THE STORM OF 1775

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, from April to September, this is where this southwestern course of the "Harmattan" jet stream 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. 

As the disturbed air rises over the 6,000 foot Loma Mountains of the Guinea Highlands, moisture is squeezed out of thin air...

  ...and thunderstorms billow and erupt into the troposphere..

In pulses spaced every three to five days apart,  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 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 warm ocean 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.

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At 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 British 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 hurricane brushed across the outer banks of North Carolina, it's sustained winds 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 by it's brush against land, 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 once 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 sands 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 another 300 vessels in this 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 (above), 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 which march across Europe. 

But I like to think that this was the particular storm which 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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SOUR MILK

 

I wish more people in 1892 had heeded the observation of steel mill owner John Metzlaff. He summed up that entire summer of acrimony and fear mongering over whether English should be the only language used in Wisconsin schools, as  “ridicules”.   As impossible as it might have been to believe at the time, this ultra-conservative capitalist asserted that in “10 or 20 years, almost nobody in Milwaukee would even be speaking German”.  And they weren't.

Wisconsin Republican Secretary of State Jerry Rusk (above) agreed, calling the political campaigning that year a “blundering business”. But the idea that the crises then gripping the state was not really a crises, does not seem to have occurred to many others, which is fairly depressing. Because it is so familiar.

William Dempster Hoard (above)  saw the world as his Methodist minister father had seen it, as the minister “Demp” himself might have become, had he not as a child, argued with his religious instructors over church doctrine.  As Robert Nesbit put it, "Even as a young man Dempster already “knew what he knew, and was not to be deflected,.” 

Instead, Hoard built a small newspaper empire in rural Wisconsin, promoting his ideas about politics and agriculture with that religious fervor he might have better directed toward religion.  In the pages of “Heord's Dairyman” (above)  he invented the modern dairy farm, from the alfalfa forage to silos for storage to breeding that produced bountiful milk and sweet cheese. He counseled his farmer congregation to “Speak to a cow as you would to a lady.” 

Then, at 56, in his 1888 campaign for governor. the Republican “Cow Candidate” preached to the voters his second great secular passion – education. “The child ...has a right to demand of the State”, he said, to be “provided with the ability to read and write the language of this country....I would recommend to require that reading and writing in English be daily taught” As if public schools were going to be taught in any other language. But, such political theology led to Hoard's victory in 1888, winning with a 21,000 vote majority.

But Wisconsin was no longer the homogenized Anglo-America it had been in Hoard's youth, which contained, he a admitted, “no foreign element but the Irish”. By 1890 over 70% of the million and a-half residents of Wisconsin were either foreign born or first generation Americans. Four out of ten Wisconsinites spoke German in their homes and in their Lutheran and Catholic churches and parochial schools. And they were already having an impact on state politics. 

Since 1874 it had been legal for Milwaukee factory workers to enjoy a beer with their Sunday meal. But that attitude tasted sour to the temperance leaning Methodists and Episcopalians across the rolling farm districts which were Governor Hoard's base. It wasn't that the Anglo-Americans descendants were any more bigoted than the the newly arrived German- Swedish-Polish-Irish Americans. But it is human nature to mistrust strangers.

Early in 1890, as Governor Hoard's re-election campaign was just gearing up, he was visited by five Lutheran ministers. The men of the cloth warned "Demp" not to enforce the objectionable portions of Bennett's Law, or he would be a one term governor.  According to his own account, Governor Hoard chose to lecture the petitioners. “If you plant your church across the pathway to human enlightenment,” he warned, “you will lose the respect of the young men in your church.” The offended Lutherans, who believed they WERE on the path to enlightenment, stormed out the Governor's office, determined to do battle. This is what happens when ministers think they are politicians and visa versa.

It was named Bennetts law, after Assemblyman Michael Bennett from the farming village of Dodgeville (above).  But Governor Hoard had written it, and inspired it, and forced it through the legislature with a minimum of debate on 18 April 1889. 

