The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probably on their last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses of water strike with immense force and, after the shock, the vessel shivering as though the hull had given way, leaving them on the verge of diving toward the bottom of the sea. Sometimes the Exe was mostly out of water—they could sense it in the darkness—and then she took what they called a “belly-flopper” and every man felt sick, fearing the end had come and, after a moment, fearing just the opposite—that it would not be the end, after all, and they would have to take more of the same.

Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by a series of lurches between gusts, pulled himself to the side of his commander. “Things look better,” he shouted. “The barometer is up a little.” But soon after that he found he had made an error. He had read it an inch too high. Actually, it had dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that the center must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceased and the wind dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing into the vortex.

The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They could see for several miles—a cauldron of steep towering cones of water with spray at the crests—a brightening sky over a chaotic sea. Some of these columns of water would clash together on different courses and produce a weird effect. The wind became light and a few tired birds sought haven on deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes and then the dreaded squalls ahead of the opposite semicircle of the typhoon began to hit the vessel. By 7:20 A.M. the full force of the most vicious gales was bringing new miseries to the exhausted crew.

After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. “So the destroyer went her way,” the commander reported, “with her nose down and her tail in the air.” She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.

Examination of the Exe showed that a part of the bottom had been battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander wrote in his report: “When I recall (which I can without any trouble) those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this world.” Actually, the commander of the Exe had escaped the worst of it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge, where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many others have failed under similar circumstances.

Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in the river and on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.

All these accounts agreed on one thing—the ring of gales around the center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A strange case was the experience on the American steamship Wind Rush, in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said: “From 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with no wind and smooth sea, and the sun was shining.”

There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of them have reported confused cross seas, described as “pyramidal” or “tumultuous.” In November, 1932, the master of the British steamship Phemius, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned sharply northward and the Phemius was trapped by the ring of fierce gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.

Twice the Phemius drifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town of Santa Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons out of a population of four thousand. The Phemius was left behind in a helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.

The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat, the Sea Gull, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he became involved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” Captain Davis said, “the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of the wind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end of Cuba.