Читать книгу Into the Raging Sea - Rachel Slade - Страница 15

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Third Mate Jeremie Riehm arrived on the bridge shortly before his 8:00 a.m. shift and watched the tropical sun rise into an unctuous sky. Another steamy Caribbean day ahead. The air-conditioning had been cranking all night and now it was chilly on the bridge in spite of the stickiness of the morning outside.

The scorching sun would soon beat down on the metal roof of the wheelhouse, so Jeremie wore a T-shirt and shorts under a light jacket. His thick brown hair flopped into his eyes. He’d brusquely brush it up and back with his fingers giving it a permanent flip. Forty-six years old, he looked like a rugged, slightly stockier Brad Pitt.

“You hear about the storm?” Chief Mate Shultz asked Jeremie.

“Yes, I’m aware of it,” he answered. “Caught a little bit of it on the news. I heard it’s gonna be a hurricane tomorrow or later today according to the Weather Channel.”

Shultz took Jeremie over to the chart table to show the new course he and the captain—who was downstairs getting breakfast—had prepared earlier that day. The chief mate pointed to Joaquin’s projected course, drawn in wax pencil on a clear plexiglass panel laid over the paper nautical chart. Tiny numbers scattered across the white sea indicated depths in fathoms; there was twelve thousand feet of ocean below them. The shallow Bahama banks blocking their escape route to the west appeared as a scorpion-shaped expanse of light blue. Sinuous purple lines represented the elaborate network of underwater communication cables that link the United States to the Caribbean islands, South America, and Europe—cords that could be cut by the keel of a ship if it dragged over them.

Joaquin had moved farther west and south, which meant that if they’d continued on their original course, they’d run straight into it, Shultz said. “I mean, our timing was perfect to reach the eye. Now worse comes to worse, we can duck in behind the islands.”

“We’re gonna get slammed tonight, though,” Jeremie said grimly, studying the chart in front of him. A slight heading change wouldn’t buy them much, he thought, and sixty miles from the eye was at least forty miles too close.

Jeremie looked up to nod at Jack Jackson, his helmsman on the 8:00 to noon watch, who’d just come up from breakfast. Jack stood by while the chief mate and third mate discussed the new plan. “It’s been too quiet this season,” Jack observed.

“Been that way last year and the year before,” agreed Jeremie. Very quiet hurricane seasons. Good weather could breed complacency.

“Out in the Pacific, it’s been one typhoon after the other, a daisy chain of ’em,” Jack said. “One in Taiwan hit 180 miles per hour.” He shook his head thinking about that kind of wind. It was enough to give an old mariner like himself a good scare.

Davidson came back up to the bridge to check in on his third mate. “So we got a little weather coming in,” he told him. “I’m sure you heard,” he continued. “Joaquin morphed its ugly head between the time we left and the morning when we woke up. Tough to plan when you don’t know but we made a little diversion here. We’re gonna be further south of the eye. We’ll be about sixty miles south of the eye. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine—not should be—we are gonna be fine.”

The captain looked at his third mate intently, confirming that the officer understood the plan. Satisfied, he left the bridge to Jeremie and Jack who together watched the rising sun cook the already hot Caribbean waters into a soupy haze.

Jeremie was known for speaking his mind. Unlike the other officers aboard El Faro, he’d come up through the hawsepipe, meaning he hadn’t graduated from one of the country’s seven maritime academies. Instead, he’d signed on to the merchant marine as general crew when he was eighteen years old and worked his way up. During his downtime aboard the vessel, he’d studied the ship’s books and manuals and often surprised his fellow officers with the depth of his knowledge. Most of them were older and had little interest in exploring all the bells and whistles offered by advancing technology. They could run a ship with or without it. But Jeremie liked figuring things out.

