‘The sea was a boiling, seething mass’: the Caribbean hurricane of 1924

Satellite image of a hurricane. The 1924 storm clipped the western tip of Cuba, killing about a dozen people. Photograph: AP

The “unprecedented hurricane” that struck the Caribbean in October 1924 was the most powerful anyone could remember.

A hurricane is really defined as a violent storm with wind speeds exceeding 74mph (119km/h). When the Saffir-Simpson scale was devised in 1971 to grade the destructive potential of storms, the 1924 event was the first on record to have made the top classification, category 5.