The Storm of the Century Page 2

  But all that was about to end. Daisy had been engaged for three years, and at last she was to be married the next June. Daisy had met Mr. Joe Gilbert of Austin, Texas, at a sailing party on Galveston Bay when she was still studying in Huntsville. Joe had been a medical student then. Now he was a doctor.

  At the party, Daisy had needed his steadying hand to board the rocking boat. Later she got ice cream on his pants, and from there the romance bloomed. It had grown fonder during the long engagement. Joe sent Daisy new novels and collections of poetry from medical school; by now, the books filled the apartment at Lucas Terrace.

  And now that Joe Gilbert was established as a doctor, he and Daisy could marry. That meant Daisy would leave her mother’s apartment. It also meant quitting work. Daisy was about to become a doctor’s wife, and as the school year began, she was keenly aware that her professional life must end with this school year’s conclusion. She savored the final days of summer, and of her single life. She knew everything was about to change. She had no idea how much.

  Though a well-known citizen of Galveston, Boyer Gonzales wasn’t home when the summer of 1900 came to an end. He was spending the summer and early fall in far-off New England. Boyer was fired by ambition to be a painter, and the northern seacoast offered qualities of light and color far different from what he’d found, and tried to bring to life in paint, amid the tropical scenes of his native Texas Gulf.

  In fact, Boyer Gonzales was spending part of this summer with one of the greatest and most successful American painters of the day: Winslow Homer. The elder artist had taken up the younger one, and the two spent much happy time painting together at Homer’s home in Prouts Neck, Maine.

  If only Boyer could have spent all his time painting with Homer. But his artistic ambitions had never fit his parents’ plans for him. They’d both recently died, and Boyer felt himself under even greater pressure to continue their legacy in Galveston. That pressure was starting to wear him down.

  He was the fourth child and the second son of Thomas Gonzales and Edith Boyer, who lived in one of Galveston’s more staggering mansions. Their importance was notable in part because the Gonzaleses were one of the few socially prominent Galveston families whose head was Mexican. Thomas, Boyer’s father, had been born Tomás, in Tampico, Mexico, and had grown up partly in New Orleans in the home of a rich cotton broker, his elder brother-in-law. This rapidly assimilating youngster had gone to school not only in New Orleans but also up the Mississippi River, in Alton, Illinois. He had worked in the family cotton brokerage, then spent three years at school in Spain; at only fifteen, Thomas Gonzales had begun overseeing the family business office in Port Lavaca, Texas.

  Thomas had started early, and he never stopped. Back in New Orleans, he soon married Edith Boyer of Philadelphia. Arriving in Galveston with his East Coast wife, he opened a wholesale grocery and cotton-factoring firm on the Strand. When he and Edith joined Trinity Episcopal Church, Thomas’s assimilation was complete.

  Thomas was conservative—a man of the receding nineteenth century. After serving with distinction in the Confederate army, he opened his own cotton firm. Contracts with textile factories in Europe made it one of the biggest shippers in Galveston’s port.

  He made a point of calling the firm Thomas Gonzales and Sons. The plan was for both Boyer and his brothers to join Thomas in the business. What other life could they possibly hope for?

  Boyer did try. Raised amid immense privilege, the sensitive youth was sent to school at Williston Seminary in Massachusetts. His summers were often spent in cooling locales like Michigan and Maine. Back home, he became a young man about town, attending afternoon garden parties at the big homes and evening dances at the Garten Verein, a fancy, octagonal pavilion where the city’s young elite held sway.

  But at an early age, Boyer was also working hard in the offices of the family cotton brokerage. He was following the plan laid out for him. He was meant to reap the benefits of hard work and grand privilege.

  So while Boyer Gonzales dreamed only of painting, in fact he’d become a family scion and a committed businessman who painted on the side. He attempted to mix the two. Hunting trips to the west end of Galveston Island—a sport of many upscale south Texans—had first inspired him to sketch and paint. The cotton brokerage had sent him to Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston, where he’d tried to capture on canvas the varying marine light of those far-flung places. Meanwhile, at his father’s behest, he carried on the business.

