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

by Erik Larson

There was talk even of controlling the weather—of subduing hail with cannon blasts and igniting forest fires to bring rain.

The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford.

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.

IT BEGAN, AS all things must, with an awakening of molecules.

The sun rose over the African highlands east of Cameroon and warmed grasslands, forests, lakes, and rivers, and the men and creatures that moved and breathed among them; it warmed their exhalations and caused these to rise upward as a great plume of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, the earth’s soul. The air contained water: haze, steam, vapor; the stench of day-old kill and the greetings of men glad to awaken from the cool mystery of night. There was cordite, ether, urine, dung. Coffee. Bacon. Sweat. An invisible paisley of plumes and counterplumes formed above the earth, the pattern as ephemeral as the copper and bronze veils that appear when water enters whiskey.

“Destiny,” he thundered, “is the subterfuge of the invertebrate.…”

Somewhere, a butterfly opened its wings.

“I first studied to be a preacher, but decided that I was too prone to tell big stories,” he later explained. “Then I studied Blackstone for a while and soon learned that I was not adept enough at prevarication to make a successful lawyer. I then made up my mind that I would seek some field where I could tell big stories and tell the truth.”

Mark Twain, merciless as always, parodied the government’s efforts: “Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place, probably areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.”

With the sobriety of a man humbled by his own genius, he wrote: “I think that wind is a species of air.”

Only one ship of the original thirty made it to Spain: the puny little Aguja, carrying Columbus’s gold.

His critics had charged the lighthouse was unsafe, to which Winstanley responded that his one wish was to be inside the structure during “the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of heaven”—one of those moments in history that begged for a burst of ominous music.

The Abilene-bound coach arrived the next day, as expected, and soon Isaac found himself skimming over a sea of wildflowers. Cartographers of the day called this the Great American Desert, but to Isaac it seemed they had gotten it wrong, for here was “a carpet of flowers such as words will not describe. The flowers rolled in the wind like varicolored waves.” Flowers north, south, east, and west—“the most beautiful vision in nature my eyes have ever beheld.”

The system, he told Congress, helped explain why Weather Bureau employees had to be committed to insane asylums more often than employees of any other federal agency. He said this with pride.

This storm was about to open its eye.

In the age of scientific certainty, one could not allow one’s judgment to be clouded by mere poetry.

It was not insured.

She did not kill him,

This did not endear him to the other passengers. Later, some would express an interest in dashing the barometer against the floor.

The first “intimation” of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, “came when the body of a child floated into the station.”

OVER THE DIN of the storm, Poe and the others heard what sounded like an artillery bombardment. They soon realized the soldiers at Fort San Jacinto on Galveston Island, just across the channel, had begun firing the fort’s heavy guns. The guns boomed well into the night. Marie Berryman Lang, daughter of the assistant lighthouse keeper, remembered it all so clearly: the waves that slammed against the lighthouse as the water rose within its base and drove the two hundred refugees ever higher up its spiral shaft; the heat and desperate humidity that caused the children to cry for water; and all the while, beyond the chaos, that lonesome booming of the guns, like the drumbeat of an Army cortege. “It was the poor soldiers,” she learned the next morning, “crying for help.”

And wherever an object protruded from the water, there were toads. Tiny ones. Dozens. “Every little board, every little splinter, had about twenty or fifty toad-frogs on it,” one witness remembered. “I never seen so many toad-frogs in all the days of my life.”

“Being entirely alone, with no responsibility on me, I felt satisfied and very complacent, for I was fool enough not to be the least afraid of wind or water.”

Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk ultimately of saving none? Did you save a daughter or a son? The youngest or your firstborn? Did you save that sun-kissed child who gave you delight every morning, or the benighted adolescent who made your day a torment—save him, because every piece of you screamed to save the sweet one? And if you saved none, what then? How did you go on?

unidentified

What the black couple did is unknown.

houses fell into the Gulf “as gently as a mother would lay her infant in the cradle.”

“And so help me,” Sterett said, “I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child’s toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless.”

Soldiers rounded up fifty black men at gunpoint and forced them onto the barge, promising whiskey to help make the task of loading, weighting, and dumping the bodies more tolerable.

Black men were said to have begun looting bodies, chewing off fingers to gain access to diamond rings, then stuffing the fingers in their pockets. The nation’s press took these stories as truth, then pumped them full of even more lurid details.