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Sea Of Storms
A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina
By Stuart B. Schwartz PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5208-6
CHAPTER 1
Storms and Gods in a Spanish Sea
The worst storms of all the world's seas are those of these islands and coasts.
—Bartolomé de Las Casas (1561)
San Miguel, arcangel
Principe general
libranos de los rayos
del tremendo temporal
Saint Michael, Archangel
The Prince over all
Save us from the lightning bolts
of the great storm
—Traditional prayer, rural Puerto Rico
The wind began on Thursday, the last day of August 1552, and by Friday it had become a storm of powerful winds and heavy rain. The residents New Spain's port of Veracruz were already accustomed to the nortes, strong north winds, brought by the cold fronts of November and December that could reach a force of 80 miles per hour along the coast and in the bay, but this was different. By Friday night it had become a violent tempest blowing from the north, and then shifting, as one observer later testified, "from all the other points of the compass" (de todos vientos de la aguja)—the telltale phrase for an early modern description of a hurricane. The rain had become a deluge, and by Friday night the Huitzilapan and San Juan rivers bordering the city were threatening to overflow their banks. The town, set in the flatlands adjoining the rivers, was in danger. Hernán Cortés's original settlement of Veracruz in 1519 had been created on the mosquito-infested sands near the coast. It had lacked good water, and was too far from any indigenous towns that could provide it food. He had moved it nearer to an Indian town, but that site also had proven unsatisfactory, and in 1524–25 it had been moved again to the confluence of the two rivers. The local Totonac peoples lived in the hills rising behind the coast, where they were protected from the nortes and flooding in the lowlands. The Spaniards had chosen poorly. The Totonacs could have warned them of the dangers of the region. Not far to the north in the uplands lay their great ceremonial center dedicated to Tajín, God of the Storms, the same deity that the Maya called Hurakan.
At ten o'clock on Saturday morning a sea surge swept onto the island of San Juan de Ulúa, just offshore, where a large fortress had been built to guard the harbor. Throughout the city and in the nearby countryside, trees were uprooted and houses began to crumble and collapse. Father Bartolomé Romero, vicar of the principal church, later testified that the wind and water were so bad that neither he nor the other priests could reach the church to say mass. The river water began to flow through streets and plazas with considerable force, isolating people in their homes and sending many to the roofs as the waters rose.
In the harbor there was havoc. Veracruz was New Spain's principal port, and it had become the terminus for the convoy system that had been established by the Spanish crown to transfer the silver of Mexico to Spain, and in return to deliver wine, textiles, and emigrants to New Spain. The protecting fort at San Juan de Ulúa could do nothing for the ships in the roadstead. Five of the large merchant vessels or naos sunk, four others were demasted, and many service boats, and small vessels in the coastal trade from Yucatan, Tabasco, and Campeche, or that came in from Cuba or Hispaniola, also sank. Houses and merchant warehouses were flooded and the docks swept away or damaged. Many of the sailors from the ships took refuge on the island of San Juan itself, in a large house in front of the anchorage, and although four or five drowned, the majority were able to survive the sea surge that swept over the docks with such force that it dismantled the seawall and carried some of its stones to another nearby island. Elsewhere on the island, when the winds shifted direction, a house that served as an inn where ten or twelve blacks and whites had sought refuge was swept into the sea with the loss of all except one man left clinging to a tree for two hours before he swam to safety. Fifty or sixty Spaniards reached the upper floor of another large house and hung on to safety. Some slaves survived by holding onto the wreckage of houses. A church bell was loosened and carried by the wind to the shore. It was a disaster that "in the memory of people had not been seen for a long time in these parts."
In the midst of disaster, who could offer help? By nine or ten o'clock on Saturday morning, the mayor and aldermen of the town had mounted their horses and were circulating through the streets warning the residents to get their families and property to high ground because of the rising water that they warned would rise to a level higher than it had in the serious flooding the city had suffered in the previous year. Many people fled on horseback to the surrounding hills. By Saturday night the water was in some places well above a man's height, and houses of adobe were disintegrating. Now barrels and casks of wine, bottles of vinegar and olive oil, and crates of merchandise flowed through the streets and were swept into the sea. Father Romero later testified that by Saturday night he saw the alcalde Martín Díaz and some helpers in a boat, moving about the city rescuing those residents who had stayed in their homes, taking the women and children who had fled to the roofs and were pitifully crying for God's mercy to save them from such a death. A young man named Juan Romero circulated with two of his slaves in a canoe, taking the ill and infirm, men, women, and children, to high ground from a large house near the church. The canoe sometimes tipped, and the passengers' money and jewels were lost in the righting of the vessel.
