Old Hurricane

“ Frank asked if hurricanes were frequent during the season.
"Not at all," was the reply, "but when they do come they are in dead earnest. From 1879 to 1886 we didn't have a really severe hurricane; but this is, I believe, the longest interval known to any of the European residents. One old settler told me there were several years when not a season passed without at least one hurricane."
"Are they very destructive?" Fred inquired. ”

“ So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the British Isles was one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. It was entirely unexpected, as were most of the big gales in England in the old days. Surprise was one of the elements of danger. The weather is seldom fine in the British Isles, over the English Channel or in the North Sea. Gloom, with fog or low-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best days, a damp haze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirty window pane. Into this background of gloom many a big storm stole its way eastward from the Atlantic. ”

“ for many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways, and chanting with the old Norsemen, "The blast of the tempest aids our oars, the hurricane is our servant and drives us whither we wish to go." ”

“ The cradle went on its wheels well enough to the door. Then the old man summoned his remaining strength, and having knotted the rope round his waist, threw himself on the ground again, and emerged with his precious charge into the roaring hurricane. Across the barren mountain slope, far above the ken of any fellow-being, in the teeth of death, the old man crept with the sleeping babe. Another threatening of the deluge of rain, which would surely accompany the tornado, added to the misery of the painful journey ”

“ HURRICANE, n. An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old-fashioned sea-captains. ”

“ This was the account which the old man gave me of the former state of the Swedes in this country. I shall speak more particularly of it in the sequel.
Hurricanes are sometimes very violent here, and often tear up great trees. They sometimes proceed as it were in peculiar tracts, or lines. In some places, especially in the hurricane’s tract, all the [125] trees are struck down, and it looks as if the woods were cut down designedly; but close to the tract the trees receive no hurt. Such is the place which was shewn to me to-day. It is dangerous to go into the woods where the hurricanes blow ”

“ Instead of waiting to be sure that the weather is favorable, planes now assigned to hurricane hunting wait to be sure the weather out there somewhere is decidedly unfavorable before they take off in that direction. But even in hurricane hunting the unexpected happens and, as in the old days, the crews are intensively 205 trained and all precautions are taken so that they are not likely to be caught by surprise in an emergency. In a period of years there are hundreds of missions into dozens of tropical storms and, unfortunately, a few have met with disaster. ”

“ He wanted only to learn about hurricanes in order to give the mariner a law of storms by which he could judge the weather for himself. Nobody worried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those days that a man on land could get his weather out of an almanac or by watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars, or the rise and fall of the barometer. Scientists who believed that it would be possible to predict the ordinary changes in the weather were decidedly in the minority. One of these was James Pollard Espy, who became known as the “Old Storm King” of America. ”

“ I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! ”

“ Now, as if all the demons of winds had let loose their cavernous lungs from the 167 four quarters of the earth, and like the shocks of artillery, volley upon volley, came the hurricane. The sea became one boiling, seething, hissing surface of foam, pressed and flattened by the weight of the tempest, which laid the black rocks bare on the ledge, and drove the water into both mouths of the inlet, until, with a crashing shock, it met in the basin, and broke over and over the cove, and high up the wall of rocks on the other side. ”

“ Above them an ebon cloud was rived with lightning, and from the gash a blinding torrent fell, hiding sea and sky, battering the deck and hissing in the scuppers, striving to flatten the rearing waves that ran and leaped uncontrolled as the hurricane reached its height. ”

“ Whether or not it was their intention to attack, I cannot pretend to say, because it was noon before they showed themselves; and soon after, when something like a movement could be discerned in their ranks, the sky grew suddenly dark, and the most tremendous hurricane ever remembered by the oldest inhabitant in the place came on. Of the prodigious force of the wind it is impossible for one who was not an eye-witness to its effects to form a conception. ”

“ A loud and wild resonance, made up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air. There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam. The blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from side to side. ”

“ Its tentacles—octopus-like arms—reach out with gale-driven torrents of rain and begin picking everything to pieces. After hours that seem like days, the central fury of the earth-blasting storm begins its devastation of man’s possessions.
And as it has proved to be unquestionably true that no two hurricanes are exactly alike, so it is evident now that the same hurricane is subject to massive changes from day to day. It has a life history. Like the caterpillar that is transformed into the cocoon and then into the butterfly, the tropical storm goes through definite stages. ”

“ Though it is only at comparatively rare intervals that the winds attain the development of a hurricane, the destruction of life and property which they occasion, both by sea and land, is in the aggregate of no small moment. ”

“ It is not probable that any survived the calamitous weather on the right front of the storm center, where the sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth, and the forward motion of the hurricane are combined in a frenzy of destructive power. ”

“ Thus we lived without any incident occurring worth relating—when one day the appearance of the atmosphere indicated a storm, and a very violent hurricane, attended with peals of thunder and lurid flashes of lightning, lasted during the whole of the day and evening. The wind tore up the trees by the roots, blew down our outhouses, made terrible havoc in our garden, and threatened to tumble our hut over our heads. ”