Once he had enough proficiency and experience, Jeremie screwed up his courage and took the third mate’s test. The exam is a brutal, three-day trial of knowledge and nerves. It was especially hard for Jeremie, who got anxious at the thought of taking tests. After passing, he didn’t want to go through that again, so he remained working as a third mate for the next decade. Sailing as a second mate would have meant more money and more authority on the bridge, but for him, it wasn’t worth the stress. He lived modestly on shore, focused on family. He was married to an African American woman who ran a day-care center on the remote Florida island where they lived with their two teenage children. When he was off duty, he helped her with the business and kept to himself.

A few years back, Jeremie joined his fellow ship’s officers Captain Pete Villacampa, Chief Mate Paul Haley, and Second Mate Charlie Baird at their union’s ultra-advanced simulation center in Miami. He was a generation younger than the other officers. For four days, they worked together on a computer-generated bridge, which rocked and rolled like a real ship, enough to make a person seasick, as the program generated complex maritime situations for them to work their way out of. Jeremie’s understanding of the weather systems, radar, and loading software—things he’d taught himself—proved invaluable. The team earned one of the highest scores the instructor had ever recorded.

Three months after that simulation test, Villacampa and Haley were fired by the shipping company, along with two other seasoned officers, Captain Jack Hearn and Chief Mate Jimmy Armstrong. The official line was that they’d lost their jobs because illegal drugs had been found on one of TOTE’s ships.

In July 2012, US customs agents in Jacksonville saw a suspicious shipping container coming off El Faro’s sister ship, El Morro. The box looked like it had been tampered with, maybe pried open after it had been sealed. Sure enough, a couple of the unlicensed crew—an ever-changing cast of characters hired through the union by the shipping company’s crewing manager—had stashed forty-seven kilos of cocaine inside it, a $3.5 million haul bound for the US market. After the seamen were busted in Jacksonville, the ship’s steward—a Puerto Rican named Danny, and another family member—were gunned down by a member of the drug cartel in a San Juan restaurant while Danny’s vessel was docked nearby.

That shipping containers had been used to transport contraband surprised absolutely no one. Roberto Saviano’s book on the Italian mafia, Gomorrah, offers a shocking example of the disturbing things people stuff in these nondescript steel boxes. In his book’s opening scene, a crate being loaded onto a ship in Naples accidentally opens midair and dozens of human corpses pour out of it and onto the ship’s deck. The dead immigrants had paid a lifetime’s worth of wages to the Mafia to have their remains repatriated to China; they were unceremoniously scooped back in and shipped according to plan.

No port authority has the resources to monitor what’s inside the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers crossing the oceans at any one time. Worldwide, approximately 1 percent of the boxes are actually opened and inspected. Drug dealers and arms brokers count on this fact to move their illicit wares around the globe; they build rare losses into their business plan. Because occasionally, someone gets caught.

Jack Hearn was captain of El Morro when the drugs were found, but how could he have known about them? Jacksonville Port was known as a major gateway for drugs traveling from South America to the US, especially since Puerto Rico’s economic collapse created a jobless, desperate population on the island. Of course TOTE’s ships occasionally carried contraband.

Hearn’s job was to deliver cargo and keep the vessel and crew safe. He’d done just that for more than thirty years. In that time, he’d watched the profession go from sextant to satellite. And in that time, the role of the captain evolved from running the ship to pushing paper. Hearn spent countless hours in his stateroom logging records, time charts, and data, managing the milk run back and forth to Puerto Rico. It was load and roll. Everyone was hustling. There wasn’t time for him to inspect every box that went on his ship and quiz every deckhand. Following the arrests, TOTE hired security guards to search crew as they came aboard.

TOTE’s firing of the four officers came as a shock to those working on the vessels. Haley wasn’t even on duty when the drugs were found. Two respected captains and two chief mates, all elders of the trade, were gone. With them, decades of knowledge and experience had been tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. The message was clear: no one’s job—on land or at sea—was safe.

