The French and English were at war. Admiral George Rodney was in the West Indies with an English fleet in several divisions. The French had sent a convoy of five thousand troops to Martinique. The storm was of immense width, extending from Trinidad, on the extreme southwest, to Antigua. The evening of October 9th was red and lowering. By ten o’clock next morning, the wind was high, and by one o’clock, vessels in the harbors were dragging their anchors. The water was driven on shore with such force at Barbadoes, that it was four feet deep in the Government House. The family took refuge under the cannon, only to find that they were moved about by the wind. By morning not a building in town was standing; every tree was either blown away, or stripped of branches and leaves. The sunny islands were suddenly become as bleak and bare as a Siberian steppe. As to the loss, ten thousand perished at Martinique; six thousand at Santa Lucia; four thousand five hundred at St. Eustatia; three thousand five hundred at Barbadoes. Scores of smaller islands were devastated, but the loss in detail is not known. Of the British fleet, the greater part was destroyed; only one vessel out of nineteen at St. Eustatia survived. A score of other ships of war and numerous transports were sunk. Of the French convoy, with five thousand troops, the governor wrote laconically that it “had disappeared.” Several English vessels at Barbadoes were carried far in shore and converted into dwellings. Doubtless, fifty thousand would hardly be too great an estimate of the total loss of life in this storm. In a similar one in 1813, the hurricane drove back the Gulf Stream, piling up the water thirty feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The ship _Ledbury Snow_, endeavored to ride out the storm, and when it was over, found herself high and dry. She had let go her anchor among the tree-tops of Elliot’s Key. The Barbadoes region suffered another severe gale in 1782, when the prizes captured by Admiral Rodney were sunk, a number of merchant vessels and two English war-ships foundered, and three thousand lives were lost at sea alone. The temperate zone has its occasional hurricanes, though they are by no means as powerful or as frequent as those of the tropics. It is stated that in the year 944, one thousand five hundred houses were destroyed by a tempest in London. In the year 1090, it is recorded that a violent storm overturned six hundred and six houses in London alone. Terrible as is the destruction of the cyclone in the western world, its fury here can not give a fair idea of the awful havoc it makes in Oriental regions. All through the Malay archipelago, along the coasts of China, Japan, the Phillipines, Hindostan, and Farther India, the ravages of the Storm King have been appalling, far exceeding even the terrible hurricanes of the West Indies.