Huracán: a Taino word, two storms dated in Santo Domingo, and a dictionary that lost the etymology
The word hurricane entered European languages from the Caribbean, and the earliest detailed European account of a hurricane says so: Oviedo's chapter of 1535 defines huracán as a word of the island's own language, dates two storms at Santo Domingo to 1508 and 1509, and records the wind reversing from north to south. Two centuries later the Spanish Academy's dictionary printed the word with a Latin etymology instead.
Why this wins its question: Ask where the word hurricane comes from and the answer returned is a one-line etymology - Taino hurakán, via Spanish - with no text behind it. This object puts the text behind it: the chapter of Oviedo that defines the word as the island's own, read as page scans, with the two storms it dates to 3 August 1508 and 29 July 1509, the reversal of the wind from north to south, the twenty-four hours of it, the twenty-odd ships lost, and the Taino statement that hurricanes were known but never one like this. It then prints the counter-document nobody quotes: the Real Academia's dictionary of 1734, which defines the word carefully and derives it from Latin ventus furens, losing the American origin its own chroniclers had recorded. And it leaves the chronicler's demonology in place beside his data instead of quietly trimming it, since a source that explains a storm by the devil and still reports the wind shift correctly is worth more with both halves showing.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The word is registered as American by the first European natural history of the Indies. Book VI, chapter III of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias opens: "Huracan, en lengua desta isla, quiere deçir propriamente tormenta ó tempestad muy excesiva; porque, en efecto, no es otra cosa sino grandíssimo viento é grandíssima y excesiva lluvia, todo junto ó qualquiera cosa destas dos por sí." The definition is given as a translation from the language of Hispaniola, not as a Castilian coinage.
The first storm is dated, timed and placed. Oviedo puts it on a Wednesday, 3 August 1508, "quassi á hora de medio dia", with Frey Nicolás de Ovando governing the island; in Santo Domingo it threw down every buhío or thatched house and damaged even some built of wall and rammed earth, did the same in many towns of the island, destroyed the country holdings, and flattened the villa called Buena-Ventura. The dating is his own, and later literature does not agree on it uniformly, which is a reason to cite the chronicler rather than a round modern date.
The wind is described as reversing, which is the observation that matters. Oviedo writes that the wind was north and tore the ships out of the port and downriver, more than twenty naos and caravels lost, and then "cambióse despues el tiempo y el viento al opóssito súbitamente por el contrario, é no con menor ímpetu é furia; é fue tan grande el sur, como avia seydo el norte", driving the same ships back up the river; the worst of it lasted "veynte é quatro horas naturales, hasta otro dia jueves, á medio dia".
A wind that blows hard from one quarter, drops, and then blows as hard from the opposite quarter is what an observer on the ground records when the centre of a rotating storm passes over. Oviedo has no theory of rotation and offers none - the inference is modern and is stated here as an inference - but the datum he wrote down in the 1530s is the one such a theory needs, and he wrote it because he was reporting what witnesses in the city described rather than what the meteorology of his day expected.
The frequency baseline in the chapter is Taino testimony, and it is reported as such. "Deçian los indios que otras veces solia aver huracanes; pero que no avia jamás acaesçido otro tan grande ni semejante en su tiempo, ni se acordaban aver oido ni visto cosa de tanto espanto é trabajo en sus dias ni en los de sus passados." The islanders supply both the word and the statement that storms of this class were known but this one was without precedent in living or inherited memory.
A second storm is dated in the same chapter, which turns an anecdote into a series. Oviedo records that in the following year, 1509, the admiral Diego Colón reached the city on 10 July, and that on the 29th of that same month came another hurricane, greater than the one of the year before, doing less harm to the houses and much more in the countryside; others followed in later years, none equal to these two.
The same chapter argues against itself, and the empirical record survives the explanation offered for it. Oviedo calls the storm an "artifiçio é obra en que ha entendido el diablo ó parte de la comunidad del infierno", says that during it the ships were carried about as if all the demons were loose, and closes by reporting that devout Christians affirm, and experience has shown, that since the Blessed Sacrament was placed in the churches and monasteries of the city the island has been spared such storms. The claim of protection is refuted by his own list of later hurricanes on the same page.
He states his evidence rather than asserting the events. Oviedo writes that of the two hurricanes there are many witnesses living in the city, one of them inside his own house, who saw the second; that there are people in Spain who were present; and that there are seamen who experienced the first "con propria pérdida" in the ships that were lost. Naming the class of witness, including one in his household, is why the chapter can be used as testimony and not only as literature.
Two centuries later the standard dictionary of the language prints the word and drops its origin. The Diccionario de la lengua castellana of the Real Academia Española, tomo quarto (Madrid, 1734), folio 193, defines "HURACAN. s.m. Viento repentino, que con increible ímpetu se mueve ordinariamente en remolinos", with effects "que parecen mas que naturáles: como llevarse grandes piedras, arrancar árboles, doblar los hierros de las rejas, derribar edificios y sumergir navíos" - then derives it from the Latin "Ventus furens, de donde se pudo decir Furacán, y corrompido Huracán", and illustrates it from Herrera's Historia de las Indias. The Antillean etymology Oviedo had printed is not mentioned.
The Academy's derivation from ventus furens is not supported by the earliest witness to the word, who was living on Hispaniola and reported it as the island's own; the modern consensus that the word is Taino agrees with him rather than with the dictionary. This object rests that judgement on the two texts it cites and not on a specialist etymological authority, so it is stated with the confidence that support allows.
The honest division of credit is narrow and worth stating. The knowledge that these storms recur, and the word for them, were Caribbean before 1492 and are credited to the islanders by the first European who wrote them down. What the Spanish record adds is the dating: a storm fixed to a weekday, a day, a month, a year and an hour, with its duration, its wind shift, its shipping losses and its named witnesses, printed and still legible. And the 1734 dictionary shows how such a record decays, since the same tradition that preserved the observation lost the acknowledgement inside two hundred years.