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

Dolin opens his study by narrating the experience of survivors of Hurricane Audrey in 1957. He details the personal experience of Dr. Cecil and Sybil Clark of Cameron Parish, Louisiana, who lost their three youngest children to rising water levels. He explains how “this harrowing and tragic story is just one of thousands that played out that day,” thus giving a sense of the vast scale of destruction (xix).

Dolin goes on to give a broad overview of hurricanes in the United States, which especially affect the inhabitants of Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, and South Carolina, in that order. The average number of Atlantic hurricanes per year is six. Dolin argues that hurricanes have “left an indelible mark on American history,” as since 1980 “they have accounted for roughly 50 percent of the cost of all the natural disasters in the United States that exceeded 1 billion in damage” (xxi).

Dolin defines the hurricane as “violent, swirling storms with sustained winds of at least 74 mph” (xxii). Though they vary in size, they are “characterized by extremely low pressure and a relatively calm center called the eye” (xxii). The main menace of hurricanes is extreme flooding, via rising sea-levels and intense rainfall.

While most people assume that North American hurricanes begin in local waters, the vast majority start in the southern Sahara desert in Africa, where the meeting of dry, desert air and humid air from the Indian Ocean creates low pressure. Thunderstorms follow, extending into the upper atmosphere and pushed west by easterly winds. While such a mass of unstable air known as the “African easterly wave” sweeps across the Atlantic every three to four days, only a small percentage of these waves become “full-fledged hurricane[s] that travels across the Atlantic” (xxiv). Other hurricanes that afflict the United States arise in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.

The word “hurricane” has Caribbean roots, as native cultures named the phenomenon after storm gods. Variations include hunraken in the Mayan language and hurakan among the Quiche and Arawak peoples (xxv).

The Saffir-Simpson scale, which has been used to measure hurricanes since the end of the 20th century, categorizes them from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most destructive. A category 5 hurricane causes so much long-term damage—from loss of infrastructure to the transmission of waterborne disease—that some survivors choose to relocate. Hurricanes thus have the power to “redefine reality and fracture people’s lives” (xxvii).

The predecessor of the Saffir-Simpson scale was the Beaufort scale which was used from the early 1800s. Prior to that, “the hurricane label was applied subjectively to storms of immense violence that were deemed worthy of such a designation” (xxvi). Dolin uses the Saffir-Simpson scale where possible but also draws upon subjective definitions for previous eras.

It was not until Christopher Columbus’ fourth voyage to the so-called New World, which he claimed to have discovered in 1492, that he encountered a hurricane. He may not have witnessed it at all, except that in May 1502, when he went out from the port of Cádiz, Spain, he asked for Hispaniola governor Nicolás de Ovando’s permission to shelter in his port for eight days, owing to his conviction that “a great storm was brewing” (2). Given that Columbus was “persona non grata” in Hispaniola, Ovando refused his request, and Columbus and his men were sent off into a hurricane (2).

Columbus had seen no storm on the scale of a hurricane in Europe; although, during his first voyage, Taíno Indians told him about the meteorological warning signs that accompanied hurricanes, including wave swells, wispy clouds, and bright red sunrises. Convinced that he saw these signs prior to his fourth voyage, he found a harbor off the coast of Hispaniola to shelter, while the homeward-bound fleet was destroyed by the hurricane. Columbus’s ability to predict the hurricane caused him to be accused of sorcery.

Dolin regards “this meteorological baptism by fire” as a fitting “prologue to European settlement of the New World,” as hurricanes over the next 500 years continued to affect aspiring settlers and changed the course of colonial history (6). The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas granted Spain a generous portion of the New World, and the Spanish also sought to conquer the territory between Florida and North Carolina. However, their attempts failed owing to the work of hurricanes. With 11 ships, Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano attempted to conquer this territory in 1559. When his fleet entered Pensacola Bay, a hurricane hit the coast, sinking eight of his ships and causing his men to face starvation. In such a depleted state, they were unable to sufficiently challenge the Indigenous inhabitants and hold onto the colony.

France, which did not respect the Treaty of Tordesillas, staged its own attempt to conquer Florida and secure it from the Spanish for Huguenot Protestant refugees. In February 1562, France sent off its own fleet expedition commanded by Jean Ribaut. The Spanish retaliated with a fleet headed by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. In 1565, the two rival fleets “were sailing across the Atlantic on a collision course” (10). As they readied themselves for battle, a hurricane intervened, wrecking the French ships and leaving surviving French soldiers at the mercy of the Spanish, who brutally massacred them and ended their ambition of colonizing Florida.

Dolin conjectures that “the destiny of the American continent might have shifted substantially” without the two above hurricanes (12). Had it not been for the 1559 storm, the Luna colonialist mission may have succeeded, as the food and resources would have remained intact. This would have aided the colony’s survival and facilitated a potential Spanish expansion through the American mainland. Similarly, without the 1565 hurricane, France may have challenged Spain’s hold and conquered Florida itself.

