In those uneasy hours when the groundswell preceded the winds, the master had to watch his barometer and the clouds on the horizon, to get the best estimate of the storm’s future course. If it gave signs of coming toward him or passing a little to the west of him, he had to run with the wind as soon as it began, every inch of canvas straining at the creaking masts to get all the headway possible. He would do better than he thought, for the surface of the sea was moving with the winds and his vessel was plowing through the waves while the sea was swirling in the same direction. It was a race for life, and if he was not unlucky, he would find himself behind the storm, sailing rapidly toward better weather. If he made the wrong choice and tried to go around the center on the east side while the storm moved northward, he might have thought that he was making headway. But the sea surface was carrying him backward while the horrible right sector rushed forward to encompass the ship. Now we see why Redfield, Reid and Piddington, when they came to a realization of some of these facts in the logs of sailing vessels, were so eager to give the world a law of storms. Their work was only a beginning, for the so-called law is not as simple as they imagined. But some shipmasters took their advice and survived, whereas any other course would have taken them to the bottom of the sea. And untold numbers had gone down in big hurricanes. Among the logs and letters collected by Redfield and Reid in their work on the law of storms were many which referred to a fierce hurricane in 1780. For more than fifty years it had been talked about as “The Great Hurricane.” But the stories didn’t all seem to fit together. The storm was said to have been in too many places at too many different times to suit Redfield. When he had finished putting the data from ships’ logs on a map in accordance with his law of storms, he saw that there had been three hurricanes at about the same time and that they had been confused and reported as one. In the year of these big hurricanes there were many warships in the Caribbean region. The American War of Independence had started with bloodshed at Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, and by 1780 England was in a state of war with half the world. Her battle fleets controlled most of the seas along the American Coast and roamed the waters in and around the West Indies.