The official hurricane season is from June 1 through November 30 each year. On average,there are 10 tropical storms, and 6 of which become hurricanes, all of them develop in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico.
Observation data of hurricanes for years before 1492 is completely unavailable because most natives of North America lacked written languages to keep records in the pre-Columbian era.
Also most records in written native languages either do not survive, or have not been deciphered or translated.
Scientists now regard even data from the early years of the Columbian era as suspicious because Renaissance scientists and sailors made no distinction between tropical cyclones and extratropical systems.
It is also incomplete because European exploration of North America and European colonization of the Americas reached only scattered areas during the 16th century.
Weather history books point out that in July of 1502 a massive storm hit the fleet of the great explorer Christopher Columbus, who predicted that it will strike the island of Hispanola.
He used his prediction at that time to warn the Governor of Hispanola, Nicholas de Ovando, who had 30 ships in his fleet set sail back to Spain.
However, the governor refused Columbus’ request to stay in the port at Santo Domingo and within two days the storm struck in the Mona Passage between Hispanola and Puerto Rico, and sank 21 of the 30 ships, and killed approximately 500 sailors.
Another storm in 1609 at the time that the first colony in the United States was being developed, a strong hurricane menaced the Western Atlantic in the weeks following the departure of a fleet with 500 colonists that left Great Britain for the New World.
The ships then met with the atmospheric event head on, which scattered all the vessels. Most were able to survive the onslaught of Mother Nature, except for the flagship of the fleet, the “Sea Venture”.
The story of the “Sea Venture” was the basis of William Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest”, according to some art critics.
The Great Hurricane of 1780 was one of several that year, and was one of the worst hurricane seasons in the era prior to record taking. Winds were estimated to be Category Four strength at 135 mph.
This storm, which affected the Southern Windward Islands including Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada, Martinique, St. Eustatius, Puerto Rico and Grand Turk Island, is believed to have killed approximately 22,000 people.
The Hurricane of September 1874, struck the Carolinas around the end of September, 1874. This storm is remembered for being the first such hurricane to be shown on a weather map.
Another historic storm was the Hurricane of September of 1875 which was an intense hurricane that struck the southern coast of Cuba as predicted by Father Benito Vines, who began to develop a tremendous reputation for accurately predicting when and where a hurricane would strike, according to expert Jeffery Rosenfeld in his book “Eye of the Storm”.
His studies of tropical storms and hurricanes during the latter portion of the 19th Century made the cuban forecasters some of the best hurricane forecasters in the world according to expert Charles Simmins.
Father Benito Vines can be called the pioneer of modern hurricane forecasting. He died on July 23, 1893 and at that time he was the director of the meteorological observatory of the Royal College of Belen, in Havana, Cuba.
He had come to Cuba in 1870 from Spain and was a member of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order. Living in Cuba, he was able to see the destruction caused by hurricanes, and the need for some way to predict their arrival and route.
Through years of study, meticulous observation of the weather and because personal visits to the locations where a hurricane had made landfall, he was able to develop some interesting theories says scholar, James B. Elsner.
As communication by telegraph became more available between the islands of the Caribbean and between them and mainland United States, it became possible to obtain weather data from very far away.
Vines cultivated a unique network of observers, sailors and reporters that could provide him with far more storm information than he could obtain in Cuba alone.
He also published several scholarly works on hurricanes and forecasting, like “Hints in Regard to West Indian Hurricanes” that was adopted by the U.S. Army and later reprinted by the Navy, because it served them to know how to operate under extreme weather conditions.
He demonstrated that the accuracy of a prediction was significantly enhanced by data from a network of observers which became the backbone of a bigger one he establish throughout the Caribbean region.
The science of hurricane prediction was in its infancy, though, at his death and over a century would pass before such predictions could be seen as accurate.
During an entire century, many people died because they ignored predictions, others because they could not flee on time, and even some died because the basic theories that Vines proposed, were ignored and denigrated.
By Silvio González via PL