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The Hurricane in History
Before the 2005 season was over, the National Hurricane Center had run out of names for the storms. Meteorologists had to fall back on designating them by letters of the Greek alphabet. Stan, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma gave way to Alpha and the like. It was the busiest year for such cyclonic killers since the United States began to name them. And, perhaps, the worst.
Katrina may find her place among the most destructive natural disasters in the history of North America. After smashing through Florida, she crashed into coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A Category 4 hurricane, her rains broke levees in New Orleans and submerged 80 percent of the city. Moving inland, she did damage in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Ohio Valley. By the time the Crescent City—inundated again, along with the coast of Texas, by Category Rita 3—was pumped dry, commercial and private property losses stood at $34.4 billion, eclipsing the record for monetary loss established by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. More than 330,000 workers had lost their jobs, and more than 1,200 people their lives.
For the second year in succession, the season was historic. In 2004 there had been Alex, Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Gaston, and Ivan. Seven hurricanes, four of which devastated much of Florida, rampaged across the Atlantic in 2004. Five swept through Virginia, the most in a year since 1893, when four hit the state. More than 1,000 Old Dominion homes were destroyed or damaged; Gaston inundated Richmond with nearly 15 inches of rain in less than eight hours, causing about $60 million in damage; and the storms spawned more than forty tornadoes. The national damage estimate topped $40 billion. More than 3,000 people died, and thousands more were injured or made homeless.
As long as men and women have lived along North America’s southeastern Atlantic coast, they have been beset by hurricanes. Until the twentieth century, there were no reliable warnings of where a storm would make landfall, or how strong the wind would be. Modern television news reports often highlight bright, clear skies and pleasant weather along the coast in the hours before a hurricane slams ashore. This calm before the storm should have made a hurricane the more surprising in early America.
Christopher Columbus had to weather a vicious storm that looks to have been a hurricane near Hispaniola, the island of today’s Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1495. There is no earlier written report of the phenomenon—a tropical cyclone born above the West African deserts that spins clockwise across the sea toward the Caribbean, feeding itself power as it goes. The word “hurricane” is a Spanish borrowing from the language of the area’s Carib Indians: “huracan.”
Spanish, French, and English explorers ran afoul of sixteenth-century Atlantic hurricanes. About seventy Spanish ships went to the bottom during one in 1559. One vessel from the fleet made it to shore in Florida to found a small colony near present-day Pensacola. A French fleet attempting to wrest control of the South Atlantic from the Spanish in 1565 was defeated not in battle but by a hurricane. The first English attempt to plant settlers on Roanoke Island was abbreviated by a hurricane.
In June 1586, Sir Francis Drake, fresh from a raid on Cartagena and headed to England, stopped by Sir Walter Ralegh’s struggling Roanoke colony in modern North Carolina’s shallow Pamlico Sound. He offered to share provisions and other supplies with the settlers, to take some of the weak and unfit off the colony’s hands, and to leave behind a bark, the Francis, two small ships—pinnaces, they were called—four boats, and crews so that the colonists could finish their explorations and follow him home in August. Ralph Lane, who had charge of the settlement, accepted, and went aboard Drake’s fleet, anchored in the hazardous harbor within the Outer Banks, to see to the arrangements. “While these things were in hand,” Lane wrote, “there arose such an unwoonted storme, and continued foure dayes, that had like to have driven all” Drak’es ships “on shore, if the Lord had not held his holy hand over them . . .
but in the end having driven sundry of the fleet to put to Sea the Francis also with all my provisions, my two Masters, and my company aboord, she was seene to be free from the same, and to put cleere to Sea. This storme having continued from the 13 to the 16 of the moneth , and thus my barke put away as aforesayd . . .
Drake offered to leave another bark at anchor outside the harbor, beyond the Outer Banks, but Lane and his lieutenants, considering “the weakness of our company, the small number of the same, the carrying away of our first appointed barke . . . with our principall provisions in the same, by the very hand of God as it seemed, stretched out to take us from thence” elected to leave with Sir Francis.
