The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  Scientists too have names for seasonal wind patterns. Every January, for example, a wind pattern known as “the African easterly jet” blows, as its name suggests, from east to west across the African continent.

  Effects of the African easterly jet are felt by people on the ground, of course. It’s windy down there. But the real action isn’t on the ground. This wind blows nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.

  Early in the year, the jet is blowing over the fifth parallel—that’s pretty far south, just above the equator. At that time of year, the jet’s speed can get up to 25 miles per hour. Brisk, but nothing to write home about.

  By spring, however, that same wind has moved northward and increased its speed. In summer, it’s blowing stiffly straight across the mid-point of that high, bulging part of West Africa. And because it’s summer, the African easterly jet starts interacting with the rainy season. Meanwhile, it reaches its highest speed: about 30 miles per hour.

  That’s nothing like gale force. Still, thanks to other conditions, it’s enough to start a chain of events that, sooner or later, and very far to the west of where the jet is blowing, can produce winds of over 100 miles per hour, the kind of gusts that would help knock down Galveston, Texas.

  What happens is this. The African easterly jet can push a batch of those daily, rainy-season thunderclouds northwestward, out over the Atlantic Ocean. There, the thunderclouds encounter another ocean wind, blowing from a different direction. The African easterly jet, curving northwestward, meets the northerly Atlantic jet, curving southeastward.

  The two winds don’t crash head-on. They’re moving on curved paths, not racing straight at one another. They spin past each other, brushing hard as they try to pass in a narrow corridor.

  The air in this spot—it’s known today as the Intertropical Convergence Zone—thus develops into a kind of atmospheric fold. One effect of the fold is that the African jet, interrupted in its northwest trip, starts to bump and ripple—really, to wave. Its westward flow takes on a regular waving pattern.

  That’s one reason we call this whole oddball system—a gigantic African rainy-season storm cloud, swept out to sea and caught in a pocket of weirdly opposing winds—a tropical wave.

  On Monday, August 27, 1900, a tropical wave appeared over open waters about midway between Cape Verde and the Antilles. We know that because a captain directing his ship through those waters made a log note on it. Unsettled weather, the captain recorded. Force Four winds, out of the east—only 13 to 18 miles per hour.

  Rain and wind in a summer sea: nothing for an experienced captain to worry about. Nothing to semaphore, no need to raise storm-warning flags for other ships passing that way.

  The captain saw conditions like this all the time.

  And yet that one captain’s note represents the first recorded sighting of the system that had begun as a tropical wave off Africa to the east and had started spinning. This was the system that, out of so many other storms, would blossom into the worst natural disaster the United States has ever experienced.

  The next day, another ship also made a note: stormy weather, winds from the south-southwest, at Force Six, maybe 30 miles per hour. Nothing like a hurricane.

  No further sightings of that storm were recorded until it had traveled thousands of miles and arrived in the Caribbean Sea. Then, as the storm approached Cuba, thousands of miles from where it began, Cuban meteorologists, among the best in the world at forecasting, began to track it. And they began to worry.

  That was on Monday, September 1. Unobserved, the system had been moving fast across the ocean. And it had already reached monstrous proportions.

  CHAPTER 3

  A REASONABLE ARGUMENT

  IN GALVESTON, ALL THIS TALK OF DRENCHING RAINS AND wildly conflicting winds, occurring over West Africa and then flying out over the sea, would have seemed remote at best. Galveston began that week with no wind. The sky was clear, the heat wave was holding on, and Africa was far away.

  But even if the storm flags had been flying that week, many Galvestonians would have shown little concern. There had been storms here before—many of them, even big ones. They were nothing to worry about.

  You weathered a storm, you picked up the mess, you moved on. The way Galvestonians looked it, this wasn’t some primitive little village, like those of old Europe, built on earthquakes and cowering in fear of nature. This was 1900—the dawn of a new century. This was the United States of America.

  This was Texas, the biggest state in a booming nation.

