’s earlier concerns that his findings would not be taken seriously, on account of his lack of scientific pedigree, they were, and many scientists, as well as more casual observers, applauded Redfield for his seminal contribution to meteorology. There was one well-known scientist, however, who wasn’t receptive to Redfield’s ideas. In fact, he set out to discredit Redfield and tear his research down. His name was James P. Espy.

ESPY WAS BORN IN rural Pennsylvania on May 9, 1785. While he was still a young boy, his family moved west to Ohio. After graduating with a law degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, Espy returned to Pennsylvania, married, and ultimately settled down in Philadelphia, where he rose to become the head of the classics department at the Franklin Institute. Although trained in law, he had always had a love of and aptitude for science, and by the early 1830s he was actively engaged in meteorological research, with a focus on violent storms.

Using his deep understanding of how gases operate in dynamic systems, Espy postulated that hurricanes are essentially large heat engines, in which warm, moist air rises from the surface of the ocean in the tropics, cooling in the process and forming the droplets of water or ice crystals that make up clouds. This transition from moist air or water vapor to droplets or crystals releases latent heat, which causes the air to rise further, and also provides the energy that propels the hurricane’s ferocious winds. As the air rises, it creates an area of extreme low pressure—hence the low barometric pressure associated with hurricanes—and given that nature abhors a vacuum, air at the surface rushes into the area of low pressure in an attempt to balance the system. But since the air rushing in is continually heated by the warm water, and also becomes saturated with vapor, it, too, rises upward, thereby continuing the cycle and drawing more air into the area of low pressure.

This was a brilliant insight and, in fact, has been proved to be the driving force that generates and sustains hurricanes. Indeed, the crucial contribution of heat is the reason why hurricanes rapidly weaken after encountering colder waters or land, since they are thereby stripped of their main energy source. Espy also argued that the air rushing in would come in straight lines (envision the wind being represented by the spokes of a bicycle wheel, all converging on a central point). This model was at odds with Redfield’s observation that a hurricane was a whirlwind, with wind circulating in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere, around a center axis.

The disagreement between Espy and Redfield spawned what would later become known as the “American Storm Controversy,” which played out primarily between Espy and Redfield, and each of their respective supporters, in the rapidly expanding scientific and popular press of the day. Espy, who soon earned the moniker “Storm King” by virtue of his meteorological studies, as well as his very public efforts to promote his theory, viciously attacked Redfield’s conclusions. Espy claimed that the evidence from numerous storms, even those from which Redfield had gathered data to support his own arguments, clearly showed that, in fact, Espy was correct. Affronted that anyone—much less a rank amateur like Redfield—would question him, Espy sought to steamroll Redfield with a tsunami of insults and overly academic scientific arguments. Espy even took his show on the road, giving lectures at lyceums throughout the country to drive his arguments home.

But Redfield would not be cowed, and he gave as good as he got, taking on his antagonist in a series of articles that defended his findings and refuted Espy point by point. Observing the raucous debate, the renowned American physicist Joseph Henry insightfully commented, “Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect in the minds of those who have attempted to study them.” Redfield, however, didn’t have to wage his battle alone. By the end of the 1830s, he had gained the support of some powerful allies, the most important of which was William Reid.

COLONEL WILLIAM REID, of the Royal Engineers, had been sent by the British government to help with reconstruction efforts after a powerful hurricane devastated Barbados in 1831, resulting in the death of nearly 1,500 people. One who lived through it compared the roar of the hurricane to “the agonizing shrieks of millions of human beings in the last agony of despair.” Reid wanted not only to rebuild the colony but also to better understand hurricanes, specifically “their causes and mode of action,” in the hope that such understanding might help people on land and mariners at sea better cope with hurricanes and their impacts.

At first, Reid was stymied in his search for information about the nature of hurricanes—until, that is, he happened upon Redfield’s 1831 article in the American Journal of Science and Arts. Thinking that Redfield’s arguments made sense, Reid set out to see whether the data supported them. He studied, in minute detail, the logs of British naval ships that had survived their encounters with hurricanes, along with any other eyewitness information he could glean from the historical record. He searched for data pertaining not only to the 1831 hurricane in Barbados but also to the Great Hurricane of 1780, as well as a host of other Atlantic hurricanes and Pacific typhoons.

Buttressed by a mountain of data, Reid overwhelmingly confirmed Redfield’s conclusions about the whirlwind nature of hurricanes, and by 1838 the two men had struck up a warm relationship, corresponding regularly and sharing ideas. That same year, Reid attended the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Newcastle upon Tyne in northern England, where he presented his findings to the thunderous applause of an audience that was thoroughly swayed by the merit of Redfield’s arguments and the persuasive power of Reid’s data.

Soon after the meeting, Reid published a book titled An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms by Means of Facts, which further elaborated on his findings. Reid’s book also built upon an idea first broached by Redfield—namely, that by knowing their location with respect to a hurricane’s eye and its revolving winds, mariners could take evasive action and steer clear of danger, either finding the quickest and safest route out of the hurricane or avoiding the hurricane altogether. This concept—that, in effect, mariners could alter their fate by better understanding the nature of hurricanes and reacting appropriately—was groundbreaking.

