Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguished himself from the other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific facts in a clear and easy style. In his writings, we find our earliest good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good. Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Sea that “typhoons are a sort of violent whirlwinds.” He said they were preceded by fine, clear and serene weather, with light winds. “Before these whirlwinds come on,” wrote Dampier, “there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward the upper part is a dull reddish color.” To him, this cloud was frightful and alarming. He went on to say that it was sometimes seen twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. The tempest came with great violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned around, blowing with great fury from the southwest. These stories by Dampier and others might have cleared up some of the mysteries of these furious storms, especially those that “turned around and came back.” They might have explained the fact that sailors were carried long distances and then cast ashore near the places from which they started—for they were huge whirlwinds, as Dampier suspected—but nobody seemed to be able to put “two and two together” and prove it. For one thing, no one knew then that weather moves from place to place. Everybody seemed to have a vague belief that the weather developed right at home and blew itself out without going anywhere. With these ideas in vogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there was no useful law of storms. But we can put William Dampier down as one of the first “hurricane hunters.” As cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grew in population, storm catastrophes became more numerous. Now and then, a hurricane seemed to appear from nowhere and caused terrible destruction on land. New Orleans was devastated in 1722 and again in 1723. Charleston and other coastal cities were hit repeatedly. Coringa, on the Bay of Bengal, was practically wiped out by a furious storm in December, 1789, and there was another disaster at the same place in 1839. Tropical storms that form in the Bay of Bengal and strike the populous coasts of India are known as cyclones. They are the same kind of storms as West Indian hurricanes and the typhoons of the Pacific. The worst feature is the overwhelming flood of seawater that comes in big waves into the harbors as the center of the storm arrives. If there is insufficient warning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.