  And this was not only Texas’s greatest metropolis but also one of the world’s greatest ports. This was the rich and beautiful island city of Galveston, Texas, U.S.A.

  At first, the place must have looked unlivable. A flat, sandy, narrow plain two miles off shore. Humid. Baking, mosquito-infested, in the gulf sun and salt. And no fresh water. To European eyes, there was nothing there.

  Yet French and Spanish sails began appearing on the gulf horizon, and casing out the island, as early as the late 1500s. It was a key factor in the later development of Galveston—and in the evolution of its unique culture—that those ships didn’t come mainly to establish civilian settlements on what would become the vastness of mainland Texas. That land was arid and forbidding. Along the coast, Karankawa, Caddo, and other indigenous people made European settlement on the mainland challenging; far inland, on great plains, the Comanche empire ruled and defended complex trading networks. At first, Europeans showed little interest in venturing into Texas.

  Instead, the imperial ships came to the gulf mainly to establish, by their military presence, competing monarchs’ claims on the New World. In hopes of enforcing supposed borders between European territories on the Gulf Coast—borders that existed more clearly on maps in far-off Versailles and Madrid than they ever did here on the ground—these ships brought more soldiers, adventurers, and priests than settlers.

  And it would have seemed especially crazy to settle, of all places, on Snake Island, as the Karankawa people who lived and hunted there—and whose reputation for cannibalism terrified and fascinated the Europeans—called their long, narrow barrier. There were, in fact, snakes on that island. There wasn’t much else. Really a glorified sandbar, the island ran exactly parallel to the slanting coastline, northeast to southwest. On its northeastern end, it looked across a small inlet toward the southwestern end of a long peninsula, one day to be named Bolivar, which came from farther northeast on the mainland. Together, those tips of land—the island and the peninsula—formed a gateway into a massive, sheltered bay, to be named Trinity, which opened deeply into the Texas mainland.

  At its southwestern end, the narrow barrier island nearly reconnected with the mainland. The water bounded there by the island and the mainland gave the island its own smaller bay, a calm, hot place very near the open gulf. In the diplomatic and military struggle over the New World, that bay came to form one of the strategic harbors in what Spain considered one of its most important American possessions: Mexico.

  The coastline of that great Spanish province Mexico soon stretched—according to Spain—from somewhere near today’s Bolivar Peninsula to Corpus Christi, then to Matamoras, and then all the way down to the Yucatan. The northern interior of that territory became known as Texas. Though barely settled by the Spanish, Texas was nevertheless overseen and administered from the south by the Spanish colonial government in Mexico.

  The status of Snake Island, however, long remained in doubt. The broad, tranquil bay between the barrier island and the mainland wasn’t far from the area that France considered its own Gulf Coast, which lay to the east. The French Gulf was centered on New Orleans and Biloxi, two trading towns near the mouth of that great interior river the French controlled: the Mississippi. Snake Island thus served as a gateway of great importance between competing sides in an imperial contest. By the late 1600s, the Spanish were calling the island Isla Blanca. The French called it Saint Louis.

  But which European power was actually in
charge of this dry, barren strip of offshore land? For years, that question couldn’t be answered. None of them were in charge, really.

  And so, through decades of wild colonial turmoil, this long, thin island, commanding a big and beautiful bay, became the scene of a revolving series of inconclusive tropical adventures. They would mark its people and attitudes for good.

  The island got its modern name in 1785, when a Spanish explorer called the bay, strangely enough, the Bay of Galvez-towm—“towm” with an “m.” That word mingles the name of the Spanish viceroy in Mexico, Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, with an oddly English-sounding word. It thus foreshadowed some dramatic changes, for both Galveston Island and the whole Gulf Coast.

  For as the eighteenth century ended, a new entity—not European, not a colony, but both North American and independent—came into existence. It called itself the United States of America.

