In 1830, the British military dispatched Major-General Sir William Reid, a highly-decorated Scottish military engineer, to Barbados. His mission was to survey and repair government buildings destroyed by a large storm that had killed 1,500 people.
Reid noticed peculiar patterns in the flattened buildings and trees. His interest in this led to a collaboration with American meteorologist William C. Redfield, who theorized that a similar storm in Connecticut was a massive, counterclockwise whirlwind. In an effort to put hard data to this theory, Reid studied the log books and reports of British vessels that had encountered storms out of the Carribean.
In 1838, Reid published An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms by Means of Fact. The book was an international success in which Sir William proved that hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere turn counterclockwise, and unknowingly provided rich context for genealogists studying immigrants nearly two hundred years later.
