Did a hurricane really get him to America?

In the musical: the hurricane appears in the opening number and returns in Act Two, in "Hurricane", at the moment Hamilton decides to publish the Reynolds Pamphlet.

The real story: a hurricane struck St. Croix on the night of 31 August 1772. Hamilton, then a teenage clerk at the trading firm of Beekman & Cruger, described it in a letter to his father dated 6 September. The Royal Danish American Gazette printed it on 3 October 1772. Impressed, the Presbyterian minister Hugh Knox and local merchants raised money to send him to study in the North American colonies. He first attended a preparatory academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, before King's College.

The newspaper introduced it this way: "The following letter was written the week after the late Hurricane, by a Youth of this Island, to his Father; the copy of it fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, shewed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the Publick. The Author's modesty in long refusing to submit it to Publick view, is the reason of its making its appearance so late as it now does."

The "gentleman" was almost certainly Hugh Knox — who also edited the Gazette whenever its regular editor was away. The letter may not have fallen into his hands quite so "by accident".

The letter begins like a news report:

Honoured Sir,
I take up my pen just to give you an imperfect account of one of the most dreadful Hurricanes that memory or any records whatever can trace, which happened here on the 31st ultimo at night.
It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o'clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour. Meanwhile the wind was shifting round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled fury and continued so 'till near three o'clock in the morning. Good God! what horror and destruction. Its impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.

Then, mid-page, it turns into a sermon addressed to himself: "Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? ... How humble, how helpless, how contemptible you now appear." It climbs to an apocalypse — "Let the Earth rend. Let the planets forsake their course. Let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder" — and lands on faith: "My staff can never be broken—in Omnipotence I trusted." It is the writing of a teenager who already knew how to move a reader, and it worked.

A small coincidence: Angelica's song takes its title from a word she wrote, "satisfied"; here, in the letter that carried Hamilton out of the Caribbean, is Eliza's: "helpless".

Fact-check verdict: true. The letter, and the newspaper page that printed it, survive.