News > To whom it may concern: 300 year old letters reveal Hurricanes’ long term rise

To whom it may concern: 300 year old letters reveal Hurricanes’ long term rise

“We had a hurricane on March 8th.” So starts a letter from 1743 written by the governor of Isle de France, now Mauritius, when the island was a French colony. The brief dispatch to his colonial collaborators at the East India Company details the storm’s devastation. In a recent study, researchers used stacks of old letters, including the governor’s account from 1743, to determine that the number of hurricanes has quadrupled in the region in the last 80 years.