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

by Erik Larson

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.”