In several parts of the globe, an extensive vacuum being suddenly created in the atmosphere by the agency of electricity, the surrounding air rushes in with immense impetuosity from all points of the compass, blowing in gusts of resistless power, destroying all the productions of the earth, leveling forests and the finest buildings, and inundating whole tracts of country by the deluge of rain with which they are accompanied. These storms seldom occur far out in the open ocean, or beyond the tropics, or nearer the equator than nine or ten degrees. Their principal localities are the West India Islands, those of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Bourbon, the north-west coast of Africa, the Bay of Bengal, and the Chinese Sea, where they are variously called hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. A heavy swell upon the sea, a dusky redness of the sky, a close oppressive air, and a wild irregularity in the appearance of things, are the usual precursors of a tropical tempest. Though generally confined to the districts mentioned, where they are of frequent occurrence, the extra-tropical latitudes, at more distant intervals, experience the force of the hurricane.
When were the winds
Let slip with such a warrant to destroy?
When did the waves so haughtily o’erleap
Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry?”
This is the language of Cowper in the Task, respecting the year 1783, when—amid the other events of that portentous season, noticed upon a previous page—a succession of storms, accompanied with violent rains, visited the whole of Great Britain, and caused considerable damage. But what is known in our records as the “Great Storm,” occurred on the night of the 26th and the morning of the 27th of November 1703, and has been referred to by almost all the writers of that period. Derham, in the Philosophical Transactions for the year following, states—
“Of the preceding parts of the year (1703), the months of April, May, June, and July were wet in the southern parts of England, particularly in May, when more rain fell than in any month of any year since 1690; June also was very wet; and though July had considerable intermissions, yet on the 28th and 29th there fell violent showers of rain, and the newspapers gave accounts of great rains that month from divers places of Europe. On Thursday, November 25th, the day before the tempest, in the morning there was a little rain, the winds high in the afternoon. In the evening there was lightning, and between nine and ten o’clock at night, a violent but short storm of wind, and much rain. Next morning, November 26th, the wind was S. S. W., and high all day, and so continued till I was in bed and asleep. About twelve that night the storm awakened me, which gradually increased till near three that morning, and from thence till near seven it continued with the greatest violence; then it began to abate slowly and the mercury to rise swiftly.” This tempest filled the whole kingdom with terror, and produced immense commercial loss, and many melancholy accidents. The country between the Loire in France and the Trent in England was the chief scene of its ravages. The historians of those times give an affecting account of the dismal appearance of the district. Houses unroofed—steeples blown down—stacks of corn scattered abroad—vessels dismasted or wrecked—and upward of eight thousand persons drowned. “The wind,” says Oldmixon, “blew west-south-west, and grumbled like thunder, accompanied with flashes of lightning. It threw down several battlements and stacks of chimneys at St. James’ Palace; tore to pieces tall trees in the Park; and killed a servant in the house. The Guard-house at Whitehall was much damaged, as was the Banqueting-house. A great deal of lead was blown off Westminster Abbey; and most of the lead on churches and houses either rolled up in sheets or loosened. The pious and learned prelate Doctor Richard Kidder, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and his lady, were killed by the fall of part of the old episcopal palace at Wells. The Bishop of London’s sister, Lady Penelope Nicholas, was killed in like manner at Horsely in Sussex, and Sir John Nicholas—her husband—grievously hurt.” Upward of 800 houses, 400 windmills, and 250,000 timber-trees were thrown down; 100 churches unroofed; 300 sail lost upon the coast; 900 wherries and barges destroyed on the Thames; the Eddystone light-house, built by Winstanley, was overthrown; 15,000 sheep, besides other cattle, were drowned by the overflowing of the Severn; and Rear-Admiral Beaumont, with the crews of several ships, perished on the Goodwin Sands.
