Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1930. THE GREAT HURRICANE

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 137, 6 December 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1930. THE GREAT HURRICANE

If the storm of November, 1703, "which Macaulay described as "the only tempest which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane," remains for the British Isles, and is likely to remain, the Great Storm of history, the tropics produced towards the close of the same, century a storm of far greater violence to which that title has sometimes been .given, but which has been more conveniently called the Great Hurricane. Not only in its violence and destructiveness, but on its toll of British lives, the hurricane which hit Barbadoes on the 10th October, 1780, and travelling with a 300-mile front in a north-westerly direction ravaged all the West Indies as far as Porto Rico, greatly exceeded the storm of 1703; and it inflicted at the same time immense losses upon the French, which were far greater than what Britain had suffered in 1703. The reason for this association in misfortune was that the destiny of the American colonies was then being fought out between Britain and France at sea, and that even in the winter months both Powers found it necessary to keep large naval and military forces in the West Indies. In passing, we may note a striking indication that the fellowship indjuced between the fighting forces by this common calamity was something better than a figure of speech. Two British warships having been wrecked at Martinique, twenty-five sailors who survived surrendered to the Marquis of Bouille, the French Governor of the island, but he declined to treat these victims of the storm as prisoners of war. With an illogical but touching chivalry, the Marquis sent them to St. Lucia with a letter to the English Governor in which he declared himself unwilling to retain as prisoners men who had fallen into his hands during a disaster from which so many had suffered. The French losses at Martinique had been so appalling that the Governor might well have been pardoned if he had welcomed the tiny set-off which the destroyer had provided. A French transport fleet of 40 vessels conveying 4000 soldiers was overwhelmed at Martinique. "The vessels disappeared" was all that the Governor had to say. Not a man survived, and 5000 others perished at Martinique, exclusive apparently of 1000 at St. Pierre, where not a single house was left standing. But in the Bermudas alone, which- seem to have marked the northern limit of the extreme violence of the storm, the British losses were twice as great. Fifty British ships were driven ashore, two battleships foundered, and 20,000 lives were lost—nearly three times the number lost both on land and on sea during the Great Storm of 1703. Macaulay's rhetorical statement regarding the Great Storm that "whole fleets had been cast away" might apparently be applied literally to the Great Hurricane. Of the British ships which survived the condition of the Montagu, which was driven to sea from St. Lucia and returned three days later, may be taken as typical. On the 13th, "wrote Commodore Hotham, the Montagu anchored before the harbour without a mast or bowsprit standing, 8 feet of -water in her hold, and all her powder damaged. But it was necessarily on shore that the hurricane of 1780 left its most permanent marks and received the most detailed records. Sometimes these records have been much improved in the telling by subsequent generations. Captain Maury, an American physical ■ geographer, who was of high repute about the middle of last century, wrote as follows of the effects produced in Barbadoes:— The bark -was blown, from the trees, and the fruits of the earth destroyed; the very bottom, and depths of the- sea were uprooted—forts and castles were ■washed away, and their'great guns were carried away like chaff. Maury has obviously more eloquence than becomes a man of science. It is true that trees were stripped of their bark, but the result is more reasonably attributed to electric action than to the force of the wind. It is true that many big guns were shifted, and that one 12-pounder "was carried from the south to the north battery, a distance of 140 yards." But the official chronicler expressly notes this fact as a proof of the violence of the storm "when assisted by the sea," and the gun was doubtless on its wheeled carriage. The uprooting of "the very bottom and depths of the sea" may be said to speak for itself—a better story for the horse marines to listen to than for a man of science to tell to anybody else. Yet on one point Maury seems to be well within the mark. He speaks of forts and castles as having been "washed away"; but large parts,of them at any rate were actually blown away. Lieut.-General Vaughan, the military commander-in-chief, who was at Barbadoes, reported that "the fortifications have suffered considerably" and that "the buildings were all demolished." He also described in detail how Government House had been unroofed.and its inhabitants ex-

pelled. It was obvious about 6 p.m., he wrote, that the storm was going to be exceptionally violent. At Government House every precaution was taken to guard against what might happen; the doors and windows were barricaded, but it availed little. By 10 p.m., the wind forced itself a passage through the house from the north-north-west; and the tempest increasing every minute, the family took to the centre of the building, imagining, from tho prodigious strength of the walls, they being three feet thick, \ and from its circular form, it would have withstood the wind's utmost rage. However, by half-past eleven they were obliged to retreat to the cellar", the wind having forced its passage into every part, and tore off most of tho roof. From this asylum they were soon driven out; the water, being stopped in its passage, having found itself a course to the cellar, they knew not where to go. The water had rose four feet, and the ruins were falling from all quarters. Driven from the cellar and afraid to return to the house the Governor and his party made for the fields, "which at that time appeared to be equally dangerous," and sought shelter in the ruins of the foundation of the flagstaff. When these began to move they thought it wise to move too. Some of them "gained the cannon" and took refuge under a gun-carriage. Their situation here was deplorable; many of ,the cannon were moved; and they had reason to fear that the one under which they sat might be dismounted and crush them by its fall, or that some of the ruins which were flying about might put an end to their existence; and, to render the scene still more doubtful, they were near tho powder magazine. When day broke, the country looked "as if it had been blasted by fire." "Not a leaf, scarce even a branch," we are told, "remained upon the trees," and from some,- as we have seen, the bark had been stripped. From his ship at sea off St. Lucia, Commodore Hotham hardly caught sight of the land during the second day owing to "the incessant drift of the rain which attended the hurricane," but what he saw on the following morning was very like the scene in Barbadoes: The face of the island, as far as the eye could reach, he says, was totally transformed; whole forests were demolished by the roots, scarcely a house left standing, and tho aspect of summer was in these few hours changed to all the gloom and dreariness of winter. Visiting Barbadoes about two months after the storm, Rodney says that he saw what, "had I not been an eyewitness, nothing could have induced me to believe," but, oddly enough, part of what the storm had done was such that seeing had not induced him to believe it. , I am convinced,-he wrote, that the violence of the wind must have provented the inhabitants from feeling tho earthquake which certainly attended the storm. Nothing but an earthquake could havo occasioned the foundations of the strongest buildings to bo rent. As a matter of fact, it was the wind without any , help from an earthquake that had wrought all this destruction, but in this case, as in others, the same reasoning which influenced Rodney has created a widespread belief that some more powerful agency than the wind must have been at work. It seemed incredible that the same force which had wrecked those fifty ships in the Bermudas had also shattered that stone-work in Barbadoes.