The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men Part 35

That day, too, came the white squalls, lasting a minute or two each, with puffs of furious wind and a bucketful of rain, like bombs fired in advance of the hurricane by some huge aeolian howitzer. Steadily the whir of the advancing wind became louder, steady, without gusts, and more and more frequent became the white squalls.

"Up, up and ever up came the sea, forced by the iron hand of the grim wind-tyrant behind. The swells came faster and the tide rose. Against the sea-wall the billows fell back, baffled, but, inch by inch, the waters of the Gulf rose against the city. Man's hereditary enemy, the Ocean, prepared itself for attack. Inch by inch the water gained, wound its sinuous way through the channel in the bay, backed into nook and cove and, long before the storm came, swirled a foot deep over land which never before in the city's history had been under water, even in the great storm of 1900.

"All day long, since midnight of the day before, three of us, up in the Weather Bureau, kept watch by our instruments, at the telegraph wire and the telephone. We had the men of Galveston to deal with, men who were not afraid of danger, men who knew well what the word 'hurricane' meant.

All through that day an army was organized, an army of men that rested neither for food nor sleep, warning those who were in the path of danger, leading the women and children to safety, carrying the old and sick upon their shoulders from regions where death was threatening.

"Our chief, at the Weather Office, summoned volunteers with motor-cycles and these men went to every corner of the city with the news of the approaching disaster. Through the streets rode these Paul Reveres, carrying the cry of the warning, and on that Sunday not one house in the entire city of Galveston was left unwarned. The city had lost six thousand lives in the hurricane of 1900. It was not to be caught napping a second time.

"At Seabrook, Texas, across the bay, Professor Stearns, a co-operative observer, personally visited every house in that section on Sunday, the fifteenth, and again on Monday. Before the hurricane, eighty-eight houses stood there; after the hurricane, there were three. Yet every one was saved, except two people, who had laughed at the weather warnings.

"Steadily the sea rose, all day Monday, and equally steadily the wind increased. The Fire Department joined in the work of protection. The police joined in the work of saving. As yet the hurricane had not come, but, through the Weather Bureau warnings, no one was allowed to pa.s.s into a fool's paradise of security.

"The summer evening came on with the whistling whir of the wind changing its note to an angry rage. In our little office at the top of the building, it looked as though we should be blown away. But there was too much to do for any man to leave. Still, had it not been for the thoughtfulness of one friend, none of us would have had anything to eat.

We did not have a let-up of any kind for fifty-six hours.

"A wall of water swept towards the island, and before it became too dark to observe, in the early twilight one could see the wind-lashed waters of the bay begin to heap themselves into broken and irregular waves, each striving to overtop the other in their plunge upon the city. They broke, indeed, into the back door of the city, and then, with a suddenness that seemed to rock the very foundations of the earth, the wind struck us, in three nerve-racking blasts.

"With the savagery of the elements at their worst, the registering-pen of the anemometer in our office began to write its message. Raging in fury, the tempest leaped to eighty miles an hour, to a hundred miles an hour, to a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The air in the middle of a hurricane is estimated to have the weight of half a million ocean liners and four hundred and seventy-three million horsepower. Imagine a weight of several billion tons being hurled with five hundred million horsepower at a speed of two miles a minute! That, boys, was the storm that plucked at our little office in the sky, and that was the force which picked up the billows of the sea and hurled them at the seawall built by the hands of Man.

"At the signal given by the t.i.tanic winds, the waves drove in from the gulf and from the bay and smashed into a thousand pieces the houses of the lower section of the city. But the wind and the waves found nothing on which to wreak their vengeance except the empty sh.e.l.ls of houses.

Without our warnings, thousands of people would have been there and thousands of lives lost. But the hurricane was foiled of its prey, because of the writing of the little instruments at the top of the Weather Bureau tower.

