The Secret Messages in Ancient Storms
“Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!”
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610-1611
One Sunday in August 1635, the Mather family from England was finally about to reach the New World when a furious storm caught the ship and its crew by surprise. The cables anchoring the boat near a group of islands, 6 miles off the New England coast, reportedly snapped, and the vessel with its dozens of passengers hurtled toward a rocky shore. Fortunately, the winds turned at the last minute and steered the ship in another direction, their son Increase Mather would later write.
But others weren’t so lucky. According to colony governors in what are now Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts, the storm drove other ships aground, toppled sundry houses, blew down hundreds of thousands of trees, and caused the sea to swell by up to 20 feet. “[It] was such a mighty storm of wind and rain,” the governor of Plymouth Plantation wrote, “as none living in these parts … ever saw.”
Indeed, contemporary simulations suggest the Great Colonial Hurricane was a Category 3.5 storm, probably the strongest in recorded eastern New England history. (For reference, Sandy, which killed nearly 150 people and caused some $65 billion in damage in the United States, was technically no longer even a hurricane when it made landfall in the New York metro area in 2012.)
Scientists know about the Great Colonial Hurricane’s impact not only from written reports but curiously, also from hidden, physical impressions the long-ago storm left on the landscape.
