Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-three mariners, one megastorm and the sinking of El Faro. Rachel Slade
through them, though sometimes they get caught in something and have to fight their way out. But thinking about Davidson’s story made him consider El Faro, a ship he knew well. She didn’t handle storms gracefully. He’d seen it with his own eyes.
“The scariest thing I ever saw was that on this ship you’re a lot closer to the water, not far above the waterline,” he said. “At night we’d get into a trough and see the white line of the waves breaking right next to us, all the way up here on the bridge.”
Davidson was too captivated by his own tale to hear Jeremie. Just thinking back on that Atlantic storm got his adrenaline going. That was real seafaring there. A wild ride. He continued spinning his yarn: “We had a rogue wave on every seventh or eighth wave in a period. On the bridge, all hell broke loose. Before we went through that thing, I would’ve said no way could the knobs of a radio to get blown off. Well, it happened.”
Hell, maybe they’d get those kinds of seas this time. But maybe not. “I think we’ll duck down south enough and we’ll speed up,” Davidson said, just a touch disappointed.
At 10:30, another NHC weather forecast came through NAVTEX on the bridge. Jack tore the sheet off the printer. “It’s moving away fast,” he said, scanning the coordinates.
“No,” said Jeremie looking at it more closely. “It’s not moving away, not yet.”
He walked over to the weather chart they’d been working on and plotted out the latest forecast. They were heading southeast, skirting the islands on the Atlantic side, and Joaquin was heading southwest, right for them.
“We’re on a collision course with it.”
At the time, the winds were only blowing 55 knots at the hurricane’s center.
When Davidson left the bridge, Jack’s mind wandered to the seafarers of long ago in their sailing ships, crossing the Atlantic, encountering a hurricane for the first time. “I wonder what the first Spanish sailors, those that survived, thought when the eye passed right over them,” he said. “They’re thinking, It’s over.”
The two men laughed. When the center of the hurricane passes above you, it’s eerily calm; often, you can see straight up to blue sky. It’s easy to think the hurricane has miraculously cleared up. In truth, the worst is yet to come as the eye wall bears down.
“I think back then,” Jeremie said, “they didn’t know the difference between a storm and a hurricane. They figured a hurricane was just a really bad storm. All those ships that sunk, the Spanish probably said, ‘sunk in bad weather.’ Probably a goddamn hurricane.”
“No one believed them,” Jack said. “The survivors would talk about hurricanes back in Spain, and people would say, Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. We know what storms are. No you don’t know what this storm’s like.”
It’s true. The first Spanish explorers in the New World had no frame of reference for such deadly tempests; there aren’t cyclonic storm systems like that in the Mediterranean or along the Spanish coast. The earliest European descriptions of hurricanes emerged a decade after Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas.
Since arriving in the region in 1492 Columbus had learned about the spiraling storms that came every July through October from the Taíno, the native people of Puerto Rico and surrounding islands. The Taíno called these storms juracánes—acts of a furious eponymous goddess, which they depicted as a disembodied head adorned with two propeller-like wings. She looked remarkably like the hurricane symbol you find on modern maps.
Columbus was sophisticated enough, or frightened enough, to use tools the Taíno had given him to predict the approach of a juracáne as it advanced toward Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. He observed cloud formations and the swell of the sea and warned all to secure the city’s main port. His small fleet sheltered in place in a bay while the Spanish governor, dismissing the warning as witchcraft, sent some twenty-six ships laden with gold to their peril.
In their attempt to reconcile the hurricane with biblical or classical references, Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century came up empty and called it the devil’s work. But actual mariners had a vested interest in understanding these unprecedented tempests, in spite of the church’s tenacious hold on apparent truth. Juan Escalante de Mendoza, captain general of the New Spain fleet, covered hurricanes and their dangers in his mariner’s guide published in 1575, writes Stuart Schwartz in his book, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina.
Mendoza called them “a fury of loose contrary wind, like a whirlwind, conceived and gathered between islands and nearby lands and created by great extremes of heat and humidity.”
This account reveals a surprisingly accurate understanding of the storm’s mechanism. Mendoza also noted signs of an imminent hurricane, including odd behaviors among birds, which are exquisitely sensitive to shifts in barometric pressure. When they sense a pressure drop, they might try to outrun it. The result is unusual species showing up in unexpected places, sometimes migrating from America to Europe to escape a hurricane. A few days before a storm, birds might go into a feeding frenzy to bulk up before winds and rains wipe out their feeding grounds. All these behaviors are easily observable.
Schwartz writes that Mendoza was “careful to mention that ‘the things that are to come, you know, sir, only God our Lord knows, and none can know them unless it is revealed by His divine goodness.’ Prediction of the weather always treaded dangerously close to the Church’s disapproval of divination.”
A HURRICANE IS NOT A POINT ON A MAP
A hurricane is not a point on a map.
It is not an object that exists in space and time. Rather, it’s a huge catharsis—a brief, explosive event when nature’s forces combine to spin off the ocean’s heat into wind. Over its brief life span, a hurricane expends the power of ten thousand nuclear bombs. It’s a spectacular display of thermodynamics in a complex, evolving, moving system.
Like a cancer, a hurricane is a lethal distortion of the stuff of everyday life. The earth’s winds harmlessly swirl about us, creating patterns in the clouds, kicking up waves for surfers, and nudging planes around the planet. All these heavenly movements are tendrils of much larger systems, like the jet streams that forever flow westerly, caught up in the rotation of Earth. Thanks to the jet stream, winter storms always pound New England in February when arctic air from Canada drifts south over the plains, gets swept east in its current, and is carried to the warmer air over the Atlantic Ocean.
Although the earth’s meteorological picture is as vast as the planet itself, it is very sensitive, prone to disruption, fickle. A butterfly-wing-like change in pressure or temperature in one place can cause a small piece of the continuum to break away from the mainstream like a recalcitrant teen. It often fades into the ether. But sometimes, when conditions are right, it can escalate exponentially, causing astounding damage to anything in its path.
Perhaps to domesticate these mighty systems, we give them names—Katrina, Sandy, Mitch, Joaquin. We mark them on our maps and say this is where she is. We draw a line and say this is where he will go. As if one day, a storm named Katrina rose out of the Gulf of Mexico like a Japanese monster hell-bent on ravaging New Orleans. As if you could put a beacon on her and track her every move as she made her way to her target. As if there were some kind of motive behind the destruction.
TROPICAL DEPRESSION ELEVEN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 1: 0300 UTC MON SEP 28 2015: TROPICAL DEPRESSION CENTER LOCATED NEAR 27.5N 68.7W AT 28/0300Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE NORTHWEST AT 2 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 30 KT WITH GUSTS TO 40 KT.
Every hurricane begins as an atmospheric low, or depression,