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The Great Hurricane of 1780 is considered the deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclone of all time. About 22,000 people died when the storm pounded Barbados, Martinique, and Sint Eustatius in the Lesser Antilles between October 10 and October 16 *. Thousands of deaths also occurred offshore. By contrast, the second-place storm, Hurricane Mitch, killed 11,000–18,000 in and around Honduras during the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season. The death toll from the 1780 storm alone exceeds that for any other entire decade of Atlantic hurricanes.
The hurricane struck the Caribbean in the midst of the American Revolution and took a heavy toll on the British and French fleets contesting for control of the area. The British fleet in the Leeward Islands then numbered twenty-five ships of the line with a commensurate number of support vessels ready to do combat against the French.
Impact and Storm History
The Great Hurricane apparently lingered near Barbados for two days circa 10-12 October 1780, killing 4,326 persons. Howling winds leveled practically every tree and structure on the island. Dozens of fishing boats failed to return to port, their passengers drowned. Almost everyone living on the island lost a family member in the storm.
British Admiral George Rodney arrived from New York after the storm, finding eight of twelve warships left in Barbados totally lost and most of their crews drowned. The storm also scattered and damaged most of the fleet under his command. A British scout sent to survey the damage mistakenly thought that an earthquake had accompanied the hurricane because of the great devastation.
The storm killed nine thousand on Martinique. While in the Lesser Antilles, it killed several thousand sailors of the Spanish, Dutch, British, and French fleets. The storm also took many lives on other islands, including Saint Lucia.
Four to five thousand lives were lost on Sint Eustatius. The storm then passed over the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico heading northwestward. It probably ranked as the most devastating in the history of the island at the time.
The hurricane passed east and north of Hispaniola around 16 October and apparently approached Florida on 17 October. It continued to produce strong northerly gales off Charleston, South Carolina as it passed to the east of the coast. Some sources say its center recurved (ceased to make westward progress and turned east of due north) at the Tropic of Cancer north of Haiti around 16-18 October; others, however, suggest that the storm came much closer to Florida.
The magazine Lloyd's List in London first published information about these storms in the 19 December issue and continued to print additional reports through April 1781.
Comparable Storms
Other Atlantic storms that caused very high numbers of deaths include Hurricane Mitch and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900; by comparison, Hurricane Katrina killed fewer than 2,000 people.
Trivia
Sunspots reached a record peak about 1780, the highest level for a period of several centuries. The supermaximal solar cycle, ca 1775-1785, included an unusually high number of fatal hurricanes - 3 of the top 10, 6 of the top 25 most fatal hurricanes recorded in the past four centuriesSolar activity subsequently only yielded greater numbers of sunspots, in the cycles peaking in 1958 and later, the highest general level of *.
See also
External links
- The Deadliest Atlantic Tropical Cyclones, 1492–1996, by Edward N. Rappaport and Jose Fernandez-Partagas
- Natural Disasters: Hurricanes, by Patrick J. Fitzpatrick, ABC-CLIO Inc. 1999, ISBN 1576070719
- thanksgiving sermon, preached at St. Lucia, the Sunday after the hurricane in October, 1780, on board His Majesty's Ship Vengeance, Capt. Holloway, and before Commodore Hotham.
- Use of Spanish and British documentary sources in the investigation of Atlantic hurricane incidence in historical times
- Hall, Maxwell, 1917: The Jamaica hurricane of October 3. 1780. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 46 (2), p. 221-225.
- Frequency of tropical cyclones (West Indian Hurricanes) that approach or enter the United States
- Dunbar, Transactions of the American * Society, Philadelphia, vol. 6, second series. Philadelphia, 1804.
- Blodgett L. Climatology of United States. p. 397, "The Great Hurricane of 1780."
- *
Atlantic hurricanes | 1780-1789 Atlantic hurricane seasons | Historic hurricanes in the United States
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"Great Hurricane of 1780"