It was a flooded city: wreckage and refuse floating everywhere, shattered homes and broken lives, commerce disrupted, the bloated corpses of animals and people decaying or washing up on shore for days after, the smell of rot and death, and soon, sickness and a shortage of water and food. These were the images of a sixteenth-century Katrina—but they were set in a social, political, and conceptual frame that made an understanding of this catastrophe a moment for reflection on human sin and moral failure as the cause of God's anger. That interpretation would change over time from a providentialist view to one that by the eighteenth century emphasized the normal risks of the natural world, and thus no longer made humans the cause of their own suffering. Explanations would then shift again in the late twentieth century to an emphasis on climatic change that once again placed the onus for natural disasters on human error, but this time on human decisions and policies, not on sin or moral failures.
From his house Father Romero had seen the trees felled and the houses flattened; hour by hour he watched the river rise and eventually overflow its banks, flooding streets and plazas and causing great waves in the streets. He awaited an opportunity to swim to the church in order to rescue the Holy Sacrament, but it was impossible. After the storm had passed he was able to enter the sanctuary, now filled with mud and debris, but he could later report that the water had not risen to the level of the golden tabernacle where the Eucharist was kept, and thus it had not been necessary for him to carry it to the hills. He believed that its presence in the church had stopped the rising water and, in fact, explained why the whole city had not been lost. "God," he said, "was served to punish us all by the loss of our possessions and homes, and to leave us our lives so we could do penance for our sins." Society's relation to nature was not direct but mediated through God's will. The turbulence and disorder of nature had mirrored the disorder of society caused by sin, and departure from virtue provided the moral origin of the storm. Other Catholic interpretations of catastrophe were also possible. The forces of evil and the Devil might also be responsible for such harm, and thus the need for the protection of the saints, public prayers, and processions to reassure and protect the faithful.
Spanish officials and settlers were by this time no strangers to the natural disasters of the New World. They had already acquired sixty years of experience of earthquakes, droughts, epidemics, floods, and hurricanes. In some way, their explanations of these phenomena were consistently providential, and even abnormalities of natural phenomena like earthquakes were still considered normal within divine purpose. But despite their acceptance of God's will as a primary cause, there was always a practical and a political aspect to their perceptions and to their responses as well. In this case, the Veracruz hurricane of 1552, we know the details of the disaster because the viceroy of New Spain, don Luis de Velasco, and the members of the audiencia or High Court that served as his council, asked to be informed of the damage suffered so that the king, Charles I, could decide what steps to take. The mayor (alcalde mayor) of Veracruz, García de Escalante Alvarado, responded to the request by providing a report supported by testimony from various witnesses. They made clear that the municipal government and courageous town residents had been the first responders, warning the residents of the danger and carrying some to safety. Now the royal government would provide help. In the months following the storm, the viceroy took steps to assure that the people of the Veracruz region would be provided for by assigning a number of Indian communities in the region of Puebla, which had also suffered from the storm, to supply food. Escalante Alvarado pleaded to have the city relocated away from its dangerous location between the river and the sea, but that fourth and final move of Veracruz was not made until 1599, and even then, the city and its port remained, like everything else in this region, under the shadow of the great storms, the characteristic hazard of the Caribbean.
