BRITISH HONDURAS: What Spiders Know

(2 of 2)

Up from Nicaragua roared two U. S. Marine planes carrying medical relief. They had a hard time landing in the rubble. Out of Colon sped the U. S. cruiser Rochester. The gunboat Sacramento set out at once from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the minesweeper Swan steamed up from Trujillo, Honduras, with food, water, bandages. Out of Kingston, Jamaica, raced H. M. S. Danae to help her own people.

At Belize, Governor Sir John Burdon surveyed his demolished town, pondered abandoning it, building a new city farther back from the bay on a piney ridge. As soon as the Belize river could be cleared of bodies and debris, native inhabitants in small boats started upcountry. Through a fetid atmosphere of stranded, rotting fish, whole families made the journey to escape threatened pestilence and famine in the ruined city. Better, they thought, take a chance in the jungle.

Most of the recent big blows from the Caribbean have been in September. It is not unusual for an equinoctial storm to beat the calendar by a week or so (autumnal equinox: Sept. 22). Florida's last two bad ones (1926, 1928) came in September, also Porto Rico's (1928), Santo Domingo's (1930). Cuba's last serious hurricane struck in October 1926.

Less than seven hours after the Belize blow, a second hurricane bore up from the southeast on San Juan, P. R. Governor Theodore Roosevelt Jr. had just left for the U. S. The wind lasted 45 min., killed two, knocked out communications for a day, slightly damaged the grapefruit crop, burst in the windows and thoroughly soaked "La Fortaleza," Governor Roosevelt's mansion.

For a while Cuba thought she might be struck. But the hurricane bumped off the mountains of Haiti, spun up and out, vanished and spent itself over the tumbling Caribbean.

A third hurricane, off the western coast of Mexico, threatened, did not materialize.