  This ambitious new nation was looking far beyond the old borders that had restrained it when, as a collection of English colonies, it had stayed pinned to the Atlantic seaboard. The Americans were gazing eagerly westward, of course. But they also looked southwestward, toward the Gulf of Mexico. They even eyeballed the big interior regions, little known to them, that the gulf led to.

  On the Gulf Coast itself, meanwhile, the political situation had grown even stranger. European sovereignty abruptly shifted, then abruptly shifted back. Those seismic movements added to the confusion. And they encouraged American interest.

  In 1762, for example, France ceded to Spain, wholesale, the entire area it called Louisiana. That didn’t mean the region later known as the state of Louisiana: it meant pretty much everything from the Mississippi to the Rockies. In the gulf, France handed over to Spain all of what had been French Biloxi, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge. Shortly the French were gone, never to return.

  But then, in 1800, Spain ceded all of that land back to France, and France, with no desire to use the property, flipped it, almost overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte marked up the American West, which he’d just received back from Spain, and sold it lock, stock, and barrel, all 828,000 square miles, to the United States in 1803.

  In the United States that transaction became known as President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Suddenly, along with much of what would become the great American West, a key city on the Gulf Coast came under U.S. control for the first time. New Orleans, with all its channels, bays, and bayous, gateway from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, was now an American city and a U.S. port. For the restless, entrepreneurial American citizens who craved land, profit, and adventure, New Orleans couldn’t have looked more exciting.

  There was one problem, however. The vast region known as Texas had barely ever been settled by white people. It was therefore highly inviting to those same restless Americans. And now Texas lay conveniently near some new territory gained by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase.

  Yet Texas remained part of Spanish Mexico. Never ceded back to France by Spain, it hadn’t been transferred by France to the United States. A new border, not fully agreed upon, therefore came into being. The border separated Spanish Texas from the new territories of the United States, bounded to the south by the Gulf Coast. And the border made everybody uneasy.

  In 1817, seven ships sailed into Galveston Bay. The captain of the fleet was the famous French pirate Jean Lafitte. He was looking for a new headquarters.

  The island at the head of the bay seemed the ideal place, and Lafitte already knew it well. By now, he was feeling old. Though renowned as a pirate, Jean Lafitte was hardly the head of some ragtag band. A powerful military strategist, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, he’d trained under the great conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte. Then, as chief administrator of a complex smuggling network, based at first in New Orleans, Lafitte commanded an expert naval artillery battalion, at once feared and envied by all the competing colonial powers in the gulf.

  Lafitte’s operation ran illicit goods from the Caribbean colonies into New Orleans. The pirate violated the U.S. Embargo Act of 1807 to provide elegant residents of that city with the luxuries they loved. Using islands off New Orleans, Lafitte managed illegal, well-defended warehouses and wharves of his own, where he employed hundreds of men.

  He faked ships’ manifests and eluded customs. His fleets of privateers took gold from nearly every nation’s ships. They took the ships too, and added them to their fleet. Lafitte also traded in enslaved Africans.

  The captain wore black and was the author of his own myth: aristocratic parents guillotined in the French Revolution, a series of duels of honor, multiple common-law wives at once, a raconteur, a brooding and violent antihero. For a time he charmed New Orleans society even as he lived outside the law.

  Underneath all that charm and style lived a shrewd tactician. By the time he took up residence on Galveston Island, Lafitte had been playing every side in the political turbulence on the Gulf Coast against every other side. Things here had now gone truly wild. Mexicans began rebelling against Spain in 1810. That brought freelance armies of Americans flooding into the area to fight on behalf of the Mexican revolutionaries. These improvising Americans, known as “filibusters” and often operating outside the sanction of U.S. law, hoped to gain land from an independent Mexico. Pirate organizations also took part in that revolution, mostly on behalf of the Mexicans.

  Then the British showed up. In 1812, during the war named for that year, they established a base at Pensacola and began trying to wrest New Orleans from the United States.

  All of that booming cannon fire and maneuvering under sail among a multitude of mutual enemies served Lafitte well. Wanted in the American territory of Louisiana for breaking U.S. laws, Lafitte nevertheless turned down a British offer of alliance in the War of 1812. He offered help to the United States.