TOTE became ruthless, driven to squeeze as much profit as possible out of an operationally expensive industry. Some mariners who worked for TOTE say that the company was making a significant profit at that time. The ships cost several million dollars, the labor, the berthing, the fuel, the endless maintenance, plus the insurance (El Faro’s hull and machinery were covered for $24 million)—all these big-ticket necessities cut into their bottom lines.

And lately, cargo prices had plummeted; worldwide, there was too much capacity, an abundance of ships, and not enough customers. Hanjin, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, filed for bankruptcy in 2016, leaving seventy-eight of its laden ships wandering the oceans in search of ports that would unload their goods without guaranteed pay.

Piracy also plagued the industry. Notorious waterways like the Malacca Strait (between Malaysia and Sumatra), the South China Sea, the Gulf of Aden (the entrance to the Red Sea), and both coasts of Africa teem with pirates looking for valuable cargo or, even better, officers to ransom. In late October 2017, six crew from a German container ship approaching a Nigerian port were reported kidnapped. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that the annual cost of piracy off the coast of Somalia ran somewhere around $18 billion.

Cyberattack posed another threat. Shipping is heavily dependent on computers for tracking vessels and complex logistics. Maersk, a global shipping giant based in Denmark, found its data held for a $300 bitcoin ransom (about $1 million at the time) by malware in June 2017. The attack cost the company approximately $300 million in lost revenue.

Compounding TOTE’s plight: Puerto Rico, the company’s cash cow, was collapsing. Islanders were fleeing the bankrupt territory, reducing demand for goods from the mainland. TOTE’s direct competitor in the Puerto Rican trade, Horizon Shipping, went bankrupt in early 2015.

Further, new environmental regulations were about to render TOTE’s old steamships obsolete.

In 2011, TOTE engaged a consultant to figure out how to run the company leaner. He immediately replaced long-standing managers and staff. Other positions were deemed unnecessary and eliminated. It appeared to those who worked on the ships that TOTE wanted younger officers and the cocaine bust seemed like an excuse to clear house.

TOTE may have had an ulterior motive for firing Captain Hearn: the old shipmaster had become a troublemaker. A few years before the drug bust, TOTE replaced El Faro with a new class of vessel in Alaska to meet environmental regulations. The old steamship was tied up in a Baltimore slip. Hearn had mastered El Faro in the icy Pacific Northwest for seventeen years, then was transferred to helm her sister ship El Morro in the warm waters between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico.

In his estimation, El Morro was an inferior ship, a rust bucket, seriously neglected while working herself to death in the corrosive Caribbean run. The hot, humid climate relentlessly gnawed away at her steel, leaving rusty tears streaming down her ancient hull.

Both El Faro and El Morro were nearly forty years old but to Hearn, El Faro was an old friend, superior to his current clunker. It ate at Hearn knowing that she’d been left to rot away in a Baltimore slip.

Hearn’s fondness for his ship wasn’t rare in the maritime world. Many people who work closely with boats think of them as living beings, complete with their own personalities and peccadilloes. Even something as unwieldy as a cargo ship can have ardent admirers.

In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck wrote eloquently in 1951 of the intense bond we instinctively form with boats: “How deep this thing must be. The giver and receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest.”

Hearn felt that clench in his heart each time he thought about El Faro. He alerted TOTE to the fact that El Morro desperately needed major maintenance. He considered the ship unsafe. When he wasn’t satisfied with TOTE’s unresponsiveness, he informed the coast guard.

Shortly thereafter, because of the drug incident, he was out of a job.

Retribution against seamen for lodging safety complaints violated maritime law but that didn’t mean it never happened. And sometimes mariners fought back. A few years before Hearn’s firing, Captain John Loftus, a shipmaster with forty years of experience, was fired for calling out safety concerns aboard a vessel owned by TOTE’s competitor, Horizon Shipping. In 2014, Loftus won a million-dollar whistleblower case against the company. The federal judge assigned to the case agreed that Loftus’s concerns were warranted.

