Sudden Sea (6 page)
Most hurricanes originating in Cape Verde follow this predictable, and suicidal, course. They come across the Caribbean, loop around the Bermuda High, and dissipate in the busy shipping lanes between the United States and Europe. Before they curve, hurricanes signal their intention by slowing down. But this Category 5 behemoth was not following the pattern. Instead of diminishing, it was accelerating. In twenty-four hours it traveled almost six hundred miles on the same direct path toward Biscayne Bay. Norton and Dunn were tracking it with extreme caution, questioning, analyzing, and weighing every possibility. Was this ferocious Category 5 hurricane a typical Cape Verde blow, or was it a freak that would defy the conventional track? Would it makethe classic turn and follow the predictable path out to sea, or hold its present course, as they feared, and barrel into Florida?
At two o’clock Monday afternoon, the storm was still on track and advancing rapidly. Norton broadcast an urgent alarm:
All interests in southern Florida should immediately make all possible preliminary preparations to withstand this severe storm and then stand by for later advisories. Hurricane warnings will probably be issued tonight.
As the afternoon lengthened, the air in the station grew as stale as a half-eaten sandwich. Doors and windows were open wide. The heat was cloying. The crackle of radios mixed with the whir of the overhead fan, the buzz of flies, the incessant
chit-chit-chit
of the Teletype machines, and the constant ringing of the telephone. Dunn was stretched out on the army cot, trying to catnap and failing miserably. Norton fielded calls from anxious relief workers and jittery officials in Washington and Tampa, seeking assurance that there would be no Labor Day sequel. Reporters hung around the station, hoping for an interview or at least a good quote.
Because forecasting is such a dicey business even today, frustrations build, and every so often a preemptive strike is launched to weaken or “seed” a storm before it comes ashore. The argument for seeding is straightforward: take out the monster before it can do any damage. Efforts, from the clever to the bizarre, have included seeding a hurricane with dry ice (Project Cirrus) or silver iodide crystals (Project Stormfury), spreading plastic sheets across the sea, detonating a nuclear device within the eye of the storm, even bombarding the eye with tons of ice cubes. None has ever succeeded.
In Jacksonville every precaution short of seeding had been taken. Evacuation plans were complete. Emergency services were in place. Everyone was restless and on edge. Only the alligators in the Everglades were snoozing calmly. Animals are always the first to sense a disturbance in the weather. The approach of a storm makes them snarling and surly, like bad drunks, and in fact, a hurricane actually has an intoxicating effect. The lowered atmospheric pressure reduces the oxygen level in the blood, just as alcohol does. As the sun dropped on Monday night, the alligators in the Florida Everglades were a picture of tranquillity.
Hurricanes are supple tricksters. For reasons scientists still cannot explain, just when a forecaster thinks he has their number, they gull him with an unexpected zig or zag that sets them on a different course. In an instant, placid waters rampage and dangerous seas becalm. Through the early evening, observations began to trickle in to Jacksonville suggesting that the extreme hurricane might be veering. It had zipped passed Haiti and was skirting the Bahamas. The barometer was falling more slowly in the outer islands, and winds were shifting. Weather stations in Havana signaled that the storm would not touch Cuba.
Hunched over his desk, Dunn began to redraw the maps. As the features of the new charts emerged, they seemed to suggest that the storm would hook sharply north-northeast and follow the typical path of a Cape Verde blow. Still, he and Norton were reluctant to take any chances with such a tricky system. They decided to maintain storm warnings from Key West to Jacksonville while issuing a tentative statewide all clear:
Danger from a tropical hurricane would seem to be past, but caution is advised for the next twelve hours.
As the hurricane continued to curve, they became cautiously optimistic. Their 7:30
P.M.
bulletin advised:
Interests on the southeast Florida coast are urged not to relax their vigilance until the recurving tendency is definitely established.
By ten o’clock Monday night, the eye of the storm was about 360 miles east of Palm Beach and still veering north. Ship-to-shore messages confirmed the altered trajectory. Jacksonville radioed an allclear advisory for the Miami area.
Tuesday, September 20
Although it was still a storm “of great intensity,” the Great Hurricane of 1938 appeared to be set on the classic route to oblivion. The barometer was creeping up one-sixteenth of an inch and winds were slowing. Estimating that the center would pass some distance east of the Carolina capes, the Jacksonville team ordered storm warnings along the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Cape Hatteras, and cautioned mariners:
All vessels in path and all small craft from the Virginia Capes to Charleston should remain in harbor until the storm passes.
