Isaac’s walk on Tuesday morning was especially pleasant, because the thunderstorm had dropped the temperature by a full seven degrees.
AT THE OFFICE, Isaac examined the 8:00 A.M. Washington weather map composed that morning by Theodore C. Bornkessell, the station’s printer, using details telegraphed from headquarters. Bornkessell’s graphic version included loopy isobars that linked areas of equal atmospheric pressure and dotted isotherms that did the same for temperature. Isaac sent a man to the Cotton Exchange to compose its large-scale version of the map. He might have sent his brother, Joseph, or Bornkessell, or a new man named John D. Blagden, on loan to ease the station’s workload since the recent departure, in disgrace, of an assistant observer named Harrison McP. Baldwin. Baldwin, the Fort Myer clown, had come to work for Isaac a year earlier and quickly tarnished the station’s reputation for accuracy. Throughout July and the first weeks of August 1900, error messages flowed from Washington to Galveston citing mistakes that Baldwin had made, and that Isaac was obligated to acknowledge and correct. The errors pained Isaac deeply. Chief Moore suspected Baldwin of far greater sins. He told Secretary of Agriculture Wilson he believed Baldwin had “fabricated” barometric readings—the highest of crimes. In mid-August, Moore put Baldwin on mandatory furlough, without pay. Baldwin left Galveston at 5:30 P.M., Monday, August 27.
Isaac was no doubt glad to be rid of Baldwin. The man had been a drag on performance and morale. It is likely, too, that Baldwin made fun of Isaac. Certainly Baldwin was given to pranks and poking fun. To a man like that, Isaac had to have been an irresistible target. With Baldwin gone, however, Isaac found himself short of hands. Moore promised him a junior observer named Ernst Giers, but at the last moment, for reasons Moore felt no obligation to explain, Moore rerouted Giers to Carson City, Nevada. The abrupt reassignment moved Isaac to a rare, if quiet, expression of complaint. He telegraphed Moore: “Giers not having arrived impossible to get along without experienced assistance in Baldwin’s place.”
Moore sent him John Blagden.
THE BUREAU’S MAPMAKER used colored chalk to compose the Exchange map. He noted pressures, temperatures, rainfall, and wind direction on a large blackboard painted with an outline of the country. That morning, Dr. Samuel O. Young, the secretary of the Cotton Exchange and an amateur meteorologist, came by to observe the process.
For the last week, Young had been keeping close track of the weather. Nothing in the official reports from the Weather Bureau’s Central Office indicated that a tropical cyclone might be forming in the Caribbean, but Young believed the signs were there.
He stood quietly beside the mapmaker. There was something soothing about the tap-tap-tap of the chalk, as the mapmaker deftly noted wind speed in Chicago, temperature in New York, pressure over the Rockies. An R meant rain, S snow. An M stood for missing.
Under Moore, only disaster or downed telegraph lines made an M acceptable.
Tiny circles with arrows, like the symbols for male and female, soon covered the map. An open circle meant clear skies. A cross meant cloudy. The arrow showed the direction of the wind.
The mapmaker drew his isobars with assurance and grace, the chalk making a sound like skates on ice. He applied the dotted isotherms with special gusto, in Gatling bursts that turned his knuckles white.
Typewriters cackled. A telephone rang. Motes of chalk dust drifted in the gray light, like virga from a cloud.
Dr. Young paid special attention to the notations the mapmaker applied along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. “When the observations at Key West were recorded,” Young wrote, “I saw that the barometer was low, that the wind was from the northeast and that the map as a whole showed pretty plainly cyclonic disturbances to the south or southeast of Key West.”
There was no specific symbol on the map that indicated a tropical cyclone. Young deduced its presence from the unusual pattern of pressure and wind. He noted also the high-pressure zones that still lingered over the Midwest and Northeast. To him, the play of isobars and wind suggested a cyclone might be churning in the sea somewhere south of Florida, perhaps Cuba, and he said as much to the mapmaker.
“He agreed with me,” Young wrote, “but said his office had received no notice of anything of the kind.”
