Isaac's Storm: Part V–VI

Nothing could be seen of Galveston. 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.

The sisters gave refugees whatever dry clothes they could find. 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.

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.

"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.

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.

Contributions slowed. Discord rose.

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

The city conducted a census and in October reported a tally of 3,406 confirmed deaths. Eight of the city's twelve wards had lost 10 percent or more of their residents.

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.

"Galveston should take heart," he wrote, "as the chances are that not once in a thousand years would she be so terribly stricken."