As a kid, author Eric Jay Dolin wanted to become the next Jacque Cousteau when he grew up. Today the Marblehead, Massachusetts, historian lives about a quarter of a mile from the sea, and said he still has that strong connection to the ocean.
Dolin's latest book is "A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes."
One of the early hurricanes in the book that affected Massachusetts was called the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.
Eric Jay Dolin, author: In August of 1635, this massive hurricane came roaring in to the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, destroyed numerous buildings, killed quite a few people, sent many boats to the bottom of the ocean.
And there's one that I talk about, which was a vessel called the Watch and Wait — traveling from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to Marblehead — the boat crashed onto an uninhabited island off of Cape Ann.
Only two people on board — Anthony Thacher and his wife — survived.
They managed to live on that uninhabited island for five days, nearly naked, before a boat came by and pick them up, brought them back to the shore.
And in compensation for his suffering, because he lost four of his children on that ship, the Massachusetts legislature actually gave Anthony Thacher that island. And it's known as Thacher Island today, and it's part of Rockport, Massachusetts.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: So much has evolved over the last 385 years since then, the least technical of which might be most simply, how hurricanes — like Sandy in 2012 and others — are named. Why don't we have more "Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635" names nowadays?
Well, there are a lot of hurricanes that had "great" — they were just named the area where they hit usually.
But then, in the 1950s, the weather bureau decided to start naming hurricanes after women because that had been informally done in the Pacific theater during WWII. They were trying to come up with an easy way to identify different hurricanes, so people didn't become confused about which hurricane they were talking about, especially when there were many hitting the shore in a particular year.
And there were some protests, but the weather bureau went ahead and made that official in 1956.
Over the years, a number of people got more upset, especially when the women's movement took off.
And this one woman, Roxcy Bolton, from Florida, decided that it was downright inappropriate to have hurricanes, such destructive forces, named after women. She argued that the Weather Service should name them maybe "himicanes," or name them after birds or politicians.
But she didn't gain any traction until Jimmy Carter came into office and appointed Juanita Kreps as the secretary of commerce. And she agreed with Roxcy Bolton — and finally, in 1979, they decided to start naming hurricanes after women and men. And that's the methodology that we have today.
And as people who have been paying attention to hurricanes in recent years will know that this past year we blew right through the 21 male and female names we had and went into the Greek alphabet and actually went further into the Greek alphabet than we ever had before.
As a historian, what are some of the things that you thought were startling in how we manage our reactions to this kind of force of nature?
Well, historically, going back before the roughly the 1800s or maybe even the late 1800s, many people just viewed hurricanes as something that God brought on. And it wasn't until later that we got a better handle on this natural phenomenon. But the single feature of a hurricane that causes the most distress, upset and leaves the most lasting memory, of course, is the death toll. And when hurricanes are coming upon an area of shore and people have no idea, they have no way to forecast that the hurricane was coming, oftentimes death tolls were much greater.
But even when we started to get a handle on forecasting hurricanes, there were still surprises. In the Galveston hurricane of 1900 still stands as the most deadly natural disaster in American history. At least 6,000, maybe as many as 8 or 10,000 people, died. And when you have that amount of carnage and destruction, not only destroying all of Galveston, but killing so many people, it resonates as a catastrophe that becomes a mark in history that we just can't forget.
So as the coastal areas have become more heavily populated, there were some larger and larger death tolls. But that's starting to go down again, with the exception of Katrina in 2005, because we do have a better warning system. But still, if a major hurricane again hits Miami or New Orleans or New York City, there is going to be widespread devastation, no matter how good the warnings are.
