"Isaac's Storm" by Erik Larson

Upon first meeting Isaac, men found him to be modest and self-effacing, but those who came to know him well saw a hardness and confidence that verged on conceit.

He has a mustache and goatee and wears a straw hat, not the rigid cake-plate variety, but one with a sweeping scimitar brim that imparts to him the look of a French painter or riverboat gambler.

He looked back with longing as his train clicked over the long wooden trestle to the mainland and his newfound friends receded into the steam rising from Galveston Bay.

Many years later he would write, "If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells . . . told us in unerring language was coming."

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 "
The speech ran on for eight thousand words.

"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."

This prompted a moment of stunned silence, followed by a great flapping of flags evocative less of an elite signal squad than a flock of startled pigeons.

He reached Hispaniola in August 1498 expecting to savor the perquisites of rank, but found rebellion and turmoil.

He used the hangings as a pretext to arrest Columbus and lock him in chains, a degree of public humiliation that speaks clearly of some deeper passion filling Bobadilla's portfolio.

On Wednesday, November 24, the winds abated; by Thursday, hundreds of ships, including a contingent of Russian warships under ceremonial escort by the British man-of-war Reserve, began to move in a slow and graceful waltz over the rough "old seas" left behind by the storms.

...earth eastward is 897 miles per hour, and at 45 degrees it is 732 miles per hour, or 165 miles less. Now, if a mass of air in a quiescent state were transferred instantly from the thirtieth parallel to the forty-fifth parallel it would be found to have a relative motion eastward of 165 miles per hour greater than...

"The unfortunate inhabitants of Coringa saw with terror three monstrous waves coming in from the sea, and following each other at short distances. The first, sweeping everything in its passage, brought several feet of water into the town. The second augmented these ravages by inundating all the low country, and the third overwhelmed everything."

Isaac's train passed through an austere landscape of grays and browns, the trees like upended spiders, but to him all of it was dazzling.

He remained true to his belief that one's time should be used efficiently, an ethos that Frederick Winslow Taylor soon would bring to American industry.

The station itself, he wrote was in "execrable" condition.

Where Abilene had been a rude new town still redolent of fresh-cut wood, Galveston had substance.

In this staunch, straight-backed time when a man could not weep and a woman could not smoke, there was always dancing.

In fact, in all 251 pages Joseph barely mentioned Isaac at all, and then only in the most cursory way.

Moore never missed a chance to burnish the reputation of the Weather Bureau or to boost his own political stature.

It is a troublesome document, for it abrades the body of convenient truth that has accumulated over the last century regarding Isaac's role in preparing Galveston for the hurricane of 1900.

"This evidence of abatement was hailed with shouts of joy, and was confirmed in a few minutes by the action of the wind, which gradually backed to the north and northwest."

It was here that he belittled hurricane fears as the artifacts of "an absurd delusion."

"It would be impossible," he wrote, "for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city."
indefatigable two
PART II The Serpent's Coil
THE STORM
Spiderwebs and Ice
THE STORM ENTERED the Caribbean Sea early on Friday morning, August 31, in a confetti of sparks and thunder, with increased winds that raised from the sea patches of dense foam and streaks of spindrift.

What made this rain unusual was the fact it did not deplete the clouds overhead.

With no advance warning from the Weather Bureau, it jettisoned thirty inches of rain in six hours.

Some while later he proposed to her, if a mite obliquely.

Its captain had the improbable name Storms.

In mid-August, Moore put Baldwin on mandatory furlough, without pay.

Stockman was a ponderous bureaucrat, given to writing immense reports about tiny things.

When he filed his second annual report on July 31, 1900, even the professors and clerks at the Central Office rebelled, and these were men accustomed to levels of tedium that would have driven ordinary men to suicide.

...has shown commendable zeal in the prosecution of that work. Nevertheless I am constrained to say that if the Official in Charge at Havana could curb a tendency toward verbosity and avoid iterations and reiterations in successive communications of matter that is irrelevant and immaterial to the subject heads, a great deal of time and labor would be saved...

It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing "unnecessary alarm among the natives."

He parsed del Monte's article.

Moore closed the letter, stating, "I presume you have not the right to refuse to transmit such telegrams, but I would respectfully ask that they be not allowed any of the privileges accorded messages of this Bureau, and that they be not given precedence over other commercial messages."

STOCKMAN AND THE observers in his network took special pains to avoid using the word hurricane, except when absolutely necessary or when stipulating that a particular storm was not a hurricane.

