The Storms of November...

The Storms of November

The Ganges, the Pacific, and Atlanta in the Tempests of the autumn.

Three storms - all destructive, and all in November, lay waste to their hosts. The Ganges floods, Hermann Mellville stirs the Pacific, and Sherman burns Atlanta!

"The gales of November" were the winds which singer Gordon Lightfoot wrote of as having doomed the coal freighter, S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald. But let us now take a look at three other storms which occurred on dates within a week of each other during the month of November:

The Ganges Floods

"Then we heard a roar like it was the end of the world and the tidal wave was on us. The roof of the house was ripped loose. I grabbed my youngest son. The roof was floating and I grabbed a tree and held on for hours. I was freezing from the rain. Children would be swept by, screaming for help. I tried to grab on to them, and tie them to me, but the current was too strong. They were swept away. I felt helpless."

This was the memory of Nomhan Das a costal villager who lived on the coast of Ganges River Delta of the harrowing night of November 12, 1970. On that evening, a major cyclone crashed down upon the Delta of the Ganges River in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The storm winds reached up to 150 mph, and produced a tidal wave estimated to be fifty feet high. By dawn, the waters had receded sufficiently to allow Nohoman Das and his family to reach dry land safely. But vast numbers of others were not so lucky. The death toll estimates ranged between 300 and 500,000, most of them struck down, or washed out to sea by the initial wave. But many more of those deaths occurred during subsequent weeks as a result of outbreaks of typhoid and cholera.

Melville and Moby Dick

Elsewhere in time, in New York, the mind of an American writer conjured up a storm on the Sea of Japan:

"It is in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepytown. Towards the evening of that day, the "Pequod" was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightening, that showed the disabled mast fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for it's after sport."

This was how the American writer Herman Melville described a typhoon on the high seas in his classic novel, "Moby Dick", published on November 14, 1851 by Harper and Brothers in New York City. Melville's tale of the young Ishmael's adventure on the whaling ship, "the Pequod", and of Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the great white whale of the novel's name has long since come to be recognized as one of the great classics of American literature, capturing as it did the adventure as well as the perils of life on the great oceans of the world. But at the time of it's debut, it was very cooly received, and Melville receieved little acclaim for it in his lifetime.

Thirteen years later in the state of Georgia, a very different, but no less damaging kind of storm was beginning it's fabled path of destruction:

 

Sherman Burns Atlanta

"A grand and awful spectacle is presented to the beholder in this beautiful city now in flames.....The heaven is one expanse of lurid fire; the air is filled with flying, burning cinders; buildings covering two hundred acres are in ruins or in flames; every instant there is the sharp detonation or the smotheredbooming sound of exploding shells and powder concealed in the buildings, and then the sparks and flames shoot away up..... scattering cinders far and wide."

So wrote Union Army soldier George Ward Nichols in his book "The Story of the Great March" in remembering the burning of the city of Atlanta which took place between November 14 and 16 in 1864. Having captured the city two months earlier, General William T. Sherman elected to march the bulk of his army three hundred miles east to the city of Savannah. Before departing, he ordered the burning of the industrial section of the city in order to keep it from being used by the Confederacy again. In his wake of his army and it's trek all the way to the Atlantic coast, he would leave a wide path of destruction as his army lived off the land, commandeering everything it needed and destroying everything else, as an example to break the back of southern resistance once and for all. As he wrote to his commander, General U.S. Grant, his march through the very heart of Georgia would be "proof positive that the North can prevail." A popular Union song put the matter a good deal more colorfully:

"Marching Through Georgia.....

""Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!..... So the saucy rebels said, -- and 'twas a handsome boast...... Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon on a host,... While we were marching through Georgia!!
Hurrah, hurrah! we bring the jubilee! ....... Hurrah, hurrah! the flag that makes you free!.... So we sung the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,....... While we were marching through Georgia."

Hence "the gales of November" that Gordon Lightfoot would describe in his song about the Edmund Fitzgerald came together in different ways to exact a terrible price on mankind.

Sources:

"Darkest Hours - A Narrative Encyclopedia of Disasters from Ancient Times to the Present." - Jay Robert Nash, Pocket Books, 1977.

"Moby Dick" by Hermann Melville

"The Story of the Great March" - George Ward Nichols, Corner House Publishers, 1972.