Shortly after TOTE fired Hearn, the coast guard inspected El Morro and concurred with the captain’s assessment: Much of the ship’s deck steel was wasted, which made her structurally unsound. Instead of paying for the expensive repairs required by the coast guard, TOTE scrapped her.

While Hearn was lobbying against El Morro, TOTE was building a case against the other officers to hold them accountable for the aging ship’s deterioration. The three seamen had spent decades overseeing the company’s aging vessels’ eternal battle against the sea: scraping, painting, and epoxying, washing down decks, cleaning out pumps, compiling repair lists, and hunting down parts no longer in production. Instead of a bonus, they received warning letters from TOTE claiming that they weren’t doing enough to maintain the ships. By the time the drugs were found on El Morro, TOTE had a paper trail pinning the ship’s condition on its senior officers. Termination letters followed.

Subsequent arbitration led to undisclosed settlements in favor of the mariners but that was scant comfort for those who had given so much of their lives to the sea.

TOTE put El Faro back into service on the Puerto Rican run, tag-teaming with her sister ship El Yunque. It was a temporary fix. TOTE had just ordered two new liquid natural gas–powered (LNG) ships to replace its two remaining elderly steamships. It would take several years before those new vessels were operational, so the old steamships continued chugging back and forth from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico, patched, painted, and duct-taped together.

El Faro and El Yunque were not only aging, they were taking on more cargo since the bankruptcy of competing shipping line Horizon, especially reefers—refrigerated containers that required constant tending to prevent the food inside from spoiling. It was pricey cargo, so it made money, but it strained the already thin crew.

As the ship’s air conditioning struggled against the day’s stultifying heat, Third Mate Jeremie let loose his frustration with the increasing workload. One of the reefers hadn’t gotten plugged in during loading the night before, he told Jack. Now a whole trailer full of food was spoiled.

A port mate once helped with loading in Jacksonville, he said, but that position hadn’t been filled since early September.

Jeremie was sick of the constant scrambling and lack of support. “You know what’s changed?” he said to Jack. “I could not fucking keep up with the loading. I had a goodie helping me”—a GUDE, general utility, deck, and engine unlicensed seaman trained in all areas of the ship—“He couldn't keep up. I was helping him plug in and I didn’t have time to get all the temps down.”

All the reefers got loaded on just before the ship left the dock, creating a shitstorm of problems. They had to scramble to get everything plugged in and secured to leave on time.

“We used to have a port mate and now we don’t. We had a longshoreman, now we don’t. Then we also lost our electrician. We used to have that system of checks where a guy would come down and make sure that every reefer was good. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

It was true. Lately, positions on the ships and onshore were being cut, and the remaining crew had to pick up the slack. Setting high standards was tough when the cast of characters was constantly changing.

“Your average union electrician wouldn’t even come on a ship like this,” Jack said. “It’s too much work for them. They’re not gonna work their way through jungles of lashing chains and dirt to get to a plug somewhere.”

“It’s insane down there in the holds,” agreed Jeremie. He guessed that the ship was carrying more than three dozen reefers, each one demanding someone’s time and attention during the short docking period between voyages. Second Mate Charlie Baird would lay out all the electrical cords neatly when the empty ship was heading back to Jacksonville, but his relief, Second Mate Danielle, didn’t do that.

“There’s just extension cords everywhere. It’s a mess down there. Everything is falling apart. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but it’s just not enough anymore.”

Jack nodded his head.

“I don’t think I could ever be captain here,” Jeremie said. “I’d lose my shit.”

Actually, Jack said, it’s good to be captain. “The captain and chief mate go down to their rooms and play video games,” he said.

“Right,” Jeremie said. “These guys got it all figured out.”

El Faro was poorly run, they agreed, but the unlicensed crew was okay, Jack said. He would know since he was unlicensed, too.

