Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT of Friday, September 7, 1900, Isaac Monroe Cline found himself waking to a persistent sense of something gone wrong. It was the kind of feeling parents often experienced and one that no doubt had come to him when each of his three daughters was a baby.

A correspondent for The Western World magazine wrote, “The summer of 1900 will be long remembered as one of the most remarkable for sustained high temperature that has been experienced for almost a generation.”

The prolonged heat had warmed the waters of the Gulf to the temperature of a bath, a not-unhappy condition for the thousands of new immigrants just arrived from Europe at the Port of Galveston, known to many as the Western Ellis Island.

Hippocrates advised any physician arriving in an unfamiliar town to first “examine its position with respect to the winds.”

He heard the susurrus of curtains luffed by the breeze.

The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound.

Joseph too had been unable to sleep. Not a terribly creative man, he described this feeling as a sense of “impending disaster.”

Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous—entirely too hopeful—to be true. Travelers arriving by ship saw the city as a silvery fairy kingdom that might just as suddenly disappear from sight, a very different portrait from that which would present itself in the last few weeks of September 1900, when inbound passengers smelled the pyres of burning corpses a hundred miles out to sea.

Waves form by absorbing energy from the wind. The longer the “fetch,” or the expanse of sea over which the wind can blow without obstruction, the taller a wave gets. The taller it gets, the more efficiently it absorbs additional energy. Generally, its maximum height will equal half the speed of the wind. Thus a wind of 150 miles an hour can produce waves up to 75 feet tall.

These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now. He had lost his wife and nearly lost a daughter. How completely Cora had held his world together now became apparent to him. His children needed food, warmth, a dry place, and most of all they needed him. As the city had fallen, so had the neat compartments of his life.

There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. “A dream,” Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, “is the fulfillment of a wish.”

Always in the past he had been able to separate himself from the meteorological events he described. Hot winds. Paralyzed fish. He was the observer looking upon these phenomena through glass. But this storm had dragged him to its heart and changed his life forever. As he sat down opposite his typewriter, human ash dusted each fresh sheet of paper.

Isaac struggled also with how to tell the story in a dispassionate, scientific way, and bleach it of his personal experience. He found this impossible. This was his storm. What he knew of it came from living through it.

But there was no other way to tell the story. Isaac sent it to Moore with a cover letter in which he wrote, “My personal experience was so interwoven with the progress of the storm that it appears that I should include it in the report. If it should not be embodied in the report please omit that portion.