The violent storms familiar to us in this part of the world as hurricanes first came to the notice of Europeans from the experiences of Christopher Columbus on his several voyages to the New World.
The word itself is thought to be native to the Caribbean region, derived from huracan, or "evil spirit", and the phenomenon was seen as the work of the "god of all evil", who would send these terrifying winds as a punishment whenever he was angry. But the widespread nature of such storms soon became apparent. "For my part," wrote the pirate and adventurer William Dampier in 1687, "I know of no difference between a Hurricane among the Carribee Islands in the West Indies and a Tuffoon upon the coast of China or in the East Indies, but only in the name."
In the latter case, the term was a mispronunciation of the Chinese ta-feng, for "violent winds". In the Indian Ocean, the same phenomenon became known as a "cyclone", after an Englishman called Henry Piddington coined the term in the 1840s from a Greek word that describes the coils of a snake.
For centuries, these great storms were thought of as isolated and local events. No one had the means to assimilate the bigger picture, and to recognise that a tempest that sank a fleet of ships near the island of Barbados might be the same one that several days later laid villages to waste in the Bahamas. It was Benjamin Franklin, who made so many other seminal discoveries as he dabbled in the sciences, who first provided the key to the mobile nature of a hurricane. On November 2nd, 1743, a violent northeasterly storm, the fringes of a former Caribbean hurricane, hit Franklin's home in Philadelphia and inconveniently obscured his view of an eclipse. Franklin learned later that the eclipse had been clearly visible in Boston before the storm arrived. From this he realised that the zone of northeasterly winds must have moved from south to north, from Philadelphia to Boston, in the opposite direction to the wind itself.
Six years later, Franklin verified his theory by tracking the progress of another hurricane from North Carolina along the eastern seaboard to New England, establishing the notion that a storm moved steadily along some predetermined path.
As with so many notions conjured up by Franklin, it was an idea that was years ahead of its time; it was not until the middle of the 19th century that it was commonly accepted that all storms are actually circular wind systems, and that they move bodily from one place to another.