  But his heart was never in it. This conflict between his parents’ plans and his own desires put Boyer under such stress that he developed a recurring respiratory problem. Seeking help, he started making frequent trips to John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. There he submitted himself to a stringent vegetarian diet, pioneered by the Seventh-day Adventist John Harvey Kellogg (it included the toasted corn flakes that would make Kellogg a household name). And yet, with each return to Galveston, and to the family business, Boyer’s breathing problems returned as well.

  Meanwhile, as Thomas Gonzales aged, that stern Mexican-American Texas war hero and Episcopalian pillar of Galveston society found himself dismayed by what he saw as a general downturn in values and morals among the youth. The onrush of the modern age did not suit him. The last thing Thomas could imagine was a Gonzales son taking up a loose bohemian profession like painting.

  As Thomas grew older, he expected to give less day-to-day attention to the business. Boyer’s elder brother, who actually enjoyed commerce, had died, and it was left to Boyer now, aided by the youngest brother, Alcie, to sustain both the brokerage and their father’s commitment to the values and styles of late-Victorian Texas.

  So Boyer’s parents’ deaths, coming close together, threw the artist into a kind of crisis. He inherited not only much responsibility but also much money, and he began using that money to fund painting trips. This summer of 1900, he’d been studying in Boston with Walter Lansil, the famous colorist, before joining Homer at Prouts Neck. These pleasures were guilty ones, stolen from his responsibilities.

  And he’d been corresponding all summer from New England with Nell Hertford, another Galvestonian, who was at home. Nell and Boyer had known one another for years. He was her frequent escort at garden parties and dances, and friends automatically paired them, treating the couple as if they were nearly engaged.

  Nell very much wished they were engaged. She was as cheerful and optimistic as Boyer was brooding and tortured. Boyer, however, remained remote, and Nell seemed to understand him. At thirty-seven, Boyer was depressed, emotionally paralyzed.

  Nell contented herself this summer with writing him long, upbeat, newsy letters from Galveston. She hoped to keep up his spirits. Despite their long companionship, she still addressed him as “Mr. Gonzales.”

  Nell didn’t know that, for Boyer, 1900 had already been a year of change. He was trying to face up to his deepest ambitions as an artist. As another kind of trouble began brewing for his city, Boyer Gonzales’s inner conflict was coming to a head.

  Little Louise Bristol, looking forward to some time off from first grade . . . Annie McCullough, rose gardener, newly married to hardworking Ed . . . Arnold Wolfram, the grocer with a cowboy past . . . Daisy Thorne, schoolteacher, cycling enthusiast, soon to be married to Dr. Ed . . . Police Chief Ketchum, the genial former Yankee soldier . . . Boyer Gonzales, painting and brooding, far away in New England . . .

  These and so many other citizens of Galveston, suffering end-of-summer humidity and stillness, could sense no impending calamity, of course. Their lives, and the lives of others in the horrific drama that began on Friday, September 7, were ordinary in that like all of us, they didn’t see their lives and their families and friendships as ordinary but special. Life in Galveston that summer, like life everywhere, was both ordinary and extraordinary.

  Out at St. Mary’s Orphanage, run by the Sisters of Charity, for example—a big complex of stone buildings standing directly on the gulf beach just east of
town—the lives of the residents might not have been considered ordinary by non-orphaned kids. But that place was the orphans’ home. The ten nuns who took care of them served as both their family and their teachers. The Mother Superior, Camillus Tracy, was truly a kind of mother, both to the orphans and to the sisters she supervised.

  So the orphans’ lives went on that week, and the nuns’ lives went on, as their lives always had. They looked forward.

