The Attacking Ocean (20 page)

This cyclone was probably a Category 4 storm on today’s Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, weakening to Category 3 as it advanced over the land. The violent winds caused a great deal of damage near the Hooghly’s mouth, blowing down trees and flattening houses. The center passed about forty kilometers west of Kolkata. Overall, the damage was severe but not catastrophic until a huge storm surge moved up the Hooghly at about ten A.M. on October 5, two hours before high water. The surge advanced slowly up the river, arriving in Kolkata only about
an hour before high tide, so the overall effect was extreme. The water rise may have been as much as twelve meters. A huge accumulation of water arrived in Saugor Bay at the river mouth where the steamer
Martaban
lay at anchor waiting to enter the estuary. The raging wind and surge dismasted her and wrecked everything on deck. She drifted helplessly across some of the most dangerous shallows in the mouth of the river. Astonishing though it may seem, the crew were able to take soundings through the height of the storm. There was never less than about thirteen meters below the keel where normally there was virtually no water at all. The survey ship
Salween
was also anchored off Saugor Island. When the cyclone struck, she soon dragged her anchor in the hurricane force winds. The captain slipped the cable and sailed into deeper water under one small staysail. Early on the morning of October 5, the ship grounded on the “beach opposite the Post Office.” Her sails were in tatters, the lifeboat washed away, great waves breaking over the deck. The ship’s log tells the tale: “Observed that the storm-wave was carrying us in shore, as we passed over the tops of several trees.” When the water receded, “found the ruins of the Telegraph Office under our jib-boom.”
¹¹

The storm surge arrived without warning in an overpowering advance. An official traveling in the lowlands took shelter in a convenient hut. He described “a most curious sound which was exactly like the letting off of steam from a steamer, but on a gigantic scale.” The cyclone ripped the roof off the hut and collapsed its walls. As the official peered anxiously through the driving rain, the “water all at once suddenly rose as if by magic, and steadily rolled towards us … The water reached us exactly at 10 minutes to 1, at which hour, being up to my waist, my watch stopped.”
¹²
The survivors clung to two coconut trees until the wind dropped.

Throughout western Bengal, terrified villagers took to their huts, huddling in the darkness with only the roaring wind as company. As the surge rolled up the Hooghly without warning, it flooded all low-lying terrain for up to sixteen kilometers on either side, sweeping everything before it in a sudden rush of water. Entire villages vanished as the water broke through dikes and breakwaters, leaving no signs of human
habitation in its train. Houses vanished, their owners drowned in a moment. A few survivors managed to cling to floating roofs or pieces of wood, only to be carried helplessly for kilometers. Cattle, even tigers, were swept along, prey and predator alike. Only water buffalo, always strong swimmers, were able to master the rapid currents. The local district superintendent of police, one R. W. King, interviewed the few survivors, reporting that women and children fared worst, trapped as they were in their dwellings thrown down by the shrieking wind. He added, “The whole is now (2nd November) one festering mess. I attempted to go near it, but the fearful stench rendered it impossible for any one to do so. The only course to follow with this and other villages similarly circumstanced, will be to leave them until the dry weather, and then to fire the whole mess.”
¹³

The morning after the storm, the Hooghly was awash in corpses and dead beasts. A foul miasma from unburied bodies permeated the air, many of them of young children. Those who survived had no food; rotting vegetation and seawater had polluted their water tanks. In desperation, they ate spoiled food and drank impure water. Cholera, dysentery, and smallpox raged as villagers starved. No one knows how many victims died in the cyclone and its surge, but at least fifty thousand lost their lives in the storm wave, while an additional thirty thousand succumbed to disease. Entire regions lost more than three quarters of their population; at least one hundred thousand cattle drowned; saltwater turned the rice crop black in the fields.

There were 195 ships in port at Kolkata, either alongside the docks or anchored in the river. This far upstream, the surge was considerably reduced, thanks to the friction of the river bottom and the loss of water over the riverbanks. The authorities had laid exceptionally strong moorings as a result of another cyclone in 1842, but the mooring chains were too short for the surge and ripped the anchors from the bottom or pulled ships underwater. Only twenty-three ships escaped damage, a small consolation for London shipping companies saddled with heavy losses. Most ended up in a confused mass of cargo ships, lighters, and small boats cast up on nearby sandbanks. Bundles of jute packed for export littered the riverbanks. Looters were rampant and many became
rich overnight. One two-thousand-ton Peninsular and Oriental liner, the
Bengal
, remained aground for two months. Digging a dock around her at vast expense refloated her. A conservative estimate of the total damage to the port and shipping lay at about a million pounds sterling (about seventy-seven million dollars today).

Another epochal storm, the Great Backerganj Cyclone of October 29, 1876, brought winds of 220 kilometers an hour and a ten-to-fourteen-meter sea surge. Unsettled weather followed several days so hot and still that pitch boiled out of deck seams of ships bound from Sri Lanka to Kolkata.
¹⁴
Thick gray clouds and heavy rain accompanied the approach of the storm, which caught many vessels making their way up and down the Hooghly River. The steamship
Penang
was steaming down the river into the teeth of the now-vicious cyclone. Huge waves broke aboard and flooded the saloon. The engineer and his crew were battened down below, the rig and deckhouses completely shredded. The ship “lay like a log,” her saloon flooded.
¹⁵
When the wind subsided, she staggered back to Kolkata, a virtual wreck on deck. Other ships suffered massive damage and dismastings. Some went aground; others were cast on their beam-ends. The most catastrophic damage came from the sea surge, which again followed on a high tide. The pressure exerted by the storm prevented the tide from ebbing, so the storm waters stalled over the shallows near the mouth of the Meghna River. Once the surge overpowered the tide at about two A.M. on October 31, the water covered low-lying coastal areas and islands to a depth of as much as twelve meters in less than half an hour. By eight A.M., the water had receded, but the destruction was universal and even more catastrophic than that of 1864. At least a hundred thousand people drowned and a further hundred thousand perished from cholera and related diseases. The total casualties approached a quarter of a million.

