It's August 24th and a category III hurricane that will be recorded in American history is brushing the American coast, preparing to make a devastating landfall with a storm surge of up to 20 feet. It isn't named Laura or Katrina... In fact this hurricane not only predates our naming system, it predates common use of the word hurricane. Today we simply call it the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.

As the storm slides past Jamestown over the Atlantic the settlers make little note of its outerbands dumping rain on them; further north, in the Narragansett Bay area, it would not be so kind. The settlers of Massachusetts Bay would be some of the first English citizens to experience a hurricane. The farms were leveled and crops destroyed. At least 46 people would die. Just offshore was Cotton Mather's grandfather, the Rev. Richard Mather, who was just arriving from England aboard the James. She had sailed with the Angel Gabriel, a ship first commissioned for Walter Raleigh's last expedition in 1617. The Angel Gabriel had sought safe harbor, unloading most passengers and then weighing anchor in Pemaquid Bay to ride out the storm. By the end of the storm, she had sank and all remaining passengers plus crew were lost to the sea. John Cogswell, patriarch of the Ipswich Cogswell's and a founder of that town, was one of several (later) prominant New Englanders who disembarked from the Angel Gabriel before she sank. Her companion ship James nearly suffered the same fate and with a full ship of over 100 souls, being directly towards a rock outcropping that would shread the decks after her anchor lines broke. She was saved from certain destruction by a reversing wind just in time. With her storm sail she limped to safe harbor in Boston, narrowly avoiding being thrown into the shoreline by the shift in winds and finally arriving with tattered sails. Anthony Thatcher was on yet another vessel, the Watch and Wait, that was caught in the storm while traveling from England to Massachusetts. That ship would be smashed to bits on the rocks at Cape Ann, Thatcher clinging to a rock before being swept away. He and his wife would be found two days later on an island now called Thatcher's Island, and this is why. The rest of his family - all of their children - would be among the 21 lives lost in the wreck of the Watch and Wait.

Mather would record in his diary of the change in winds;

When news was brought to us in the gun room that the danger was past, oh how our hearts did then relent and melt within us! And how we burst into tears of joy amongst ourselves, in love onto our gracious God, and admiration of his kindness in granting to his poor servants such an extraordinary and miraculous deliverance. His holy name be blessed...

William Bradford, who was at Plymoth Plantation, would record the severity of the storm;

[the hurricane] was such a mighty storm of wind and rain as none living in these parts, ever saw

And John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, would make similar recordings.

However life went on. The founder of Rhode Island, William Rogers, would be banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony only 45 days (or so) after the storm hit. More immediately concerning was the violence that had come to Mass Bay only three weeks earlier when Brookfield was attacked in a native raid. Violence continued over the next few weeks and a native powwow had predicted the English dead from the storm would equal the number of trees "blown down in the woods." Days later, being caught in an ambush, 21 were killed. It was 57 in the next ambush, about two weeks after the storm - life had not stopped for the hurricane.

This certainly isn't the only time hurricanes happened or were referenced. We have records of hurricanes starting with Colombus, who learned the signs from the Taino - the word "hurricane" is derived from their Hurican, the god of evil - and he moved ships to safe harbor before a storm that decimated the Caribbean settlements. His companions didn't listen, set sail, and lost some 500 men to the sea.

Another fateful hurricane hit Florida in the mid 1500s just as the forces from Fort Caroline, a French settlement, were moving to attack the Spanish at St Augustine (who had built that base specifically to control/kick the French out of La Florida). The large French fleet, which would likely have burned St Augustine, was caught in a hurricane and destroyed. Those that made it to shore were captured by Spanish soldiers sent to attack Ft Caroline by land. After burning the fort, the found the shipwrecked Frenchmen wandering back towards it, so they killed them all. The hurricane is probably why St Augustine, and not Fort Caroline, is the oldest existing settlement in the current US. The Spanish had learned the value of avoiding the storms over the previous 50 years but from hard lessons of losing ships and men on the gulf coast.

Much more can be said on colonial hurricanes particularly as records became more abundant through the 18th and 19th centuries, but there wasn't a whole lot they could do to prepare in colonial days. Often there was just a path of destruction needing to be rebuilt and the colonists simply had little choice but to do just that.

I imagine there could be a variety of answers here, but maybe telling the story of St. Joseph, Florida will help some.

