In 1900, the Texas town of Galveston, with a population of 42,000, was hit by a hurricane of unprecedented force, practically wiping it off the face of the earth. By destroying a good half of the taxable property, the Great Galveston Hurricane caused $ 98 million in 1900 dollars in damage to the city and state.
The Washington Weather Bureau, which at that time did not know how to track the movement of cyclones in the sea, lost sight of the hurricane as soon as it swept over Cuba, devastating the islands of Antigua and Haiti. The hurricane was rated Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale after it hit the southwest Gulf Coast.
Galveston in 1900
According to various estimates, on September 9, 1900, from 6 to 12 thousand citizens died in Galveston. Official sources indicate the figure is 8 thousand dead and missing. The Great Galveston Hurricane, as it is commonly called in the American media, became the third in the history of all Atlantic atmospheric disasters after the Great Hurricane of 1780 and Hurricane Mitch of 1998.
For comparison, the second most fatal hurricane in history at Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades National Park claimed 2,500 lives, the third in history Katrina hurricane - 1,800 lives …
The city was dying. Tidal water, rising at a speed of up to 30 cm / h, flooded the streets, washing away wooden buildings, stone structures and even military forts. Wind gusts reached a speed of 215 km / h. In addition to everything, the heavenly abyss opened up, and in some day more than 2 billion tons of precipitation fell on the doomed city …
Then hell began. The survivors went crazy when they found the corpses of the dead relatives and friends. Cases of mass suicides have been reported in the city. Coffins washed from the city cemetery floated along the streets that had become canals.
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Boats with marauders and robbers maneuvered between them. Some of them sailed here from the other end of the bay on … specially rented steamers. Several hundred of such scum were executed on the spot without trial or investigation by police detachments that arrived in time.
However, our story does not end there, but only begins.
A year before the disaster in Galveston, Charles Coglen, an actor of a theater troupe that toured Texas, died.
Charles Francis Coglen (1841-1899), a famous theater actor of the century before last, was born into an Irish immigrant family in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, a province in southeastern Canada.
At the age of 19, Coglen made his debut on the London stage and soon became one of the leading actors in the Prince of Wales Theater. In 1876, the actor moved overseas and for many years played in the play "Famous Case" at the American theaters "Augustin Daly's Company" and "Union Square Stock Company".
In 1898, Charles Coglen, together with his sister Rosa Cogelin, wrote the script for the play "The Royal Box" based on the play "Keene, or Genius and Dumas" by Alexandre Dumas, and played the main role in it for the last year of his life. With this performance, the theater group went on tour to Texas …
On November 27, 1899, Charles Francis Coglen died of a heart attack in the dressing room immediately after the premiere of the play. The ashes of the deceased were buried.
A terrible hurricane of 1900 scattered city blocks and cemeteries. The water carried the coffins into the open sea. She also took away the ninety-kilogram metal coffin with Coglen's ashes. The sealed zinc coffin did not sink, like the others, carried off to the open sea by the Gulf Stream.
The posthumous voyage lasted no less … 9 years. During this time, the coffin circled America, having swum over 6,000 km, and was thrown onto the coast of Prince Edward Island, a few tens of meters from the Cognac family nest in Charlottetown …