White Hurricane : A Great Lakes November Gale and America's Deadliest Maritime Disaster | 
 enlarge | Author: David G. Brown
Publisher: International Marine Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $3.44
You Save: $21.51 (86%)
New (2) Used (16) from $3.44
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 838949
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 250
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 007138037X
Dewey Decimal Number: 977
UPC: 639785802099
EAN: 9780071380379
ASIN: 007138037X
Publication Date: June 27, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dust jacket if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear; pages can include limited notes and highlighting. Goodwill Industries of Greater Grand Rapids, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to changing lives through the power of work. The organization offers a wide range of employment and training programs free of charge to assist those with disabilities and other barriers to employment.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In early November 1913, not quite 19 months after the loss of the Titanic in midatlantic, an autumn gale descended on the Great Lakes. "Gales of November" - like the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in the 1970s - are a fact of life for Great Lakes mariners, but this one was anything but ordinary. Meteorologists now believe that a blast of cold polar air met a warm, moist air mass entrained in a low-pressure cell moving up from the Gulf of Mexico through the U.S. heartland, and the result was a violent weather "bomb" and the worst recorded storm in Great Lakes history. The storm lasted four days, with sustained winds as high as 75 miles per hour, freezing temperatures, white-out blizzard conditions, and mountainous seas. Though the U.S. Department of Agriculture's weather bureau (forerunner of the U.S. Weather Bureau) issued storm warnings on Friday morning, November 7, the warnings contained no hint of anything more than 50-mile-per-hour winds for Friday and Saturday. Most ships were making their final trips of the season; their captains knew that as autumn turned to winter the weather would only get worse, and then the lakes would freeze. Across the Great Lakes, hundreds of ships left port that weekend, heading directly into the jaws of what became a survival storm. On the ocean, with sea room, a well-found ship can often survive by running off before a storm until it blows out. On the Great Lakes there is never sufficient sea room. In the driving snow, ship masters could only guess where the treacherous shores lay. Ships iced up and became topheavy; some turned turtle. By Monday evening 19 ships had sunk, another two dozen were driven ashore, and at least 238 sailors had lost their lives. The city of Cleveland, buried under 22 inches of snow that drifted up to second-story eaves, and facing shortages of milk, bread, and meat, was confronting the worst natural disaster in its history. White Hurricane recreates the four-day storm with narrative intensity and factual depth. To make sense of this big, sprawling, multifaceted story, author David Brown develops it chronologically and focuses on the most exciting human dramas. One or two ships in each of the four hardest hit lakes - Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie - carry the narrative, while other disasters are reported more briefly as they occur. The featured ships are those that left in the newspaper archives and other original and secondary sources the richest, most exciting, most mysterious, and most humanly moving stories. The destructive impacts ashore - especially the privations in Cleveland - weave another narrative strand. On Lake Huron, for example, we meet the Regina, a small Canadian package freighter, as it takes on cargo Thursday at Port Huron. On Sunday, despite gale-force winds, the Regina, the Charles S. Price, and the H.A. Hawgood all leave the sheltered St. Clair River to steam north on Huron. The Regina gets as far north as Saginaw Bay before turning back. The Price and Hawgood also turn around. By dark, the Hawgood is stranded on a Canadian beach and the other ships are missing. Residents of Harbor Beach, Michigan, hear the whistle of a ship in distress just offshore, but can do nothing. The Revenue Cutter Service (forerunner to the U.S. Coast Guard) sends its only Lake Huron rescue vessel to Lake Erie to aid a vessel that, it turns out, doesn't need help. Later, the bodies of Regina's crew and the wreckage of one of her lifeboats wash ashore on the Canadian side of the lake. Intermingled are bodies from the Charles S. Price, one reportedly even wearing a Regina life jacket - leading to an enduring mystery concerning what exactly happened out there. On Lake Huron, for example, we meet the Regina, a small Canadian package freighter, as it takes on cargo Thursday at Port Huron. On Sunday, despite gale-force winds, the Regina, the Charles S. Price, and the H.A. Hawgood all leave the sheltered St. Clair River to steam north on Huron. The Regina gets as far north as Saginaw Bay before turning back. The Price and Hawgood also turn around. By dark, the