After reviewing the work of Redfield and Reid, the editors of the Edinburgh Review proclaimed “that a real step has been made in the statistics and philosophy of storms.” They went on to “predict that no sailor will study these records of atmospherical convulsions, without feeling himself better armed for a professional struggle with the elements.” And they warned that the mariner who would sail either to the West or the East Indies “without Colonel Reid’s book, will discover, when it is too late, that he has left behind him his best chronometer and his surest compass. In his attempts to escape the Scylla of its incipient gales, he may recklessly plunge himself into the Charybdis of the hurricane.”

Englishman Henry Piddington took Redfield’s and Reid’s idea even further. After spending more than a decade captaining merchant ships in the East India and China trade, Piddington retired from the sea around 1830, when he was in his early thirties, so that he could pursue his broad interests in science. He settled in Calcutta, where he was appointed curator of the Museum of Economic Geology, and he began publishing articles on a wide array of topics, including the discovery of a new fossil dinosaur, fish biology, and the suitability of various soils for cultivating cash crops. Piddington’s intellectual meanderings came to an end in 1839, when he decided to focus his considerable energies on the study of storms.

Piddington spent the better part of the next decade studying and writing about hurricanes, but he didn’t call them that. Instead, he coined the word cyclone, which is derived from the Greek word signifying the coil of a snake, to refer specifically to hurricanes that occurred in the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. As a former mariner, Piddington strived in all of his work on cyclones to give sailors the tools they needed to safely navigate tempestuous seas. To that end, in 1848 he applied Redfield’s and Reid’s findings in creating a handy guide with the hefty title The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms: Being a Practical Exposition of the Theory of the Law of Storms, and Its Uses to Mariners of All Classes, in All Parts of the World, Shewn by Transparent Storm Cards and Useful Lessons.

The triumphant introduction to the book boldly stated that its purpose was “to explain to the seaman, in such language that every man who can work a day’s-work can understand it, the theory and the practical use of the Law of Storms for all parts of the world; for this science has now become so essential a part of nautical knowledge that every seaman who conscientiously desires to fulfill his duties . . . must wish to know at all events what this new science is: of which he hears it said, that it teaches how to avoid Storms—teaches how best to manage in Storms when they cannot be avoided—and teaches how to profit by Storms!” Tucked into each copy of the book were two transparent storm cards that, if held up to a map or chart and properly oriented over a ship’s location, could be used not only to instruct captains in which direction to sail to most quickly escape a storm’s clutches, but also in how to use a hurricane’s winds to their advantage in hastening their voyage.

Mariners who had the greatest need for accurate information came down universally on the side of Redfield and Reid in the great storm controversy. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, after returning from his 1854 groundbreaking expedition to Japan, which led to a peace treaty that opened the secretive kingdom to the West, sang their praises. To Redfield and Reid, Perry intoned, “are navigators mainly indebted for the discovery of a law which has already contributed, and will continue to contribute, greatly to the safety of vessels traversing the ocean.” While he admitted that others had added to the understanding of hurricanes, Perry argued that these two should get the credit for “the original discovery of this undeniable law of nature, and its application to useful purposes.”

At about the same time, a captain in the British navy who penned a tome quite similar to Piddington’s, called The Storm Compass or, Seaman’s Hurricane Companion, proclaimed that Redfield and Reid “should be remembered by seamen of all nations with feelings of gratitude; for by the simple light of truth . . . they have literally disarmed the storm of its greatest terrors. How many lives would have been saved, had the truth been known in years gone by! How much suffering have been avoided! How many ships, laden with valuable property, [would] have been saved to their owners!”

ESPY WATCHED THESE ASSAULTS on his theory—that the winds in a hurricane rush straight in toward the center as a result of the rising warm air that creates an area of extreme low pressure—with increasing alarm and anger, and he sought to fight Redfield at every turn. Realizing that the epicenter of science was Europe, Espy launched his own tour of the continent. His appearance in Glasgow before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1840, however, didn’t go as he hoped. Since that august body had already declared in favor of Redfield, they gave Espy a polite but lukewarm hearing. Soon thereafter, Reid wrote to Redfield, “I hear from England that people’s minds were satisfied with the revolving theory of storms; so that few cared to listen at Glasgow, and elsewhere, to Mr. Espy’s explanations of his particular theory.” France’s Academy of Sciences gave Espy a much more enthusiastic and supportive reception. According to one account, famed French astronomer and mathematician François Arago, convinced of the value of Espy’s work, declared, “France has its Cuvier, England its Newton, America its Espy.” In an effort to further his cause, in 1841 Espy published a tremendously long and tedious tome titled The Philosophy of Storms, which laid out his theories for the entire world to see.