Gods of the Wind
If at first the Spaniards, and then the other Europeans, basically saw in these great American storms a supernatural power, they differed very little in that regard from the native peoples of the region. For the latter, the great storms were part of the annual cycle of life. They respected their power and often deified it, but they also sought practical ways to adjust their lives to the storms. Examples were many. The Calusas of southwest Florida planted rows of trees to serve as windbreaks to protect their villages from hurricanes. On the islands of the Greater Antilles—Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—the Taino people preferred root crops like yucca, malanga, and yautia because of their resistance to windstorm damage. The Maya of Yucatan generally avoided building their cities on the coast because they understood that such locations were vulnerable to the winds and to ocean surges that accompanied the storms. Archaeologists who work on Mesoamerica have suggested that such aspects of life as field management and crop selection, urban layouts and drainage systems, house construction, forest usage and maintenance, warfare, migration, trade, and cultural shifts or interruptions like the Maya abandonment of some of the Classic cities (c. 200–1000 CE) all have been influenced by hurricanes and other natural calamities. It was from the inhabitants of the islands, the Taíno of the Greater Antilles and the Caribs who inhabited the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles, that the Europeans first learned of the storms, but they subsequently also tapped into the knowledge and understanding of the peoples who occupied the Mexican Gulf Coast and of the Maya speakers of the Yucatan peninsula and northern Central America. All of the Mesoamerican peoples believed that wind, water, and fire were the essential elements in the cycles destruction by which they marked the passage of time. so the gods of rain and wind—Tlaloc and Ehcatl (a form of Quetzalcoatl) for the Nahuatl speakers of the Mexican highlands; Tajín for the Totonacs of Veracruz; and Chaak and Hurakán for the Maya—played a predominant role in the cosmogony and cosmology of these peoples. In the Popul Vuh, the origin myth of the Quiché Maya, Hurakán, "heart of the heavens," god of wind, storm, and fire, was one of the creator gods in the cycle of destruction and creation of the universe. Sculptures from the Totonac ruins at El Tajín and the Maya cities of Uxmal and Copan as well as pre-contact and post-conquest pictographic codices make clear the importance and destructive power of such gods. The Mesoamerican religions recognized a duality of forces so that the gods of wind could in their benevolent form bring rains for the crops, but in their malevolent aspects were destroyers of homes and milpas, bearers of misery and death. Even among the Maya of contemporary Quintana Roo there is still a belief that hurricanes represent a struggle between benign and malevolent aspects of Chaak as part of a cosmic battle that can bring the destruction of floods, tidal surges, and high winds, but can also renew the earth and bring life-giving waters.
A great deal of confusion clouds the etymology of the word "huracán," by which the Spanish came to know the storms and from which the English "hurricane," French "ouragan," Dutch "orkaan," and Danish "orkanen" all derive. Was it just coincidence that the Taíno word "hurakan" and the Maya "Huracán" were so similar, or was this the result of linguistic ties, or affinities, or cultural contact? Perhaps the Spanish "huracán" simply postdates the contact with Mesoamerica and was applied after the fact by chroniclers who were writing about earlier contacts on the islands. We know that the term does not appear in Fray Ramón Pane's descriptions of Taíno culture from the 1490s, and is first used in Fernández de Oviedo's Historia natural in 1526. Columbus's journal employs the term, but the original of that document disappeared long ago, and the version that finally appeared in print was not published until the mid-sixteenth century, long after the conquest of Mexico had taken place. Thus, there is the possibility of a later post-Mesoamerican contact interpolation of the term. It is also possible that the etymology of "huracán" is not Amerindian at all. The word does not appear in the original 1611 edition of Sebastian de Covarrubias's great dictionary, the first vernacular dictionary of Spanish, but a later edition of 1674 claimed that the etymology could be traced to the Spanish verb horadar (to penetrate) because the water seemed to almost penetrate the ships that were sunk, causing a "horacán." An eighteenth-century Spanish dictionary ascribed the origins of the word to the Latin term ventus furens (violent wind), which was then hispanized as "furacan" or "furacano"—the form in which Columbus first used it.
Whatever the origins of the term, however, the Native American peoples who had migrated to the islands from the South American continent had learned to structure their lives to the seasonality, frequency, and power of the storms. The Taínos of the large islands marked time in their communal ceremonial dances or arreitos by singing of the great deeds of their ancestors and chiefs and by remembering the occasions of the great hurricanes. Ramón Pané, the Augustinian friar who accompanied Columbus's second voyage in 1492 and who became the first European to write about the indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles, reported that the Taíno saw the winds as the force of the cemi or deity Guabancex, the mistress of the winds, who was accompanied by her two assistants, Guataubá, the herald who produced hurricane-force winds, and Coatrisquie, who caused the accompanying flooding. The power of these cemis was widely feared. The island people dreaded them because of their effect on agriculture and because of the devastation they caused, but the Taíno also came to know the storms and to recognize their seasonality and the signs by which their coming could be anticipated.
The Taíno saw the great storms as a dangerous but creative cosmic force in the formation of their world. In their cosmology these winds in the past had separated the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas from Cuba, and their force continued to shape the contours of the island world. As was pointed out by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, perhaps the most remarkable and most impressive evidence of Taíno familiarity with the hurricanes is the archaeological evidence from eastern Cuba of ceramic images of a round face with spiraling arms pointing in opposite directions, which suggests that the Taíno perceived the circulatory nature of the hurricane winds around an eye (the face of the image; fig. 1.1), a fact that would not be established by Western science until the mid-nineteenth century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sea Of Storms by Stuart B. Schwartz. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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