A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was the Italian explorer who claimed to have discovered America in 1492. His four voyages marked the beginning of the European colonial project in America, which was already inhabited by indigenous Americans. Columbus appears in Dolin’s book as the prototypical European who was fazed by a hurricane—a storm of a magnitude that was non-existent in Europe. Columbus’s disfavor with Nicolás de Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola in May 1502, meant that he and his men were sent straight into the path of a hurricane. Still, Columbus, who was able to communicate with Taíno Indians in the Greater Antilles, spotted the warning signs of “large swells, high wispy clouds, and an ominous red sky in the morning” that signaled the potential arrival of a hurricane (4). He was thus able to use local knowledge to take the warnings seriously, sheltering in a harbor to protect himself, rather than going out to sea. Columbus was thus wiser than subsequent generations of Europeans and White Americans who ignored the knowledge of indigenous peoples because of the mistaken belief that they knew better.