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, 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. 

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,  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.

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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 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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HOT AIR

 

I find it typical of their age that Joseph and Jaques Montegolfier saw their invention merely as an extension of the family paper business. Thus it was that at two o’clock in the afternoon of 21 November, 1783, the first humans - neither of whom was a Montegolfier - made humanities’ first recorded free flight. 

The brother’s built an open fire on a barbeque in a wooden basket suspended beneath their colorfully painted paper balloon. Then, surrounded by stacks of kindling, in a vessel that was essentially built of kindling, the two volunteer aeronauts, Monsieur Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlenes, rose 500 feet above the Jardin du Chateau de la Muette, just  outside of the palace of Vincennes. While the Montegolfiers were solidly grounded and accepting royal congratulations for their ingenuity, the two royal employees floated gently off toward Paris. 

The airborne pair rose to 3,000 feet, but didn't make to the big city.  After traversing some 5 miles Pilatre noticed their envelope was beginning to smolder at the edges and the heat was causing their wall paper envelope to come apart at the seams. Desperately, Pilatre sacrificed his coat to smother the flames, and the cooling paper bag then settled gently back to earth in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, back at the Chateau, a skeptical audience member asked, “What does Doctor Franklin conceive to be the use of this new invention?” And Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “What is the use of a new-born child?”

There years later, on 15 June, 1785, Monsieur de Rozier attempted to cross the English Channel in a balloon, this time mixing the open flame required to produce hot air, with the staying power of flammable hydrogen. After being pushed 5 kilometers inland by unfavorable winds, the inevitable fire engulfed the contraption. The flaming mess then plummeted 1,500 feet onto the Pas-de-Calais countryside, killing the brave Pilantre and along with his passenger, Pierre Romain (above), thus proving that ballooning was going to be a dangerous profession.

When he was fourteen John Wise built a working model of a Montegolfier hot air balloon in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When it landed on a neighbor’s roof, the open flame in the basket almost burned down his neighbor’s house. John’s father insisted that henceforth the boy limit himself to non-flammable kites and parachutes. In the long run this turned out to be an advantage.

John took a scientific approach to ballooning, so much so that he was generally refereed to as “The Professor”. He studied mathematics and parachutes. And it was not until May of 1835 that John became airborne himself for the first time when he undulated across nine miles of Pennsylvania farmland between Philadelphia and Hanover.

He was so inflated by this success that he abandoned his career as a piano maker, and became a full time aerialist. Being a practical man "Professor" Wise immediately began looking to make ballooning as safe as possible, by looking for some way to bail out of a burning balloon.  

Water color artist Robert Cocking was not the first man to use a parachute, that was  Frenchman Andr'e-Jacques Garnern, in October of 1797.  But on 24 July, 1837, the 61 year old Robert Cocking became the first parachute fatality. After that ballooning became a lot less popular.    

John Wise was wise enough to realize that the problem with Cocking’s parachute was its 250 pound weight. The following year John invented a successful “rip panel” which, if pulled, would collapse a balloon’s envelope into a practical parachute, allowing a desperate aeronaut to float safely to ground, and thus avoiding the hydrogen flames which too often engulfed the gas bags of the era.

On each flight, John made barometric readings, gauged wind speeds, and went high enough, often enough, that he was the first to suggest that there were great rivers of wind in the upper atmosphere, which would one day be called the Jet Stream. And being a dedicated balloonist, John also became expert in the manufacture of coal-tar  gas.

The process began by “cooking” coal in an airless oven, so it could not ignite. When the rock reached 2,000 degrees Celsius, all the water and aromatic hydrocarbons, the largest percentage of which was hydrogen, were driven off and could be captured. Clearly the nomenclature was not intended to imply the stench of an “aromatic” hydrocarbon.

Now, the original goal of this process was the transformation of coal into coke, which burned hotter than regular coal and was used to melt iron and steel without imparting any contaminates into them. But after this nifty bit of chemistry was completed the coke manufacturers were left with buckets of a stinking flammable semi-liquid substance called coal tar, and a stinking vaporous lighter than air substance called “coal-tar gas”. Disposing of these vile and grotesque materials was both dangerous and expensive, so there was considerable motivation to find some profit in them.

In fact the search for profit from these waste products led directly to the entire field of organic chemistry, including the development of color dyes, explosives, fertilizers, even the creation of artificial rubber (plastics). Even today, most of what we call "organic chemistry" is really petrochemicals. As part of that new science,  the noxious coal gas would eventually be renamed “Town Gas” because of its popularity as an economical source of street lighting. Even Ben Franklin in 1783 had no idea the paper balloon he saw rising over Vincennes would led to all of that chemistry -  any more than a 1960’s taxpayer could know that the Apollo Moon program would lead to a non-stick Teflon fry pan and the 21st century micro-chip computer that now regulates the stove that cooks dinner.  How could they? In the Lafayette, Indiana of 1960, for instance,  there was only one computer, and it occupied an entire floor in a building at Purdue University, especially constructed to house it. 