“ The full force of the terrific wind-storm had probably passed to northward; this land where they now found themselves--whatever it might be--had doubtless borne only a small part of the attack. But even so, and even through the sky gleamed clear and blue and sunlit once again, Stern and the girl knew the hurricane had been no ordinary tempest.
“It must have been a cyclone, nothing less,” judged the engineer, as he finished his meal and reached for his comforting pipe. “And God knows where it's driven us to! So far as judging distances goes, in a hurricane like that it's impossible. ”

“ Far above the wind careered in a narrow current, which did not touch the surface of the sea but only bore onward the clouds. The agitation of the sky above contrasted with the stillness below made the latter not consoling but rather fearful, for this could be none other than that treacherous stillness which precedes the sudden outburst of the hurricane. ”

“ The storm, however, still raged as furiously as ever; for, though the rain was less violent, the wind blew a hurricane, threatening to settle down into a long sustained gale. Had the torrents of water, which first drenched us, continued falling, there might have been some hope of extinguishing the flames; but the subsidence of the rain, and the unaltered violence of the wind, rendered the situation of the schooner hopeless.
“We can do nothing more, I fear,” at length said the skipper, drawing me aside, “the fire is on the increase, and even the elements have turned against us. ”

“ In this desperate encounter with the elements, every rope and stick strained and cracked almost to breaking. All at once this hurricane died out, and then an awful stillness fell on the scene. Not a voice spoke, not a footfall was heard, scarcely a breath broke the appalling silence. The schooner rose and fell ominously on the agitated swell. Suddenly a flash of lightning played far off on the dark edges of the cloud behind us, and then followed a low hoarse growl of distant thunder. ”

“ The wind, indeed, had deserted them, the storm had fled, and its departure, which they had believed to mean safety, meant in fact destruction. Had the sou'-wester continued, it might have driven them wildly on some shore, might have beaten the leak in speed, might perhaps have carried them to some propitious sandbank, and cast them on it before the hooker foundered. The fury of the storm, bearing them onward, might have enabled them to reach land; but no wind now meant no hope. They were going to die because the hurricane was over. ”

“ But what are you to do in winter, when the snow falls so thickly that you cannot see the houses, particularly when the metel turns the whole country topsy-turvy? No language can give an idea of these metels or hurricanes. They come down on the land with such whirling and driving gusts, such furious and continuous tempests, such whistlings and groanings of the wind, and a sky so murky and threatening, that no hurricane at sea can be more alarming. ”

“ The tops of the lofty trees rustle ominously, though not a breath of air agitates them; a hollow whistling in the high regions of the atmosphere comes as a warning from the black floating vapour; midnight darkness envelops the ancient forests, which soon after groan and creak with the blast of the hurricane. ”

“ I had heard of hurricanes in the woods, and surmised that one was at hand. It soon came crashing its way; the forest writhing, and twisting, and groaning before it. The hurricane did not extend far on either side, but in a manner plowed a furrow through the woodland; snapping off or uprooting trees that had stood for centuries, and filling the air with whirling branches. I was directly in its course, and took my stand behind an immense poplar, six feet in diameter. It bore for a time the full fury of the blast, but at length began to yield. ”

“ The searching north-east wind had scarcely diminished in its parching fierceness, and in hot suffocating gusts swept fitfully over the broad glittering expanse of water and salt whereon the moon shone brightly—each deadly puff succeeded by the stillness that foretells a tropical hurricane—an absolute absence even of the smallest ruffling of the close atmosphere. ”

“ Such was the force of this hurricane of wind that every window pane on the ocean side of our house (the Signal Station at Highland Light) was blown in and smashed into a thousand fragments. Men exposed to the full force of the storm were blown from their feet and hurled about like blocks of wood.
Men of the Life Saving service were exhausted by their exertions in trying to cover their beats, and several of them were completely unnerved by their frequent trying experiences in dragging torn and sea-washed bodies from the surf. ”

“ THE most formidable enemy the sugar cane has to encounter, and the principal dread in those latitudes in which it grows, must, from its destructive pre eminence, be deemed the hurricane. The fell Tornado, and the burning plains of Africa have only sands and deserts to witness their malignant fury; but the wind which, from its effects, I am about to describe, sweeps through the regions of cultivation and expence, and reduces, and almost with a single blast, the independent to distress, the affluent to want, and the feeling to despair. ”

“ And yet all of them fit a certain direful pattern; there is nothing else that resembles these big storms of the tropics. Like the explosion of an atom bomb, with its enormous cloud recognized by everyone who sees a picture of it, the hurricane has well-known features—unlike anything else—but of such enormous extent that no one can get a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Putting together what we know by radar, upper air soundings, aircraft penetrations and millions of weather observations in the low levels, we can draw a sketchy word 254 picture. ”

“ 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 wildest cries of agony and fear arose from below, where row beyond row of the thickly crowded streets swayed backwards and forwards, like the agitated waves of the ocean, when the first blast of the hurricane is felt ”