"When the storm was at its height, our anemometer blew away. When she went, the wind was howling cheerfully along at seventy-five miles an hour. The chap who was with me, a plucky fellow, suggested that we should go up on the roof and put up a new one. I thought myself that if we went up there, we'd be carried off like a couple of straws. But I wasn't going to have him think that I was scared. So up we went. My word, boys, but it was blowing! We worked for half an hour when the gale got under my coat and blew it open like a sail. In a fraction of a second I was being driven breathless to the parapet.

"Through the storm I heard a faint voice crying:

"'Take it off!'

"I tore the coat off and it flew up in the air like a crow, but it was almost too late. I was thrown against the parapet like a bullet. My shirt-sleeve tore and flew to ribbons, and I became conscious that my arm was hurting horribly. I fought my way back against the wind over to the roof and helped the other chap with the anemometer, which had nearly been erected when the wind caught me, and we got down the trap-door to the office of the Bureau. Then I keeled over. My arm was broken. My partner fixed it up as best he could."

"And you went on working?" asked Fred.

"Naturally," the young observer answered. "I wasn't going to give in just because of a broken arm. Besides, there was work to do, work worth doing.

"Far out to sea, meanwhile, was occurring one of the strangest stories of the sea. The annals of the ocean hold many thrilling escapes, but none, perhaps, more startling than that of the stranding of the three-masted schooner _Allison Doura_, which pa.s.sed through the eye of the Galveston hurricane. Obed Quayle, a Cape Cod sailor who was one of the men on board, told me the story.

"'We were six days out of Progresso, Mexico,' he said, 'with a cargo of bales of sisal. The weather had been fair, with a goodish bit of head winds, but we reckoned to make Mobile on Sunday, the fifteenth. On Friday the weather began to look dirty and there was a long rollin'

swell from the eastward that I thought was going to yank the booms out of her.

"'At eight bells of the second watch, the wind shifted, and any one could see with half an eye that there was trouble brewin'. The sea smelt of a storm. We made everything snug alow and aloft, put in double reefs and lay by.

"'At two bells of the afternoon watch, the gale struck us, and it struck us hard. Captain Evans Wood, the skipper, a mighty good seaman, handled the craft well, but our foretopmast was snapped right out before the gale had been on us an hour.

"'The jib-boom, too, went with the crash and the nasty mess of timber and shrouds, floatin' to leeward, began to hammer at our hull in an ugly fashion. A couple of us got at the wreckage as best we could, but before we had cut it adrift, the _Allison Doura_ had sprung a leak and four of us went to the pumps.

"'While we were workin' at the wreckage of the foremast, the schooner was p.o.o.ped and the wheel was carried away. Bill Higgins, a young fellow who was at the wheel, was swept against the rail and had his head split open.

"'I've seen some bad weather in my time, but never just in that way.

With the mizzen boom we rigged up a fore jury-mast and made shift to hoist a storm staysail to give us steerin' way and rigged up a tiller for steerin'. The wind was whistling like all possessed. It was askin'

more than any vessel had a right to stand, and around midnight the fore staysail was blown clean out of the bolt ropes and she lost steerage way again. We couldn't hold her to the wind.

"'With losin' steerage way so much and without bein' able to hold her up to the wind at all, we couldn't run out of the storm. The gale drove us in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another st.i.tch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get p.o.o.ped, any more than we had to.

The mainmast went with a crash.

"'That left it nasty. The mizzen-mast, bein' the only one left standin', took her down by the stern and the waves runnin' along behind slapped us in the quarters good and proper. The skipper he give us orders to cut away the mizzen-mast, to lighten her.

"'It didn't take much cuttin' neither. The axes hadn't more than gotten through one of the weather shrouds, when the gale took the mast and chucked it over the side. That left us with the fore jury-mast that we'd rigged up, but not a st.i.tch of canvas. The ship was as naked as a n.i.g.g.e.r baby in the Cannibal Islands.

