Cape & Islands News

Category 3 Hurricane Hit Pilgrims in 1635

Mammoth hurricane pounded colonial villages, swept Cape, coast

The winds whipped up to 130 mph, snapping pine trees like Pick-up- Stix and blowing houses into oblivion. A surge of water, 21 feet high at its crest, engulfed victims as they desperately scurried for higher ground.

The merciless storm, pounding the coast for hours with torrential sheets of rain, was like nothing ever seen before. One observer predicted the damage would linger for decades.

This wasn’t New Orleans in August 2005. 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.

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 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... Read the rest of this Telegram & Gazette story here, and comment below.
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Two storms: a comparison 

1635; The Great Colonial Hurricane sweeps across southern New England on a path west of Providence, Rhode Island, and Plymouth, Massachusetts. Narragansett Bay floods, drowning 17 Native Americans; tree damage is severe throughout southeastern Massachusetts. Governor William Bradford described the storm: "such a mighty storm of wind and rain as none living in these parts, either English or Indian ever saw. ...It blew down sundry houses and uncovered others. ...It blew down many hundred thousands of trees turning up the stronger by the roots and breaking the higher pine trees off in the middle." The local crops, along with the forests and many local structures like the Aptucxet trading post in Bourne on the southwest corner of Cape Cod, suffered major damage. Bradford, in his account, predicted signs of the damage would endure into the next century.
1938: September 21: A devastating hurricane drives through the northeastern United States. Residents are unprepared for the storm and the flooding it brings. Over 600 people are killed, most by drowning. Another hundred are never found. Property damage is estimated at $4.7 billion in today's dollars with over 8,000 homes are destroyed, and 6,000 boats wrecked or damaged. Yet the hurricane does not receive much media attention; Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler in Europe dominated headlines before and after the storm as Germany marched into Czechoslovakia beginning World War 2. 

Read these other cctoday stories about the 1938 hurricane here.