On the ships, officers and crew rarely talked to each other. The gulf between the two classes of mariners could be as stark as black and white. They had separate unions, separate sleeping quarters, separate mess halls, and separate lives. The officers on El Faro lived in New England or southern Florida. As members of the American Maritime Officers union, they could call their hall to get work instead of showing up in person and they usually signed long-term employment contracts.

The unlicensed crew on El Faro mostly came from tough Jacksonville neighborhoods where a seafaring job could save kids from a life in and out of prison, if they could resist becoming drug mules. Guys like LaShawn Rivera, thirty-two, who was working as a cook in the galley on El Faro on her final voyage.

Shipping had been the young man’s salvation. He’d been raised in Atlanta by his mother and stepfather, Robert Green, a bank manager who later joined the ministry. When Shawn was a teen, the family uprooted to Jacksonville. Away from his cousins and hometown, the boy got teased at school for being different, and he withdrew to the streets. Soon he started dealing drugs and spent time in juvie. Then he had a baby girl.

For a young troubled kid in Jacksonville, few job prospects lay ahead, but he was determined to take care of his child.

One day, an elder of the neighborhood told him about the merchant marine. It sounded like the way out—one of the few good jobs available to folks without a college degree. Shawn drove over to the Seafarers International Union hall and studied the job board. All those ships heading to exotic places around the world called to him. He spent all day every day at the hall until he landed a spot on a ship.

The first time he sailed abroad, he called his stepdad from London. “I’m never coming back,” he told him. Back, Pastor Green says, meant the Jacksonville streets.

In search of a specialty, Shawn took cooking courses through his union and eventually was certified to prepare food for the thirty-three men and women on El Faro, his dreadlocks loosely tied back. Working on the ships gave him a sense of pride and purpose, but it would never make him rich. He had a fiancée and then another little girl to support on his $80,000 a year salary. In his spare time, he consumed popular business and self-help books, trying to find a better way to care for his family. When he shipped out on El Faro in late September, Shawn left behind his older daughter, plus a one-year-old baby girl, his fiancée—pregnant with their second daughter—and a stack of books promising him a better future.

After sailing for forty years, Jack Jackson had met many guys like LaShawn Rivera and plenty of other unlicensed seamen who were much rougher around the edges. Trapped on a ship way out at sea, things could get ugly, sometimes violent, and you couldn’t just call the cops.

“You wouldn’t believe the fucking shit that goes on on these ships, ya know?” he said to Jeremie. “I’ve always had the bad luck of being around these crazy eccentrics. I mean, I’ve been with some real sickos, man. I mean, some real fucked-up people, man.”

Jack’s assessment was that during this tour, at least, they were sailing with some good people.

Jeremie looked out at the sweltering sea. Dazzling sunlight burned up the hazy dawn. He was happy to hear he wasn’t a sicko.

At 9:30 a.m., Davidson walked in. “What’s this silly thing telling us?” he asked, gesturing to the NHC weather alerts coming in through the SAT-C printer.

Jeremie joined him at the machine and studied the new data. “Showing the wind warning and all that stuff. We’re going into it.”

“We’re going into the storm,” Davidson said turning to face down the horizon. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

For Davidson, handling a massive cargo ship was a true test of a man’s mettle. Courage was a job requirement for taking the top post in the American merchant marine. You had to be ready to fight drunken seamen, confront recalcitrant officers, and wrangle more speed out of your chief engineer. And there was always the threat of the sea itself. That said, Davidson hadn’t yet seen much weather on El Faro. Erika was the first real storm he’d been through on that ship. And thanks to Charlie Baird, he hadn’t witnessed how El Faro handled in a full-blown tropical cyclone. Their route during Erika through the Old Bahama Channel took them south of the islands. They had forty-knot winds on their port side but were in the lee so the seas stayed calm enough that the crew had been able to work as they steamed through.

