Free Atlantic Fury by Hammond; Innes

north, sweeping down the east of North America, meets up with the warm, damp air of the Gulf Stream. It’s the breeding place for every sort of beastliness – hurricanes bound for the States, big depressions that move across the North Atlantic at tremendous speed to give Iceland, and sometimes the Hebrides and the north of Scotland, wind speed almost as bad as the much-publicised Coras and Ethels and Janets and what-have-yous that cause such havoc in America. Now look at this.’
    He picked up a red pencil and with one curving sweep drew an arrow across to the area between Iceland and Norway. ‘There! That’s your Low now.’ He drew it in, a deep depression centred over Norway, extending west as far as Iceland, east into Siberia. And then on the other side, over towards Greenland and Canada, more isobars drawn in with long, curving sweeps of hand and pencil. A high pressure area, and between the High and the Low, in ink, he marked in arrows pointing south and south-east. ‘That’s a polar air stream for you. That’s a real big polar air stream, with the wind roaring out of the Arctic and temperatures falling rapidly. Snow at first in the north. Then clear skies and bitter cold.’
    He stared at it for a moment, an artist regarding his handiwork. ‘I haven’t seen that sort of weather pattern up here – not at this time of the year. But I experienced it once in Canada just after the war when I was working for the Department of Transport at Goose Bay. By Christ, man, that was something. A Low over Greenland, a High centred somewhere over the mouth of the Mackenzie River and a polar air stream pouring south across the Labrador.’ He drew it for me then on another sheet of paper, adding as his red pencil circled in the pattern, ‘Have you any idea what a polar air stream means up there in the Canadian North in October – to the Eskimos, the prospectors, the ships in Hudson Bay?’ And when I shook my head he embarked on an explanation. I can’t remember all he said; I found myself listening to the tone of his voice rather than to his actual words. It had become noticeably more Welsh, a distinct lilt that seemed to change his personality. It was his enthusiasm for the subject, I suppose, but all at once he was like a poet, painting with words on a canvas that was one quarter of the globe. I listened, fascinated; and as he talked the red pencil was constantly moving, filling in that old atmospheric battle picture until the high pressure system over north-western Canada had become a great whorl of concentric lines.
    Like an artist he couldn’t resist the picture as a whole, but as his pencil flew over Greenland and down as far as the Azores, it was this big High he talked about; the effect it had had on people, animals and crops – on transportation, particularly aircraft and ships. The High represented cold, heavy air, clean, crisp, dry-frozen stuff hugging the earth’s surface, weighing down on thousands of square miles of ocean, thousands of square miles of pack ice. The winds around this cold mass had been clockwise and wherever they had touched the periphery of the low pressure area to the east, the movement of the cold air stream had been accelerated to hurricane force. At first those gales had been blizzards, thick with driving snow as damp, humid masses of air were forced into the upper atmosphere and cooled to the point of precipitation. ‘When that High got really established,’ he said, ‘there was snow in many places that didn’t expect it for another month. Blizzards in the Middle West of Canada reaching south across the border into the States, and that High was like a young giant. It went on drawing strength into itself – like a boxer in training and working himself up for the big fight.’
    â€˜You make it sound very dramatic,’ I said.
    â€˜Weather is dramatic, man; indeed it is, when you’ve got