They sent clipped telegrams in a code that did not allow for conjecture or expressions of instinct, yet in their seeming precision produced the same sense of mastery over the weather that daily weather journals gave to men
like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

The next day, Belen's Father Gangoite released to La Lucha his view that the storm, while at the moment a small one, appeared to be "a cyclonic disturbance in its incipiency. This kind of storm sometimes produces heavy rain over this island, and acquires greater energy as it moves out over the Atlantic."

Wednesday, Captain T. P. Halsey of the steamship Louisiana, then moored in New Orleans, ordered his crew to cast off the main hawsers and make for the Gulf.

Nothing in the reports from the Weather Bureau indi-cated conditions capable of threatening a modern steamship—there was no reference at all to gales or cyclones, no indication whatsoever that the storm could be a hurricane, or even had the potential to become one.

Modern technology helped perpetuate this ethos.

The storm did not grow through some gradual accretion of power; it exploded forth like something escaping from a cage.

The Gulf was hot to begin with because of ambient high temperatures and because so far in that season there had been no other hurricanes to roil and cool the waters.

Once again the ship righted, but now something profoundly peculiar occurred that piqued great excitement among seekers of the Law of Storms.

The Atlantic theory had been a compelling one, however—so much so that a vestige of it survived at the Galveston station well into Saturday morning, despite Isaac's experience on the beach.

Why he did not run can never be known, but it is likely his failure to do so was the product of those eight hundred previous voyages, his own ornery temperament, and the technological arrogance of the time—hell, the Pensacola was made of steel and weighed two million pounds.

Out of prudence and pride, Stockman began rereading his own letter.

All in all, Stockman felt, it was an excellent letter: muscular, understated, full of detail.

...we still have it in sight as it passes through the Gulf, and that it is at present in the 4th quadrant, between Abilene and Palestine. "Who is right?" splendiferous three PART III Spectacle OBSERVATION Saturday, September 8: Buford T. Morris, a real-estate agent who lived in Houston but spent weekends in Galveston at his house a few blocks...

Wind keened among the deck rails and boom wires.

Only a confluence of storms, he believed, could produce such intensity.

Legend holds that the sea convinced Isaac of the same thing—that he raced back to the office, galvanized the station into a flurry of action, then sped back to the beach and warned everyone he saw to flee the city or retreat to the center of town.

But Isaac's response, and that of his station, was in reality more ambivalent.

A few hours after Isaac's trip to the beach, the Alamo's Captain Hix made his visit to the station—the visit in which he was told the coming storm was an innocuous "offspur" of one that had struck Florida.

He struck a reassuring note: "An inundation might be wasteful and damaging, to be sure, but there is no possibility of serious loss of life."

Many decades later, Ousley's daughter Angie would describe the flooding as an event "which did much to preserve my father's reputation for editorial profundity. CHILDREN FOUND THE storm nothing but delightful. Henry C. Cortes of Houston was eight years old when he came to Galveston on Saturday, September 8. Early that morning his...

Powerful gusts of wind punctuated her remarks.

Judson was adamant.

Everyone knew the rabbi and the stories that had given him near-legendary stature—the scar on his head delivered under unclear circumstances by a rifle butt during a Zulu uprising in Africa, the story of how he had barged alone into one of the city's most unsavory bordellos to rescue a young woman held captive within, throwing her over his shoulder and bolting back into the night.

A lushly planted esplanade of oleander, live oak, and Mexican dagger divided Broadway, but the heavy rains of the past month and the fresh downpours of the morning had turned the esplanade into a wonderfully slippery flume of mud, through which the children stomped and slid despite stern shouts from parents on the adjacent sidewalks.

With cinematic timing, a sledgehammer of wind struck the house with so much force it knocked plaster from the walls.

Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived.

This water was not stationary, however, like the in situ flooding that might accompany a heavy rain.

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

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.

Isaac's and Joseph's accounts diverged in subtle ways that seemed to shed light on their later estrangement.

Joseph enciphered the message, then fought his way to the Strand.

It was truly a transitional moment: There he was, at the cusp of the twentieth century, using the telephone to send a telegram.

Evacuate, Joseph urged.

Stay, Isaac insisted.
celerity four
PART IV Cataclysm
TELEGRAM
Houston, Texas 7:37 P.M.

They were too busy seeking shelter or had battened themselves within their homes.

Galveston sat astride a portion of Texas coasdine canted forty-five degrees toward the northeast.

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?

The storm raged and water burbled up through the holes in the floor and slid in a sheet under the front door, but everyone was home and the unspoken fear that had gripped the place was suddenly gone.

Lumber ricocheted among the walls of the hallway outside the bath.

It was when the current caught them and swept them away that the violence occurred, with bedrooms erupting in a tumult of flying glass and wood, rooftops soaring through the air like monstrous kites.