A century earlier, Lafayette, Indiana was in many ways an average American town. It had a two story courthouse, a half dozen churches, a synagogue, two banks, three newspapers, several hotels, two breweries producing 4,000 bottles of beer a year, a bathhouse, a steam locomotive maintenance shop and businesses manufacturing everything from wagons, and farm machinery to bicycles, electric meters, steering gears, safes, and a meat packing plant. What made the town special was the Lafayette Gas Light Company, where coal was converted into coke and town gas.

And it was because of the Lafayette Gas Works, and because the nationally respected chemist Charles Wetherill was in town to meet his new in-laws and to encourage the Hoosier wine industry, that history, and John Wise, paused in the village of 10,000 souls for a single momentous moment. For “Professor "Wise had convinced that one day, “…our children will travel to any part of the globe without the inconvenience of smoke, sparks, and sea-sickness, and at the rate of one hundred miles per hour.”

On Tuesday, 16 August, 1859, next to the gas works at Forth and Union Streets in Lafayette, the fifty-one year old “Professor” John Wise began inflating his balloon with town gas.  Despite the large crowd gathered, estimated at 20,000, to witness the launch, a leaky value caused a 24 hour postponement. (an event which should be familiar to any who watched a Mercury launch at Cape Canaveral.) So it was at “precisely two o'clock the next afternoon (Wednesday,17  August, 1859) in the presence of a smaller crowd of citizens” that John Wise’s gas bag finally rose into the sky.

John carried with him a number of scientific instruments, in order to conduct airborne experiments of the “ozone” for Mr. Wetherill. He also carried copies of the local newspapers, as well 123 letters consigned to him by the local postmaster, making this fight the first official “air mail” delivery attempt in the United States. All the mail was addressed to people in “New York City”. The likelihood of success was doubted by the Daily Courier; “The fact is, that the aerial ship "Jupiter" is about as well adapted to the navigation of the "upper current" as Mr. Wise is adapted to preach the gospel.”

The temperature was 94 degrees when the restraining ropes were released, and “The Jupiter” rushed straight upward, to an altitude of perhaps 12,000 feet. And there the gas bag hung in mid-air, fully visible to the townsfolk, suspended in a breathless sky. “Professor” Wise noted in his diary, “My friends below wonder why I was not going on my voyage east. I thought so myself, but what can I do? (his balloon, which he had named) Jupiter was full as a drum—no wind—not a breath!” After an hour of motionless hovering, Wise released 55 pounds of ballast, and the balloon rose to 15,000 feet, until the Wabash River was little more than “a crooked thread of water” below him.  Still there was no discernable movement toward New York City. That balloon envelope, John reported, was, “now quite flaccid in her lower hemisphere.” Finally, at 3:55 p.m., the barest breath of air began to move the Jupiter – south.

Forlorn and still sailing south twenty-five minutes later, “Professor” Wise floated 40 miles to Crawfordsville, Indiana (above). With the sun setting, and not enough ballast left to compensate for the cooling of the gas with nightfall, Wise set the Jupiter down on the road, six miles south of Crawfordsville.  

As the Lafayette Courier explained, “So endeth the "trans-continental" voyage. That it was only trans-county-nental is no fault of the great Aeronaut.” The air mail was delivered to New York via the railroad. The deflation of spirits in Lafayette was attended to by Herbert’s brewery, and the town became, according to a local reporter, the scene of “a colossal drunk”. “Ever light pole had a lein on it”, wrote another newspaper humorist. Surely Doctor Franklin would have never foreseen that such a mass intoxication would be the result of his newborn child’s hesitant first steps.

The final act in this drama was perhaps easier to predict. John Wise was last seen alive on this earth suspended beneath yet another gas bag, at 11:14 p.m., on 28 September, 1879, about 20 miles to the west of La Port, Indiana, headed north, out over lake Michigan. John had been accompanied on this his last flight by a paying customer, Mr. George Burr, who was a cashier at the Bank of St. Louis, Missouri. Their flight, from that city,  had only been intended as a test, to last only a few moments. 

But the wires holding the balloon down were weak, the wind was up, and without adequate warning, the bag was pulled into the air, then blown across Illinois and finally La Porte, Indiana (above), and then north over the chilly waters of the Lake Michigan, giving passenger Burr more flight time than he had sought. A body assumed to be his was washed ashore in Indiana several days later. But “Professor” Wise was never seen again, and was presumed dead.

But I am certain that old Ben Franklin could have predicted that tragedy, because he never risked his life in a balloon. He just sold them. Still, it was clear, that old Ben could recognize a revolution when he saw one, even if he could not imagine the resulting details.

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