Isaac's Storm (11 page)

A
hurricane
set
the
hunt
in
motion.

ON
SEPTEMBER
3,
1821,
a
hurricane
moving
up
the
coast
from
Cape
Fear
made
landfall
near
New
York
City,
and
continued
north
well
into
New
England.
Soon
after
the
storm
a
thirty-two-year-old
saddler
named
William
Redfield,
son
of
a
long-dead
sailor,
took
a
trip
on
horseback
through
Connecticut
and
happened
to
notice
something
unusual
in
the
landscape
around
him.
Near
Canaan,
in
northernmost
Connecticut,
the
trees
had
fallen
in
a
direction
exactly
opposite
that
of
the
toppled
trees
he
had
seen
farther
south.

After
his
return
home,
Redfield
made
a
careful
study
of
the
hurricane.
He
collected
fragments
of
detail
about
the
storm
from
newspapers,
letters,
ships'
logs,
and
other
sources,
and
in
the
process
became
the
first
man
to
track
a
hurricane
from
first
sighting
to
last.
His
interest
expanded
to
include
other
hurricanes,
which
he
pursued
with
equal
zeal.
His
first
paper,
"On
the
Prevailing
Storms
of
the
Atlantic
Coast,"
appeared
in
1831
in
the
American
Journal
of
Science,
and
quickly
became
a
classic
of
meteorology.
He
concluded
there
could
be
only
one
explanation
for
the
changing
pattern
of
damage
he
had
encountered:
"This
storm
was
exhibited
in
the
form
of
a
great
whirlwind."

Redfield's
meticulous
research
caught
the
attention
of
a
British
naval
officer,
Lt.
Col.
William
Reid,
who
had
been
dispatched
by
King
William
IV
to
Barbados
to
supervise
the
reconstruction
of
British
interests
there
in
the
wake
of
yet
another
disastrous
hurricane,
this
the
great
"Barbados-to-Louisiana
Hurricane"
of
1831,
which
killed
over
fifteen
hundred
people.
Reid
too
became
obsessed
with
hurricanes.
After
his
return
to
England,
he
adopted
Redfield's
tracking
techniques
and
in
turn
ignited
the
storm-watching
passions
of
a
countryman,
Henry
Piddington,
who
applied
the
same
techniques
to
the
unfathomably
deadly
storms
of
the
Bay
of
Bengal.
It
was
Piddington
who
coined
the
word
cyclone,
from
the
Greek
for
"coils
of
a
snake,"
and
it
was
his
research
that
resonated
most
darkly
within
Isaac
Cline
on
Saturday,
September
8,1900.

Piddington
reconstructed
a
cyclone
that
struck
the
bay
town
of
Coringa
in
December
1789.
"The
unfortunate
inhabitants
of
Coringa
saw
with
terror
three
monstrous
waves
coming
in
from
the
sea,
and
following
each
other
at
short
distances.
The
first,
sweeping
everything
in
its
passage,
brought
several
feet
of
water
into
the
town.
The
second
augmented
these
ravages
by
inundating
all
the
low
country,
and
the
third
overwhelmed
everything."
The
three
waves
killed
at
least
twenty
thousand
people,
although
the
final
toll
was
beyond
tally.
"The
sea
in
retiring
left
heaps
of
sand
and
mud,
which
rendered
all
search
for
the
property
or
bodies
impossible."

Isaac
read
Piddington's
work.
It
would
come
back
to
him
years
later
on
the
beach
at
Galveston.
"I
had
studied
the
meagre
information
available
relative
to
tropical
cyclones,"
Isaac
wrote.
"I
had
read
of
the
Calcutta
cyclone,
October
5,1864,
which
caused
a
storm
tide
16
feet
deep
over
the
delta
of
the
Ganges
and
drowned
40,000
persons,
and
the
Backergunge
cyclone
of
October
31,1876,
which
caused
an
unprecedented
storm
tide
ranging
in
depth
from
10
feet
to
nearly
50
feet
over
the
eastern
edge
of
the
delta
of
the
Ganges,
and
drowned
at
the
lowest
estimates
100,000
persons."
At
that
point,
however,
he
was
only
thinking
in
terms
of
waves.
He
still
had
no
appreciation
of
how
similar
the
undersea
landscape,
or
bathymetry,
of
Galveston
Bay
was
to
that
of
the
Bay
of
Bengal.
That
would
come
later.

Piddington,
in
his
immensely
popular
text
The
Sailor's
Horn-Book
for
the
Law
of
Storms,
offered
practical
advice
for
coping
with
hurricanes.
He
included
transparent
storm
cards,
or
"horn
cards,"
which
showed
the
direction
of
wind
at
various
points
in
a
cyclonic
circle.
A
mariner
could
match
the
winds
he
was
experiencing
with
the
winds
marked
on
the
card
and
thus
determine
where
in
the
body
of
the
storm
his
ship
was
located
and
thus
how
to
avoid
sailing
toward
what
Piddington
called
"the
fatal
centre."
With
these
storm
cards,
Piddington
wrote,
"you
have
the
hurricane
in
your
hand."