"Strangely enough," Joseph wrote, "amid the seething turmoil, I did not feel unduly excited. In fact, I was almost calm. I was convinced that, in some way or another, I should come out of it alive. I kept thinking of an uncle of ours, who, alone of all those aboard a sinking ship, saved himself by getting on a plank when the vessel went under and [by] drifting upon this frail support five miles to shore."

The conversation starts quietly but soon, partly because their tempers rise, partly just to be heard over the wind, rain, and barrage of debris, they start shouting.

In Galveston harbor, the first mate of the English steamer Comino, moored at Pier 14, recorded in the ship's log a pressure of 28.30 inches, and noted: "Wind blowing terrific, and steamer bombarded with large pieces of timber, shells, and all manner of flying debris from the surrounding buildings."

Slate shingles became whirling scimitars that eviscerated men and horses.

A storm's trajectory can also increase the destructive power of a surge.

Now he was alone, his house an atoll in a typhoon.

The rain slammed against the interior walls with such force it exploded in pixels of light.

THE HOUSE SHUDDERED, shifted, became buoyant.

Moments later he too careened toward the Ursuline convent, but his door got caught in a large whirlpool of water and wreckage.

"As the house capsized, I seized the hand of each of my brother's two children, turned my back toward the window, and, lunging from my heels, smashed through the glass and the wooden storm shutters, still gripping the hands of the two youngsters. The momentum hurled us all through the window as the building, with seeming deliberation, settled far over. It rocked a bit and then rose fairly level on the surface of the flood."

She bled heavily from head lacerations.

He felt only square shapes, planks, serrated edges.

He was elated; he was distraught.

Joseph: "At one point, two other castaways, a man and a woman, joined us on the wreckage that, at that time, was serving us as a lifeboat. The strangers remained with us for some little time, until the man crawled up to where I sat, pulled the two children away, and tried to shelter himself behind my body. I pushed him indignantly away and drew the children back. He repeated the unspeakable performance. This time I drew out a knife that I carried, and threatened him with it."

Joseph lunged for him, but the dog entered the sea, and soon he too was gone.
meretricious five
PART V Strange News
TELEGRAM
Houston, Texas 11:25 P.M.

Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling.

Now and then a peculiar scent drifted to the ship from the city, and some aboard recognized it immediately as the odor of putrefaction.

"It is always the rule to exaggerate these calamities and he is only repeating what someone has told him."

Throughout Saturday night, survivors turned gratefully toward a particularly solicitous—and tall—nun, only to find themselves staring into the stubbled face of a man in a nun's habit.

At first glance, the wreckage in the foreground seems to be a homogeneous mass of wood reaching all the way to the horizon, where a pale line demarks the Gulf of Mexico.

The city's racial harmony began to erode.

And for William Marsh Rice, the elderly New York millionaire who owned the plant, it was indeed the end—the hurricane and fire prompted him to begin preparations for transferring a large amount of cash to Houston to begin reconstruction, which in turn caused his valet and an unscrupulous lawyer to accelerate their ongoing plot to poison him.

The steamer Comal arrived on Monday and berthed at Pier 26, but her captain was so repulsed by the stench, he moved the ship down the wharf.

"It would not surprise me if in its careful expenditure there were not a few playthings," Barton wrote, "possibly a doll, a wooly dog, an antelope or a little village."

A rather unctuous letter went to Willis Moore from an observer in the West Indies Service, William H. Alexander.

Isaac struggled also with how to tell the story in a dispassionate, scientific way, and bleach it of his personal experience.

Isaac clipped Moore's letter and an accompanying blurb in which the Post's editors stated they had gladly printed Moore's response because they had no desire "to captiously find fault" with the bureau, adding archly, "We would all rather believe that the weather service was valuable than that it was of no use to the public."

The Diario de la Marina noted that the Cuban public always gave "greater credence" to Gangoite's forecasts, and that the facts justified this attitude.

By way of retribution, he asked permission to halt the bureau's climate and crop service in Cuba and to move the headquarters of the West Indies hurricane network out of Havana.

Barton was accused of withholding clothing from Galveston's destitute blacks, and of squandering money in payments to members of the Relief Committee.

"It is," she wrote, "an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts."

Early in 1901, the Morrison and Fourmy Company, which published the city directory, conducted its own canvass and found an overall loss in population of 8,124.

Isaac's disillusionment deepened when Moore pressured him to assist Moore's campaign to become secretary of agriculture under Woodrow Wilson.

And maybe Isaac, for his part, transformed his own guilt into a perverse anger at Joseph for having been right about urging everyone to evacuate.

In the last years of the century a hurricane with the banal name Mitch killed thousands in Latin America and sank a lovely sail-powered passenger ship.