The West Indies and the vicinity of the Mauritius seem to be two principal foci of hurricanes, from their frequency and tremendous violence in those localities. Of thirteen hurricanes, described by Colonel Reid, in his interesting attempt to develop the law of storms, eleven took place in the neighborhood of the Mauritius and Madagascar, which sanctions an opinion prevalent among seamen, that gales are commonly avoided by ships steering in a course so as to keep well to the eastward of the Mauritius. To give some idea of a tropical hurricane, the particulars gathered by Colonel Reid from various sources, respecting that which desolated several of the West India Islands in the year 1831, are here introduced. It passed over Barbadoes, St. Lucia, St. Domingo, and Cuba, swept the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, raged simultaneously at Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans, entered the adjoining states, and seems to have been disorganized by the opposition offered to its progress by the mountain region of the Alleghanies. The hurricane accomplished the distance of 2000 miles in 150 hours, at an average velocity of 13½ miles an hour, but the rate of its progressive motion was insignificant in comparison with that of its rotatory movement, a feature hereafter to be adverted to. Before its arrival at St. Vincent, a cloud was observed to the north by a resident, so threatening in its aspect and peculiar in its color, that of olive green, that, impressed with a sense of impending danger, he hastened home, and by nailing up his doors and windows saved his house from the general calamity. In this island, the most remarkable effect of the storm was the destruction of an extensive forest at its northern extremity, the trees of which were killed without being blown down. In 1832, these trees were frequently examined by Colonel Reid, and appeared not to have been killed by the wind, but by the immense quantity of electric matter rendered active during the storm. When at its height, two negroes at Barbadoes were greatly terrified by sparks of electricity passing off from one of them, as they were struggling in the darkness, in the garden of Coddrington College, to reach the main building, after the destruction of their hut. Such was the quantity of spray carried inland from the sea by the wind, that it rained salt water over the whole island, which killed the fresh-water fish in the ponds, and several ponds continued salt for some days after the storm. The afternoon that ushered in the hurricane, that of the 11th of August, was one of dismal gloom, but about four o’clock, there was an obscure circle of imperfect light toward the zenith subtending an angle of 35° or 40°. Variable squalls of wind and rain, with intervening calms, prevailed till midnight, when the lightning flashed fearfully, and a gale blew fiercely from the north and north-east. At 1 A. M. the wind increased, but suddenly shifted its quarter, blowing from north-west and intermediate points. Toward three o’clock, after a little intermission, the hurricane again burst from the western points, hurling before it thousands of missiles—the fragments of every unsheltered work of human art. The strongest houses vibrated to their foundations, and the surface of the earth trembled as the destroyer passed over it. There was no thunder at any time distinctly heard, but the horrible roar and yelling of the wind, the noise of the ocean, whose waves threatened the destruction of every thing in Barbadoes that the other elements might spare, the clattering of tiles, the falling of roofs and walls, and the combination of a thousand other sounds, formed a hideous and appalling din. As soon as the dawn rendered outward objects visible, and, the storm abating, permitted the inhabitants of Bridgetown to venture out, a grand but distressing picture of ruin presented itself. From the summit of the cathedral tower, the whole face of the country appeared the wreck of its former condition. No sign of vegetation could be observed, except here and there a few patches of sickly green. The surface of the ground exhibited the scorching and blackening effect of the lightning. A few remaining trees, stripped of their boughs and foliage, wore a cold and wintry aspect; and the numerous villas in the neighborhood, formerly concealed amid thick groves, were exposed and in ruins.
In the year 1837, three hurricanes occurred in the West Indies and adjacent parts of the Atlantic, the narratives of which, as collected by Colonel Reid from different observers, present some singular features. The first passed over Barbadoes on the 26th of July. The sky assumed a blue-black appearance, with a red glare at the verge of the horizon. The flashes of lightning were accompanied with a whizzing noise, like that of a red-hot iron plunged in water. The barometer and sympiesometer fell rapidly and sunk to 28·45 inches. The Antigua hurricane, the second of that year, commenced in the Atlantic, on the night of the 31st of July, and was encountered by Captain Seymour, in the brigantine Judith and Esther of Cork. He observed near the zenith a white appearance of a round form, and while looking stedfastly at it, a sudden gust of wind carried away the topmast and lower scudding sails. During the hurricane the eyes of the crew were remarkably affected, their sight became dim, and every one of their finger-nails turned quite black, and remained so nearly five weeks afterward. The captain inferred, from the universality of the effect, that it could not have been produced by the firmness of the grasp with which they were holding by the rigging, but that the whole was caused by an electric body in the elements. On the 2d of August, in another situation, the Water Witch was caught by the skirts of the same storm, the wind blowing in squalls