Hamilton’s own hurricane description was dated Sept. 6, 1772, though not published until Oct. 3 in St. Croix’s first newspaper, the Royal Danish American Gazette (founded just two years earlier).
Chernow said the likely go-between was Hugh Knox, a minister at the church that Hamilton attended as well as a part-time journalist at the Gazette. Knox penned this brief introduction:
The following letter was written the week after the late Hurricane, by a Youth of this Island, to his Father; the copy of it fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, shewed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the Publick.
While most of Hamilton’s letter addresses the storm as an urgent call for spiritual awakening, he didn’t hold back in portraying the fury of the storm itself:
It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels. A great part of the buildings throughout the Island are levelled to the ground, almost all the rest very much shattered; several persons killed and numbers utterly ruined; whole families running about the streets, unknowing where to find a place of shelter; the sick exposed to the keeness of water and air without a bed to lie upon, or a dry covering to their bodies; and our harbours entirely bare. In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.
When read with a modern eye, Hamilton’s writings offer a few clues on the meteorology behind this storm:
* He clearly conveys the passage of a hurricane’s calm eye, with fierce winds on either side:
It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o’clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour. Meanwhile the wind was shifting round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled fury and continued so ’till near three o’clock in the morning.
The evolution of wind shifts indicates a hurricane moving roughly from southeast to northwest, which is consistent with the most common tracks through the Lesser Antilles.
* The mention of “almost perpetual lightning” suggests at least some period of intense thunderstorms, most likely within rain bands and/or wrapped around the hurricane’s inner core.
* Hamilton notes that “the rain was surprizingly salt” (sic). Hurricanes can loft huge amounts of sea spray, some of which would be expected to sweep onshore during an intense landfall.