Hawgood is stranded on a Canadian beach and the other ships are missing. Residents of Harbor Beach, Michigan, hear the whistle of a ship in distress just offshore, but can do nothing. The Revenue Cutter Service (forerunner to the U.S. Coast Guard) sends its only Lake Huron rescue vessel to Lake Erie to aid a vessel that, it turns out, doesn't need help. Later, the bodies of Regina's crew and the wreckage of one of her lifeboats wash ashore on the Canadian side of the lake. Intermingled are bodies from the Charles S. Price, one reportedly even wearing a Regina life jacket - leading to an enduring mystery concerning what exactly happened out there. The book's prologue and epilogue follow ripples from the long-ago storm into the recent past. In the prologue, we trace a diver's discovery of the Regina - the ship that disappeared--in the 1980s. Her overturned hull and bar-taut anchor chain provide mute testimony to the 70 years before. In the epilogue, two divers become the 239th and 240th victims of the storm in the summer of 2000, as they dive on the Regina. The U.S. Weather Bureau and the U.S. Coast Guard owe their existence in part to the Storm of 1913. Like Isaac's Storm and The Heart of the Sea, White Hurricane is both thrilling narrative and scrupulous history. This is the book that carries The Perfect Storm to the heart of America, and David Brown, a Great Lakes mariner and writer and the author of The Last Log of the Titanic, is the ideal guide.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Un-put-down-able, even for a landlubber November 7, 2008
I picked this book up on a whim, then found I couldn't stop turning the pages. Mr. Brown has a style that carries the weight of his story's detail as smoothly as one of those big freighters do her cargo on a calm sea. it is a tribute to this man's narrative skill that he drew me, neither knowledgeable nor particularly enthusiastic about his subject, and fascinated to the last page. The maps and illustrations are very helpful as well for visualizing how the structure of the ships and the geography of the lakes contributed to this set of disasters. I highly recommend this book.
 Grandpa's storm April 22, 2008
Growing up I had heard stories about this storm from my late grandfather, Hugh McLeod, captain of the "Matoa" one of the grounded and destroyed ships. In fact I have the baromoter from the Matoa and it still works perfectly.
This book really put my grandfather's stories in context of the overall storm. While I knew there were many ships sunk and lives lost (although not on his ship), I knew nothing about them. While a casual reader might find the jumping around from day to day and ship to ship a little confusing, for me it really filled in the blanks.
Ironically, four years to the day before this storm, my grandfather's two brothers died when the Marquette & Bessemer #2 went down in Lake Erie.
Could not put this down ... March 10, 2008
I loved this book and could not put it down. Not only did Brown provide a human interest story of the people involved but he provided insight into the state of weather prediction of the time. The book was full of interesting information. I could go on but you simply have to read it. I disagree with the reader who suggested he needed a central focus. The storm was the central focus.
Detailed and Interesting March 1, 2008
This is a great book for someone with an interest in the Great Lakes, meteorology or ship wrecks. It is a detailed chronological account of a monster storm that hasn't been matched in the Great Lakes for nearly a hundred years. It paints a pretty good picture of what it would have been like to have been on a ship during the storm. There are indexed pictures of each of the major ships involved, but I wish there were weather maps to show what was going on - it's hard to follow fronts and cells in your head when the story jumps around between the lakes.
A Must for Boaters and Residents Along the Great Lakes December 10, 2007
Residents of the Great Lakes region and boaters of all regions will find this book fascinating. The Great Lakes are one of North America's greatest treasures. Their beauty comes not just from their size but from their amazing diversity. From the rocky shores of Lake Superior to Michigan's majestic dunes, to the locks on the St Laurence Seaway these fresh water seas are an endless source of amazing sites and destinations.
From their creation to the present day, the constantly changing weather of the Midwest can change these bodies of water from nearly glass smooth to a source of death and destruction within hours. This is never truer than in the month of November. If you wish a greater understanding of the lakes and their weather this book is for you.
Just as one takes the grocer, and the steel in their car for granted; the lakes are often overlooked by many Americas. Although their commercial use has declined in recent years, these vital waterways provide America with her grain, steel and other bulk commodities. If you enjoy tales of common men facing the uncommon, the stories of the men that made a living on the lakes and survived the Great Storm of 1913 should not be overlooked.
|
|
|