CUBA
Suspicion
THERE WAS BAD weather in Cuba—mal tiempo. There was also bad blood. Willis Moore’s passion for control had gouged a deep chasm between Cuban and U.S. meteorologists.
Moore and officials of the bureau’s West Indies hurricane service had long been openly disdainful of the Cubans. It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba’s own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau. In August, Moore moved to hobble the competition once and for all. The War Department was then still in charge of Cuba, as it had been ever since the end of the Spanish-American War. Moore’s chief liaison on the island was H. H. C. Dunwoody (now Colonel Dunwoody), the bureaucratic intriguer who had helped undermine Moore’s predecessor, Mark Harrington. Through Dunwoody, Moore persuaded the War Department to ban from Cuba’s government-owned telegraph lines all cables about the weather, no matter how innocent, except those from officials of the U.S. Weather Bureau—this at the peak of hurricane season.
It was an absurd action. Cuba’s meteorologists had pioneered the art of hurricane prediction; its best weathermen were revered by the Cuban public. Over the centuries, storm after storm had come to Cuba utterly by surprise, until 1870 when Father Benito Vines took over as director of the Belen Observatory in Havana and dedicated his life to finding the meteorological signals that warned of a hurricane’s approach. It was he who discovered that high veils of cirrus clouds—rabos de gallo, or “cock’s tails”—often foretold the arrival of a hurricane. He set up a network of hundreds of observers, runners, and mounted messengers to watch for changes in the weather and spread the alarm. After Vines’s death in July 1893, Father Lorenzo Gangoite took his place at Belen and likewise devoted his life to storm.
But the Weather Bureau under Willis Moore wanted hurricanes all to itself. After the war, Moore headquartered the Indies network in Havana. Dunwoody served as the bureau’s senior representative on the island, but the man who actually ran the stations day by day was a bureau manager named William B. Stockman, the local forecast official for Havana, who saw the people of Cuba and the Indies as a naive, aboriginal race in need of American stewardship.
“It was at first very difficult to interest the various peoples in the warning service,” Stockman wrote to Moore in a voluminous June 1899 report on the Indies service’s first full year of operation, “as the inhabitants of the islands are very very conservative and it is most difficult to get them to adopt any measures that radically differ from those pursued by their forebears, and forecasting the approach of storms, etc., and displaying warning signals or issuing advisory statements relative thereto, was a most radical change—the inhabitants being accustomed to hear of these phenomena only upon their near approach to a place or after it had passed in the vicinity.”
It was as if Father Vines had never lived, and the Belen Observatory had ceased to exist. Eventually Belen’s Father Gangoite discovered Stockman’s remarks. By then, however, the corpses floating in the hot seas off Galveston had freighted Stockman’s words with a brutal, unintended irony.
Stockman was a ponderous bureaucrat, given to writing immense reports about tiny things. When he filed his second annual report on July 31, 1900, even the professors and clerks at the Central Office rebelled, and these were men accustomed to levels of tedium that would have driven ordinary men to suicide. Internal memos flew from department to department, politely recommending that Stockman be muzzled. On August 15, Professor E. B. Garriott, one of the bureau’s most senior scientists, wrote to the chief clerk: “I am loth to criticize the work of a man who has shown commendable zeal in the prosecution of that work. Nevertheless I am constrained to say that if the Official in Charge at Havana could c
urb a tendency toward verbosity and avoid iterations and reiterations in successive communications of matter that is irrelevant and immaterial to the subject heads, a great deal of time and labor would be saved both at Havana and the Central Office.”
Willis Moore’s recommendation was a bit less florid: “Kindly tell him to save himself much work.”
In most other respects, however, Stockman was a good man to have in Havana. He shared Moore’s obsession with control and reputation, as did the men Stockman placed in charge of the hurricane stations on outlying islands. Like Moore, Stockman worried about the damage likely to occur through the issuance of unwarranted storm alerts. In the Indies service, however, this concern took on a colonial cast. The poor, ignorant natives were too easily panicked. Restraint was the white weatherman’s burden. It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing “unnecessary alarm among the natives.”