Espy was so focused on the purported merits of his theory that he would not dispassionately consider any other. Even when presented with evidence that contradicted his view, he would not budge. Alexander Dallas Bache, one of his colleagues at the Franklin Institute, and also a friend, commented on Espy’s pig-headed approach, which seemingly made him immune to intellectual conversion. “The earnest and deep convictions of the truth of his theory in all its parts,” Bache wrote, “and his glowing enthusiasm in regard to it; perhaps, also, the age which he had reached, prevented Mr. Espy from passing beyond a certain point in the development of his theory. . . . He was not prone to examine and re-examine premises and conclusions, but considered what had once been passed upon by his judgment as finally settled.” Former president and current congressman John Quincy Adams was a little less charitable in his estimation of Espy, observing that he was “methodically monomaniac[al], and the dimensions of his organ of self-esteem have been swollen to the size of a goiter.”

Redfield died in 1857, and Espy in 1860. Each went to his grave thinking he was correct regarding the nature of hurricanes. As it turned out, they were both partially correct. In a hurricane, winds do rush toward the center area of extreme low pressure, as Espy had predicted, but they don’t do so in straight lines. And although the winds do rotate around a central point, they do not do so in circles as Redfield thought. Instead, a hurricane’s winds spiral in toward the center because they are influenced by the so-called Coriolis effect, which was first hypothesized in 1831 by French mathematician Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis but wasn’t applied to meteorology, and more specifically to hurricane behavior, until William Ferrel did so a couple of decades later.

LIKE REDFIELD, Ferrel was largely self-trained, and he possessed a keen mind. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania and Virginia, he had only a rudimentary education and spent much of his time working on his father’s farm and others nearby. Using some of his earnings to purchase mathematical books, Ferrel became entranced with the sky, especially solar and lunar eclipses, and before long he was proficient enough in astronomical calculations to predict the arrival of eclipses with considerable accuracy. Ferrel added more mathematical books to his growing library and gained enough skill and promise to enroll in two colleges, where he studied mathematics, Latin, and Greek, ultimately graduating from Bethany College in West Virginia at the age of twenty-seven, and soon thereafter embarking on a career as a schoolteacher.

While teaching in Missouri, Ferrel continued his self-directed studies, purchasing a copy of Newton’s most important work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Principia, as it is usually called. This treatise on mathematics, physics, and the celestial and terrestrial mechanics of motion opened up a whole new world of inquiry for Ferrel, who continued to acquire the classics of science as he pursued teaching jobs in Kentucky and Tennessee. With his mind fully engaged in the mysteries of the universe, Ferrel focused his efforts on meteorology, zeroing in on the motions of the winds and the ocean.

He published three papers between 1856 and 1860, the key conclusion of which was captured neatly in a single sentence from his second paper (“The Influence of the Earth’s Rotation upon the Relative Motion of Bodies Near Its Surface”), which appeared in the Astronomical Journal in 1858. “If a body is moving in any direction,” Ferrel asserted, “there is a force [the Coriolis force], arising from the earth’s rotation, which always deflects it to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern.” In other words, Ferrel showed how, in a hurricane, the air rushing in toward a region of low pressure will be diverted or deflected on its course, thus resulting in the hurricane’s mesmerizing, spiraling motion.

Apparently, Redfield wasn’t aware of Ferrel’s work before he died, but Espy read Ferrel’s first paper after Joseph Henry forwarded him a copy. While Espy was encouraged by Ferrel’s support of his theory on the source of the energy that drove hurricanes—the latent heat coming from the condensation of ascending water vapor—he vigorously disagreed with Ferrel’s findings regarding the impact of the Earth’s rotation on a hurricane’s progress, characteristically preferring to stick to his own rigid views. Nevertheless, Ferrel’s contribution was accepted in time, providing a more accurate conception of hurricane behavior. It gave us the final link that created the basic and accepted image of a hurricane as a mass of swirling or spiraling, moisture-laden winds, the velocity of which greatly increases as one approaches the central axis of the storm until one enters the calm, clear, and surprisingly beautiful eye.

By the mid-1800s, hurricanes were no longer an inscrutable force, but rather an explainable, albeit far from completely understood, phenomenon. Still, broadly understanding a phenomenon and protecting oneself from it are two different things. Even though Redfield’s, Reid’s, and Piddington’s work offered guidance on how to avoid or outflank hurricanes at sea, people both at sea and on land still had little warning that a hurricane was heading their way. There might be some signs, such as a red sky or swelling seas that appeared in advance, but by the time those signs were recognized, the hurricane would be on the verge of arrival. To properly deal with hurricanes, what was required was not only an understanding of hurricane dynamics but also a way to predict when and where they would hit, so that people could prepare and take evasive action. As the young nation flourished and populations living in coastal regions swelled, with trade growing apace, what America desperately needed was a means of forecasting the weather and issuing storm warnings.

†††29.92 inches is the equivalent of 14.7 pounds per square inch.

‡‡‡There was yet a third massive hurricane that hit the Caribbean in October 1780, called Solano’s Hurricane, which struck a few days after the Great Hurricane of 1780. Although it gravely damaged the Spanish fleet under the command of Admiral Don José Solano y Bote Carrasco y Díaz, it did not impact the English or French fleets, and therefore did not have a direct impact on the American Revolution.

§§§This publication later became the American Journal of Science and is the oldest continuously running scientific journal in the United States, having been launched in 1818.

CHAPTER
2

The Law of Storms

CHAPTER 2

The Law of Storms

CHAPTER
2