  Clarence Howth, a young lawyer with a wife, a new baby, and a big, solid house only three blocks from the gulf, remained the supremely confident young man he’d always been. Not much bothered Clarence. With others of his type, he ate big lunches that week in the rowdy, cigar-smoke-filled environs of Ritter’s Saloon on the Strand, exchanging the usual jibes and gossip. Like most of us, Clarence Howth didn’t spend time imagining what it might be like to see his wife’s lace curtains and wool rugs collapsing into an ocean that appeared almost out of nowhere. Like little Louise looking forward to Saturday and a day off from school, like Annie running her household and tending her roses, Clarence lived his life and pursued his plans.

  Arnold Wolfram, long since pacified to a middle-class urban life, went to work at the grocery. Daisy planned her wedding to Dr. Joe, cycled, mused over the changes coming in her life. The police chief confronted the work that had piled up on his desk while he’d been away. Annie McCullough’s father, Fleming Smizer, manning the customs post on the mainland, fully expected to return to Galveston at will, by ferry or tug. The Sisters of Charity taught and cared for the children as they listened to the sound, usually so mild, of steady gulf surf. They all had plans.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE STORM: AFRICA

  MEANWHILE SOMETHING ELSE WAS HAPPENING, SO FAR AWAY from the citizens of Galveston and their normal concerns that they couldn’t possibly have imagined how thoroughly it would overturn their lives and plans. We know now that a hurricane arrived in Galveston at the end of the first week of September in 1900, and that its effects on Galveston were such that the hurricane continues to rank as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. But in 1900, the origins of that hurricane would have been entirely invisible to the people it would hurt the most.

  Even today, the exact origins of the Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900 remain a matter of conjecture. Most of the storms that the tropical regions of the globe are so good at producing never develop into hurricanes. Even those that do become hurricanes rarely inflict anything like the kind of damage that Galveston would experience that fall.

  Nowadays, with modern forecasting technology—a fine-tuned integration of radar, satellite, globally networked communications, and digital imaging—each tropical storm can be watched before petering out, as most of them do. The storms that don’t die out—the ones that grow, accelerate, and travel great distances—get tracked.

  In 1900, however, tropical storms couldn’t get close, coordinated scrutiny as they appeared, exploded, rained, thundered, traveled, and then, usually, died—or, unusually, became a hurricane. People in 1900 started watching storms only after they’d turned into something to watch. They could forecast: some weathermen got very good at knowing when a distant hurricane was coming. But being certain exactly where and when a particular hurricane had begun was more difficult.

  By 1900, a deadly storm’s likely origins could sometimes be determined in retrospect, thanks to observations made aboard ships near storms, or by those right in the middle of them. Those shipboard observations were recorded in logs and then communicated, when possible, to other ships by semaphore. In 1900, wireless ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore telegraphy was still experimental; weather reports made from sea could only be telegraphed on land, well after the observation itself had been made, and sometimes much later.

  Meanwhile, the storm itself would be moving over great expanses of ocean. That meant that until a storm made landfall, it was moving faster than ships at sea could communicate with people on land.

  Ship reports from the summer of 1900, studied today, suggest that the hurricane that made its most destructive landfall on the Texas barrier island early that September had its birth in a storm that at first looked nothing if not typical—and therefore, likely to be harmless. In late August, in the central Atlantic Ocean, a few hundred miles from the Cape Verde Islands, a series of events began to occur. Common events—ones that don’t normally mean human disaster.

  The Cape Verde Islands lie right off the big upper bulge of West Africa. If you draw a line on a map nearly straight westward from Cape Verde, over almost nothing but wide-open ocean, you arrive at Puerto Rico, gateway to the Caribbean Sea. Behind that island lie Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Straits, and the southern coastline of the United States.

  Cape Verde is probably where the Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900 began. And that line on a map most likely represents its rough path. The Texas coastline is certainly where it went, and where it wreaked its worst havoc.

  The area around the Cape Verde Islands serves as a kind of incubator for many of the hurricanes that do so much damage to the North American continent. Meteorologists have even enshrined the islands in a storm classification, the “Cape Verde Type Hurricane.” That’s because in summer there’s an enormous volume of hot open water there, conducive to storm formation.