“Ship’s solid,” he told Jeremie authoritatively. “There was no shortage of swell running during that storm.”

“This ship is solid,” Jeremie agreed. “The hull itself is fine. The plant no problem. But it’s just all the associated bits and pieces, all the shit that shakes and breaks loose that’s the problem. And where the water goes,” he added prophetically.

“Just gotta keep the speed up,” said Davidson, perturbed that his third mate didn’t simply agree with him the way a third mate should. “And who knows? Maybe this low will just stall a little bit, just enough for us to duck underneath.”

Throughout the voyage, Davidson never referred to Joaquin as a hurricane. He called it a “low,” or a “storm,” or a “system,” continually downplaying Joaquin’s power, either to reassure himself or to firm his officers’ resolve.

Davidson then reminisced aloud about storms past. It was the mariner’s way of showing off experience. And balls. He’d earned his stripes: “The worst storm I was ever in was when we were crossing the Atlantic. Horrendous seas. Horrendous. We went up, then down, then down further. You’d roll a little bit into the trough, then you’d rise up a crest and come crashing down and all your cargo would break loose. The wheels on the vehicles aboard moved so much that the lashings loosened up. We were in that shit for two days. The engineers would be cleaning the fuel strainers every three hours.”

On a steam ship, keeping the fuel lines clear is critical—they’re the main arteries to the boiler. And they can get blocked. Heavy fuel oil, the kind used for older cargo ships, is thick, viscous, and dirty, rife with impurities and solids. Just like a bottle of wine that’s been stored for a while, sediment can settle at the bottom of the holding tanks and accumulate there. Sudden movement will stir up that gunk, which then clogs the lines that feed the boilers. To minimize this problem, the fuel lines are equipped with strainers—wire mesh trays that look like fryer baskets—and under normal operation, these have to be cleaned out daily.

In rough weather, with the ship tossing and turning, engineers might find themselves cleaning those strainers with greater frequency. One former officer told me that several years ago, when El Faro was in thirty-foot seas, an engineer had to clean out the strainers every three minutes. It’s arduous work, not as simple as dumping fryer oil. The whole fuel strainer assembly needs to be taken apart to access these strainers, then put back together.

Davidson recalled that during the Atlantic storm, the ship’s engineers had to slow the turbines to protect their machinery. “We could only do six knots,” he told Jeremie. “The winds were 102 knots, force 12.” (Force 12 is the maximum level on the traditional Beaufort scale, an empirical measure of wind speed as it relates to sea conditions. The scale was widely adopted in the nineteenth century as a way to standardize mariners’ observations at sea. Force 12 refers to winds greater than 73 miles per hour and greater than forty-six-foot waves. On land, force 12 would cause “devastation,” according to the scale. At sea, the air would be thick with sea spray and foam, and visibility would be nil.)

“It was like that for a solid twenty-four to thirty-six hours,” Davidson continued, “I shit you not. This for a couple of days. It was bad. It was bad. We had a gust of wind registered at 102 knots. It was the roughest storm I had ever been in.”

Jeremie wasn’t the kind of man to one-up Davidson with his own sea stories. Ships are supposed to go around storms, not through them, though sometimes they get caught in something and have to fight their way out. But thinking about Davidson’s story made him consider El Faro, a ship he knew well. She didn’t handle storms gracefully. He’d seen it with his own eyes.

“The scariest thing I ever saw was that on this ship you’re a lot closer to the water, not far above the waterline,” he said. “At night we’d get into a trough and see the white line of the waves breaking right next to us, all the way up here on the bridge.”

Davidson was too captivated by his own tale to hear Jeremie. Just thinking back on that Atlantic storm got his adrenaline going. That was real seafaring there. A wild ride. He continued spinning his yarn: “We had a rogue wave on every seventh or eighth wave in a period. On the bridge, all hell broke loose. Before we went through that thing, I would’ve said no way could the knobs of a radio to get blown off. Well, it happened.”