AT LEAST SIX recorded cyclones have killed over a hundred thousand people. One of the worst storms on record came on November 13, 1970, when Cyclone Bhola hit the entire Bangladesh coast.
¹⁶
The storm formed over the central Bay of Bengal, then traveled north and intensified, with
winds as high as 185 kilometers an hour. The cyclone’s storm surge devastated islands off the Ganges delta, leveling entire villages and destroying crops over a wide area. At least half a million people died, and also a million head of cattle. More than four hundred thousand houses vanished and thirty-five hundred schools and other educational institutions were inundated. Local fisheries suffered heavy losses. Forty-six thousand fishermen perished, with about 65 percent of the fishing capacity of the coastal region being destroyed, in an area where 80 percent of protein comes from fish. Three months after the storm, three quarters of the local population was receiving food aid. The storm affected over three and a half million people with various degrees of severity. Studies after the cyclone revealed that about half the casualties were among children under ten years old. The Bhola disaster prompted Beatle George Harrison and Ravi Shankar to organize the Concert for Bangladesh, the first such relief concert for aid, in 1971. The relief concert coincided with the formation of an independent Bangladesh and a new era in cyclone forecasting. Unfortunately, as we shall see in
chapter 11
, both a rapidly growing population and accelerating sea rise have complicated the equation.

Backerganj and Bhola—two great cyclones of the past two centuries offer a daunting portrait of human vulnerability to sea surges and other catastrophic events that affect low-lying coastlines. They also reinforce an often inconspicuous reality of today’s world. Millions upon millions of us dwell, often in densely populated megacities, at the edge of the attacking sea. We are vulnerable to the ocean and its whims in ways unimaginable even one or two centuries ago.

9
The Golden Waterway

Hemudu, Yangtze river delta, China, CA. 4500 B.C.E. A savage typhoon wind booms overhead like a prolonged, rolling thunderclap, swishing through the reeds with frightening power. Gray clouds roil over the shallows; blowing dust envelops the planked houses close to the rice fields. Normally typhoons give warning of their approach—mounting gray clouds, still winds, and intense humidity. Every farmer knows the menacing signs. But this fast-moving storm has arrived unexpectedly, so there is no time to move to higher ground beforehand. The villagers shelter inside their dwellings, their portable possessions bundled close at hand. Suddenly the wind drops. The elders know that the center of the storm is overhead. They tell everyone to move inland without delay, for they know what approaches from the ocean. Men, women, and children gather their belongings and run for such higher ground as there is in the flat landscape. The wind returns without warning, stronger than before and with it the ominous sound of rushing water. Within minutes, the villagers find themselves lying on a low island that was once a ridge. Blowing spray soaks them to the skin as they clutch tree trunks and hold on for their lives. Two women lose their grip and vanish into the gloom, never to be seen again.

Hours later the wind drops. Nothing remains of the village except a few floating timbers and carcasses of water buffalo drowned by the surge despite being good swimmers. Seawater slowly recedes from the waterlogged countryside, leaving a muddy wilderness of shattered trees and soggy grass in its train. Dense clouds of steam rise from the sodden
delta as the hot sun and suffocating humidity torment the land. The stink of decaying bodies and rotting vegetation pervades the air. The farmers pick themselves up. They slowly rebuild their village and replant their rice gardens with the arrival of the monsoon floods. Severe typhoons are part and parcel of human existence along the East China Sea, and have been since the time of the ancestors.

LIFE ALONG CHINA’S long, low-lying coastline has involved constant adjustment to changing sea levels ever since the end of the Ice Age. Many people call this a “muddy coast,” a landscape of mudflats and shallow lakes, of wetlands and sand dunes.
¹
As is the case along all “muddy” coasts with reduced topography, sea level rise can cause extensive horizontal water movement, which is often out of proportion to the actual extent of the rise. Waterlogged environments, often rich in game and plant foods, expand and contract with even minor changes in the ocean. When people lived off game, fish, and plant foods, adapting to these shifts was a simple matter, even when hunting groups lived in the same location for long periods of time. Relationships with the changing sea became more complex when coastal peoples began cultivating rice, today the staff of life for the Chinese.

Rice accounts for over half the food eaten by nearly two billion people and over 21 percent of all calories consumed by humankind. Yet the history of domesticated rice remains largely a mystery, except for the certainty that the Lower Yangtze Valley played a critical role in its early cultivation.
²
Unfortunately we have little to go on, except for some charred rice fragments from the walls of a pot found in the delta region dating to around 8000 B.C.E. Much farther upstream, in the Middle Yangtze region, minute rice phytoliths, microscopic fragments of intercellular silica, appear in occupation levels at Diaotonghuan Cave, dating to around 10,000 B.C.E.
³

Both these finds were wild forms, for it took five thousand years for fully domesticated rice to develop and become genetically “fixed.” Many generations of early cultivators grew some partially domesticated rice, while still relying on many species of other wild plants, among them fruit and acorns. The crops they planted interbred with wild rice stands, resulting in considerable diversity due to a high rate of genetic exchange. It was not until the nascent farmers created isolated rice plots that fully domesticated forms developed and became fixed.