  Yet because most such storms dissipate over that warm sea, the real question for researchers has long been not why some Cape Verde events become damaging storms, but why so many more don’t. Every summer and fall—today, as in 1900—conditions there seem ripe for almost constant disaster.

  What was happening in the late summer of 1900 off the shores of West Africa involved some of the most titanic forces on Earth. Citizens of Galveston, Texas, from Annie McCullough to Nell Herford to Arnold Wolfram, were destined to bear the brunt of big meteorological events they never could have imagined.

  Around the continent’s big, western bulge, mainland Africa gets most of its annual rainfall all at once: that’s a classic rainy season. The region has what’s called a savannah climate: rolling grasslands, with not enough annual rainfall to support big trees. Every morning, all summer long, as sunlight begins hitting the continent and moving across it, masses of hot, wet air start lifting from all that grass, from the soil, from the warm rivers, from the laboring people and the grazing animals.

  The sheer size of this daily upward movement of water is astonishing. The air mass that results may be thousands of miles long. It can be many miles thick. And this happens every morning.

  Every midday, this huge mass of wet heat has risen into a higher zone, where the air is cooler. The warm mass, less dense than the colder air up top, infiltrates the coolness and, for a while, it just keeps rising. But now as it rises, it changes: the surrounding coolness makes the hot air mass start condensing.

  The wet air mass begins releasing a hot vapor. The vapor drives what is now a gigantic cloud of moisture still higher into the cooler air.

  At last, the cloud has reached the highest point of cold air; it can rise no longer. The two air masses—hot and cold—are in conflict. As energy from the two conflicting air masses is released, thunder rolls.

  The hot-air cloud starts to tower. It flattens out along the bottom. Meanwhile, water in the cloud begins to crystalize. Amazingly enough, given the heat below, it has soon frozen into icy droplets.

  These billons of droplets start doing what they’re named for. They drop. And as they drop, they melt, becoming rain. So all afternoon, every day, what was once that miles-thick mass of hot air falls back to the earth in the form of a hard rain, pounding the whole savannah. Under thick, dark, banging clouds, water deluges the grass and soil.

  Near the ground, the temperature plummets. Rivers, swelling and flooding, pour silt onto the land. The silt promotes both crop and natural growth. The rainy season is punishing, but it is necessary to life.

  By evening, most of the water collected from the ground in the morning has fallen as afternoon rain. Often the sky clears for a brilli
ant sunset.

  The savannah rainy season can be dangerous, but because it’s necessary, the people who live by seasonal flooding have found many ways of coping with it over thousands of years.

  In the police station back in Galveston, Ed Ketchum would have complained genially of the summer heat, but he wouldn’t have considered in any detail how other heat, in faraway places like western Africa, might interact with conditions in the Gulf of Mexico to bring disaster into his personal and his professional life. Weather science and weather mapping didn’t bring information like that to Ed.

  Sister Elizabeth Ryan and Mother Superior Camillus Tracy, caring for the orphans in the big building on Galveston’s beach, had many things on their minds. The African savannah rainy season, and its possible effect on those orphans, wouldn’t have been among them.

  Even to people living on the savannah, pounded by flooding rains they equally feared and celebrated, the storms drenching their land that summer seemed to stay put. The rain came every day, just as it always had. Rain seemed to exert its fierce effort solely on the ground it rose from and was busy enriching.

  But to people in ships at sea, far from the original sites of the African rains, the savannah’s rainy season had other visible effects. Ships’ captains were among the few people on Earth capable of observing directly how those storms moved, and the violence that their path, very occasionally, could cause. Late in August of 1900, one such movement began to occur.

  And here another titanic planetary force enters the hurricane equation: wind.

  Like the rains, many winds are seasonal, and people have been giving those winds names since before anyone can remember. Meltemi, blowing north from Africa across Greece in late summer. Abrolhos, the spring and summer squalls off eastern Brazil. Chinook, the hot, dry hard wind that can blow in winter between the North American plains and the Rocky Mountains, melting snow. There are dozens of others.