Typhoon

“ Gnashing, grinding, the iron-toothed wind fell again upon the hapless suburbs, revolving in the opposite direction. It is what sailors call the return storm, when its cyclonic revolutions are reversed and the typhoon returns to complete its devastation. Going, the typhoon is a monster; returning, it is in addition, a maniac. What it has failed to destroy, it returns to mangle. ”

“ The typhoon was making its departure, which is not less terrible than its coming. Screaming, hovering and hastening it makes its retreat; mangling what it has heretofore destroyed. In time it weakens and begins to linger, then exhausted it hesitates, stops, and whispers. Frenzied, it again wanders uncontrollably about; revolving always in the same circle and moving whimsically hither and thither until its strength is gradually expended. ”

“ As I lay in my bunk next the port with the wind scoop out, I could feel the wind gradually rising and the alternate violent puffs and lulls were signs that a typhoon was brewing, as the master of the ship was well aware from his falling barometer. Later in the evening when I left my cabin for a few moments, my surmises were confirmed.
On the next day (Friday, August 17) , we were well into the typhoon. The wind was violent and the sea both magnificent and awful. In a typhoon the wind blows the surface water into clouds of foam and spray. For all the world it looks like a snowstorm at sea. ”

“ The gale increases—blast pursuing blast, roaring and sweeping round the walls and over the roofs of the houses with the frantic violence of a typhoon. There is a horror in the sound, and then the prospect from the windows! ”

“ Familiar as the older man was with these suburbs, he stumbled along uncertain; the youth lagged. Both were stifling, for the scorching wind had started again with increasing severity, causing them to cover their faces with their silken sleeves.
There are winds that freeze, winds that burn, winds that tear and cut, but this wind that precedes the typhoon, chokes. It fills a man’s nostrils with so much burning air that he gasps for breath; he staggers, sometimes blood oozes from the eyes and ears, he strikes at the wind, claws the air, starts to run, stumbles and falls to the earth. ”

“ A thin cloud sweeps over the white ground—it is formed of whirling snow; the wind becomes a tempest; the cloud rises up to heaven: and, maddening, bewildering even to the most weather-hardened, dangerous in the extreme to all things living, the buran rages across the steppes, a snow-hurricane, as terrible as the typhoon or the simoom with its poisonous breath. For two or three days such a snow-storm may rage with uninterrupted fury, and both man and beast are absolutely storm-stayed. A man overtaken in the open country is lost, unless some special providence save him ”

“ There is no greater wind in the world than a typhoon; the traditional wind that would blow the hair off the back of a dog is as nothing to it. A cyclone is the same sort of thing, and the two terms are interchangeable; cyclone is the name of European origin, while typhoon comes from the Asiatic.
"The typhoon blows in a circle, and may be briefly described as a rapidly revolving wind that has a diameter of from two to five hundred miles. It is a whirlwind on a large scale, and as furious as it is large. ”

“ Nearly all writers agree that a typhoon is a circular storm-disc varying from one to ten miles in height, and in diameter from fifty to one thousand miles; and that the winds within the disc blow in circles—or nearly so—round a common centre, which is generally calm, and varying in size from one tenth to one fifth, and in some cases as much as one-fourth, of the whole diameter of the gale. ”

“ Now a typhoon is conceded to be the most colossal kind of a storm, and right here in the China Sea, between Hong Kong and Manila, is the place where they grow the biggest typhoons—this is headquarters for typhoons—and we are now in the midst of the biggest of its kind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A third name for them is ‘cyclone’; and as this threatening sky seems to remind Dunn so powerfully of a Chinese typhoon, depend upon it we are going to have a taste of a West Indian hurricane, or cyclone. I have read somewhere that they frequently originate out here in the heart of the Atlantic.”
“If we’re agoin’ to have a typhoon, or a hurricane, or a cyclone—whichever you likes to call it—all I say is, ‘The Lord ha’ mercy upon us,’” remarked Dunn. “Big ships has all their work cut out to weather one o’ them gales; so what are we agoin’ to do in this here open boat, I’d like to know?” ”

“ Sudden shift of wind to N. Present course likely to take us right into Typhoon No. 2. Decided to take down main and heave to. Only mizzen up, tiller lashed. Breeze freshening, barometer dropping, rain ...
Squalls increasing in size and frequency. Riding well.... Winds very strong.... Heavy confused seas.
By the next day No. 2 had passed in front of us, about a hundred miles ahead, and the weather was rapidly improving. Winds at the center of the typhoon were force 12—hurricane. ”

“ TYPHOON, s. A tornado or cyclone-wind; a sudden storm, a 'nor-wester' (q.v.) . Sir John Barrow (see Autobiog. 57) ridicules "learned antiquarians" for fancying that the Chinese took typhoon from the Egyptian Typhon, the word being, according to him, simply the Chinese syllables, ta-fung, 'Great Wind.' His ridicule is misplaced. With a monosyllabic language like the Chinese (as we have remarked elsewhere) you may construct a plausible etymology, to meet the requirements of the sound alone, from anything and for anything. ”

“ Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,
And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne [1] ,
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown. ⁠5
II.
From a single cloud the lightening flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
Is bellowing underground. ⁠10
III.
But keener thy gaze than the lightening's glare,
And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;
Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
Makes blind the volcanoes ”

“ The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves. ”