  General Andrew Jackson was deeply skeptical of Lafitte’s trustworthiness. Yet as the commander of American forces against the British, he made a deal with the pirate. Jackson would pardon Lafitte’s men and release Lafitte’s ships captured by the United States in a recent raid; the gentleman pirate would, in turn, deploy his mighty naval organization against the British on behalf of the United States.

  The famous Battle of New Orleans, the United States sent the British packing for the last time. Jean Lafitte’s crack artillery, and his shrewd advice to Jackson on naval strategy, played crucial roles in the victory.

  The dashing pirate did not rest. Lafitte next offered his services to Spain. He agreed to spy on the Mexicans who were rebelling against the empire. It was this scheme that first brought Lafitte to Galveston Island.

  Another French pirate, Louis-Michel d’Aury, had made Galveston a base of operations, both for seizing ships and for supporting the Mexican revolutionaries. Lafitte went to the island at Spain’s behest to gather intelligence on d’Aury’s operation. But he really spent his time there sussing out the island as a future headquarters for his own smuggling business.

  Soon Lafitte and his men were alone on Galveston. D’Aury had taken his men to fight for Mexico; when he returned to the island, he found Lafitte in command. Respecting his colleague’s ruthlessness, d’Aury turned his fleet around and left for good. Lafitte ruled Galveston.

  The island was now, according to Lafitte, an independent kingdom. He called it “Campeche,” and the pirate himself was the head of its government. He established his own court of admiralty and began running the place as a benevolent dictatorship, devoted to smuggling.

  He built himself a big, solid, red two-story house, La Maison Rouge, complete with a moat; it faced the harbor. But he spent most of his time on the Pride, his flagship anchored in the bay.

  Lafitte’s people built homes on the island. Over time they created a small town. The pirate king accepted newcomers on the condition that they swear loyalty to him. Soon he had built a community of 200 men and a number of women with allegiance only to Campeche, which meant to Lafitte himself.

  Lording it over the Karankawa, w
ho had used the island for generations, the citizens of this shadowy, self-declared outlaw state raided ships of the United States and every other nation in the Gulf of Mexico. These were the first full-time European residents of Galveston Island.

  It’s almost impossible to believe that fewer than eighty years passed between 1821, when Jean Lafitte—finally kicked out by the U.S. Navy—sailed away from Galveston and disappeared forever, and 1900, when Daisy Thorne, the cycling schoolteacher, Ed Ketchum, the Yankee police chief, the Bristol family, and so many others were making their plans and living their lives in a booming modern city.

  Those eighty years could not have been more eventful, for Galveston, for Texas, and for the United States. The pirate king, somehow brought back from the dead, wouldn’t have believed his eyes.

  The startling changes that Galveston underwent in that brief span of time would continue to mark its people’s moods and attitudes. For it’s putting it mildly to say that Galvestonians became accustomed to coping with dramatic events. By 1900, a fort guarding Galveston harbor could boast of having been under the command of Spanish Texas, Mexican Texas, the independent Republic of Texas, the U.S. state of Texas, the Confederate state of Texas, and then the United States of America again. Galvestonians took it all in stride.

  Things changed fast. First, the Mexican revolutionaries did, in the end, kick out the Spanish. One of the most important effects of that change was that American settlers started putting down deep roots in Texas that would prove fateful to the region’s future and to the development of Galveston. The first deals for settling Americans in Texas, made by Moses Austin, a Missouri Territory mining entrepreneur, were originally struck with Spain, but when Mexico became independent, the new nation chose to honor them. In 1823, Mexico certified the American settlement, now led by Moses Austin’s twenty-four-year-old son, Stephen.

  Mexico quickly regretted it. These Americans were heedless of authority. They kept expanding to new territories, breaking the rules of settlement. They soon outnumbered Mexicans in Texas and seemed to be colonizing the whole place.