50 National Geograjpliic Magazine. 



the instruments thenaselves vary greatly in quality, and while 

 some of them may have been compared with standards very 

 recently, there are others whose errors ai-e only approximately 

 Icnown. Moreover, when a vessel is pitching and rolling in a 

 storm at sea, in imminent danger of foundering, it is, of course, 

 impossible to set the vernier of the barometer scale and read oJ0f 

 the height of the mercury with very great precision. It will 

 thus be readily understood that the many hundreds of observa- 

 tions carefully taken and recorded for the Hydrographic Office 

 by masters of vessels are necessarily more or less discordant, 

 although the results obtained rest on the averages of so many 

 reports that the probable error is always very small. An exhaus- 

 tive study of reports from vessels at various positions along the 

 coast, from the Straits of Florida to Sandy Hook, together with 

 the records of the coast stations of the U. S. Signal Service, indi- 

 cates a continuous eastward movement of the trough of low bar- 

 ometer during the night, accompanied by a rapid deepening of 

 the depression. All along the coast we have the same sequence 

 of phenomena, in greater or less intensity, according to the lati- 

 tude of the vessel, as we noticed here in Washington that Sun- 

 day afternoon, when the warm southeasterly wind, with rain, 

 died out, and after a short pause a cold northwesterly gale swept 

 through the city, piling up the snow in heavy drifts, with trains 

 belated or blockaded, and telegraphic communication cut off 

 almost entirely with the outer world. It was a wild, stormy 

 night ashore, but it was ten-fold more so off the coast, where the 

 lights at Hatteras, Currituck, Assateague, Barnegat, and Sandy 

 Hook mark the outline of one of the most dangerous coasts the 

 navigator has to guard against. To bring the scene vividly 

 before the mind would requii'e far more time than I have at my 

 disposal, and I can only regret that I cannot quote a few reports 

 to give some idea of the violence of the storm. 



By means of a careful comparison of many reports, it is evident 

 that although the general trough-like form of the storm remained, 

 yet another secondary storm center, and one of very great energy, 

 formed off shore, north of Hatteras, as soon as the line had 

 passed the coast. It was this center, fully equal to a tropical hur- 

 ricane in violence, and rendered still more dangerous by freezing 

 weather and blinding snow, which raged with such fury off Sandy 

 Hook and Block Island for two days, — days likely to be long mem- 

 orable along the coast. Its long continuance was probably due to 



