I like reading stuff like this.
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Published: November 25, 2006 12:00 am

Clues found to area's most devastating
hurricane

Staff and wire reports
Daily News of Newburyport

NEWBURYPORT - The winds whipped up to
130 mph, snapping pine trees like toothpicks
and blowing houses into oblivion. A surge of
water, 21 feet high at its crest, shipwrecked
an Amesbury man and his family on the rocky
coast of Maine.

The merciless storm, pounding the coast for
hours with torrential sheets of rain, was like
nothing ever seen before.

This was New England in August 1635, battered
by what was later dubbed "The Great Colonial
Hurricane" - the first major storm suffered by
the first North American settlers, just 14 years
after the initial Thanksgiving celebration in
Plymouth Colony.

Even today, its frightening characteristics are
drawing the attention of hurricane experts.
After exhaustive research, they believe the
storm of 371 years ago holds some insight -
and warning - for the area.

At the time, the only English settlement in
Greater Newburyport was a small village at
Newbury's lower green, and it was only two
months old. A decaying cellar hole stood in
what is now downtown Newburyport's
waterfront, the remains of a trading or
fishing post built by Walter "Great Watt"
Bagnall, who had been killed by Indians
four years earlier.

Amesbury was still unsettled by the English,
but the storm would play a major role in the
fate of its first settlers and one of Greater
Newburyport's founding families, the Baileys.

John Winthrop, head of the Massachusetts
Bay colony, recalled in his Aug. 16, 1635,
entry that the winds were kicking up a full
week before the hurricane.

Once it did arrive, the hurricane "blew with
such violence, with abundance of rain, that
it blew down many hundreds of trees,
overthrew some houses, and drove the ships
from their anchors," Winthrop wrote. He
detailed the deaths of eight American Indians
sucked under the rising water while "flying
from their wigwams."

Once the weather cleared and the sun rose
again, the few thousand residents of Plymouth
and Massachusetts Bay colonies were left to
rebuild and recover from a hurricane as
powerful as 1938's killer Long Island Express.
The 20th century hurricane killed 700 people,
including 600 in New England, and left 63,000
homeless.

"The settlers easily could have packed up and
gone home," said Nicholas K. Coch, a professor
of geology at Queens College and one of the
nation's foremost hurricane experts. "It was
an extraordinary event, a major hurricane, and
nearly knocked out British culture in America."

Coch has used information that he collected
from detailed colonial journals to reconstruct
the great hurricane. The 371-year-old data
was brought to Brian Jarvinen at the National
Hurricane Center, where it was interpreted
using the SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland
Surges from Hurricanes) computer model.

The result: The hurricane likely tracked
farther west than was long thought, passing
over uninhabited easternmost Long Island
efore moving north into New England. Once
clear of the colonies, it veered off into the
Atlantic.

Coch said the pioneers from across the Atlantic
likely endured a Category 3 hurricane, moving
faster than 30 mph, with maximum winds of
130 mph and a very high storm surge - 21 feet
at Buzzards Bay and 14 feet at Providence.
Reports at the time said 17 American Indians
were drowned, while others scaled trees to
find refuge.

The storm was moving about three times as
fast as the typical southern hurricane, and
arrived in full bluster. Although it struck
nearly four centuries ago, very specific details
about the first recorded hurricane in North
America were provided by the local leaders'
writings.

"The documentation was better than any
hurricane until the mid-1800s," Coch said.
"That's a story in itself."

As the hurricane approached, John Bailey
was heading to America with his son, John,
and perhaps his daughter, Johanna, on board
the ship Angel Gabriel. When the storm struck,
the ship was anchored in Pemaquid, Maine,
where it was utterly destroyed.

Bailey and other passengers - among them the
Blaisdells, one of Salisbury's founding families
- lost almost everything. Bailey and his children
moved from place to place for two years, before
finally settling down in what is now Amesbury.
They built their house where the Powow River
drains into the Merrimack River, in the vicinity
of the intersection of Merrimac and Main streets.

Bailey had planned to establish a home before
sending for his wife to come over, but she was
so traumatized by his account of the hurricane
that she refused to come. He would never see
her again, despite the fact that Town Meeting
voters ordered him in 1650 to force her to join
him in America.

So brutal was the storm that 50 years later,
Increase Mather wrote simply, "I have not
heard of any storm more dismal than the
great hurricane which was in August 1635."
His father, the Rev. Richard Mather, was
aboard one of the ships nearly sunk at sea
by the ferocious weather - but he survived,
along with about 100 other passengers.

Coch said the most interesting news about
the hurricane is that storms can often follow
the same track. And just a minuscule shift of
a storm's movement in the area of North
Carolina - "a fraction of a degree" - could
send a hurricane up through Providence
and right into Boston, the professor said.

"We could have a catastrophic situation
with national repercussions," Coch said.
"If the track of a future moves 25 miles to
the west of the 'Colonial Hurricane,' the
angerous right side could pass right over
Boston and Providence. That's why we
study old hurricanes in the Northeast."

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