In the song “America,” in “West Side Story,” Anita and her friends sing of Puerto Rico: “Always the hurricanes blowing/always the population growing/and the money owing...”
It may always have been that way, but in the last three years Puerto Rico has been hit with a devastating hurricane, a couple of minor ones, several earthquakes, island-wide power blackouts and a persistent financial crisis. But the deadliest hurricane in Puerto Rican history—even after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017—remains Hurricane San Ciriaco, which killed more than 3,300 people as it barreled across the island in six to nine hours in 1899.
The entire storm, then known as the West Indian Hurricane or the Great Bahamas Hurricane of 1899, lasted 28 days—the longest-lived Atlantic hurricane on record—as it made its way up from Cape Verde through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Florida, North Carolina and finally out to sea. It lashed most of the Caribbean, but by far did the most damage and took the most lives in Puerto Rico.
The storm was so bad that it was front page news in The New York Times for several days at a time when the sensational Dreyfus Affair dominated the news—and it sparked a massive relief effort spearheaded by Washington and New York City, under Mayor Robert Van Wyck and Governor Theodore Roosevelt.
Much of the story is told in the Municipal Archives through letters and appeals for help from the Military Governor of Puerto Rico—which became a U.S. possession a year earlier as a result of the Spanish-American War—and the U.S. War Department to Van Wyck. An index to The New York Times articles about Puerto Rico from 1899 to 1930 compiled by the CUNY Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos is very helpful.
It was spotted off Cape Verde on August 3, but it wasn’t covered by the The New York Times until the August 8 edition, which contained a small story saying that a cyclone hurricane had slammed into the Island of Guadalupe on August 7 and that “many houses had their roofs blown off and were flooded and some of them were destroyed but no fatalities were reported.”
The news soon grew ominous. In a dispatch filed on August 9th for the August 10th edition—this was, after all, decades before television, the Internet and news-as-it-happens—The Times ran a short story on Page One headlined “WEST INDIAN HURRICANE.” A sub-headline screamed: “GREAT HAVOC IN PUERTO RICO.” The story, filed from Washington, began: “Hundreds of houses have been destroyed and several persons killed by the hurricane that has swept over the West Indies...”
The story reported that military officials in San Juan said cavalry barracks had been destroyed, “many other public buildings partially demolished and hundreds of native houses wrecked; that telephone and telegraph wires are down, and that several people have been killed.” San Juan escaped with relatively minor damage compared to the south, center and west of the island as the storm made its way diagonally northwest from Guayama.
