by Erik Larson
Isaac led them around the track at vicious speeds, forcing some to wrap their arms around their horses’ necks.
This could not have won him many friends.
THE HEART OF the weather service, and the thing that had to exist before there could even be such a service, was the telegraph. It allowed for the first time in history the rapid, simultaneous transmission of weather observations from stations thousands of miles away.
At Fort Myer, Isaac took apart and rebuilt telegraph transmitters to learn what caused the “click.” A badly mauled telegraph pole stood in a squad room where its top extended into the skylight. Isaac learned to climb the pole and to string telegraph wire.
He also learned to send and receive messages and to use a special code developed by the weather service to save time and reduce the costs of transmission. The word madman indicated a morning barometric pressure of 28.33 inches. A wind of 57 miles an hour was embalm. The code word for a wind of 150 miles an hour was extreme. The cipher allowed a telegraph operator to pack a lot of information into just a few words. One example: “Paul diction sunk Johnson imbue hersal.” Decoded, it meant: “St. Paul, 29.26 inches barometric pressure, –4 degrees temperature, wind six miles per hour, maximum temperature 10 degrees, dewpoint –18 degrees. This observation was at 8:00 P.M. and the local prediction called for fair weather.”
But the service insisted that its men also know the tried-and-true visual methods of military communication. Isaac learned how to send messages using flags, torches, and the heliograph, which used a mirror to send bursts of light over long distances and was deployed later, in April 1886, during the Army campaign to capture Geronimo. Signal practice was awkward and difficult, especially at night when it required torches. These nocturnal sessions frequently involved “midnight travel in the rain, over muddy roads in black darkness, the horses choosing the proper route, as we could not,” recalled H. C. Frankenfield, who also arrived at Fort Myer in 1882. Two decades later the bureau would assign Frankenfield the task of figuring out where the great hurricane of 1900 had come from.
Isaac became adept at signaling in every medium, but most recruits did not take this aspect of their training very seriously. They did not take much of anything seriously. Often recruits told each other in advance what messages they would send. One lieutenant deliberately marched a squad of new recruits double-time off the edge of a three-foot-high porch. Another officer, seeking to impress a carriage full of young women, suddenly ordered his squad to signal the word asafoetida, a medicinal ingredient that few knew how to spell. This prompted a moment of stunned silence, followed by a great flapping of flags evocative less of an elite signal squad than a flock of startled pigeons.
One morning a recruit named Harrison McP. Baldwin, the clown of his class, raced out in the predawn light for morning rifle drill, and executed without flaw all the required maneuvers.
Without his rifle.
No one noticed.
Years later, Baldwin went to work for Isaac Cline in Galveston. He was an able clown, an abysmal weatherman. It was a failing that Isaac would find intolerable, but one that probably saved Baldwin’s life.
The Storm
Monday, August 27, 1900:
15.3 N, 44.7 W
IT ADVANCED SLOWLY. Eight miles an hour, maybe ten. It moved west and slightly north and covered about two hundred miles a day, roiling the seas and erecting an electric wall of clouds visible to ships far outside its arc of influence. The first formal sighting occurred Monday, August 27. The captain of a ship at latitude 19 N, longitude 48 W, in the open sea below the Tropic of Cancer halfway between Cape Verde and the Antilles, noted in his log signs of unsettled weather. He recorded winds blowing from the east-northeast at Force 4, a “moderate breeze.” Thirteen to eighteen miles an hour. His barometer showed 30.3 inches.
He dismissed the storm as a distant squall.
Fort Myer
What Isaac Knew
BETWEEN bouts of mounted swordplay, Isaac journeyed deep into the mysteries of weather. Meteorology was an emerging science rooted not so much in rigorous research as in stories and adventures, which only enhanced the mystery. By gaslight, with the bells of Washington tolling softly in the summer steam, he immersed himself in the millennial quest to understand wind, and in the hunt for the Law of Storms, one of the driving scientific explorations of the nineteenth century. He found it all as compelling as anything by Verne, a great sweeping saga full of crimson clouds, hundred-foot waves, and strange occurrences. He read how men caught in the fiercest storms found the decks of their ships carpeted with exhausted horseflies and how the survivors of a colonial hurricane emerged to find deer stranded in trees. In the Caribbean, wind had lifted cannon.
