A tropical cyclone is a cyclone originating in the tropics or subtropics. Although it generally resembles the extratropical cyclone of higher latitudes, there are important differences, the principal one being the concentration of a large amount of energy into a relatively small area. Tropical cyclones are infrequent in comparison to middle and high latitude storms, but they have a record of destruction far exceeding that of any other type of storm. Because of their fury, and because they are predominantly oceanic, they merit special attention by mariners. A tropical storm may have a deceptively small size, and beautiful weather may be experienced only a few hundred miles from the center. The rapidity with which the weather can deteriorate with the approach of the storm, and the violence of the fully developed tropical cyclone, are difficult to imagine if they have not been experienced.
—NATHANIEL BOWDITCH
That warning was written over two centuries ago. Nathaniel Bowditch, an autodidact and mathematical savant, was the first American to compile and accurately record every element essential to navigation in his compendious The American Practical Navigator, a thick, heavy tome first published in 1802 that has subsequently been updated in over fifty editions. The American Practical Navigator has sailed with U.S. merchantmen in an unbroken chain for those two hundred years, and U.S. warships have carried it from Tripoli to Havana Harbor to the Persian Gulf. To sailors, the phrase “according to Bowditch” evokes the same resonance as does Hoyle for contract bridge grandmasters. It remains to this day the bible of the United States Navy.
Bowditch was born in 1773 in the seafaring town of Salem, Massachusetts, the fourth of the Revolutionary War shipmaster Habakkuk Bowditch’s seven children. When he was an infant, his father left the sea to seek his fortune as a coopersmith, a profession at which he failed miserably. By the time Nathaniel was ten years old, his family faced such poverty that he was forced to leave school to join his father in the cooper’s trade. But the young Bowditch’s skill at fashioning wooden tubs also proved negligible, and two years later he found employment as a clerk with a local ship chandlery firm. The barrel-making industry’s loss was the nascent U.S. Navy’s gain.
By his mid-teens, Bowditch’s remarkable mind was celebrated throughout New England and beyond. He taught himself French, Spanish, German, and Greek in order to better comprehend the nuances of the finest scientific sourcebooks of the era in their original languages, and at thirteen he began studying the rudiments of navigation. A year later he assisted local Salem authorities in surveying his hometown, by fifteen he had published an almanac and constructed a crude barometer, and at sixteen years old the international scientific community credited Bowditch with discovering a mathematical error in Sir Isaac Newton’s classic The Principia, which he had read in the original Latin.
When Bowditch was twenty-one, he went to sea for the first time as a sort of scholar-in-residence on the Salem merchant ship Henry, circumnavigating the globe from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and back. During four subsequent sea voyages over the next decade, the last as master and part owner of his own three-master, he compiled his timeless text through firsthand observation and analysis of all aspects of the planet’s seas, tides, currents, winds, and stars.
Bowditch’s official portrait depicts a pinched, scrivener-like visage from the pages of Dickens, and this is fitting: He was just as prolific as the English novelist, all the while never forgetting that he was writing for the learner. Aware that most seamen of his era were poorly educated, if not illiterate, his stated purpose in publishing The American Practical Navigator was, above all, functionality—“to put down in this book nothing I cannot teach the crew.”
During World War II his encyclopedia remained the premier reference work for seafaring fundamentals. It was from their “Bowditches” that ship commanders such as Lt. Comdr. James A. Marks of the destroyer Hull administered promotion examinations to enlisted men such as Chief Quartermaster Archie DeRyckere. And during an earlier naval court of inquiry investigating losses from a separate, devastating storm, a restless admiral sitting in judgment was overheard to mutter, “The whole matter certainly is a mess, and indicates that nobody ever heard of a guy named Bowditch.”
In December 1944 a well-thumbed “Bowditch” took center place in the small library in the ship’s quarters of Comdr. George F. Kosco, chief aerologist of the Third Pacific Fleet.
In essence and utility, Kosco was Admiral Halsey’s head weatherman. A handsome, athletic six-footer, Kosco’s relationship with the admiral stretched back to the late 1920s, when as a midshipman he’d boxed at the Naval Academy under the guidance of the team’s supervisor, then-captain William F. Halsey. After graduation, Kosco earned a master’s degree in weather aerology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began his career as a seagoing officer of the line.
He spent much of the 1930s in the Caribbean helping to pioneer the nascent science of “hurricane hunting”—hazardous duty in the early era of flight—and he acquired a reputation as an authority on navigation and meteorology. When war broke out, he served as the aerological officer aboard several carriers before being assigned to Halsey’s Third Fleet in early October 1944. Following two months of special weather indoctrination at Pearl Harbor, he was billeted aboard the New Jersey in early December.
From his office on the battleship’s navigation bridge, one deck above flag plot, Kosco rapidly became a member of Halsey’s inner circle. He was charged with overseeing a staff of seven—a chief aerographer’s mate and six rated enlisted men—when Task Force 38 was to weigh anchor in Ulithi and steam for Mindoro on December 11.
Unknown to Halsey and Kosco, on that very day a small, invisible mass of air, calved from the atmosphere like an iceberg from a glacier, had begun churning in one of the most volatile corners of the earth. This meteorological disturbance had been seeded in the natural hothouse climate of the intertropical convergence zone, an equatorial trough of warm, sticky air known to mariners as the doldrums. The storm proceeded to incubate just north of the equator, over six hundred miles southeast of Ulithi, midway between the coast of New Guinea and the Caroline Islands.