The next year Drake encountered another hurricane near Roanoke Island. He rode it out at sea for six days.
In June 1609, an expedition for Virginia’s two-year-old Jamestown set out from Plymouth, England with about 800 men and women in nine vessels. Captain Christopher Newport, commanding the flagship, the Sea Venture, steered the fleet into a great Caribbean tempest July 25. A catch with 20 people aboard sunk, and the Sea Venture, carrying fleet commander Admiral George Somers, and the newly appointed governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Gates, was driven on a reef—in the words of a passenger,“fell in between two rocks, where she was fast lodged”—just off Bermuda. All 150 souls aboard got ashore safely, though they were now marooned on a little-visited island, known to seamen as The Isle of Devils, thought by the superstitious to be home to evil spirits. Passengers William Strachey and Silvester Jourdain published accounts of the storm, and the struggles of the castaways.
Strachey wrote:
For four-and-twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend any possibility of greater violence; yet did we still find it not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former . . . Our sails wound up lay without their use . . . sometimes eight men were not enough to hold the whipstaff in the steerage and the tiller below in the gunner room . . . It could not be said to rain: the waters like whole rivers did flood the air. . . . What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them.
Jourdain wrote, “Our ship became so shaken, torn, and leaked that she received so much water as covered two tier of hogsheads above the ballast.”
Seven ships struggled into Jamestown while, in Bermuda, the shipwrecked saved the stores as they could from the Sea Venture, and set about building the pinnaces Deliverance and Patience from wood on the island and salvaged fittings. One hundred thirty-four survivors sailed for Virginia on May 10, 1610, and arrived safely eleven days later.
There is a possibility that the travails of the Sea Venture inspired William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play about castaways on an inspirited Caribbean island. Recent scholars doubt a connection, but there is evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with Strachey’s and Jourdain’s accounts.
Atlantic hurricanes were not given names until World War II, and then but informally. In 1952, names became official. But just as certainly as we remember such particularly powerful and damaging storms as Camille, Andrew, Isabel, Floyd, and the like, European colonists found ways to designate and memorialize the most dreadful of the storms. The Spanish named hurricanes according to the saint’s day on which they struck, and to a lesser degree so did the French and English. Often storms were linked to an important event or personage, as The Independence Hurricane of August 29, 1775, and George Washington’s Hurricane, which swirled over Mount Vernon, July 23–24, 1788. More often, the storms were simply, yet vividly, described, like the Great Gust of 1724.
The Dreadful Hurry Cane of 1667 nearly demolished Jamestown. One of the three or four worst storms of the colonial era, and possibly the worst to hit Virginia before the 1900s, the twenty-four hour storm struck September 6 and destroyed thousands of houses and other buildings, devastated the colony’s corn and tobacco crops, washed away a cemetery, and heavily damaged the region’s shipping. An eyewitness reported the storm surge:
The sea (by the violence of the wind) swelled twelve feet above its usual height drowning the whole country before it, with many of the inhabitants, their cattle and goods, the rest being forced to save themselves in the mountains nearest adjoining, while they were forced to remain many days together in great want.
The hurricane “overturned many houses, burying in the ruines much goods and many people . . . few having escaped who have not suffered in their persons or estates.” Some families took refuge on their rooftops, and one account reported flooding of inland farms “not in sight of rivers.”
The worst hurricanes to strike the seaboard were in 1724, 1747, and October 19, 1749—during which a Williamsburg family drowned when its house washed away. A storm surge of about fifteen feet covered the streets of Hampton, twenty-five miles east, by four feet, washed a goodly portion of the walls of Fort George into the bay, and built a super sand bar near the confluence of the James and Elizabeth Rivers, a feature now called Willoughby Spit.