Weather was a national obsession and had been for centuries. Countless men, including some of the most prominent of their times, kept daily track of the weather and often for decades on end. Thomas Jefferson kept a lifelong weather journal and on July 4, 1776, despite certain other pressing matters, noted the temperature in Philadelphia to be a lovely 76 degrees. Samuel Rodman Jr., a prominent Massachusetts merchant, and his son Thomas together produced an uninterrupted daily record that began in 1812 and continued for three-quarters of a century. Such detailed journals told nothing about the fundamental forces that powered the weather, but they gave the men who kept them a sense of mastery over nature. By recording the weather, quantifying it, comparing it year to year, they demystified it at least to the point where storms ceased to be punishments meted by God.
But with God at least partly out of the way, the mystery only deepened. The first “scientific” definition of wind, by Anaximander, a Greek natural philosopher, would have seemed laughably primitive to Isaac, but for its time six centuries before the birth of Christ, it was a wonder of ingenuity. He called it “a flowing of air.”
But what was air?
The first person to show conclusively that air had substance was Philo of Byzantium during the third century B.C. He attached a tube to a glass globe, then inserted the open end of the tube into a dish of water. When he placed the globe in shadow, the water rose within the tube. When he exposed the globe to sunlight, the level fell. “The same effect,” he wrote, “is produced if one heats the globe with fire.”
He did not know it, but he had stumbled upon the fundamental engine that drove the world’s weather and that two thousand years later would power the ships of Columbus and his peers briskly over and with dismaying regularity under the seas. He had missed the broader question: If heat could cause a small volume of air to drive water up and down a tube, what could it do to the vast sea of air that covered the world?
Aristotle proved beyond doubt that air had mass when he demonstrated that a container filled with air could not also be filled with water. Did this mean that air had weight?
Aristotle flattened an airtight leather bag and weighed it, then filled the bag with air and weighed it again. Nothing changed. He concluded, erroneously, that air was weightless.
The world tumbled forward. Over the next fifteen centuries, the definition of wind did not advance very far beyond Anaximander’s “flowing of air.” In A.D. 1120, before Europe rediscovered the great works of the Greeks, Adelard of Bath, an English monk, thought he had stumbled upon something new.
With the sobriety of a man humbled by his own genius, he wrote: “I think that wind is a species of air.”
AS MEN VENTURED beyond the bounds of their accustomed territory, goaded by riches and glory, they encountered strange new meteorological phenomena. Early mariners discovered the miraculous trade winds that blew their ships toward the Indies. But they also discovered the doldrums at the equator and, just north of the trades, another realm of stillness that they named the Horse Latitudes, where half-dead crews becalmed for weeks cast their horses overboard to conserve drinking water.
Early captains learned also that these new seas harbored the exact opposite of doldrums, monster storms with cunning lulls during which the sun would shine an
d the winds cease, seducing unwary crews into believing the worst was over. Isaac learned that the first European to encounter such storms was the ever-charmed Columbus, and how the weather of the Indies revealed itself to him gradually, as if to prepare him for his first true hurricane. That storm occurred during his fourth and final voyage with such discriminating ferocity it sparked accusations that he had conjured it through magic—a not-unreasonable charge given the mysticism of the age, and the storm’s result.
COLUMBUS SET off on his first voyage on August 3, 1492, from Palos, Spain, with a fleet of three tiny caravels, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. By nineteenth-century standards, the three vessels hardly qualified as ships. They were large boats crewed skimpily with a few experienced sailors and adventure-hungry boys. Not only did Columbus and his captains have no means of determining the exact location of their ships in the featureless blue of the ocean, they also carried none of the meteorological tools that mariners in Isaac’s time took for granted.