"'We did our best with it, of course, and dug up a stretch of storm canvas about the size of a leg-o'-mutton sail and lashed that to the jury foremast and the stump of the bowsprit. With that gale cuttin' off our ears, it was all the sail she could carry. Bill, we had him lashed near the tiller we'd rigged up, not havin' a wheel, and by-n-by, most of us was wishin' we was lashed. But the old hooker stood up under it well, and though she was buried nearly all the time, her nose came right out of the green.

"'We'd have done anything in the world to beat north-east, for we knew the hurricane was goin' to the north-westward, but we couldn't do anything but run before the wind in our crippled state and the wind was blowin' north-east. It was shifting northerly and then westerly and we all knew that we were bein' driven into the very middle of the storm.

The gale grew fiercer and fiercer, the sea was lashed to a ma.s.s of foam and in the shriekin' of the hurricane we couldn't tell, half the time, whether we were under water or above it.

"'Bill, with his broken head, stayed put at the tiller, the skipper never went below, Cookie tried to get some grub and the other four of us were lashed to the pumps. It was rainin' in torrents, too, but that didn't make any difference, for there was so much water that you couldn't tell whether it was the waves or the spray or the rain that was drownin' you; all we knew was that we were gaspin' for breath in an atmosphere that seemed about half air and half water.

"'Then, quite suddenly, the wind died down, and the rain fell from the sky as though the sea had been picked up and were bein' tilted over the ship. The clouds, racin' by and so low that they seemed almost as if you could reach up and touch them, flew overhead so fast that you couldn't believe it was a real sky you were lookin' at. It seemed like a painted piece of metal driving across the sky on an aeroplane. It fairly made me giddy to watch them. The winds died down, and suddenly became quite calm.

"'I've seen some seas, too, in my time, but never nothin' like this.

Waves, no matter how high, I've been used to all my life. I've seen seas over the banks of Newfoundland that would look like a mountain, but waves like those in the eye of the hurricane I never saw before and I never hope to see again. They came from the east and the west, from the north and from the south. They met in the middle and struck each other, making whirlpools that set the schooner spinnin', they rose up and fought against each other, they swerved and leaped and jumped. One end of the schooner was yanked this way and a wave would come along and yank it to the other, cross currents pitched her nose down, and while her bow was down, another would slap her in the stern.

"'We was all lashed to the pump wheels. We were bruised and battered and sore. I never thought we'd get out of it. And, steadily, while lyin'

almost without enough wind to fill our one small sail, we were pitched and tossed and shaken as a terrier shakes a rat. How the timbers of the ship ever held together, I don't know. We sprung another leak and while, before, we had been able to have ten minutes' spell in every hour, now we not only had to keep pumping steadily, but we had to keep those handles going at a swingin' pace. Cookie came and gave us a hand at the pumps and started some of the old chanties. The sun came out and shone clear above us and all the clouds disappeared. You might have thought it was a warm, mild day in summer, only for the orange-colored ring all round the sky and that boiling spot of a sea. We went on pumpin'.

"'It got so quiet in the eye of the hurricane that I felt as if I wanted to scream, and when Cookie stopped singin' for five minutes, I could see the glare of madness comin' into the men's eyes. For all I know, it may have been in my own. Bill was the first to go. He dropped the tiller and came shriekin' along the deck with his sheath knife, yellin' for the wind to begin again. The skipper drew a revolver, ready to shoot him if necessary. But I saw Bill was comin' for me, and before he could reach me with his knife, I got him one in the right on the point of the jaw.

One of the other men went to the tiller, while Cookie and the skipper lashed Bill fast to the stump of one of the masts, standin' him upright, so that when he came to, he wouldn't be able to hurt any one.

"'The other men at the pumps began to talk wildly. We hadn't no water.

Our deck-casks had been carried away, with all our boats and everything movable, and we couldn't get at the tanks below, because we couldn't open the hatches. They was battened tight and if you so much as lifted a corner of the tarpaulin, the whole Gulf of Mexico would tumble in and there would be the end of us.