“ Chrysantheme.
Since yesterday we have had a tremendous storm of rain and wind (a typhoon that has passed or is passing over us) . We beat to quarters in the middle of the night to lower the topmasts, strike the lower yards, and take every precaution against bad weather. The butterflies no longer hover around us; everything tosses and writhes overhead: on the steep slopes of the mountain the trees shiver, the long grasses bend low as if in pain; terrible gusts rack them with a hissing sound; branches, bamboo leaves, and earth fall like rain upon us. ”

“ Sometimes the typhoon is of large diameter and travels slowly, so far as progressive movement is concerned; at others it is of smaller dimensions, and both the circular and progressive motions are more rapid. However they are always storms of terrific energy and frequently cause terrible destruction of crops and property on shore and of shipping at sea. ”

“ In the northern hemisphere when the falling barometer and other signs create suspicion that a typhoon is approaching, facing the wind and taking 10 or 12 points to the right of it, will give the approximate bearing of its center. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A typhoon was described to me as a mighty wind of extreme velocity, covering a vast area, and resembling a blizzard ; but it has no fixed direction and moves over land or sea with the same ease and force. In a cyclone, of which the center is a vacuum, the suction is so powerful that it draws in birds, which have been known to drop down helpless on the decks of ships. A cyclone usually travels in one direction and its path is generally less than a half mile wide. ”

“ Now as the severity of a typhoon is measured by the velocity of the winds within the storm-disc—and we admit on the first principles that the greater the rapidity with which the currents revolve around the focus, the greater the condensation of vapour there, and hence the more perfect the vacuum at the centre—we shall have an explanation of the reasons why the barometer falls lower in a severe, than in a more moderate gale. ”

“ It [174] is said that persons who have never witnessed the sublime and terrible spectacle can scarcely realize, even from the most graphic descriptions of eye witnesses, what a typhoon really means. A Chinaman informed me that the last typhoon destroyed not less than 18,000 persons in this neighbourhood alone—not a large number when we bear in mind the enormous floating populations in Chinese towns. All the day the air was ominous of a coming something. At noon I asked a Chinaman when it might be expected. ”

“ Nearest the centre the wind has the greatest violence, and the farther you can get from it, the less severe is the gale. Mariners always try to sail away from the centre of a typhoon, and I have known a ship to turn at right angles from her course in order to get as far as possible from the centre of a coming tempest. There is a great difference of opinion among captains concerning these storms, some declaring that they have been in the middle point of a typhoon and escaped safely, while others aver that no ship that was ever built can withstand the fury of a storm centre. ”

“ Near the vortex there are usually marked oscillations. The typhoon generally begins with a northerly wind, light drizzling rain, weather squally and threatening, a falling barometer and the wind veering to the eastward, when the observer is to the northward of the path of the storm, and backing to the westward when he is to the southward of it; the wind and rain increase as the wind shifts, and the storm generally ends with a southerly wind after abating gradually. ”

“ Whether it be called a hurricane, as in the Atlantic, a typhoon, as in Chinese waters a simoom, as in the Sahara, or a tornado, as on the western coast, such a storm is always a gyratory one, and most dangerous for any ship caught in the current which increases from the circumference to the center, and has only one spot of calm, the middle of the vortex. ”

“ By reference to the Diagram, we find the Francis Henty entering the typhoon in N.E. by E. quarter, or having the wind S.E. by S. and follow her through the first half of the storm-disc to the centre, the wind having changed but one point to S.E. This change of wind is the effect of having changed the bearing of a centre, first by running to the Northward and Eastward on a course inclining towards the track of the typhoon ”

“ In doing this it should be borne in mind that at such a time as the approach of a typhoon, above all others, the current is least to be depended on, and that its strength would in all probability be greatly increased should the typhoon be coming up from the south-west. On the east coast from the Gulf of Yedo northwards, from October to April inclusive, north-west winds prevail which frequently blow very hard. ”

“ The storm increased every hour of the night, the barometer going down from 82 to 30, disclosing the fact that we were heading directly toward the centre of the typhoon. We have rolled so heavily that the rail goes under at each dip. The men remained at their posts in the stable division, striving to keep the animals from plunging out of their stalls from sheer terror. Suddenly a mule falls. Men hurry to raise it. ”

“ These oscillations are caused by the disturbed condition of the atmosphere in front, and in the vicinity of the advancing gale. If the atmospheric fluid in which we live and breathe was visible to the eye, it would be seen on the approach of a Typhoon to move in great waves over the barometer, like the undulations of a troubled sea after a heavy gale of wind; and as the barometer measures exactly the weight of a perpendicular column of the air immediately above it, it in consequence rises and falls according as the atmospheric waves reach, pass over, and leave it. ”

“ The typhoon now shifted from the north-west to the westwards, and the barometer, rising shortly afterwards to 29.20, jumped up thence another twenty points in the next hour.
“It’s passing off now,” said Captain Gillespie, when he could make himself heard between the squalls, which now came with a longer interval between them. “Those typhoons always work against the sun, and we’ve now experienced the worst of it. There goes our last sail, though, and we’ll have to run for it now.” ”

“ Many a strong ship lies at the bottom of the sea, where she was sent by just such a storm as we are about to pass through, and many another has barely escaped. I was once on a ship in the China seas, when the captain told the passengers that it would be a miracle if we remained half an hour longer afloat. But hardly had he done speaking when the wind fell, the storm abated, and we were safe. The typhoon is to these waters what the hurricane is to the West Indies; it is liable to blow at any time between April and September, and is often fearfully destructive. ”