40 NaUonal Geographic Magazine. 



THE GREAT STORM OFF THE ATLANTIC COAST OF 

 THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 11th-14th, 1888. 



By Everett Hayden, 



In charge of the division of Marine Meteorology, Hydrographic Oifice, Navy Dept. 



Inteoduction. 



The history of a great ocean storm cannot be written with 

 any completeness until a long interval of time has elapsed, when 

 the meteorological observations taken on board hundreds of 

 vessels of every nationality, scattered over the broad expanse of 

 ocean, and bound, many of them, for far distant ports, can be 

 gathered together, compared, and, where observations seem dis- 

 cordant, rigidly analyzed and the best data selected. It is only 

 when based upon such a foundation that the story can fully 

 deserve the title of history, and not romance, fact and not hypo- 

 thesis. At best, there must be wide areas where the absence of 

 vessels will forever leave some blank pages in this history, while 

 elsewhere, along the great highways of ocean traffic, the data are 

 absolutely complete. Last August a tropical hurricane of ter- 

 rific violence swept in toward our coast from between Bermuda 

 and the Bahamas, curved to the northward off Hatteras, and 

 continued its destructive course past the Grand Banks toward 

 northern Europe; hundreds of reports from masters of vessels 

 enabled us accurately to plot its track, a great pai'abolic curve 

 tangent to St. Thomas, Hatteras, Cape Race, and the northern 

 coast of Norway. Six months later a report forwarded by the 

 British Meteorogical Office, from a vessel homeward bound from 

 the Equator, indicated that it originated far to the eastward, off 

 the coast of Africa, and only the other day the log of a ship 

 which arrived at New York, March 30th, from Calcutta, supplied 

 data by means of which the storm track can be traced still more 

 accurately, westward of the Cape Verde islands. Not only that, 

 but this same vessel on the 11th of March was about 500 miles 

 to the eastward of Bermuda, and, while the great storm was 

 raging between Hatteras and Sandy Hook, was traversing a 

 region to the northeastward of Bermuda from which our records 

 are as yet very incomplete. It will thus be clearly understood 

 that while the most earnest efforts have been made, not only to 