The English colonists of the 17th century were also battered by hurricanes. They had to leave their settlement of Jamestown, Virginia in 1610 after a 1609 hurricane depleted their resources. This may have also been the hurricane that informed William Shakespeare’s 1610 play The Tempest.

Dolin concludes the chapter by stating that “while American colonists were quite familiar with hurricanes, [...] they knew nothing about the origins of these storms, the forces that governed their behavior, or how they were structured and progressed over time” (23). Until Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to meteorology, people almost always assumed that storms had divine causes.

Benjamin Franklin was the first person to observe that “hurricanes had forward movement, and that a hurricane’s winds could blow contrary to the direction in which it was moving” (26). Despite Franklin’s inability to understand the reasons for his observation, this was an important initial step in approaching the truth of the hurricane phenomenon.

While the Enlightenment period spanning the late 1600s to the early 1800s was one of important scientific discoveries, human understanding of hurricanes evolved little during this time. This was true despite the fact that two of the era’s most monumental storms hit during the period of the American Revolution. The historian Nathaniel Philbrick argues that “the hurricanes had a decisive impact because they caused France, America’s ally in the war, to reevaluate its stance vis-á-vis sending ships north to fight the British” (32). Sitting out the hurricane enabled the French to help the Americans in the Battle of the Chesapeake, which led to the revolutionaries’ eventual victory.

However, two 19th-century scientists, William C. Redfield and James P. Espy, built a reputation for their research into hurricanes and were rivals in what became known as the “American Storm Controversy” (40). Redfield hypothesized that hurricanes were composed of two opposing winds that blew against each other. Thus, “the hurricane was a great whirlwind, its winds revolving around a central axis” (36). While others, such as the British natural historian William Dampier, had thought of hurricanes as whirlwinds, Redfield’s discovery was important because it was backed by “a mountain of data” (38). Redfield also made other important discoveries, including the fact that the hurricane spins in a counterclockwise direction in the northern hemisphere and that wind speeds increase substantially in the movement from the hurricane’s outer edge towards it center.

Espy, who explicitly rejected Redfield’s theory, thought that “hurricanes are essentially large heat engines, in which warm, moist air rises from the surface of the ocean in the tropics, cooling in the process and forming the droplets of water or ice crystals that make up clouds” (39). Dolin argues that Espy's “contribution of heat” was an essential one, as it explained why “hurricanes rapidly weaken after encountering colder waters or land, since they are thereby stripped of their main energy source” (40). Espy posited that rather than being a whirlwind, as in Redfield’s conception, the wind rushed in straight lines like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, meeting at a central point.

Both Espy and Redfield were “partially correct” in their theories (45). However, William Ferrel in 1858 was the one to accurately propose that the “hurricane’s winds spiral in toward the center” in concert with the Coriolis effect, named after the French mathematician Gustave Gaspard Carioles (45). Still, while hurricanes were better understood by the end of the 19th century, people still did not know how to predict when they would arise and how to take precautionary measures.

The technology that made Samuel F. B. Morse’s electric telegraph possible in 1844 enabled the advent of weather forecasting. William Redfield pointed out that the application of this new technology in forecasting would save lives. This began in 1846 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. After a brief hiatus during the American Civil War, hurricane forecasting resumed in February 1870 when President Ulysses S. Grant charged the US Army Signal Corps with collecting telegraphic weather reports for the East Coast and Great Lakes regions. The service was patchy, both in accuracy and consistency, and reporting on hurricanes was scant until they hit the coast, when it was already too late.

It was not the Americans but the Cubans who led the way in hurricane forecasting, thanks to the efforts of Father Benito Viñes. Although he was deeply religious, Viñes wanted to serve his storm-afflicted island by studying the science of hurricanes. He combined empirical observations, which he performed up to ten times a day, with temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity readings. When Viñes’s weather predictions were correct, his reputation expanded and his telegraphed weather reports were disseminated all around the Caribbean and in the United States, where prominent meteorologists thanked him for his work. Sometimes, he failed, and hurricanes that were expected to miss Cuba hit it, causing devastation. Modern meteorology experts Dr. Bob Sheets and Jack Williams conclude that Viñes “successful forecasts were almost certainly more luck than skill, but they weren’t all luck” (62).

When Spain surrendered Cuba to America after the Spanish-American War of 1898, President William McKinley thought that the conquest of Cuba would permit an expanded weather-monitoring and reporting network into the Caribbean. While “this foothold in Cuba had the potential to be a forecasting bonanza,” both in terms of geographical positionality and the Cubans’ weather expertise, “the Americans not only ignored it but actively disparaged it” (75).

According to Dolin, “America’s forecasting capabilities left much to be desired,” as four hurricanes in 1893 snuck up on the East Coast and wreaked a “horrific trail of devastation” (62). The greatest oversight was a prediction that a Category 1 hurricane in New York would be no more than a light storm (62).