After overcoming a few technical problems, the ships caught the trades and made quick, untroubled progress. The weather was perfect: clear blue skies, brisk and steady winds shoving big cotton clouds over the horizon, cool nights and balmy days, the overall effect one of languid, sloe-eyed sensuality. “The weather was like April in Andalusia,” Columbus wrote, “the only thing wanting was to hear nightingales.”
But something curious did occur during that first voyage. A lookout saw them first, rising a long way off. Astonished, he sounded the alarm.
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 23, the fleet’s exact position unclear but the weather good, skies bright, no sign of a storm on any horizon. Nonetheless, the lookouts spotted immense swells marching slowly and silently toward the ships. Columbus and his captains turned the fleet into the oncoming seas and watched open-jawed as the surface of the ocean rose in great oil-smooth hills of blue and green. The swells lifted the ships to exhilarating heights but posed no danger.
What Columbus did not know was that these swells were most likely the advance guard of a hurricane rising hundreds of miles away, well out of sight—the same brand of swell Isaac observed as he stood on the seat of his sulky in Galveston four centuries later.
The ships continued their journey; Columbus opened the gates to the New World.
The more time Columbus spent in the waters of the Indies, however, the more he saw the flaws in his original appraisal of Caribbean weather. Water spouts danced among his ships. Tropical rains fell as if from a ruptured cask. Squalls tore the sails from his spars. By the time of his final voyage, Columbus had learned that the seas of the New World were both seductive and deadly, but in the process had become adept at reading the tropical skies for signs of trouble.
He was ready for his first true hurricane.
FOUR YEARS BEFORE the storm, Ferdinand and Isabella, intending to reward Columbus, appointed him viceroy of the Indies. He reached Hispaniola in August 1498 expecting to savor the perquisites of rank, but found rebellion and turmoil. When word came back to Spain that chaos, not the sovereigns, reigned in Hispaniola, Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched an emissary, Francisco de Bobadilla, to straighten things out. Secretly they had granted him extraordinary powers, which he demonstrated immediately upon his arrival. It did not help that as Bobadilla sailed into Santo Domingo harbor he saw seven Spanish corpses dangling from the gallows. Swaying palms were one thing; swaying countrymen quite another. He used the hangings as a pretext to arrest Columbus and lock him in chains, a degree of public humiliation that speaks clearly of some deeper passion filling Bobadilla’s portfolio. Greed perhaps, but certainly envy.
In October 1500 Bobadilla marched the iron-laced Columbus through town and on board a ship, La Gorda, bound for Spain. Bobadilla himself took over the administration of Hispaniola. After returning to Spain, Columbus remained in chains for six more weeks before the sovereigns released him. He pleaded for the license and funds to conduct one more great voyage. In a sign of new warmth toward the admiral, Ferdinand and Isabella commanded Bobadilla to assemble all proceeds from trade and the mining of gold that were owed Columbus, and to place these in the custody of his designated agent. On March 14, 1502, the sovereigns granted Columbus another voyage. Like wise parents seeking to head off the wars of jealous children, they forbade him to stop at Hispaniola.
Columbus, delighted to be sailing again, set out with four caravels, and on June 29, 1502, found himself and his fleet off Hispaniola. He saw that a great convoy of thirty ships was being readied in the Ozama River at Santo Domingo for imminent departure, but did not know at the time that this fleet was carrying Bobadilla and a vast fortune in gold, including his own share. That Bobadilla had consigned Columbus’s gold to the smallest and flimsiest of the convoy ships, the Aguja, was yet another mark of whatever hidden passion fueled his hatred. If any ship was likely to sink, it would be the puny Aguja.
Columbus had at least three good, practical, defensible reasons for what he did next: First, the departing convoy presented an excellent opportunity for getting mail from his own little fleet promptly back to Spain. Second, he wanted to trade one of his ships, a poor performer, for something a bit more spry. Third, the weather had taken an ominous turn, exhibiting the usual troika of storm signs: oily swells, oppressive heat, a red sky.