By eight o’clock Tuesday night it was still curving north-northeast. Winds had diminished to 138 miles an hour from a morning high of 155. The Category 5 storm was downgraded to a Category 3. Grady Norton sent Dunn home. He expected the storm to lose steam in the colder northern waters and flatten out in the busy shipping routes of the North Atlantic. At worst, it might cause a few cases of seasickness. At about 10:30
P.M.
he broadcast a confident message:
The storm may come close enough to cause strong winds but I feel safe in saying there will be no hurricane winds for Florida.
If it kept to its new northeastern path, the storm would continue to brush by the Bahamas, swing up the coast, and knock itself out at sea without ever touching land. Good news for Florida, but tricky for ships at sea.
Although he did not expect any surprises, Norton maintained his hurricane watch, tracking the storm through Tuesday night. It continued to advance at a steady twenty miles per hour, until Wednesday morning. At about two o’clock on September 21, it began to accelerate. Doubling its speed to forty miles an hour, it sprinted up the coast. This was the first sign that the Great Hurricane of 1938 would not follow the rules.
At Sea
O
n Tuesday night, September 20, the SS
Conte di Savoia
was steaming toward New York. The Italian liner was due to arrive the following evening, four hours after the RMS
Queen Mary
departed for her return trip to Southampton. The two ships should pass in the night.
The
Conte di Savoia
was smaller than most of the grand liners — 814 feet long and just under forty-nine tons. Fitted out in rococo splendor, she and her sister ship, the
Rex,
were the pride of the Italian line. The
Conte
’s grand Colonna Lounge was girded with marble columns, and statues were poised on pedestals beneath a frescoed ceiling. The gracious service and superb kitchen matched her lavish appointments. On the menu were the finest Parma prosciutto, feather-light gnocchi tossed in a subtle walnut sauce, veal chops stuffed with pâtß de foie gras, and risotto with white truffles. Her urbane captain, Alberto Ottino, took personal pride in each dish served.
A veteran of many transatlantic crossings and a man of keen enthusiasms, Ottino strode the deck as if it were a stage. A ship’s captain must be an actor as well as a sailor, performing for the pleasure of his passengers. On this voyage he was carrying two thousand. One of the passengers was Ernesto Gherzi, a Jesuit priest and meteorologist.
In the early 1900s Jesuits were regarded as near-mystical hurricane hunters. Armed with their own empirical observations and only the most basic tools — a sextant, barometer, and anemometer to measure wind velocity — Jesuits stationed in Cuba, the Philippines, and Shanghai forecast the arrival of tropical cyclones with almost preternatural accuracy. Father Gherzi had spent twenty-three years at the Zi-ka-wei weather observatory in Shanghai. Built by the Jesuits in the 1900s, Zi-ka-wei was the most important meteorological station in Asia. During his years there, Father Gherzi had made a special study of typhoons. “On the China coast we have twenty, thirty, forty typhoons a year,” he liked to say. “After a while you can forget your instruments and just sniff one coming.”
The Jesuit was a Savonarola of the sea. His forecasts were so uncannily accurate, the Chinese named him “typhoon father.” But the Boxer Rebellion put an end to his work. Many of the Jesuits were massacred. Father Gherzi was lucky to escape with his life. Now the official weather forecaster for the Italian airline and shipping company, he was sailing to the United States to visit meteorological institutes and weather stations. He planned to stay at Georgetown University and tour the Naval Observatory, the Bureau of Standards, and the D.C. Weather Bureau.
The
Conte di Savoia
had departed from Genoa on September 14, making stops at Naples, Cannes, and Gibraltar before beginning the transatlantic crossing. On the morning of Sunday, the eighteenth, while she was skimming along on an uneventful sea, Father Gherzi had warned the captain: “One of my children will be visiting soon.” Captain Ottino dismissed his caution as Jesuitical mumbo-jumbo, pointing out that there was not so much as a whitecap on the ocean. He joked that he would throw the typhoon father overboard if he made any more dire pronouncements.
