Tale of the Scale a touch on the gusty side

 

Defining the Wind: the Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned ScienceInto Poetry

by Scott Huler, Crown Publishers

ISBN: 1400048842, 2004

 Even before I took up sailing, I was more than vaguely aware of the time-tested and oft refined Beaufort Scale and its handy ability to summarize the real-life effects of wind on sea and (later) land. What I didn’t know was much about Beaufort, other than he was of Napoleonic Wars vintage and was one of those polymath captains who turned to science after many years of fighting for the British Navy.

Oh, and the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic? That’s named for him, as well.

After reading Scott Huler’s somewhat obsessive 2004-penned tale of how his own poetic, rather than his scientific, interest in the Beaufort Scale drew him into a 200-year odyssey of research, sidetracking, pilgrimages and mystery solving, I know more about a lot of things, one of which is Scott Huler’s mental processes.

Huler was a copy editor when he stumbled across Beaufort’s famous scale of wind effects in the early 1980s. There it was, in a dictionary of all places, and he found the compact rhythm of “Force 5, Fresh Breeze, small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters” a sort of nature-focused haiku, and he determined to learn more about this Beaufort fellow and his windy prose. The result defines the wind, but perhaps not as he intended.

What he learned is that the story of man’s measurement of the natural world around him has been a fairly slow and torturous progression from “damn, it’s somewhat blowy out there, what?” to today, when satellites can track rogue waves in the middle of empty oceans, down to the closest ten centimetres, and no trip around the bay is complete with checking out Windguru. Beaufort himself (and while we learn a great deal about him, he is only one of many characters in this story) was an exceptionally good, Cook- and Vancouver-level hydrographer and surveyor, as well as a good observer of the natural world when he wasn’t being shot in the face or the groin by the enemies of His Britannic Majesty.

Beaufort either devised independently or modified an existing wind scale to sea conditions, and amended his original scale in terms an average sailor would understand: thus, ‘Force 5, bring in topsails, whitecaps form’, and so on. The scale didn’t achieve wide acceptance or the Beaufort moniker until close to the end of Beaufort’s long and detail-oriented existence; since then, it has seen derivatives such as the Petersen Sea State Scale, and various land-based methods of clocking the wind by its effects on one’s surroundings, not by its effects on those little hand-held windspeed doohickeys increasing common in the Wednesday night club races.

Huler’s own prose I found a little wide-eyed and repetitive in spots, but you can’t bring in Captain Cook, William Bligh, Charles Darwin and other big names of the 18^th and 19^th century and be considered boring. Beaufort and his scale, the way Huler tells it, tells us a great deal of not only what people thought worth measuring two hundred years ago, but what they thought worth thinking about in a world being transformed by technology and improving science. This book’s sole fault is that this former copy editing author could have used a bit of trimming: I found him a wee bit long-winded.