It
all
sounded
good
and
precise
on
paper,
but
hurricanes
still
came
by
surprise,
still
killed
by
the
thousands.
As
one
nineteenth-century
captain
put
it,
"if
the
centre
always
bore
eight
points
from
the
direction
of
the
wind;
if
the
wind
gradually
increased
in
force
as
we
near
the
centre;
if
the
wind
veered
gradually
in
all
parts
of
the
storm;
and
if
the
centre
were
the
only
dangerous
part
of
it,
then
the
avoiding
of
a
hurricane
would
be
very
simple."

WHAT
ISAAC
DID
not
learn
much
about
at
Fort
Myer
was
forecasting,
a
black
and
dangerous
art
that
only
a
few
men
in
Washington
were
allowed
to
practice.
Incorrect
forecasts
eroded
the
faith
of
a
public
already
skeptical
of
the
service's
prowess
and
worth.
A
few
newspapers
had
taken
to
running
the
service's
weather
forecasts
opposite
the
often-superior
forecasts
of
astrologers
and
assorted
weather
prophets.
To
help
ensure
that
the
best
men
got
deployed
to
the
field,
the
weather
service
gave
its
Fort
Myer
trainees
a
rigorous
examination.
The
top
scorers
won
immediate
assignment
as
assistant
observers
to
posts
throughout

the
country.

At
one
point
the
test
asked
each
trainee
to
choose
a
scientific
mission
related
to
meteorology
that
each
could
pursue
while
conducting
the
routine
work
required
in
a
weather
station.
The
chief
did
not
want
his
observers
just
sitting
around
between
weather
observations,
a
wise
policy,
given
the
sex
scandals,
grave
robbing,
and
other
incidents
that
would
soon
surface
and
further
undermine
the
weather
service's
reputation.
Isaac
gave
a
beauty
queen's
answer
—
that
he
wanted
to
do
something
that
would
"give
results
beneficial
to
mankind."

Isaac
scored
in
sixteenth
position,
and
the
service
promptly
assigned
him
to
Little
Rock,
Arkansas.
When
not
recording
temperature
and
barometric
pressure,
he
was
to
investigate
how
climate
shaped
the
behavior
of
Rocky
Mountain
locusts,
said
to
be
swarming
the
countryside.
To
Isaac,
this
was
the
fulfillment
of
a
dream.
"I
was
twenty-one
years
old,"
he
wrote,
"the
world
was
before
me
and
my
enthusiasm
was
such
that
I
thought
I
could
do
any
thing
that
it
was
possible
for
man
to
accomplish."

THE
VORTEX
GAINED
definition.
Rivers
of
air
flowed
toward
its
center.
The
earth's
rotation
drove
them
to
the
right,
but
each
right-veering
gust
imparted
to
the
vortex
a
left-hand
spin,
just
as
a
glancing
blow
on
the
right
side
of
a
cue
ball
will
cause
it
to
spin
left.
The
arriving
winds
lowered
pressure.
As
the
pressure
fell,
air
moving
toward
the
storm
gained
velocity.
The
stronger
winds
drew
more
water
vapor
from
the
sea,
which
fed
the
clouds
around
the
center
of
the
vortex
—
releasing
more
heat
and
driving
the
pressure
still
lower.
 

On
Tuesday,
August
28,
the
storm
overtook
a
ship
located
about
three
hundred
nautical
miles
southeast
of
Monday's
first
sighting.
The
ship's
log
noted
winds
from
the
south-southwest,
the
bottom
right
rim
on
a
Piddington
horn
card.
The
wind
was
stronger,
Force
6,
twenty-five
to
thirty-one
miles
an
hour.

Guy
wires
whistled.
 

IT
WAS
WINTER.
Isaac's
train
passed
through
an
austere
landscape
of
grays
and
browns,
the
trees
like
upended
spiders,
but
to
him
all
of
it
was
dazzling.
"Something
new,
something
of
interest
and
beauty
unfolded
before
my
eyes
all
the
time."
He
arrived
in
Litde
Rock
just
before
the
state
legislature
passed
a
bill
that
resolved
a
long-festering
controversy.
Henceforth,
the
new
law
declared,
the
legal
pronunciation
was
"Arkansaw."

Isaac's
boss
assigned
him
responsibility
for
weather
observations
to
be
made
at
five
in
the
morning
and
eleven
at
night.
In
between
he
was
to
put
together
bulletins
for
the
station's
customers
and
collect
weather
dispatches
cabled
each
day
by
a
network
of
railroad
agents.

He
did
not
find
any
locusts.
"They
evidently
learned
that
I
had
been
put
on
their
trail
and
disappeared."
But
he
did
find
another
means
of
filling
his
time.

The
University
of
Arkansas's
medical
school
was
only
three
blocks
from
the
station.
Medicine,
Isaac
reasoned,
would
provide
not
only
a
productive
way
to
fill
his
day,
but
also
satisfy
the
Signal
Corps'
requirement
that
its
observers
pursue
a
scientific
endeavor
related
to
their
daily
duties.
He
could
study
how
weather
and
climate
affected
people,
a
new
field
and
one
that
"could
not
evade
me
as
the
Rocky
Mountain
locusts
had
done."
He
enrolled
in
the
middle
of
the
1882-83
school
year,
and
found
his
work
and
study
schedules
complemented
each
other.
"The
one
gave
me
a
rest
from
the
other,"
he
wrote,
"and
I
never
became
tired."