For all these good, practical, and defensible reasons, Columbus sent one of his captains ashore with a request to permit his fleet to enter the harbor, a clear violation of the sovereigns’ orders.
The new governor, Don Nicolas de Ovando, only laughed.
Stung, Columbus led his ships to the leeward side of Hispaniola to place the mass of the island between the ships and the rising storm. He instructed his captains that if they became separated by the storm to meet in a harbor on Ocoa Bay, near what later became Puerto Viejo de Azua.
Meanwhile, with great fanfare—trumpets blaring, cannon roaring, banners streaming—the thirty-ship convoy ferrying Bobadilla and Columbus’s gold sailed from Ozama and made for the Mona Passage, the strait between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico that connects the Caribbean to the Atlantic.
The storm was a full-fledged hurricane. Columbus’s fleet, sheltered in the lee of Hispaniola, caught a glancing blow that nonetheless topped anything in severity that Columbus had so far confronted. “The storm was terrible,” he wrote, “and on that night the ships were parted from me. Each one of them was reduced to an extremity expecting nothing save death; each one of them was certain the others were lost.”
In a maneuver that went against customary marine practice, Columbus did not strike for open sea but instead brought his ship closer to shore to leverage further the windbreak afforded by the mountains of Hispaniola. His ship survived. On Sunday, July 3, he sailed his caravel into Ocoa Bay, the designated meeting place. He saw no sign of the others.
As his ship rocked gently in the gorgeous blue, its decks quiet but for the sounds of repair, Columbus watched the entrance to the bay through thermals of humid air.
A lookout would have spotted it first as a glint of white against the settling sea. He cried out, then perhaps wished he had not, as the glint disappeared and the ship eased back into the turquoise quiet.
But another spark followed, a true sign now. Sails and finally a ship. Followed by another. And, impossibly, yet another.
All safe.
And what of Bobadilla?
The hurricane caught the convoy in the Mona Passage head-on, the eye passing close, perhaps directly overhead. It drove twenty of the gold ships to the bottom with all hands. One of these carried Bobadilla. In all, five hundred mariners lost their lives. A few ships, gravely wounded, fought their way back to Santo Domingo.
Only one ship of the original thirty made it to Spain: the puny little Aguja, carrying Columbus’s gold.
THE ENIGMA OF air continued to command the attention of the world’s greatest minds. In 1638, Galileo tried a variation of Aristotle’s leather-bag experiment. He constructed an apparatus consisting of a glass bulb with an ai
rtight valve. He weighed the bulb. Next he forced air into the bulb until it contained much more than its normal volume. Now when he weighed it he found a measurable difference.
So air did have weight.
In Galileo’s time this was astonishing news. Air was invisible, yet it had weight. It was everywhere, piled high over the world. Therefore it must exert a force on every man, rock, and tree. The meteorological significance escaped Galileo, but five years later his discovery led to a famous series of experiments by Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist who opened the single most important window into the forces that drive the world’s weather.
He too began with a glass bulb, but attached to it a tube some “two cubits” long, a cubit being a vague unit of measurement equivalent to the distance between a man’s elbow and the tip of his middle finger. He filled this tube with mercury, inserted the tube into a bowl also containing mercury, then watched the mercury in the tube fall until it stabilized about halfway between the bulb and the dish.
It never completely stabilized, however. Torricelli observed that it crept up and down at different points during the day and under differing atmospheric conditions. He did not come to this easily. Before he settled on mercury, he tried water. To get any observable effect, he had to use a glass tube sixty feet long, not exactly a device likely to win favor among mariners headed for Shakespeare’s “vexed Bermoothes.”
The term barometer arrived a decade or so later when Robert Boyle coined the name to describe his own air-weighing device, an instrument that so delighted the Royal Society, it resolved in 1668 to have a collection of Boyle’s barometers built and dispatched to the far limits of the world. The proposal was never enacted, but by Isaac’s time the barometer had become so well accepted as a meteorological tool that it wound up in all those places anyway.