He saw conspiracy everywhere. The Cubans, he believed, were trying to steal the bureau’s weather observations to improve their own forecasts. He spent a good part of August 1900 investigating a man who called himself Dr. Enrique del Monte and claimed to be a professor at the University of Havana. In April, del Monte had published a well-received essay, “The Climatology of Havana,” in the bureau’s own Monthly Weather Review. Briefly, del Monte had even worked for Stockman. But now Stockman believed del Monte to be a fraud, perhaps even an agent of the Belen Observatory.
Stockman composed a nine-page letter to Willis Moore, dated August 10, which he devoted entirely to del Monte. He parsed del Monte’s article. In the essay, the doctor had described his observatory and the shelter that housed its instruments, and told readers it was located on a particular train line in Havana. Ah—but no such observatory existed! Stockman checked. “The shelter described for the exposure of the thermometers exactly describes the structure used for said purpose by the Belen College Observatory.”
Moore too suspected the Cubans, and believed a conduit for purloined weather intelligence ran between New Orleans and Belen. On August 24, 1900, W. T. Blythe, director of the bureau’s New Orleans section, wrote Moore a letter that stoked his suspicions. He notified Moore that the College of Immaculate Conception in New Orleans received a copy of the national weather map every single day—the college simply dispatched a messenger to his office to pick one up. He did not feel he had the authority to refuse. He suspected, however, that the college then transmitted the contents by submarine cable to Belen. The real purpose, Blythe wrote, was “to enable the Belen College in Havana to compete with this Service.”
It was all too much for Moore. Too clear. Moore instituted the ban on Cuban weather telegrams and halted all direct transmission of West Indies storm reports from the bureau’s Havana office to its New Orleans station. The bureau even sought the help of Western Union. On August 28, Willis Moore, then serving as acting secretary of agriculture, wrote to Gen. Thomas T. Eckert, president of Western Union. “The United States Weather Bureau in Cuba has been greatly annoyed by independent observatories securing a few scattered reports and then attempting to make weather predictions and issue hurricane warnings to the detriment of commerce and the embarrassment of the Government service.” He revealed his suspicions of the New Orleans connection. “I have reason to believe that they are copying, or contemplate doing so, data from our daily weather maps in New Orleans and cabling the same to Havana.”
Moore closed the letter, stating, “I presume you have not the right to refuse to transmit such telegrams, but I would respectfully ask that they be not allowed any of the privileges accorded messages of this Bureau, and that they be not given precedence over other commercial messages.”
To the Cubans, the cable ban was an outrage. “This conduct,” wrote the Tribuna in Cienfuegos, “is inconceivable.” Especially at the peak of hurricane season, “when everybody is waiting for the opinions and observations” of Cuba’s hurricane experts. The newspaper cited in particular the reports of a meteorologist named Julio Jover. The cable ban, it cried, represented “an extraordinary contempt for the public.”
The uproar took the bureau by surprise. Apparently Moore, Dunwoody, and Stockman expected the backward peoples of Cuba to accept the ban just as they accepted the daily rise of the sun. On Wednesday, September 5, as the storm of 1900 moved toward Havana, Dunwoody wrote to Stockman: “A very bitter opposition is being made both officially and through the newspapers, to the order prohibiting the transmission of weather bureau dispatches, by cranks on the island.
“I am not certain whether my position will be sustained by higher officials, but I have made the issue on the basis of good service. Of course, it will be necessary for you to furnish the press with good reliable warnings, in order to defend the stand I have taken.”
Dunwoody stood firm, and for the moment prevailed. The War Department allowed the ban to continue.
