This last sort of storm not uncommonly attacks you when you are seemingly quite safe in harbor. In 1698, Captain Langford, in port and well anchored, saw that he was about to be thus assailed, slipped his cable, and found safety on the open sea. Other craft, whose commanders had less freight or less daring, remained at anchor and were destroyed.
At Madras and at Barbadoes, warning signals are given to the ships at anchor. In Canada, the electric Telegraph, swifter than Nature's own electricity, sends warning of the coming storm from port to port.
To the sailor when on the broad Ocean, the great friend and adviser is the Barometer; its perfect sensitiveness gives you the most exact information of the weight with which the storm-laden atmosphere oppresses it. Usually, it tells you of nothing but fine weather; it almost seems to sleep. But at the first and most distant note of the rising storm, it suddenly awakens, is agitated, and its mercury descends, ascends, redescends. The barometer has its own tempest. Peron when at the Mauritius observed that flashes of pale light escaped from the mercury, and filled the whole tube. During gales, the sensitive instrument seems actually to breathe. "In its fluctuations," say Daniel and Barlow, "the water barometer breathed, blew, like some wild animal."
But the Tempest advances and occasionally illuminates the horizon all around with its electric lightnings. In 1772, during the great storm in the West Indies, when the sea rose seventy feet above ordinary high water mark, the dense darkness of the night was dissipated by balls of lurid fires that lighted up every shore.
The approach of the storm may be more or less rapid. In the Indian Ocean, thickly studded with islands and obstacles, the whirlwind and the water-spout approach you only at the rate of some two miles an hour; while when they come along the course of the warm current, that comes to us from the Antilles, they travel at the rate of from forty to fifty. Their speed would, in fact, be incalculably great but for their oscillation, beaten as they are by the winds, both internally and externally.
Slow or rapid, the fury of the tempest is the same. In 1789, in a single instant and with a single rush, the tempest dashed to pieces every vessel in the port of Ceringa; at a second rush the town was flooded; at the third it was in ruins, and twenty thousand of its inhabitants were dead. In 1822, off Bengal, a water spout was for twenty-four hours sucking up air and water, and, when it burst, fifty thousand people perished.
In different localities, different aspects of the Tempest. In Africa you have the upas, the fierce compound of simoom and tornado. The atmosphere seems calm and clear, and yet you feel a strange oppression of the lungs and a general anxiety as terrible as it is strange. Then a black cloud, "no bigger than a man's hand," appears on the horizon, approaches with lightning speed, lengthening, widening, and deepening as it approaches (vires acquirit eundo) the storm descends, and in a quarter of an hour all around is devastated, utterly ruined, and ships have utterly disappeared. Nature takes no heed of such small matters. About Sumatra and Bengal, you see in the evening or night (never in the morning) a dark arched cloud in the sky. It rapidly increases, and presently, from that dark cloud, come down flashes and sheets of pale and ghastly lights. Woe to the mariner who shall encounter the first wind that rushes from that sinister cloud; he will pretty certainly go down.
But the ordinary form is that of a huge funnel. A sailor, who was caught in one of these terrible storms, says: "I found myself, as it were, at the bottom of an enormous crater of a volcano; all around was darkness, above a glimmering of lurid lights." That light is what is technically termed "the eye of the Tempest."
When the Water spout, the horrible Typhoon, empties itself, human science and human daring are of no avail. Roaring, howling, shrieking, hissing, the storm fiends are at work above, below, around the luckless vessel. Suddenly there is a dead, a quite horrible silence, and there comes forth, seemingly, from the very centre of the water spout, a blinding flash, and a deafening report, and when you, at length, recover power to look aloft, you find that mast and spars have been shivered.
Seymour tells us that, sometimes, after being caught in one of those horrible Typhoons the sailors, for a long time, have blackened nails and weakened sight. Sometimes, too, this terrible Typhoon sucks up not only air and water, but also the luckless ship, holds it suspended in the air, and then dashes it rudely down into the watery abyss. From this terrible action and pitiless power of the Typhoon, the Chinese derived their notion of the terrible mother Typhon, who, hovering in the sky, picks out her victims and is ever conceiving and bearing the Ken Woo, whirlwinds of fire and iron. To that terrible Typhon they have erected temples and altars, adoring her and praying to her in the vain hope of humanising her.