The Great Charleston Hurricane 15 September 1752

  Charles Town, South Carolina, had not only to contend with epidemics of yellow fever which swept the town every year 'with great mortality' striking down whites, visiting Native Americans, and even the native-born blacks supposedly more 'seasoned' to local diseases. In 1752 Charles Town experienced a severe summer heatwave while throughout South Carolina 'a general drought prevailed.' All around  plants shrank and withered. 'The atmosphere appeared to glow.' At night people 'lay abroad on the pavements.' Those dying of heat exhaustion were hastily buried, 'in sheets wrung out of tar and [bound] … up tightly with cords.' When the drought did break in late July, 'every shower was accompanied with the most dreadful lightning and thunder.' The lightning, wrote one South Carolinian, 'in one afternoon fell on sixteen different objects in town, including St. Philip's and a meeting house. Several people were struck dead and vessels dismasted on the river. A much older Daniel Gordon many years later at Sydney Cove might have recalled such a storm. Almost from the day of his convict ship arriving there in late January 1788 'not a day [had] gone [by] but ther [had] been Seveer thunder and Lighting.' On the night he had landed, amid the raucous celebrations at finally touching land after an eight month voyage, the promised storm finally broke 'so violent that the thunder shook the' eleven ships moored in the harbour and lightning set fire to the surrounding trees and killed a pig, six sheep and two lambs belonging to Robert Ross, the veteran of Bunker Hill and the siege of Boston.¹

Nature had not done with Charles Town. On the evening of 14 September an increasingly violent north-east wind arose and blew through the night. Day broke to a 'suddenly overcast' sky, drizzle, then rain. By now the wind's 'violence was so great that no person could stand against it without support.' At 9 a.m. surging in from the sea 'like a bore', Charles Town's harbor was flooded in a few moments', driving ships, 'sloops, and schooners' smashing into the houses along Bay street. Cattle and hogs drowned in the streets. A vessel carrying Palatines newly arrived was driven as far as the marshes near James Island, where Daniel's relative, Sylvia, then aged three, would spend most of her youth and early womanhood. '[A] channel a hundred yards long, thirty-five feet wide and six feet deep' had to be dug to drag the ship out. The wooden pest house on Sullivan's Island was 'carried six miles up the Cooper river.' Nine of its fifteen occupants disappeared. In Charles Town Daniel Gordon sought refuge in the upper storey of his master's house. “warehouses, scale-houses and sheds upon the wharves, with all the goods in them were swept away, the wreckage from them caught up in a flood ten feet above the high-water mark pouring into surrounding houses. A 'negro wench' was left in the raging storm surge while her master, carried away with her and his family, all lost in the disintegrating house, was snatched to safety from an upper window on the corner of Broad street. She 'saved herself by clinging to a tree.' The 'four to five foot thick' curtain line on Charles Town's land side was 'badly damaged' and other fortifications 'entirely demolished', the shore line bastions 'all beat in', their gun carriages carried out to sea or shattered against fort walls and corners. One 'great' gate at Craven's Bastion was 'burst open onto the street' and never replaced. When the great flood suddenly receded at 11 a.m., 'five hundred houses' had been washed away. Many were dead. 'Nothing was to be seen but ruins of' buildings, 'canows, wrecks of pettiaugers and boats, staves, shingles, household and other goods driven round about the Town', now debris in a sea of mud. Thirty years later a Hessian captain noted 'the city as well as the country soon recovered.' More telling was his observation that 'hardly anyone ever refers to it.' Even allowing for the passing of a generation, that never-ending silence spoke loudly of the trauma of those who had gone through it.²

1Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, New York, 2011, pp.71-72; David Ramsay, History of South Carolina, Vol. 2, Newbury, 1858, pp.37-38, f/ns, [facs.]; The Journal and Letters of Lt. Ralph Clark, 1787-1792, (eds. Paul G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan), Sydney, 1981, p.96; The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787-1789, Sydney, 1979, p.67; for the last word on the legend of European Australia's foundational orgy cf. Grace Karskens, The Colony. A History of Early Sydney, Crow's Nest, 2009, pp.313-317.

2Ramsay, History of South Carolina … Vol. II,pp.177-179 and 179-181, f/n*; Book of Negroes,http://www.blackloyalist/info.sourceimagesdisplaypage/transcript. p. 19; Hewatt, Historical Account of The Rise and Progress of The Colonies ...pp.180-182; cited in Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, pp.28-29; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, p.19; 'Diary of Captain Hindricks', p.333.