No eighteenth-century hurricane had greater impact on Williamsburg and Virginia than one September 7–8, 1769. According the Virginia Gazette, the rains of the “most dreadful hurricane . . . came down in torrents.” The story has an oddly familiar, almost modern, ring to it.
The damage done in the country must be inconceivable, for the corn is laid level with the ground, and much of it destroyed; the fodder is entirely gone. What tobacco was in the fields is quite spoiled, and that in houses, by their falling, and the deluges of rain which poured into them, greatly damaged, which may likewise be said of the wheat. There was not a dry house in town that day, many old houses were blown down, and a number of trees . . . there is no travelling with carriages. . . . most of the mills are destroyed; upwards of fifty, we hear . . .
The shipping &c at York have suffered greatly. . . . A schooner . . . loaded with rum, is ashore on Colonel Digges’s marsh. A sloop belonging to George Booth, with two hogsheads of tobacco on board, drove to Colonel Digges’s plantation and stove to pieces. The top of the wharf was carried away, and drove against Mr. Jones’s store, which saved that from being swept off likewise. All the boats and country craft are ashore.
In addition to personal loss and suffering in the immediate aftermath, the economy suffered for years, another parallel with modern hurricane disasters.
The Gazette story concludes with an account of a daring rescue, reminiscent of a staple story line in twenty-first century news coverage of natural calamities.
The James river postboy, in his way down, crossing a swamp, was washed off his horse by the rapidity of the current, but got hold of a tree; and a man hearing him call for help, swam into his assistance, but could not get him out. He therefore went and brought more people, swam in again, and tied a cord around him, upon which he was drawn out.
Substitute an automobile for the horse and the tale sounds modern and familiar.
Hurricanes wreak havoc on shipping, and throughout the colonial era, the great storms overset European navies vying for control of the Americas, sometimes directly influencing warfare. In addition to Spain’s disastrous loss of 1559 and the French fleet sunk in 1565, Spain’s efforts in the Thirty Years’ War were retarded by the loss of a fleet off Florida in a 1622 hurricane.
The Independence Hurricane of 1775 severely damaged H.M.S. Mercury near Portsmouth, Virginia, and the Liberty, driven aground, was captured and burned by Virginia rebels in an early act of revolutionary zeal. A major British and French naval engagement August 12, 1778, seems to have been forestalled by a hurricane.
The Great Hurricane of 1780, which struck the Caribbean near Martinique and Barbados, October 16, tested the British and French navies. The loss of warships on both sides would influence naval activities for the remainder of the American Revolution, but that’s not why the hurricane is remembered. The storm, which cost nearly 22,000 lives, is the deadliest hurricane in history. Not until 1998, when Mitch devastated Central America, did any storm approach the 1780 storm’s killing spree.
Third on the list is the storm that struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900, producing half the casualties of the 1780 storm. According to the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center, the death toll in no decade approaches this single, horrible storm. Contemporary accounts say that the damage done islands in the bull’s-eye of the 1780 hurricane was beyond belief or comprehension.
The human loss caused by The Great Hurricane reminds us that the storms were more dangerous in the days before modern weather tracking technologies provided warnings. Hurricanes caused more casualties before 1800 than since.
Sailors were especially vulnerable. The National Hurricane Center says that 90 percent of shipboard deaths caused by hurricanes was before 1790. All twelve offshore losses of 1,000 or more individuals also were before that year. Similar patterns characterize casualty figures on land.
In the midst of another Atlantic hurricane season, we have the ability to track narrow and rapid shifts in the storms as they move toward and sometimes directly over our coasts. Paying attention to media reports of the storms, making prudent preparations, and, when necessary, evacuating the projected landfall area will save lives. Certainly, we are better off than were our forebears. Yet, like them, in the end, we can only take shelter.
This article was written Christopher Geist, professor emeritus at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, and was first published in the Winter 2005 issue of the Colonial Williamsburg Journal.
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