High water as a test for madness

Fear that the Gulf of Mexico might one day sweep away much of south Louisiana is nothing new. Such an idea has been much discussed recently, particularly in light of the destruction of recent hurricanes, the steady loss of wetlands, and the consequences of global warming.

In 1871 the big fear was that a huge tidal wave, brought on in part by an unusual alignment of the planets, would sweep us away. The huge wave was supposed to roll across the Atlantic, wipe out much of the eastern United States, push into the Gulf of Mexico, and come swirling into Louisiana on Oct. 4.

A lot of people in Louisiana believed that prediction. Some of them moved to higher, safer ground to get away from the expected inundation.

It was a prediction made more credible because it was attributed to Professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, one of the most prominent earth scientists of the day. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and had been the first to show scientifically that an Ice Age, or several Ice Ages, had changed the Earth’s geology. By the time he made his startling tidal wave prediction, he had moved from his native Switzerland to the United States and was lecturing at Harvard.

He was so well known and respected that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem in his honor on the scientist’s 50th birthday. It never gained the acclaim given “Evangeline” and some of Longfellow’s other works, but then Aggasiz is a lot harder to rhyme than Evangeline.

Agassiz was an old man in 1871, but people still listened when he spoke. “The fact that this sensational rumor was reported as having its origin from the scientific research of the celebrated Professor Agassiz [gave it credence] even among more intelligent and better educated classes,” according to a newspaper report from New Orleans.

That’s why a group of prominent south Louisiana citizens wrote to Professor Caleb G. Forshey, who had gained a reputation as a civil engineer working on Mississippi River projects, as a railroad builder, and in 1871 was working with the city of Galveston to improve the channels in Galveston Bay. He was an expert on tides and such things.

Forshey phrased his answer carefully, but the gist of it was that Professor Agassiz was “an illustrious servant in his domain of inquiry” who surely had nothing to do with “this monstrous and cruel hoax.” Further, such a prediction would be something far outside of Agassiz’s field of study and he would be “without authority” should “he ever become so unphilosophic as to assume the prophet for the amusement of alarming the unscientific.”

No scientist could make such a prediction, Forshey said.

“No ‘conjunction of the planets’ or combination of causes known to science” could give “the remotest guess” to when an earthquake or something like it might happen, he said, and a tidal wave that would have such huge consequences would be caused only by “a considerable upheaval beneath the sea.”

A scientist would have to be crazy to predict such a wave, he said. In fact, “no better test of fitness for a madhouse could be given … than the utterance of any such prophecy.”

We’ve come a long way since Forshey’s day, and scientists are much closer to being able to predict the undersea upheavals that can cause devastating tsunamis, but if Louisiana is going to be struck by a tidal wave, it is much more likely to come from a hurricane than an earthquake.

There are a couple of reports of tsunami waves from Caribbean earthquakes striking the Gulf Coast years ago, but none of them were more than two to three feet in height.

That doesn’t seem very threatening, but I’m not sure what either of the professors would say about that today. Because of disappearing wetlands, coastal erosion, and higher sea levels, a two-foot wave would travel a lot farther into south Louisiana than it would in the days when talking about such a thing appeared to be “a test of fitness for the madhouse.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.