St. Joseph doesn't exist any more, but at one point it was a prosperous port town. Founded in 1836, as an alternative to the shallow port in Apalachicola, Florida, the deeper waters in St. Joseph's Bay would allow for better transportation of cotton. A new steam locomotive powered railroad was also run from St. Joe to the Apalachicola River so that cotton could be transported quickly and efficiently. (Interesting side note: Railroads predate locomotives by at least a century!) This steam locomotive was among the first of its kind in the US, reportedly only the third one, to give you an idea as to how important this new port city was believed to be by investors.

Within just a few years as many as 5,000 people moved to St. Joseph, and it looked like it might grow to be one of the dominant port cities in the Gulf within a few more years. Unfortunately for the residents, St. Joseph was plagued by natural disasters. Massive storms smashed into the port city in 1837 and 1839. These were probably the Apalachicola Bay Storm and Storm 3 of the 1839 hurricane season. The main damage these storms caused was wrecking the ships in the bay by driving them ashore or battering them against the wharf, and the damage of the wharf. A wood frame or log cabin style house was not difficult to rebuild and was quite sturdy, and most people in this era and place would have been able to build them themselves. Before most casual carpenters understood the math behind efficient load bearing and balloon-style framing, even a simple home was probably vastly over-engineered to the point that it would withstand all but the worst hurricane force winds. Windows and roofing tiles might still fly off, but the structure would be safe shelter and easy to fix. But large cargo boats and deep water docks required skilled labor, time, and money. The loss of the shipping at this point caused the city to stagger, but it could have recovered.

Unfortunately, in 1841 Yellow Fever devastated St. Joseph, killing hundreds, maybe more, and and by the end of the year fewer than 500 people remained, most having fled the fever and loss of business. Then on September 14, at sundown, the Late Gale of St. Joseph struck St. Joseph directly, completely destroying the wharf and docks. This was apparently the death knell for the city, and it never recovered. A hurricane in 1844 finished the ruins of the briefly prosperous town off, and it slowly disappeared into the woods and surf. The 1844 hurricane brought with it storm surge, or tidal wave, as it was called at the time, that washed much of the remaining town away, undermined buildings, and even knocked down brick walls.

So why didn't anyone know these storms were coming and evacuate? Well, in the 1830's and 40's the only way to get advance notice of a storm's approach was from something that could move faster than a hurricane. However, hurricanes can move from 10-20 miles an hour at this latitude, and the fastest sailing ships of the era would have traveled barely faster than that. Telegram would work, but the first telegram in the United States was not sent until 1844, and it was far from frontier Florida.

So there was no way to get truly advanced notice as we think of it, but perhaps some advance notice could be had with barometric readings. Barometers, after all, were in use as early as the late 1600's! However, they were not popular in the United States until the 1840's, with the first patent being recorded in 1845. Prior to that they were likely curiosities or surveying tools, like the one Thomas Jefferson used to measure altitudes of mountains. It wasn't even until the 1860's that barometers were used to forecast weather, and later in the 1870's that the measurements were understood well enough to make predictions. So while there may have been a barometer in St. Joseph, no one used it to detect an approaching hurricane.

This leaves only visual clues, which could include the color of the sky, behavior of animals, and how bad the storm looked from where you were standing. However, these are very poor indicators of a hurricane's strength, as it is difficult or impossible to see through the outer bands and observe how fast the eye-wall is rotating until it is upon you. It would have been hard to tell a strong storm apart from a massive hurricane until it was far too late. With no aerial or satellite observations, many people would not have understood that a hurricane even rotated, what its shape was, or what made them so much worse than a regular storm.

In short, the people in the frontier like the Florida panhandle might not have any warning for a hurricane, and there wasn't much they could do about it or did do about it. There was no real sense of a hurricane season because in the United States there was national or even state wide system for tracking storms, so unless you read about one in a newspaper you might never experience one or understand that they happen at particular times of year. On average, most towns only get a major hurricane impact once every few years at most, and in frontier towns turnover of residents can be very fast, leading to a short memory for the inhabitants. A port town like St. Joseph might construct a sea wall or wharf to keep tides and other typical surges at bay, but that was a costly and time consuming endeavor unlikely to have been undertaken in a new frontier town. Building one to withstand a hurricane might seem like a waste of money if you hadn't already been hit by one, and it still had to seem worth it to invest in rather than just moving elsewhere.

Eventually in the 1870's a storm watching system is set up using telegram signals and barometric readings, but it is not terribly reliable for decades. That said, it was better than nothing.