I know three curious things about the Sahara Desert. First, in Arabic, Sahara means desert, so the Sahara Desert translates as the Desert Desert. Secondly, the 3 1/2 million square mile surface of the Sahara is actually 75% sun baked rock, and only 25% sand dunes, And third, the powerful jet stream that crosses this tan expanse from northeast to southwest, carries on average only 10% humidity, and yet this huge empty dry expanse is the father of hurricanes.
The womb is the "The Sahel", where the desert meets the green scrub of the savanna plain. And in most of the last 2,000 years, April to September, this is where this southwestern course of the "Harmattan" jet slams into the northeast bound African Monsoon.
This head on collision of these two air masses sets up a disturbed atmosphere with clouds popping out of a clear blue sky in regular pulses as the high and low pressure waves conflict and combine.
In pulses spaced every three to five days, collections of these thunderstorms then pass over the beaches of Africa's Ivory Coast, pulled by the easterly jet stream. Once over the Atlantic these storms will not see see land again for the next 3,700 miles.
Some 300 miles off Mali, what was at first an easterly wave of separate thunder storms, sails south of the Cape Verde Islands. And like an angry fleet of sailing ships, fed by 80 degree surface waters the wave of thunder storms deepen into a tropical depression, with sustained surface winds of over 38 miles per hour.
Friction between the troposphere below and the jet stream above convert the vertical heat engine of the thunderstorms into a horizontal sweep, gathering together squalls and storms and driving them in a counter-clockwise spin. As the separate storms loose their identities, they are now called a Tropical Storm,
Sometime in mid-August of 1775, one such nameless tropical depression approached the outer edges of the new world. Over the empty Atlantic, this storm went unnoticed because there was nobody with a barometer close at hand. Fed on a steady diet of 80 degree plus water the air pressure at the center of the storm dropped even more, causing the circulation to tighten, causing the surface winds to increase until they topped 74 miles per hour. It was now a Category One Hurricane. Ahead, the windward islands of the Caribbean awaited.
SAt the end of the fifteenth century, when Christopher Columbus first invaded the new world, he found people revered a capricious god of storms known as “Hunrakan”, or “Hurakan”. Having never heard of Africa, the residents of the islands of Martinique and Dominica, had no concept of the source of the violence that assaulted them almost without warning on Friday, 25 August, 1775. So they ascribed it to the mysterious work of the god Hurricane. The surface winds in the storm were now a steady 100 miles. It had become a Category Two Hurricane.
A report from St. Croix described the damage to piers and unloading equipment (above) and how ships at anchor desperately slipped their cables, seeking the relative safety of the open sea. It was as likely as not that such gambles resulted in an enigmatic death. Fifty years later the British Admiralty would estimate that each year 5% of all ships in the Caribbean were lost to such storms, taking as many as a thousand sailors each year to watery graves.
One such sailor, Captain John Tollemache, was sailing his 10 gun brig-sloop, the HMS Scorpion (above), on the open sea, heading from occupied Boston to Bermuda. As the Scorpion was only 100 feet long and 30 feet wide, she did not handle the storm well. Royal Navy historian C.S. Forrester explained, "Few men in the Royal Navy had a good word to say for the gun-brigs, which rolled terribly and were greatly over-crowded..." But in the open sea, and under skilled eyes and hands, Tollemache managed to bring her to safely port.
A week later, on Saturday, 2 September, 1775, The now Category Three Storm brushed across the outer banks of North Carolina, it's sustained wind at 120 miles per hour causing extensive property damage....
...taking 163 lives in the port of New Bern (above) and destroying the corn crops of Parasquotank County. Weakened, the storm turned out to sea again, and regained strength.
The Williamsburg “Virginia Gazette” mourned that, “…most of the mill dams are broke, and corn laid almost level with the ground…many ships…drove ashore and damaged at Norfolk, Hampton and York”. The British warship H.M.S. Mercury was forced from her blockade of Norfolk, “…and driven aground in shoal water.” Patriots picked her bones and liberated her cargo, as a gift of the storm.
With its center still off shore this unnamed hurricane swept up the open water of Chesapeake Bay. At 8 on Sunday morning, 3 September, Philadelphia was being pounded by a constant rain .
The wind was from the southeast and the barometric pressure dropped to 29.5 inches of mercury. By 3 that afternoon the wind had shifted to the Southwest, and records speak of the “highest tide ever known” - what modern weathermen and women would call a storm surge.
