The Bahamas and the Caribbean Have Withstood Hurricanes for Centuries

Europeans came to the islands unprepared for the destructive storms, even as indigenous people understood their massive power

the Bahamas were spared this past weekend when Tropical Storm Humberto's 70 mph winds just brushed by the islands. Only two weeks earlier, they were not so fortunate as Hurricane Dorian caused such havoc to the country that the full extent of the damage has yet to be accounted. The Category 5 behemoth rampaged through the upper Bahamas with record-setting windspeeds, then lethally paused its forward motion over Grand Bahama for more than a day, allowing its destructive eyewall to spin in place. The storm's 185 miles-per-hour winds splintered homes and whipped up a storm surge that swallowed the land. An international effort is searching for the 1,300 people (as of this writing) still missing.

The level of destruction is reminiscent of Hurricane Maria's landfall on Dominica in 2017, which killed 65, damaged or destroyed 90 percent of the island's structures, and prompted a fifth of the island to migrate in its aftermath. Maria also tore through Puerto Rico, causing flash floods, destroying homes and completely crashing the power grid for months. The initial death toll of 64 was later expanded to nearly 3,000 as people died from the lingering effects the storm caused. An estimated 130,000 Puerto Ricans left the island in its aftermath.

In the past four Atlantic hurricane seasons, five Category 5 hurricanes have formed; the vulnerability of these islands has never seemed more stark. Can these communities recover and survive such an uncertain future? If history is any guide, they will, as many times as they need to.

Hurricanes have ravaged the Caribbean for millennia. The cycles of activity have varied, but the massive storms have always presented a threat. Centuries ago, long before the advent of weather forecasting, the storms in and around the Caribbean inflicted so much catastrophic damage that it seems remarkable people remained. But they did, and they rebuilt. Now, as we enter an uncertain era marked by a warming planet, the resilience of these communities will be tested again and again.

For the indigenous Taíno and Carib people who populated the Caribbean islands in the pre-Columbian exchange years, the storms were part of the cycle of their seasons—feared, but expected. The Carib, from the Lesser Antilles, were skilled navigators on the water and scheduled the launch of their raiding party canoes for early winter, past what is recognized today as the June-to-November hurricane season, notes Yale history professor Stuart Schwartz in Sea of Storms, his history of Caribbean hurricanes.

“There's even evidence Europeans relied on Indians to tell them when hurricanes were coming,” Schwartz said. The indigenous islanders read signs in the way birds and fish behaved, the color of the sun, and abrupt shifts in the breeze. “The Indians are so skillful that they know two or three or four days beforehand the coming of it,” one Englishman wrote in 1638.

Scientists still marvel at a Taíno statuette, believed to be the god Huracán—from which we get the word hurricane—found in Cuba by scholar Fernando Ortiz. The ceramic sculpture depicts a head with two arms sweeping in counterclockwise direction, mimicking a hurricane's spiral winds. “How they may have made this deduction remains mysterious,” writes MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel in his history of hurricanes Divine Wind. The storms are far too big for humans to perceive from the ground. It wasn't until much later that Europeans deduced the storm's counterclockwise circular wind pattern. Perhaps they inferred this from the pattern of destruction, or from observing small funnel clouds over the water called windspouts, he suggests.

While the hurricane's fearsome vortex winds may have been well known to the Taíno and Caribs, they were new to the colonizing Europeans in the 16th century. Because the early colonists had no name for them, researchers scouring diaries and records look for the telltale description of winds “coming from all points on the compass,” according to Schwartz.'

More often than not, the storms caught the European colonizers off-guard, with cataclysmic results. Christopher Columbus had experienced a hurricane or tropical storm in 1495 near Hispaniola, the first known recorded. Seven years later, on his fourth voyage from Spain, Columbus stopped in what is now the Dominican Republic.