By the night of the twentieth, the
Conte di Savoia
was thirty-six hours from New York Harbor. The captain, who had a sweet, lyric voice that he liked to think had echoes of the popular tenor Beniamino Gigli, was entertaining a group of first-class passengers with “Che Gelida Manina” from
La Bohème
when a radioman brought him the hurricane caution. If Jacksonville’s calculations were correct, the
Conte di Savoia
would sail directly into the extreme hurricane. Captain Ottino read the message and turned salt white. The priest’s words came back to him like a prophecy. He rushed up to the bridge, shouting for the Jesuit. Now, according to the Americans, the hurricane the priest had prophesized was approaching rapidly.
Father Gherzi stood watch, as he had done through most of the voyage, in apparent communion with the sea. It was Bible black now, silent and satiny. Black cassock flapping against spindle legs, long, slender fingers clamped on his broad-brimmed
cappello,
he looked like a strange crow perched on the bridge. Father Gherzi was about six foot four and reed-thin with close-cropped graying hair and a Vandyke beard. He conversed in Latin, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, and half a dozen other languages with equal ease and possessed a calm containment that quieted the captain’s alarm.
When Ottino repeated the radio message, the Jesuit shrugged. “I think the weather gods knew I was coming to the eastern coast and sent the typhoon with me.” Father Gherzi stayed on the bridge for several more hours, watching the sea, studying the cloud formations, and listening to the wind. Then he assured the captain that there was nothing more to fear. The
Conte di Savoia
would skirt the storm, not sail into it, as the U.S. Weather Bureau was predicting. Although she might encounter squalls from the outer edge of the disturbance, Ottino did not have to reduce speed or alter course. The hurricane was moving north too fast for the paths of ship and storm to converge.
This time Captain Ottino heeded the “typhoon father’s” forecast and held his ship on course. The
Conte di Savoia
would slip into New York Harbor just after the hurricane had blown through.
Six hundred vacationers had booked the Cunard–White Star Line’s Caribbean cruise. They sailed from the Hudson River pier on Saturday, September 17, paying from $122.50 for a thirteen-day trip to Kingston, Havana, and Nassau. Billed as “the finest of Cunarders,” the RMS
Carinthia
was built to be a floating pleasure palace. Among the amenities were instantaneous hot running water in every stateroom, beds six inches wider than on other ships, racquet courts, a full gym with sundeck, two promenade decks, two sea-view lounges, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a movie theater, a cardroom, and a cocktail deck. Even the second-class public rooms were paneled to evoke the feel of a British country house. Once renowned for her luxurious round-the-world voyages, by 1938 the aging vessel was reduced to Caribbean cruises. The leisurely jaunts of eight to thirteen days offered first-run movies, dance classes, and two orchestras.
Captaining the
Carinthia
was A. C. Greig, an Aussie with a crisp no-nonsense manner. Greig had the compact, boxy body of a Morris Minor, a chin as cleft as Cary Grant’s, and an affinity for the composer whose name he almost shared. The
Peer Gynt Suite
was a standard in the repertoire of the ship’s orchestras. Greig was a cautious captain, and throughout the weekend as the
Carinthia
glided south, he maintained a constant watch on the hurricane that was heading toward Florida. Greig was concerned for his passengers’ comfort. They had not booked passage for a harrowing maritime adventure. They wanted a relaxing cruise — midnight suppers of cold lobster and champagne, carefree lessons learning the Lindy in the arms of flattering young hoofers. Broadway hopefuls hungry for work signed on cruise ships as stewards, harboring a fantasy that they might be glimpsed by one of the Tin Pan Alley legends — Cole Porter, say, or Richard Rodgers — who regularly booked passage on the Cunard liners.
Tuesday morning the
Carinthia
was about 150 miles north of Florida, and the Weather Bureau was still expecting the storm to hit Miami later in the day. To play it safe and assure his passengers a smooth sailing, the captain adjusted his course, bearing west to hug the southern coast and put more than a hundred miles between the
Carinthia
and the storm. Through the day, barometric pressure held steady at 29.71, indicating stable weather. Greig, a crisp, assured commander, was confident that he had steered his ship clear of danger. But late in the afternoon, the sky turned slate gray, and sundown brought an unnatural calm. It stilled the offshore waters and aggravated Greig’s worries, giving him a sour stomach. Instead of turning out of the path of the killer cyclone, as the hurricane recurved, the
Carinthia
was sailing into it.