from the W. and N. N. W. till the evening, when “a calm succeeded,” states Captain Newby, “for about ten minutes; and then, in the most tremendous, unearthly screech I ever heard, it recommenced from the south and south-west.” The third hurricane of the year was met with by the Rawlins, about midnight of the 18th of August, when, after blowing violently for twelve hours from the north, in an instant a perfect calm ensued for an hour, and then, quick as thought, the wind sprung up with tremendous force from the south-west, no swell whatever preceding the convulsion. During this hurricane, an extraordinary phenomenon presented itself, resembling a solid, black, perpendicular wall about 15° or 20° above the horizon, which disappeared and became visible again several times, described by one of the observers, as “the most appalling sight he had ever seen during his life at sea.” A similar spectacle is described by an officer on board the ship Tartarus, during a hurricane on the American coast in the year 1814:—“No horizon appeared, but only a something resembling an immense wall within ten yards of the ship.” The power of the wind was remarkably exemplified during the great hurricane of 1780, which at Barbadoes forced its way into every part of the Government-house, and tore off most of the roof, though the walls were three feet thick, and the doors and windows had been well barricaded. Obliged to retreat from thence, the governor and his family fled to the ruins of the foundation of the flag-staff, and, compelled to relinquish that station, they with difficulty reached the cannon of the fortifications, under the carriages of which they took shelter. But here they were not secure, for the cannons were moved by the fury of the wind, and they dreaded every moment that the guns would be dismounted, and crush them by their fall. From the preceding accounts it appears that the agency of electricity is frequently extensively developed in hurricanes; that they have a progressive motion; that calms of short duration occur during their continuance; after which the wind bursts forth from a quarter different to that from which it has been blowing—peculiarities which have led to a theory respecting storms which may be considered as established in its leading principles.
Down to a very recent date, a hurricane was generally deemed to be simply a gale of wind pursuing with immense velocity a rectilinear direction. Colonel Capper departed from this idea after investigating the storms of the Indian Ocean, and published the conclusion in the year 1801, that the hurricanes he had examined in that region were real whirlwinds of varying diameter, having a progressive as well as a rotatory motion. The evidence collected from the records of an immense number of storms in the Atlantic by Mr. Redfield, of New York, and in the Indian Ocean by Colonel Reid, seems to place beyond all dispute the fact, that they occur in the form of a ring, having an outer circle, where the air revolves with intense velocity, and an interior space, the diameter of which is sometimes equal to several hundred miles, the vortex of the whirlwind, which is the scene of gusts and lulls, a comparatively slow progressive motion on the surface of land and sea distinguishing the whole. A hurricane which occurred at New Brunswick in the year 1835 strikingly exhibited the character of a revolving storm; for, while about the centre bodies of great weight were carried spirally upward, at the extremities the trees were thrown in opposite directions. The same circumstance was observed at Barbadoes in 1831, near the northern coast: the trees which the hurricane uprooted lay from N. N. W. to S. S. E., having been thrown down by a northerly wind, while in some other parts of the island they lay from S. to N., having been prostrated by a southerly wind. It is evident, therefore, that the direction of the wind at a particular point affords no indication of the course in which the whole revolving mass of the atmosphere is advancing. Another singular conclusion respecting storms, which the American and Anglican philosophers, along with Professor Dove of Berlin, have arrived at by independent investigations, is, that the hurricanes in the southern hemisphere revolve in a counter direction to those in the northern; and while the axis of a storm in the North Atlantic has a progressive motion from the equator obliquely toward the north pole, that of one in the Indian Ocean proceeds obliquely from the equator toward the south pole. In the Pacific Ocean, a region of hurricanes, their revolving motion appears to be sanctioned by the evidence which has been obtained respecting them. Mr. Williams, the missionary, describes a hurricane at Raratonga, one of the Hervey Islands, during which the rain descended in deluging torrents, the lightning darted in fiery streams among the dense, black clouds, the thunder rolled deep and loud through the heavens, and the island trembled to its very centre as the war of the elements raged over it. Scarcely a banana or plaintain tree was left, either on the plains, or in the valleys, or upon the mountains; hundreds of thousands of which, on the preceding day, covered and adorned the land with their foliage and fruit, and immense chestnuts, which had withstood the storms of ages, were laid prostrate on the ground, while those that remained erect had scarcely a branch, and were all leafless. It was observed, that when the gale ended, the wind was in the west, whereas in the early part of its action the east end of the chapel had been blown in, which shows the wind then to have been in the east. The hurricanes of New South Wales have been observed to develop the same peculiarity. Mr. Meredith traced the path of one in the centre, and found at the termination a circle plainly shown, in which the trees lay all ways.