The principle that if, in the northern hemisphere, you stand with your back to the wind, low pressure is to your left, was not enunciated as Buys Ballot's Law until 1857. Long before that, however, sailors had developed empirical rules for ships caught in the vicinity of hurricanes - principles which allowed them to proceed with reasonable confidence towards much calmer waters. "Reid's Law of Storms" was one such set of principles.
It began in the 1820s in Connecticut. In the aftermath of a vicious storm a man called William Redfield, riding on horseback through the ravaged landscape, noticed something quite unusual: in north Connecticut, the trees felled by the storm had fallen in a direction exactly opposite to that of the toppled trees he had seen on his journey farther south.
The experience prompted Redfield to gather information about storms. He collected fragments of detail from newspapers, letters and other sources, and his paper "On the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast", published in the American Journal of Science in 1831, quickly became a classic of meteorology. His conclusion was that "storms exhibit all the characteristics of a great whirlwind".
Redfield's research attracted the attention of a Scottish naval officer called William Reid, then serving in Barbados, and it was this Col Reid, building on Redfield's work, who produced the Law of Storms.
The first task facing a vessel in danger from a hurricane was to assess the likely position of the ship relative to the storm centre, and also the direction of movement of the storm. Both could be approximated by observing the direction of the wind at successive times two or three hours apart, and noting how it changed. The Law of Storms then identified a number of important areas in the vicinity of the hurricane.
The "Navigable Semicircle" was the half of the storm on the equator side of its line of movement: in the case of a typical young North Atlantic hurricane moving north-eastwards, the navigable semicircle was the south-eastern half of the storm. It was a relatively safe area because, bearing in mind the anticlockwise swirl of wind and the north-eastward movement of the storm, a ship which "ran with the wind" would soon be blown out of harm's way.
The "Dangerous Quadrant" on the other hand was, in the above example, the sector from north-west to north-east. A ship in this zone could be carried around by the strong winds into the direct path of the advancing centre. The only sound advice was to sail close to the wind, and make as much headway in the opposite direction as was possible.