Abstract
PÈRE DECHEVRENS, the indefatigable head of the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory at Zikawei near Shanghai, has just published the first part of a work dealing with the typhoons of 1882. The present instalment is confined to those of the months of July and August in that year. The various plans and maps showing the course of the typhoons, and the height of the barometer at various times during their progress in different places, are so “fabulously complicated,” to use the writer's phrase, that he fears more than one reader will regard his pamphlet as a work of imagination. Pere Dechevrens, however, has had the advantage of observations made in China, Japan, and the Philippines by captains of vessels, lighthouse keepers, Customs officers, &c., such as have never before been made of any cyclone. Chinese typhoons, as he points out, fortunately for the meteorologist, though unfortunately for the navigator, ravage places visited by the ships of all nationalities, and hence with a little arrangement and organisation these phenomena may be easily studied in these regions. The Shanghai Chamber of Commerce aad Sir Robert Hart have arranged for a regular supply to Père Dechevrens of a regular series of meteorological observations, and one of the earliest results is the pamphlet now before us. As a consequence of these wide and varied observations, the writer, while acknowledging the work of his predecessors, such as Spindler in Russia, Knipping in Japan, and Faura in Manila, claims that, while they were only able to give the history, as it were, of incidents in the life of a typhoon, he, thanks to the vast number and extent of the documents placed in his hands, has been able to connect these various fragments, and to trace the history of several typhoons from their cradle in equatorial maritime regions to their grave in the North Pacific Ocean. This, in his own words, is what Père Dechevrens has now done in his pamphlet. The first section deals with July 1882, and it is divided into several sub-sections, dealing with the formation of a typhoon on July 5, its progress in the China Sea, and a first separation or offshoot from the main storm, its progress on the mainland of China, the second typhoon of July 10 in the China Sea, and before Hong Kong, in the Formosa Channel, “its flight towards India, and its disappearance in the north of China,” and finally an account of a typhoon in Hong Kong and Indo-China. The typhoons of August are discussed in a similar manner in detail, the conclusions being supported by observations made in all parts of the China seas and coasts. There are also a large number of diagrams. In his recapitulation the writer points out that, though he has been speaking of various typhoons, such as that in the Formosa Channel, in Hong Kong, &c., he has really been dealing with only one widespread storm, which, during its life of fifteen days, visited every coast from the equator to Siberia, and from the extreme east of Japan to the western frontier of India. The character which Pere Dechevrens gives the phenomenon he has so carefully studied is this:—“It allows itself to stray with the greatest ease outside the straight path. In a truly headlong way it throws itself against all obstacles, gets into difficulties from which it can scarcely extricate itself, wastes its energies in whirlwinds, often powerless, which it abandons readily, goes, returns, hastens, stops still, in a word revolving always in the same circle, until, having expended all its strength, it disappears miserably at that part of the Pacific which in a short time would have been able to give it the necessary vigour to sustain a longer career, and, like many others, to reach the shores of North America, or at least, if retarded by the violence of the North Pacific, as far as Behring Straits.” Three facts which this study renders prominent are:—
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The History of a Typhoon . Nature 30, 388 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/030388a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/030388a0