A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

William C. Redfield (1789-1857) was born to a low-income family in Middletown, Connecticut. Although he only received a rudimentary education, he was a “voracious autodidact” who read scientific books and formed a local debate society (36). He was running a general store and a saddler’s shop in 1821 when his hurricane research began on a journey to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to deliver the news that his wife and child had died. However, personal tragedy did not stop Redfield, a “keen and insightful observer,” from noticing that the downed trees in his native Cromwell were northwest facing, while those in Stockbridge faced the opposite direction (37). This, in addition to other observations, led Redfield to conceive the idea of the hurricane as “a great whirlwind, its winds revolving around a central axis” (37). While previous generations of mariners observed that hurricanes had a whirlwind structure, what made Redfield different was his Enlightenment-informed capacity to test his findings with empirical research. Redfield’s hurricane research evolved to incorporate theories about the velocity of winds.

While Redfield initially kept his insights to himself, in 1831 he met the Yale mathematician Denison Olmsted, who encouraged him to publish his hypothesis in the American Journal of Science and Arts. He entered into the “American Storm Controversy” with James P. Espy and garnered rival supporters (40). Towards the close of the 1830s, Redfield collaborated with Colonel William Reid of the British Royal Engineers. Another Englishman, Captain Henry Piddington, applied their theory to an 1848 publication which aimed to keep sailors safe in storms.

Redfield’s contribution to hurricane science continued to be part of a collaborative effort, as it was the American mathematician William Ferrel who built on the former’s ideas by showing that the hurricane’s whirlwind structure was shaped by the Coriolis effect.

Redfield was also the first to promote using the new telegraph technology to track hurricanes, greatly improving preventative measures.

Redfield’s rival, James P. Espy (1785-1860), was born in rural Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio. He eventually settled in Philadelphia where he headed the classics department at the Franklin Institute. Despite his humanities background, Espy was a talented scientist who engaged in meteorological research during the 1830s. His contribution to hurricane research was to show that “hurricanes are essentially large heat engines” which draw their energy from warmer ocean temperatures (39). His main point of disagreement with Redfield was that the air rushing into the hurricane came in straight lines and not in a whirlwind as Redfield posited. Dubbed the “Storm King” by the press, Espy vehemently attacked Redfield’s hypothesis and marshaled the evidence he garnered from studying several storms against Redfield’s. He was so enthusiastic in his defense of his own theory that he traveled around the country and later to the United Kingdom to promote it. In 1841 he set out his treatise in The Philosophy of Storms. However, Espy’s ruthless individualism and stubbornness, which caused him to discount all research apart from his own, damaged his reputation. Congressman John Quincy Adams, for example, dubbed Espy “methodically monomaniac[al]” (45).

Espy serves as the prototype for later scientists in Dolin’s book, whose individualism is to detriment of themselves and to that the discipline as a whole.

Spanish-born Father Benito Viñes (1837-1893) was a Jesuit priest who in 1870 went to Cuba to direct the observatory at the College of Belén. The devout Viñes’s life-goal was to be “useful to my brethren and to contribute in some fashion to the advancement of science and the welfare of humanity” (60). He devoted himself to uncovering “the mysteries of hurricanes” which had caused so much loss in Cuba over the centuries (60).

Viñes hoped to battle hurricanes with both divine and scientific intervention, as he encouraged his fellow monks to pray on specific days while setting out to learn as much about hurricane behavior as he could. His research included the study of the seminal American works by Redfield and Espy, in addition to launching his own “strict regimen of observations ten times a day,” as he gathered temperature, pressure, and relative humidity readings and recorded the appearance of clouds (61). His observations of natural phenomena echoed the approach of the Taíno Indians. Furthermore, he collected data from the Cuban navy and from ships that docked in Havana. Unlike Espy and his American successors, Viñes was happy to collaborate to achieve the best results.

Viñes’ reputation grew when telegraph technology enabled him to expand his reach. However, the accuracy of his forecasts varied, and in 1888 the hurricane he predicted would pass Cuba on its route to Florida, ended up hitting the island and leaving 10,000 people homeless. Still, modern meteorologists laud Viñes with being “able to use the limited information available to him to craft unusually accurate hurricane forecasts” (62). He received the honor of participating in the 1893 International Meteorological Conference in Chicago.

Viñes was a key figure in establishing a Cuban meteorological tradition that would rival that of the United States.

Clara Barton (1821-1912) was the self-taught nurse who founded the American Red Cross in 1881, an organization which served people in times of disaster. Perhaps most famous for her work as “The Angel of the Battlefield” during the American Civil War, she also managed her then-small Red Cross team, providing hurricane aftercare in the late 1880s and early 1890s (67). Dolin considers that the food her team provided “was critical to fending off mass starvation” following the 1893 South Carolina hurricane (68). Barton’s goal was to provide immediate relief and to help the afflicted to help themselves by participating in the recovery of their community. Barton was remarkable for actively contributing to the nation’s welfare at a time when women did not even have the vote. She also illustrates Dolin’s argument that those employed in war relief could easily adapt their skills to the wreckages caused by meteorological enemies like hurricanes.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American writer famed for his European war exploits and his sharp, concise writing style. He crossed paths with the American hurricane menace as a resident of Key West in Florida. When he heard of an approaching storm in August 1935, he made his own calculations about the impending disaster and prepared his house and his fishing boat accordingly. Prior to the storm, his drinking buddies were World War I army veterans whom President Roosevelt put to work in Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the Florida Keys. These veterans were already impoverished as a result of the Depression, and many of them suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, known then as shellshock. When Hemingway heard how badly they had been struck by the Labor Day hurricane, he was devastated. He volunteered to save those he could and collect the dead. Hemingway wrote vivid descriptions of the natural devastation and the distortion of bodies by water-bloating. In a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, he confirmed that he “saw more dead than I’d seen in one place since the Lower Piave […] in June of 1918,” implying that the scene was one of war-like devastation (149). Hemingway’s sense of outrage was such that he wrote a recriminatory article titled “Who Murdered the Vets?” for the September 1945 issue of New Masses. He argued that the efforts to warn and rescue the veterans had been a mess, and he was not shy about blaming the Weather Bureau and the federal government for the deaths. Hemingway was one of the few writers who blamed the Weather Bureau’s inadequacy and refused to make excuses for its limitations. Ahead of his time, Hemingway set the trend for holding politicians and forecasters accountable for their mistakes in times of meteorological disaster.