The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

Reid examined the ruins and made inquiries of many people about the nature of the hurricane of 1831. He came to the conclusion that there had not been an earthquake, but all the damage had been caused by the wind and sea. One of the residents told Reid that when daybreak came, amidst the roar of the storm and the noise of falling roofs and walls, he had looked out over the harbor and saw a heaving body of lumber, shingles, staves, barrels, wreckage of all description, and vessels capsized or thrown on their beam ends in shallow water. The whole face of the country was laid waste. No sign of vegetation was seen except here and there patches of a sickly green. Trees were stripped of their boughs and foliage. The very surface of the ground looked as if fire had run through the land.

Reid resolved to study hurricanes and see what he could do to reduce the consequent loss of life. He wanted to tell sailors how to keep out of these terrible storms and he thought it might be possible to design buildings capable of withstanding the winds. Soon afterward, he saw Redfield’s articles in the American Journal of Science. He wrote to the author and they began a friendly correspondence which continued until the latter’s death.

Neither Redfield nor Reid was actually the first to declare that the hurricane is a great whirlwind. Many others had suggested this before them, and in 1828 a German named H. W. Dove had confirmed it, but none of these had hunted up the data and talked and corresponded with hundreds of seamen to collect facts to prove their contentions. And none had presented the facts in a way that would serve as a law of storms for seamen.

Following the lead of General Reid, an Englishman named Henry Piddington, on duty at Calcutta in India, became a great hurricane hunter in the middle of the nineteenth century. He collected information from every source, talked to seamen of all ranks from admiral down, and added a great deal to the law of storms. Because of the movement of violent winds around and in toward the hurricane center, he gave it the name cyclone, which means “coil of a snake.” This is the reason why tropical storms are now called cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.

Piddington, who became President of the Marine Courts of Inquiry at Calcutta, published numerous memoirs on the law of storms. Of all the accounts that he collected of experiences of seamen in tropical storms, the outstanding case, in his estimation, was that of the Brig Charles Heddles, in a hurricane near Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean, east of Africa. Mauritius is south of the equator, where hurricane winds blow around the center in a clockwise direction, the opposite of the whirling motion of storms in the northern hemisphere.

The Charles Heddles was originally in the slave trade but at the time that she was caught in the hurricane was mostly being employed in the cattle trade between Mauritius and Madagascar. Only the fastest vessels were engaged in the cattle trade, and the Charles Heddles was an exceptionally good ship. Her master was a man named Finck, an able and highly respected seaman.

On Friday, February 21, 1845, the Charles Heddles left Mauritius and in the early morning of the twenty-second ran into heavy weather, with wind and sea gradually increasing. It became squally and the vessel was laboring greatly by midnight. On the twenty-third it was worse, with a frightful sea and the wind very high, accompanied by incessant rain. The seas swept over the decks and the crew was frequently at the pumps.

By this time Captain Finck had determined to keep the brig scudding before the wind and run his chance of what might happen. The steady change of the wind around the compass as the day wore on made it impossible for him to estimate his position, but he was sure he had plenty of sea room. The crew was unable to clue up the topsail without risk of severe damage, so round and round they went.

Wind force and weather were always about the same. There was a terrifying sea, the vessel constantly shipping water, which poured down the hatchways and cabin scuttle. The fore topsail blew away at 4 P.M. and they continued scudding under bare poles, the ship’s course changing steadily around the compass. By the twenty-fifth of February, the vessel was taking water through every seam, the crew was constantly at the pumps or baling water out of the cabins with buckets. All the provisions were wet. The seas broke clear over the ship.

On the twenty-sixth, the hurricane winds continued without the least intermission. The ship was continually suffering damages, which had to be repaired as quickly as possible by the exhausted crew. The seas were monstrous, water going through the decks as though they were made of paper. Still the ship was scudding and steadily changing course around the compass. By the twenty-seventh, the weather had improved but the ship persisted in going round and round, veering and scudding before the wind. After all this travel, Captain Finck succeeded in taking an observation and found, to his surprise, that he was not far from port in Mauritius, from which he had set sail before the storm, almost a week earlier, and on the twenty-eighth he made for port there.