re: How did they track hurricanes in the 1900s?

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"Isaac's Storm."

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On Wednesday, September 5, 1900, the Galveston Daily News ran a tiny, 27-word squib in its weather section: A tropical disturbance was moving over western Cuba and heading for the south Florida coast. The notice was datelined “Washington, D.C.,” September 4. It was simply signed “Moore.” That was Willis Moore, director of the United States Weather Bureau.

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Accurate long-range tracking of hurricanes was hard to come by in 1900. But Moore’s notice was so wrong—about the nature of the storm and its direction—that it seems to suggest both meteorology and international communications remained in a primitive state. Nobody, one might assume, knew anything in advance about the hurricane’s strength or track.

But that’s far from the truth. As early as Monday, September 3, the storm was being observed by meteorologists in Cuba. They were perhaps the best in the world at assessing and predicting the tracks of hurricanes, and they knew the storm had grown into an unmistakably violent one headed for the Texas Gulf Coast. Why didn’t the U.S. Weather Bureau know that? The grim answer to that question had to do with a highly problematic relationship between the United States and Cuba following the Spanish-American War.

Cuban revolutionaries, assisted by the United States, had won independence from Spain in 1898. Yet in September 1900, the U.S. government still administered the island, and within the U.S. Weather Bureau, which had stations in the Caribbean, resentment and disdain for Cuban forecasting had become entrenched.

Meteorology, like much other science in Cuba, was the province of Jesuit priests. The Belen Observatory, founded by Father Benito Viñes in Havana in 1858, was perhaps the most advanced in the world. An extension of a Jesuit preparatory school, the observatory benefited from the long Jesuitical tradition of inquiry, experimentation, publishing and teaching.

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AT THE U.S. WEATHER BUREAU in Washington, D.C., director Willis Moore made squelching Cuban forecasting one of the most important reforms he brought to the office. The bureau had been established as part of the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps in 1870; when Moore took it over in 1895, he was determined to make it a model of efficiency. Perhaps most important, he tightened the rules concerning local forecasting—especially regarding storm warnings. Moore believed local weathermen had been over-warning the public. There was a tendency to sow panic. It created an unhappy impression that the bureau was not fully in control. From now on, all storm warnings would come from Moore at his hub in Washington. The local weathermen would cable regular temperature, atmosphere and wind condition reports to the central office, where clerks aggregated the morning data into a national weather map, which was then telegraphed back to each station. It was for Washington, not for local weathermen, to determine what was going on locally.

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To the Americans, Cuban forecasts seemed hysterical, despite their extraordinary history of accuracy. The superstitious lore of a backward people, the bureau believed, lacked the Yankee grit and know-how that was making America a great leader on the world stage.

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And there was yet another problem with the Cuban weathermen. The Havana observatory, Stockman claimed, had been secretly piggybacking on U.S. reports. Agents in the bureau’s New Orleans station nabbed copies of the daily weather maps coming out of Washington, then sent the U.S. maps by undersea telegraph to Havana. Such shifty shenanigans allowed the Cubans, as Dunwoody put it, “to compete with this service.”

In other words, the Cubans never got things right, but when they did, it was because they stole U.S. data. Having pinched good reports, the Cuban forecasters whipped a silly, uneducated, overemotional population into frenzy with overblown warnings of monster storms.

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IN LATE AUGUST 1900, Moore decided to deal once and for all with the Cuban annoyances. Hurricane season was well underway. This was the perfect time, Moore calculated, to shut down all communication between Cuban weathermen and the people of the United States. 

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But Moore went further and banned direct communication between the U.S. Weather Bureau’s office in Havana and the office in New Orleans. Havana would report directly to Washington, and Washington would decide what information to give New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

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