The Great Hurricane

August 25, 2022 – The 1780 Great Hurricane is one of the worst natural disasters in history for North Atlantic Hurricanes.  It kicked off in mid-June when a windstorm formed in the Caribbean and tore across St. Lucia and Puerto Rico.

In August, two more storms struck the Caribbean islands and New Orleans, killing dozens of people and wrecking all the ships moored in the mouth of the Mississippi River. The month of September was relatively quiet, but October 3 brought the infamous Savanna-la-Mar Hurricane, which flooded the coast of Jamaica in a deadly storm surge.

It is reported that a light rain began to fall after sunset and continued throughout the night, giving way to downpours and gusting winds by midmorning. By nightfall on October 10, the entire island was in the grip of punishing winds typical of a category five hurricane.

Since the Great Hurricane came long before the advent of modern storm tracking, the residents of the Caribbean had no warning of what was about to hit them.  In Barbados, witnesses noted that October 9 was a particularly pleasant day, distinguished only by a brilliant blood-red sky in the evening.

The Great Hurricane ravaged Barbados for most of late October 10 and early October 11. Sugar cane fields were flattened, and nearly all of the island’s buildings—including those made of stone—were blown away like houses of cards, leaving only pockmarked foundations behind.

Some 4,500 people lay dead on Barbados, but the island was only the first target in the Great Hurricane’s assault. On October 11, the storm turned northwest and passed over the island of Saint Vincent, where it ripped apart over 500 houses. Nearby Saint Lucia was hit even harder.

It finally died down after reaching the chilly waters of the North Atlantic sometime after October 18, but not before striking tiny Bermuda, where it caused mass devastation and wrecked several dozen ships.

It left much of the eastern Caribbean in utter ruin. The misery only mounted in mid-October, when another massive hurricane struck a Spanish fleet in the Gulf of Mexico and caused 2,000 fatalities. The storms crippled the Caribbean’s sugar trade, and despite an outpouring of charitable donations and government aid from Britain and elsewhere, it took several years before many of the islands recovered.