Hurricane, Bahamas. Winslow Homer (1898). Image donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By Nicolette Bethel This article appeared originally on Blogworld and is republished here with the author's permission. Anyone who has grown up with me knows that I’m not a person to take hurricanes lightly. When I was 17, I wrote an extended essay on the subject. The essay required me to delve into the science behind hurricanes, and also sent me to the archives in search of the impact of hurricanes on The Bahamas. I knew about the 1929 hurricane, of course; my grandmothers’ generation had survived it, and they would tell us stories of the bad old days when hurricanes came along every year and pass directly over Nassau. And the history books I had at my disposal (Michael Craton’s 1968 edition of A History of The Bahamas and Paul Albury’s 1975 The Story of The Bahamas) mentioned an earlier hurricane, one from 1866, which also devastated Nassau. I read everything I could get my hands on about both hurricanes. And then, for the next decade or so, I was a hurricane prophet, warning my family (really, anyone who would listen) to get ready every year. Because, although Nassau had not sustained a major hit for a good 20 years or so, I just knew it was going to be a matter of time. Well, as we can see, it was. New Providence was struck directly in 2001 by Hurricane Michelle, whose eye passed over Nassau, and then almost struck directly by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, whose eye shifted just to the west of our island in the last hours before it struck. But nothing yet has impacted the capital the way the hurricanes of the 1920s and the 1800s did. There are two things I want to say about this. The first has to do with the past and what it can teach us. The other has to do with the future and how we can use what we have learned. What the past can teach us The Bahamas, like the USA, historically sits outside the most common path of hurricanes. The majority of our archipelago lies above the Tropic of Cancer, in the sub-tropical zone, and at least until the end of the twentieth century, most hurricanes tended to form and stay within the tropics, crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea and then sweeping up the Lesser Antilles. This was disastrous for the Caribbean but fortuitous for The Bahamas, as the Caribbean islands tend to be mountainous, and mountains help to break up hurricanes’ organization. The most common result was that by the time that hurricanes reached The Bahamas, even major ones like Inez and David and Georges, they had dissipated and were reduced to Category 1 or 2 hurricanes, or even to tropical storms. Every thirty years or so, however, some regular shift in global weather patterns appeared to encourage the formation of hurricanes further north and increase the likelihood that they would affect The Bahamas and US eastern seaboard. These hurricanes would sweep across the Atlantic and not be disrupted by land or mountains until they were well inland in the USA. The 1866 hurricane in The Bahamas was one of these, one of the earliest with a systematic plotting of its location and its intensity (believed to be a powerful Category 4 hurricane). Our primary source of information regarding its intensity comes from the barometric pressure recorded during the passage of the storm (for more details, read Wayne Neely’s book). This was followed by another deadly hurricane in 1899; then a series of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes between 1926 and 1932; then Betsy in 1965; and then Andrew in 1992. For anyone who wants to learn anything about hurricanes in The Bahamas, look to Wayne Neely. He’s the expert. If you want to know who to listen to on social media, check what he has to say. It’s his hobby; but it’s also his training, and his job. This meant that it was quite possible, at least during the twentieth century, for a Bahamian adult to live and die without experiencing more than one or two devastating hurricanes. My father was such a person. He was born in 1938, and between then and his death in 1987, he experienced only one major storm: Betsy in 1965. His life during the 1970s was spent putting up hurricane shutters when we were under hurricane warnings, only to find out that the hurricane had either blown out to sea, or was nothing more than some wind and rain. And he complained. Our hurricane shutters were heavy wooden things that were fitted into our window frames and held in place with bars of two-by-four. They were hard to put up and hard to take down, and when he put them up only to be disappointed by some storm or other, he refused to take them down until the end of the season.