[
469]
her arrival a few hours, we should probably not have been able to board her, so much had the gale increased, and the sea risen.
For the next few days, as the reader will speedily see, we had as much as we could do to take care of ourselves, without thinking of the enemy, or his ships.
We had a fearful gale to encounter.
As this gale was a cyclone, and the first really severe gale that the
Alabama had met with, it is worthy of a brief description.
We begin, in our generation, to have some definite knowledge of the atmospheric laws.
To our ancestors, of only a generation or two back, these laws were almost a sealed book.
It is now well ascertained, that all the great hurricanes which sweep over the seas, are cyclones; that is, circular gales, revolving around an axis, or vortex, at the same time that they are travelling in a given direction.
These gales all have their origin in warm latitudes, or, as has been prettily said, by an officer of the
Dutch Navy writing on the subject, they ‘prefer to place their feet in warm water.’
They do not, however, confine themselves to the places of their origin, but, passing out of the tropics, sweep over large tracts of extra-tropical seas.
These circular gales are the great regulators, or balancewheels, as it were, of the atmospheric machine.
They arise in seasons of atmospheric disturbance, and seem necessary to the restoration of the atmospheric equilibrium.
In the East Indian and China seas, the cyclone is called a typhoon.
It prevails there with even more destructive effect than in the western hemisphere.
It takes its origin during the change of the monsoons.
Monsoons are periodical winds, which blow one half of the year from one direction—the north-east for example—and then change, and blow the other half of the year, from the opposite direction, the south-west.
When these monsoons are changing, there is great disturbance in the atmospheric equilibrium.
A battle of the winds, as it were, takes place; the out-going wind struggling for existence, and the in-coming wind endeavoring to throttle it, and take its place.
Calms, whirlwinds, water-spouts, and heavy and drenching rains set in; the black, wild-looking clouds, sometimes rent and torn, sweeping with their heavy burdens of vapor over the very surface of the sea. Now, the out-going,
