Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Stuart B. Schwartz. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina .

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 121; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/121.2.532

1937-5239

Shawn William Miller,

Financial Crisis of the 21st Century

Only in the last half century have humans been able to accurately forecast weather disasters. However, even without the somewhat vague precision of today’s weather satellites, peoples of the Greater Caribbean, since its initial human settlement, have dreaded the expected arrival of the hurricane, whose season commenced with summer and remained a threat often until Christmas. Among both indigenous and colonial societies, the time of the summer solstice began with rituals offered to ward off what were among the most harrowing and destructive of natural phenomena. Hurricanes might level every human construction in their broad paths, killing thousands and leaving the survivors, especially the poor, to best fend for months without shelter, without food, and too often without help. Of all the New World’s novel features, hurricanes unambiguously announced that this was indeed a New World. In Europe, Christians had employed their church bells, on which they engraved phrases such as Fugo fulmina (I drive away thunderbolts), to break up maleficent storm clouds; in the Caribbean, the hurricane carried the bells and their towers away. In the aftermath of a storm, colonialists questioned if civilization was even possible on the islands and coasts that lay along the hurricane’s well-worn paths.