No Cure for Tropical Depression

In August 2005, an area of low pressure developed off the west coast of Africa and gained energy by sucking up warmth and moisture from the tropical North Atlantic. Within a week, a hurricane formed near the Bahamas. The world turned and the storm grew, its core pressure dropping and wind speeds increasing as it skirted Florida and swelled in the Gulf of Mexico. Satellites provided startling images of the monstrous cyclone as meteorologists scrambled to predict its path. Who could have imagined what dread the name Katrina would inspire?

Hurricane Katrina tore across the Gulf shores of Mississippi and Alabama. Thanks to a storm surge and careless engineering, Katrina also turned New Orleans into a fetid drowning pool. In the intervening decade, New Orleans has become a kind of living history museum, like a down-at-the-heels Colonial Williamsburg complete with celebrity donors and buses to the slave quarters. Has the city recovered? Certainly old scores are being settled. The ex-mayor, Ray Nagin, was sentenced to jail in 2014 for taking a bribe, and yet serious questions about federal and state negligence remain unanswered. What will happen when the next big storm hits? Will cool heads (and charitable hearts) prevail?

Stuart B. Schwartz tells a long story of big storms, more or less ending with Hurricane Katrina. (“Super storm Sandy” gets added, but this requires expanding one’s mental map of the Caribbean to include New Jersey.) Best known for his wide-ranging work on colonial Brazil, Schwartz’s versatility as a historian is on full display in this erudite, accessible, and ultimately essential book. Without getting too technical, he bridges economic, political, and environmental history; the history of slavery; the history of science and technology; literature; and popular culture. More than this, Schwartz builds his narrative from original sources in multiple languages and moves effortlessly among historiographies. If All Can Be Saved (2008) was Schwartz’s tip of the hat to Carlo Ginzburg, Sea of Storms is a fitting homage to Fernand Braudel. In classic Braudelian form, this is an environmental history of a sea: a macro-region given a sweeping, multicultural treatment over the longue durée. The book is also in line with big, new climate-centered histories such as Geoffrey Parker’s colossal Global Crisis (2013), which also ends by reflecting on Katrina and other catastrophic storms.

Schwartz’s more manageable book centers on core social concerns that five centuries of Atlantic cyclones have served to intensify, if only seasonally. This is not an argument about climate change but a meditation on changing human perceptions of Providence and divine wrath, risk and uncertainty, scientific probability, private charity, and the scope of government responsibility. A survey of the rich record of great storms passing over multiple islands and coasts allows Schwartz to identify and trace broad patterns and to spot abrupt changes or glaring contrasts. For example, whereas New Orleans was insufficiently evacuated when Katrina arrived in 2005, leading to nearly 2,000 deaths, most of Cuba’s vulnerable citizens were taken to safety when Hurricane Flora ravaged half the island in 1963, just a few years after the Revolution. Schwartz is willing to leave the question open: is mandatory evacuation too authoritarian?

Sea of Storms consists of nine chapters that manage to be both chronological and thematic. Pre-Columbian understandings of hurricanes remain vague, and the word itself has obscure origins, but Schwartz quickly establishes the meaning that arriving Spaniards attached to these cyclonic, multi-day storms: they were secret judgments of God. A typical response to a shattered fleet or flattened city was “humility and resignation”—followed by a parade (p. 21). Curiously, however, Schwartz finds that—when compared with the many earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, plagues, and other calamities so much lamented in mainland Spanish America—Caribbean hurricanes were considered a modest affliction. In fact, Baroque-era Spanish observers proved no more or less prone than...