Hell, maybe they’d get those kinds of seas this time. But maybe not. “I think we’ll duck down south enough and we’ll speed up,” Davidson said, just a touch disappointed.

At 10:30, another NHC weather forecast came through NAVTEX on the bridge. Jack tore the sheet off the printer. “It’s moving away fast,” he said, scanning the coordinates.

“No,” said Jeremie looking at it more closely. “It’s not moving away, not yet.”

He walked over to the weather chart they’d been working on and plotted out the latest forecast. They were heading southeast, skirting the islands on the Atlantic side, and Joaquin was heading southwest, right for them.

“We’re on a collision course with it.”

At the time, the winds were only blowing 55 knots at the hurricane’s center.

When Davidson left the bridge, Jack’s mind wandered to the seafarers of long ago in their sailing ships, crossing the Atlantic, encountering a hurricane for the first time. “I wonder what the first Spanish sailors, those that survived, thought when the eye passed right over them,” he said. “They’re thinking, It’s over.”

The two men laughed. When the center of the hurricane passes above you, it’s eerily calm; often, you can see straight up to blue sky. It’s easy to think the hurricane has miraculously cleared up. In truth, the worst is yet to come as the eye wall bears down.

“I think back then,” Jeremie said, “they didn’t know the difference between a storm and a hurricane. They figured a hurricane was just a really bad storm. All those ships that sunk, the Spanish probably said, ‘sunk in bad weather.’ Probably a goddamn hurricane.”

“No one believed them,” Jack said. “The survivors would talk about hurricanes back in Spain, and people would say, Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. We know what storms are. No you don’t know what this storm’s like.”

It’s true. The first Spanish explorers in the New World had no frame of reference for such deadly tempests; there aren’t cyclonic storm systems like that in the Mediterranean or along the Spanish coast. The earliest European descriptions of hurricanes emerged a decade after Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas.

Since arriving in the region in 1492 Columbus had learned about the spiraling storms that came every July through October from the Taíno, the native people of Puerto Rico and surrounding islands. The Taíno called these storms juracánes—acts of a furious eponymous goddess, which they depicted as a disembodied head adorned with two propeller-like wings. She looked remarkably like the hurricane symbol you find on modern maps.

Columbus was sophisticated enough, or frightened enough, to use tools the Taíno had given him to predict the approach of a juracáne as it advanced toward Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. He observed cloud formations and the swell of the sea and warned all to secure the city’s main port. His small fleet sheltered in place in a bay while the Spanish governor, dismissing the warning as witchcraft, sent some twenty-six ships laden with gold to their peril.

In their attempt to reconcile the hurricane with biblical or classical references, Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century came up empty and called it the devil’s work. But actual mariners had a vested interest in understanding these unprecedented tempests, in spite of the church’s tenacious hold on apparent truth. Juan Escalante de Mendoza, captain general of the New Spain fleet, covered hurricanes and their dangers in his mariner’s guide published in 1575, writes Stuart Schwartz in his book, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina.

Mendoza called them “a fury of loose contrary wind, like a whirlwind, conceived and gathered between islands and nearby lands and created by great extremes of heat and humidity.”

This account reveals a surprisingly accurate understanding of the storm’s mechanism. Mendoza also noted signs of an imminent hurricane, including odd behaviors among birds, which are exquisitely sensitive to shifts in barometric pressure. When they sense a pressure drop, they might try to outrun it. The result is unusual species showing up in unexpected places, sometimes migrating from America to Europe to escape a hurricane. A few days before a storm, birds might go into a feeding frenzy to bulk up before winds and rains wipe out their feeding grounds. All these behaviors are easily observable.

Schwartz writes that Mendoza was “careful to mention that ‘the things that are to come, you know, sir, only God our Lord knows, and none can know them unless it is revealed by His divine goodness.’ Prediction of the weather always treaded dangerously close to the Church’s disapproval of divination.”