In what sounds suspiciously like an apocryphal report, three Japanese soldiers stationed on an enemy-held island in the Carolines later claimed to have been fishing not far from shore in a small dugout canoe that very morning. They recalled that the sky was cloudless, the air still, the water as smooth as polished mica. Abruptly, one of the soldiers nudged his sergeant and pointed at what appeared to be a small whirlpool developing some twenty feet from their bow.
Just as they dipped oars to paddle closer and investigate, a sudden and powerful gust of wind lifted the canoe and dumped the men into the sea. They scrambled to right the vessel, climbed back aboard, and turned the craft to run for the beach. By the time they reached land, the sea before them had turned choppy and dirty in a great circle around the vortex, and a stiff breeze was already causing the palm trees about them to rustle and sway.
Simply put, cyclonic winds are the result of a complex interaction of air temperature, atmospheric pressure, and the topography of an ocean’s surface. They have been long recognized as a Pacific typhoon’s most destructive meteorological feature. It is these powerful, low-altitude streams of air that birth both the long swells that radiate outward from a storm’s inverse barometer—the domed mound of seawater in the eye—as well as the huge, deadly waves that ensue. Moreover, it is wind that allows a typhoon to grow by, in a sense, cannibalizing itself. The spindrift and spray sheared off the tops of these great gouts of water by slicing gales combine with solid sheets of falling rain to feed a typhoon engine’s constant demand for evaporation.
The synchronous horizontal and vertical winds of a typhoon, fashioned by the dual kinetic processes of advection and convection, can best be imagined as a haphazardly tiered meteorological layer cake. Moving outward from the center, the soft, humid, 15-mile-per-hour breezes that waft through the eye of a storm give way to the violent “gust zones” of the thick eye wall, whose air speeds can average a ship-scuttling 155 miles per hour. Further removed, the eye wall’s sustained gusts gradually cede to heavy gales that extend 150 to 250 miles from the eye. These, in turn, devolve into the windy rain bands that dominate a typhoon’s fringe.
Similarly, this gentle-voracious-rapid-slower pattern of moving air also applies to a vertical cross section of a tropical cyclone’s circulation. Once free from the friction created by the earth’s surface, a typhoon’s winds become more violent as they rise until, finally cooling and decelerating, they dissipate in the upper atmosphere of the storm system’s outflow layer.
Winds and seafarers share an ancient, symbiotic narrative in which the hand of God, or the gods, is manifestly present. The medieval Japanese who perceived a benevolent celestial purpose behind the kamikazes that destroyed the Great Khan’s invasion fleets in the thirteenth century do not stand alone. From Zeus’s breath instigating Odysseus’s windblown adventures across Homer’s “salty waste” to the hallowed “Protestant Wind” that scattered the remnants of the Spanish Armada about the west coast of Ireland in 1588, sailors and landsmen alike have come to associate their confluence with divine providence. Early Americans were no less immune to the myth.
Following a particularly violent hurricane that struck the Outer Banks in the early 1700s, a humbled North Carolina colonist noted in his journal that the gusts were a form of heavenly punishment. “Then the Lord sent a great rain and a horrible wind,” he wrote, “whereby much hurt was done.” A century later the editor of South Carolina’s Winyaw Intelligencer detected in a vicious, two-day storm that spanned several high tides “none other than a ringing condemnation of the ironies of intellectual hubris of an overconfident town.”
“[The] inhabitants apprehended no danger from the tide, as, from the violence of the gale,” the Intelligencer thundered. “It was presumed that it could not continue until the period of the succeeding high water. In this expectation, however, it pleased the Almighty to disappoint them and, by the awful result, to prove how fallacious are all human calculations.”
But for men working upon the sea, the Lord apparently saves his worst, in the form of giant, cyclonic, wind-spawned walls of water that can reach heights of one hundred feet and have washed an ocean clean of all who sail before them. Moreover, the intricate collision of surface and subsurface ocean currents set in motion by a typhoon’s winds run with the ferocity of a swollen river. These wind-driven tides have been known to shatter coral reefs, snap sunken airplanes in two, send schools of sharks into feeding frenzies, and crumple sunken ships resting on the seabed as if they were aluminum toys.
Before the dawn of modern meteorology, fleets trapped in a typhoon often assumed that because the winds blew from two directions—northwesterly from the storm’s upper left corner and southeasterly from the lower right—they were actually caught between two storms, with the calm eye the barrier separating them.
Now, by 1944, the United States had amassed the greatest naval forces in the history of warfare. The sailors of this contemporary armada had no way of knowing that theirs would be the last world war to ever employ such sea power. Nor, like the Spanish and Mongol cohorts who had sailed before them, could they guess at the forces of nature soon to be arrayed against them.
In fact, if they are to be believed, the only humans to sense that nature would again interfere with the destiny of fighting men upon the sea were three lonely Japanese soldiers, fishing off a forlorn Pacific atoll. If their story is true, they remain perhaps the only humans in history to witness the birthing of a typhoon. Their exact conversation on this momentous occasion is not reliably recorded. What is chronicled, however, is that as they watched the sea turn into a maelstrom before their eyes, they were convinced of one thing: Whatever this force of nature before them was, it was unquestionably growing.