The bill required daily school attendance for all children between seven and fourteen, and it required that all instruction be in English. To meet the first requirement, the law mandated all schools, public and parochial, report attendance records in the public press. And to insure this, the law levied fines on  school officials and parents who failed to ensure their children met both requirements - daily attendance and proficiency in English.

Lutherian clergy saw Bennett's Law as over reaching by the government, and an usurpation of parental rights. And, they pointed out, of the 346 Lutheran and Catholic schools in Wisconsin , just 139 did not teach in English. And in those school that taught in German, most of the students also attended public schools, where English language was already standard.  The alliance of Democrats and Church groups was strengthened when the Republican claim of 40,000 to 50,000 children in the state not attending any school at all was shown to be mere hyperbole. However, the proof did not prevent the bogus number from being repeated as fact in Republican circles. Sound Familiar?

In his stump speech that year, William Hoard proclaimed, “The parents, the pastor, and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state.” He pleaded, "I want the little German boy and girl...to have the same chance in life as my children. Without a knowledge of the English language they can not have this chance.”

A German language newspaper responded, “It is not sufficient for them that we should become Americanized...but they want us to become de-Germanized. And they think that can be accomplished first by destroying German schools.” U. S. Senator, Democrat William Vilas, pandered by asking, “What is the difference if you say 'two and two make four' or 'zwie und zwei machen vier?” 

And then on 1 April, 1890, the Republican incumbent mayor of Milwaukee was handily defeated by a Democratic newcomer, newspaper man and humorist George Peck.   A month later 100 Republican bigwigs met in Madison to supposedly endorse Bennett's Law, and the best Hoard's people could get from them was a "no comment".

At their state convention in August, the Democrats sounded like winners. They nominated Peck to run for Governor, declaring Bennett's law “unwise, unconstitutional, UN-American, and undemocratic.” The Republicans met the same month (and in the same city) and re-nominated Hoard, while promising to modify the law. 

They also raised a red flag over their Milwaukee headquarters bearing the image of a one room schoolhouse. The words on the flag read, “Stand by it”.

Hyperbole became the favored language of public discourse. The Chicago Journal called Hoard a “giant armed for the war against...pestilent foreign-ism.” Hoard warned that those who stood in his way were “like cows in front of a locomotive”.  The Republican Stevens Point Journal suggested that Governor Hoard would rather die than abandon Bennetts Law. 

Democrats called Episcopalian clergymen, liars. A Catholic Bishop claimed from the pulpit that Bennetts law had been secretly written by the anti-religious Freemasons. And a Freemason newspaper seemed to confirm this when it trumpeted, “give us ten years...(and) The Bennett Law will be the keystone of a higher civilization.”

It was, in fact, not. On Tuesday, 4 November, 1890 Hoard's cows came home to roost. His 1888  21,000 vote majority became a 30,000 vote minority, as he lost 43% to 52% to Peck. The Democrats won every seat in the executive branch, and control of both houses of the state legislature by a 2-1 advantage. Wisconsin's federal congressional representation went from 7 Republicans and 2 Democrats, to 8 Democrats and 1 lone Republican. That year Wisconsin voted for a Democratic President for the first time since 1852. And every Republican blamed William Dumpster Hoard (above, left) and his damn cows (above, right).

On 3 February. 1891 the new Democratic Wisconsin legislature repealed Bennett's law.  It was replaced a few months later with an almost identical law, but without the English only requirement. But, as John Metzlaff had predicted. just seven years later the Democrats in Wisconsin passed a law requiring English only be used in even parochial schools, and this time there were no mass protests. 

It seemed as if the citizens of Wisconsin did not so much object to the language requirement, as they did not trust preachers like William Demptser Hoard, to make that decision for them. “Demp” might be able to energize his base, but his inability to respect his opponents lead the Republican party to an electoral disaster. 

“Demp” would have done well to remember his own advice, from the pages of “Hoard's Dairyman”. “Happiness”” he observed, “doesn't depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel toward what we have.”

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