At Newport, Rhode Island, the wind shifted from the northeast to southeast between 10am and 2:30pm. As that Sunday ended and the 4th of September began, the storm turned northwestward, and headed out to sea.
There was only one landmass in the new world remained between the hurricane and its ultimate fate over the cold waters of the Labrador Current; Newfoundland.
Late September was the peak fishing season for the long finned squid (Logilo pealiei), used as bait for Cod fishing. Every year there were thousands of fishermen in their dories, from Ireland, England, France, Portugal and Spain, in the bays and inlets of Newfoundland, to take their share of the bounty.
This season the squid had made no appearance until late in the afternoon of Saturday, 9 September when they suddenly ascended on the jigging hooks in an ominous blizzard. The squid were even attacking each other while writhing on the hooks. What was driving these cephalopods to such as frenzy? As the storm approached Newfoundland, it's winds climbed again to 157 miles per hour. It was a rare Category Five Hurricane.
As the fishermen happily pulled in their abundance that evening of 9 September, 1775, they noticed that the dying sun was blazing in an odd orange tint, and that the wind was freshening and gathering. As darkness enveloped the fishing fleets the more cautious captains made for Salvage Point or Ochre Pit Cove. But in the darkest of nights none of these anchorages would be protection enough
That night the sea and the air conspired to murder men and their works. Ships which had thought they were safe, were battered onto rocky shores. By dawn of the next day in Northern Bay (above) three hundred fishermen would be drowned,...
...their white and bloated bodies strewn across the rocks like beached dolphins. They now lie in a forgotten mass grave somewhere in the Provincial Park. Human bones would continue to wash ashore on this beach (above) for years to come. It was the revenge of the squid, which now feasted on the dead fishermen.
In the narrow harbor of St. Johns (above), there arose a tempest of a most particular kind — "the sea rose on a sudden 30 feet; 700 boats, with
all the people belonging thereto, were lost, as also 11 ships with most of their crews,...“Even on shore they severely felt its effect, by the destruction of numbers of people and, for some days after, in drawing the nets ashore, they often found
20 or 30 dead bodies in them; a most shocking spectacle!"
At Harbor Grace (above) on Conception Bay, 30 miles to the south, there was released "a most terrible gale of wind" which destroyed 300 vessels in the harbor and "... all their crews were lost... while at anchors, and causing inhabitants of the north shore to suffer still greater severity. At Anspach upwards of 200 fishing boats and their crews were lost
In Placentia (above), dawn found the 2,000 residents of the narrow village - most substantial community in Newfoundland - awash in a six foot storm surge. Those who survived did so by climbing into the rafters of their attics. A fishing schooner was thrown up on the beach overnight. The only surviving crew member was a boy, lashed to the wheel. Off the Avalon Peninsula two navy schooners were sunk and dozens of fishing ships were dismasted and left adrift.
After it was all over a review of the losses listed by the marine insurance company of Lloyds of London would produce the startling figure of 4,000 dead, mostly Irish and English, in the fishing fleets off Newfoundland.
Rear Admiral Robert Duff, Governor of Newfoundland, attempted to detail the disaster for his superiors back in London.
"I am sorry to inform your Lordship that…the fishing works in those places…were in a great measure defaced…(you) should image…that the amount...in shipping, boats, fishing works etc. cannot be less than thirty thousand pounds…” (about $40 million today). There was barely a house left on Newfoundland with an intact roof or chimney, even if they had not been flooded out.
The hurricane of September 1775 remains, more than two hundred years later, Canada’s deadliest natural disaster. For decades afterward the survivors on Conception Bay claimed to still hear the desperate cries of the lost souls in the cold surf.
As for the storm itself, conceived over the hot dry Sahara and born of the warm equatorial waters, it could not simply die. Once over the colder currents of the North Atlantic the storm converted from a warm core to a cold one, drawing a diminished power not merely from air pressure variations but also from temperature divisions, becoming just another in the unending string of common “baroclinic” cyclones that march across Europe.
But I like to think that this was the particular storm that passed over Carrickfergus castle (above), outside of Belfast, Ireland in 1775, and which brought with it such violent and continuous lightening and thunder that it was said the Scotch and Irish fairies were doing battle in the heavens above.
That would be a significant enough ending for such a significant storm in such a significant year.
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