CHAPTER XLI

WEST INDIAN HURRICANES IN PUERTO RICO FROM

1515 TO 1899

Whoever has witnessed the awful magnificence of what the primitive inhabitants of the West Indian islands called ou-ra-can, will never forget the sense of his own utter nothingness and absolute helplessness.  With the wind rushing at the rate of 65 or more miles an hour, amid the roar of waves lashed into furious rolling mountains of water, the incessant flash of lightning, the dreadful roll of thunder, the fierce beating of rain, one sees giant trees torn up by the roots and man’s proud constructions of stone and iron broken and scattered like children’s toys.

The tropical latitudes to the east and north of the West Indian Archipelago are the birthplace of these phenomena.  According to Mr. Redfield[85] they cover simultaneously an extent of surface from 100 to 500 miles in diameter, acting with diminished violence toward the circumference and with increased energy toward the center of this space.

In the Weather Bureau’s bulletin cited, there is a description of the most remarkable and destructive among the 355 hurricanes that have swept over the West Indies from 1492 to 1899.  Not a single island has escaped the tempest’s ravages.  I have endeavored in vain to make an approximate computation of the human life and property destroyed by these visitations of Providence.  Such a computation is impossible when we read of entire towns destroyed not once but 6, 8, and 10 times; of crops swept away by the tempest’s fury, and the subsequent starvation of untold thousands; of whole fleets of ships swallowed up by the sea with every soul on board, and of hundreds of others cast on shore like coco shards.

To give an idea of the appalling disasters caused by these too oft recurring phenomena, the above-mentioned bulletin gives Flammarion’s description of the great hurricane of 1780.[86]

“The most terrible cyclone of modern times is probably that which occurred on October 10, 1780, which has been specially called the great hurricane, and which seems to have embodied all the horrible scenes that attend a phenomenon of this kind.  Starting from Barbados, where trees and houses were all blown down, it engulfed an English fleet anchored before St. Lucia, and then ravaged the whole of that island, where 6,000 persons were buried beneath the ruins.  From thence it traveled to Martinique, overtook a French transport fleet and sunk 40 ships conveying 4,000 soldiers.  The vessels disappeared.”