Havana has had other claims to meteorological fame besides being the stimulus for the "Privy Hurricane" we talked of yesterday in Weather Eye. It was the adoptive home of Father Benito Vines, a Jesuit who became a legend in his life as the leading guru of his day on hurricanes.
In 1868, when the corrupt and inefficient regime of Queen Isabella II of Spain collapsed, and the deposed monarch was obliged to seek refuge with her Bourbon relatives in France, many of those identified with the royalist cause thought it wise to follow suit. Father Vines was one, but instead of France he fled to Cuba, where he arrived in 1870.
He was horrified at the devastation wrought by hurricanes and, when he became director of the meteorological observatory in Havana, he took it upon himself to study their behaviour, thereby trying to ease the lot of the local populace which was often at their mercy.
Father Vines studied hurricanes from every angle. First, he started a programme of detailed weather observations at the observatory to provide himself with a reservoir of basic data. Then, after every major storm he was to be found sifting through the wreckage to get clues to the strength and direction of the wind. He questioned survivors and meticulously recorded every detail.
In five years, Father Vines knew more about hurricanes than any living person. He was the first to discover that the cloud pattern and the behaviour of the wind well in advance of a storm could be used to track it accurately. Using this information, he designed an instrument which he called the "antilles cyclonoscope", a kind of slide-rule which used cloud and wind observations to estimate from a considerable distance the current position of a hurricane, and to calculate its likely path. Father Vines's first forecast was published in a Havana newspaper on September 11th, 1875 - just two days before an intense hurricane ravaged the entire southern coast of Cuba; many lives were saved as a result of the timely warning.
A year later, he predicted the path of another violent storm, and throughout the 1880s his hurricane warnings were telegraphed on a regular basis to every island in the Caribbean. He became known and much loved throughout the region as "The Hurricane Priest", and when he died in 1893, the local newspaper, La Lucha, brought out a special edition to describe "The Last Hours and Death of Benito Vines".