November 1839 Coringa cyclone

The years before 1980 featured the pre-1980 North Indian Ocean cyclone seasons. Each season was an ongoing event in the annual cycle of tropical cyclone formation. The North Indian tropical cyclone season has no bounds, but they tend to form between April and December, peaks in May and November. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical cyclones form in the northern Indian Ocean. Below are the most significant cyclones in the time period. Because much of the North Indian coastline is near sea level and prone to flooding, these cyclones can easily kill many with storm surge and flooding. These cyclones are among the deadliest on earth in terms of numbers killed.
On 25 November 1839, an enormous cyclone caused a 40-foot storm surge that hitCoringa, Andhra Pradesh, wiped out the harbor city, destroyed 25,000 ships and vessels in its bay, and killed 300,000 people. Survivors never entirely rebuilt the city.

1737 Calcutta Cyclone


On 7 October 1737, a natural disaster struck the city of Calcutta (modern-day Kolkata) inIndia. For a long time this was believed in Europe to have been the result of an earthquake, but it is now believed to have been a tropical cyclone.Thomas Joshua Moore, the duties collector for the British East India Company in Calcutta, wrote in his official report that a storm and flood had destroyed nearly all the thatched buildings and killed 3,000 of the city's inhabitants. Other reports from merchant ships indicated an earthquake and tidal surgewere to blame, destroying 20,000 ships in the harbor and killing 300,000 people. It should be noted that the population of Calcutta at the time was around 3,000-20,000.
Although there seems to be little evidence for the popular figure of 300,000 deaths or for the existence of an earthquake at all, it is this number that shows up in popular literature.At the same time, the figure of 3000 is only an estimation of the number of deaths inside the city itself.This apparent incongruity in the data suggests a possible mix-up with the numbers for the 1839 Coringa cyclone mentioned in this article, which also suggest 20,000 sunk ships and 300,000 fatalities. Both of these figures may stem from the 300,000 figure in the 1737 super cyclone in the West Bengal region as neither one has similar numbers .