From the log kept by Captain Finck and the observations made on other ships caught in the same hurricane, Piddington laid down the track of the storm and the course of the Charles Heddles. Now it was clear that the ship had been carried round and round the storm center, at the same time going forward as the storm progressed. Its course at sea looked like a watch spring drawn out—a series of loops extending in an arc from the north to the west of Mauritius. Here was vivid and undeniable proof, from the experience of one ship, that hurricanes over the ocean are progressive whirlwinds, like the storm which Redfield had charted from trees blown down in Connecticut in 1821.
Another fact was quite clear to Piddington and he published it with the hope that all seafaring men would profit by it. He could see now why a ship could be carried hour after hour and day by day before the wind, apparently to great distances, and then be cast ashore near the very place where the ship took to sea.
Inspired by this report of the Charles Heddles in the hurricane, Piddington suggested, for the first time in history (1845), that ships be sent out to study hurricanes. He wrote:
“Every man and every set of men who are pursuing the investigation of any great question, are apt to overrate its importance; and perhaps I shall only excite a smile when I say, that the day will yet come when ships will be sent out to investigate the nature and course of storms and hurricanes, as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to survey pestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service.”
The prediction which Piddington put in italics was eventually verified, though nearly a century later.
“Nothing indeed can more clearly show,” Piddington continued, “how this may, with a well appointed and managed vessel be done in perfect safety—performed by mere chance by a fast-sailing colonial brig, manned only as a bullock trader, but capitally officered, and developing for the seaman and meteorologist a view of what we may almost call the internal phenomena of winds and waves in a hurricane.”
But this was only the beginning. Learning the secrets of the hurricane proved to be far more difficult than Redfield, Reid and Piddington had imagined. The world looked in amazement at the tremendous labors of a few men who collected enormous quantities of reports, interviews, and observations from mariners and tried to put the bits together, but there was a prevailing suspicion that the real facts were locked in the minds of men who had gone to their doom in ships sunk in the centers of these awful storms and the lucky ones who came back had seen only a part of their ultimate terrors. In these days of relatively safe navigation at the middle of the twentieth century, our minds are scarcely able to grasp the seriousness of this scourge of tropical and subtropical seas which destroyed so many ships and drove busy men, working long hours for a living, to such tremendous labors, at night and at odd times, to learn the truth. We may get some light from the stories of desperate sailors who, by some strange fate, were thrown exhausted on the rocks that finally claimed the broken remains of once-proud vessels of trade and war.
3. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
“Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon: