The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

This experience of the Third Fleet made it plain that a sailing vessel had very little chance of survival in the central regions of a fully developed tropical storm. The only hope was that the master would see the signs of its coming and manage to keep out of it. Once he became involved, the force of the wind was likely to be so great that his vessel soon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. The gales seemed to have unlimited power. Even today, we don’t know accurately the speed of the strongest winds. It seems likely that the highest velocities are between two hundred and two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Wind-measuring instruments are disabled or carried away and the towers or buildings which support them are blown down.

Long after the time of Columbus, it was generally believed that a storm was a large mass of air moving straight ahead at high velocities. A ship might be caught in these terrible winds and be carried along with them, to be dashed on shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. Every mariner wanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangely enough, few wanted to avoid them altogether. If a sailing vessel circled around a storm, it took longer to get to the port of destination and how could the master explain the time lost to his bosses when he got home, if he had no record of a storm in the log book to account for the delay?

From this point of view, some of the things that happened seemed very strange. Two or three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a sailing ship to be caught in a hurricane and scud for hours or days under bare poles in high winds and seas, and finally come to rest near the place where it first encountered the storm. A sailor on board would imagine he had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might survive the wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashore near the place where he started!

Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be accounted for. For example, it was often claimed that “the storm came back.” After blowing in one direction with awful force until great damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that had not been destroyed in the first blow. To add to the mystery, many ships were never heard from again. They became involved in hurricanes and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind.

Men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships and men that were never seen again. And yet it is amazing to find how near some of these men came to the right answer. There were seafaring men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whose operations were centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. They were English, Dutch, Portuguese and French, all at one time or another opposed to Spanish control in the Carribbean. On various occasions they seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements.

During these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. Doubtless, there were many more not recorded. A great number of vessels went down in the seas and harbors around St. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where the buccaneers sought haven from the Spaniards.

One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was William Dampier. He was born in England in 1652, became an orphan at an early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he made a voyage to Newfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies and then fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year he went to Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiar with the harbors, bays, inlets and other features of the Carribbean coasts and islands. At times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the South American coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, they raided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed the Pacific to Guam, and then to the East Indies.

At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately took him over most of the world. But he died poor, just three years before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars’ worth of prize money.

Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguished himself from the other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific facts in a clear and easy style. In his writings, we find our earliest good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good. Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Sea that “typhoons are a sort of violent whirlwinds.” He said they were preceded by fine, clear and serene weather, with light winds.

“Before these whirlwinds come on,” wrote Dampier, “there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward the upper part is a dull reddish color.” To him, this cloud was frightful and alarming. He went on to say that it was sometimes seen twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. The tempest came with great violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.