"'One of the chaps, however, insisted on scoopin' up with his hands the briny water that flowed from the pumps. It was mixed with bilge water and smelt horribly. He went mad, too. But we couldn't afford to lose any man's work and we lashed his hands to the pump handle. He went mad in a happy fashion and pumped wildly, singin' and talkin' in a way that made your heart curdle to hear it. Still, he pumped. The clouds began to form again round us, the same racin' clouds, the orange rim came nearer and we knew that we were once again approachin' the edge of the hurricane.

There happened to be a little food in the galley and a sc.r.a.p was given to each man. If we were going under, there was no need to drown hungry.

So, faintly, but with quickenin' loudness, the whirring roar of the hurricane rose into a shriek and the fury hit us again.

"'I suppose I went on pumpin', I suppose we all went on pumpin', for the vessel stayed afloat, but what happened after we pa.s.sed into the hurricane again, I can't tell you. I was deafened, stunned, blinded. I think I must have gone mad, too. Our trysail blew out right away, and the tiller that we had rigged up went as well. The bulwarks were laid flat with the deck. The skipper and one of the men were lashed to the stump of the mizzen mast, Bill, who had come to again and was ravin', was lashed to the jury foremast, and the other four of us were lashed to the pumps.

"'Whether I pumped for a day, a week, or a century, I'll never tell you.

It seemed to me that I had been drivin' round that pump wheel for thousands and thousands of years. I remember that I thought that I was dead and that I had been sentenced to turn the wheel of a ship's pump forever. On Sat.u.r.day afternoon I started my trick at the pumps, and maybe half a dozen times before midnight, I had ten minutes' spell. On Sunday I never left the handles and the last bite I had to eat was in the evenin'. All day Monday the four of us, lashed to the pumps, had never a stop, nor a bite to eat, nor a drop to drink. We laughed; how we laughed! I must have laughed for hours. We would have killed each other to stop, but the skipper had lashed our wrists to the pump handles. Did we stop? No one could ever tell. Did we pump without stoppin'? No one could ever tell that, either. Once in a while my brain cleared, and I saw the skipper, sagged, unconscious, dead, I thought, by the mizzen mast, and I heard the ravin's of Bill, lashed to the fore.

"'In the night, I suddenly saw the lights of a town. It was Galveston, and we were drivin' right on for it. I was so glad that I sang and shouted. At last, at last we were goin' to be wrecked. Then, perhaps, there would be rest, unless indeed I were already dead and pumpin'

forever. We drove on and on, while I shouted--and went on pumpin'.

"'A sea picked us up and threw us at the sea-wall, the seventeen foot high sea-wall. Just before we struck, I saw the Captain move and look up. The schooner was thrown out of the water, as a porpoise jumps, vaulted the sea-wall and came to solid ground with a crash that broke every timber. We landed stern first, and the wave that followed us tore off our bow and foredeck and threw them clear over the vessel. The foredeck was found, after the storm, a hundred yards southeast of the maindeck. The bow was found eight blocks away, in the centre of the business district of the city.

"'We stopped pumpin'. There weren't any pumps any more. Of the seven of us, five were unconscious when a rescuin' party reached us, through the hurricane, four hours later. Two of us were crippled for life, and it was many a long day before Bill was free from the madness which had begun with the crack on the head when the wheel was swept away.

"'Daylight of Tuesday found me in bed, with an army surgeon straightenin' out my broken bones. The hurricane still raged over Galveston. We had been derelict for two days and a half, at the pumps for fifty-seven hours, without food or water for forty hours, yet not a man was lost. No other dismasted vessel has ever lived through the eye of a hurricane and been tossed over a sea-wall into the business streets of a city. Yet seven of us, all Americans, still live to tell the tale.'"

The young observer paused and looked at the boys. They were all very still.