STOCKMAN AND THE observers in his network took special pains to avoid using the word hurricane, except when absolutely necessary or when stipulating that a particular storm was not a hurricane. They took what might be called a behavioralist approach to storms. They collected readings of temperature, pressure, and wind, and based solely on these, determined whether a storm existed or not. They sent clipped telegrams in a code that did not allow for conjecture or expressions of instinct, yet in their seeming precision produced the same sense of mastery over the weather that daily weather journals gave to men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. To Stockman, the tropical storm then making its way over Cuba was the sum exactly of its parts, no more and no less. And the parts did not add up to much. On Saturday, September 1, he released the bureau’s evaluation of the storm to the Diario de la Marina, in Havana. “A storm of moderate intensity (not a hurricane) was central this morning east by south of Santo Domingo.… Fast steamers which sail today from Havana for New York will reach their destination ahead of the storm.”
The Cubans took a more romantic view, a psychoanalytic approach, that was the product of the island’s long and tragic experience. Nearly every Cuban alive had experienced at least one major hurricane. Cuban meteorologists had the same instruments as their American counterparts, and took the same measurements, but read into them vastly greater potential for evil. The Cubans wrote of hunches and beliefs, sunsets and forboding. Where the Americans saw numbers, the Cubans saw poetry. Dark poetry, perhaps—the works of Poe and Baudelaire—but poetry all the same.
They were wary from the start. On August 31, Julio Jover reported his assessment of the atmosphere to La Lucha in Havana. Barometric pressure had begun to rise, he noted—but he saw no comfort in the fact: “This, far from proving to us that the indications of a cyclone are vanished, reaffirms our opinion of the unstable equilibrium of the atmosphere, and therefore of the increase in energy of the center of low [pressure] which is over the Caribbean Sea.”
The next day, Belen’s Father Gangoite released to La Lucha his view that the storm, while at the moment a small one, appeared to be “a cyclonic disturbance in its incipiency.… This kind of storm sometimes produces heavy rain over this island, and acquires greater energy as it moves out over the Atlantic.”
Father Gangoite was right about the rain—
Between noon and 8:00 P.M., Monday, September 3, Santiago received over 10 inches. The rain kept coming. By Friday, the total reached 24.34 inches, enough vertical flow to fill a claw-foot bathtub.
—but Gangoite was right, too, about the energy.
NEW ORLEANS
Captain Halsey’s Choice
AT 9:20 A.M. Wednesday, Captain T. P. Halsey of the steamship Louisiana, then moored in New Orleans, ordered his crew to cast off the main hawsers and make for the Gulf. He saw a red-and-black storm flag rippling in the wind at Port Eads, Louisiana, but believed he had nothing to fear. Nothing in the reports from the Weather Bureau indicated conditions capable of threatening a modern steamship—there was no reference at all to gales or cyclones, no indication whatsoever that the storm could be a hurric
ane, or even had the potential to become one.
And if a cyclone did materialize, so what? He had survived eight so far.
The Weather Bureau’s reluctance to use words like hurricane and cyclone inadvertently reinforced the bravado of sea captains like Halsey. Many mariners still believed that whether a ship encountered a storm or not was largely a matter of chance, so why worry? It was an ethos of resignation born of the frequency with which hurricanes took the ships and lives of even the best captains. Wrote Piddington, in a late edition of his Sailor’s Horn-Book, “we must expect to find many ‘of the old school’ who do not like ‘new-fangled notions;’ many who ‘do not like to be put out of their way;’ many who ‘think the old plan is good enough;’ and that ‘hit or miss, for luck’s all,’ is quite enough with a stout ship and a good crew.” Modern technology helped perpetuate this ethos. Steel and steam produced ever-stouter ships. Engines reduced the worst storm hazards—the loss of control after sails were furled, the imbalance imparted by suspending tons of timber, canvas, brass, and rope high above a ship’s deck. Technology was an elixir for last-minute qualms.
The Louisiana entered the main body of the Gulf at 5:22 P.M. Halsey’s barometer read 29.87 inches. Winds were from the east-northeast, the top-left quadrant of a cyclone. The storm itself was moving toward the northwest. If Halsey had held one of Henry Piddington’s transparent storm cards on a chart over his position, he would have seen that his ship now lay directly in the cyclone’s path.