Wayne Neely
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With Foreword by Herbert Saffir, Rediscovering Hurricanes is an entertaining and informative book on hurricanes. It is a book that offers a
fascinating examination of Hurricanes and its impact on extensive areas of our
planet. It also provides an introspective look at Hurricanes and how they have
influenced regional and world history. For example, were it not for several hurricanes,
Spanish would not be the official language of Cuba,
French would not be the official language of Guadeloupe, Japan might
have been part of China
today were it not for a hurricane which destroyed the Mongol fleet poised to
attack Japan.
This book goes into great details and provides some very interesting and fascinating stories of the major hurricanes
of the North Atlantic from 1495 to Present. It
also includes several lists of notable
Atlantic tropical cyclones and reasons for notability. It includes the major hurricanes but it also goes in-depth into some of the major historic
hurricanes such as, The Great Hurricane
of 1780, Katrina, Andrew, Mitch, Gilbert,
Lake Okeechobee Hurricane, the Great
Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and many others. No book on hurricanes would be
complete without two controversial topics, Global Warming and El Niño. Most hurricane
authors over the years have mainly concentrated on the negative aspects of
hurricanes without explaining the benefits of hurricanes. Well this book
devotes a complete chapter on the benefits of hurricanes and why they are
important to the earth’s dynamic and complex ecosystem. Finally, this book also
features information on unusual weather facts like, the first flight into a
hurricane was based on a bet and not a carefully planned flight, or the first
weather radar was discovered by accident during the Second World War. If you
are curious about hurricanes you definitely need to buy this book-you won’t be
disappointed.
Wayne Neely is a certified Meteorologist working at the Department of
Meteorology in Nassau, Bahamas for the last 17 years-prior to that he majored in Geography
at the College of The
Bahamas in Nassau. He then attended The Caribbean Meteorological Institute in
Barbados
where he majored in weather forecasting. His love for hurricanes and the
weather came about while growing up on the island of Andros-another
island in The Bahamas where he grew up listening to his parents, grand
parents and other older residents in the community talking about a
major hurricane which occurred in 1929 and devastated The Bahamas...That
peaked his interest in hurricanes and got him started on writing his first
book called "
The Great Bahamas Hurricane of 1929-Personal Recollections of the Greatest storm of the 20th Century in The Bahamas" and he then went onto write his second book called
"The Major Hurricanes to Affect The Bahamas" and now this is his third book and the rest is history....Over the years Wayne has written several articles on hurricanes and other severe weather events for some of the major local and international newspapers and magazines.
MAJOR ATLANTIC HURRICANES
FROM 1495 T0 THE PRESENT DAY
Hurricanes played an important role during the European
exploration and colonization of the Americas. New settlements were
established, battles were lost and geography was changed by these monster
storms. During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
hurricanes posed some great and unique challenges for the colonists in the
Caribbean, Central America and North America.
These storms quickly became the most feared aspect of their physical
environment, destroying staple and cash crops and provisions, leveling
plantations, cities and towns, disrupting shipping and trade, and resulting in
major economic losses for colonial residents and native inhabitants. During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hurricanes making landfall in the
Caribbean and on the coast of North America may have gone unreported
because of the dispersed character of colonial settlements in the region. By
the eighteenth century, settlements were more uniformly distributed throughout
the Caribbean and increased use of the
sea-lanes provided a higher likelihood of storms being detected and reported. With
the coming of the Europeans, written records, first in meticulous Spanish and
then English, began but generally only of storms that sank ships or devastated colonial
settlements were recorded. The quantitative record of Atlantic hurricanes began
in 1851, and actually started to be reliable just before the turn of the 20th
Century. The historical record of hurricane activity in this region before the
late 1800’s is sadly deficient. There are a number of reasons why hurricanes
moving through this region may not have been recorded in historical records
because given the fact that the major islands in this region were not settled
until early to mid 1600’s. First, prior to the early to mid 1600’s hurricanes
that moved through the region were not recorded due to lack of permanent
settlements. Second, a small percentage of North Atlantic
hurricanes made landfall in the region only, so therefore they were not
recorded. Third, unless these storms produced excessive damage and/or loss of
life, they were unlikely to be recorded in historical manuals or documents. Fourth,
during the early 1900s and earlier in the 1700’s and 1800’s Wars in Europe and America with impact on the Caribbean
were nearly constant during the colonial period. News of these events often
dominated newspaper reports and may have pre-empted reports of lesser scale
weather events such as hurricanes in the region, especially with the minimal
storms. Inaddition, colonial affiliations impacted the sharing of news. Poor
relations between the British and the French resulted in trade restrictions
between the two colonies, by extension; this would inhibit the delivery of news
of weather catastrophes to colonies with different affiliations. Fifth, it was
estimated that as much as fifty-four percent of the hurricanes and tropical
storms in the North Atlantic Ocean failed to make landfall in the Caribbean so from a historical perspective, storms would
only be documented if a ship encountered a hurricane while in transit,
survived, and then reported the incident after making port. For example, in The
Bahamas, between 1784 and 1837, ships’ Captains filed twenty-two reports of
storm damages after making port in Nassau.
Sixth, ship logs, newspaper records and weather dairies of plantation owners
often reported these storms as ‘severe
gales’ rather than hurricanes or tropical storms, so some of these storms
might have gone unreported or under-reported. Finally, hurricanes that made
their way through one island in the region after (or prior to) inflicting
greater damage among those of other populated areas of the North Atlantic coast
or the Caribbean, may have gone unreported in the face of the greater damage
reports from these more populated areas. An accurate record of historical
weather patterns is essential as scientists attempt to understand how
contemporary weather patterns relate to the weather and climate of the past
with a view of affecting the weather of the future. When choosing these storms,
I took into consideration such obvious factors as the event's magnitude,
historical significance, meteorological uniqueness (low barometric pressure,
catastrophic storm surge and high winds), records they created or shattered,
economic impact, and death toll when devising this list. Based on these factors
these storms on the list have earned the title as the major North
Atlantic storms.
The Hurricane of 1495--In 1495 Christopher Columbus encountered a
hurricane near Hispaniola. The earliest
hurricane report comes from Christopher Columbus, who encountered a tropical
storm on one of his voyages to the New World.
He later declared that “nothing but the
service of God and the extension of the monarchy” would induce him to
expose himself to such a danger from a storm again. Columbus and his crew were
the first Europeans to experience a hurricane, and it is from his accounts that
information about storms and the word itself entered European consciousness.<
