The Great Darkness

 

I suspect the citizens of New England were primed for the end of days in 1780. They were in the fifth year of a bloody war which would cost the new nation of 2 ½ million souls at least 50,000 dead, and $400 million dollars. Worse, the winter just passed had been brutal. In the core of what would later be called "The Little Ice Age", parts of Chesapeake Bay had frozen over, as had the Hudson River and New York and Boston harbors. Record cold and record snows were recorded from the Mohawk valley of New York east to the coast of Maine, and as far south as Georgia.

In Sudbury, Massachusetts seven feet of snow had kept widower Samuel Savage from reaching his own barn. He complained to his diary, “…one snow upon another…and it keeps coming still…” Then, March brought a sudden thaw, which saw bridges carried away by swollen rivers jammed with ice. April was cold and wet, with late snows. And then in May, the days abruptly turned warm and dry.

Mr. Savage’s diary recorded six days of “fair and pleasant “weather in May, although merchant Samuel Phillips of Weston, Massachusetts, observed that the air was remarkably “thick” with vapors and mists, and odd fogs rose from the still frozen north facing slopes of the White Mountains. “The sun rises and sets very red”, wrote the 55 year old Patriot.

That May, encamped with the Continental Army in Morristown, New Jersey, General George Washington was anticipating bad news from Charleston, South Carolina, and he would soon get it. His meteorological observations fit his mood. He noted on the evening of 18 May, “Heavy and uncommon kind of clouds, dark and at the same time a bright and reddish kind of light intermixed with them….” But back in New England, these odd atmospheric phenomena proved merely the curtain riser for the dramatic morning of Friday, 19 May, 1780.

At six that morning, when the sun rose over West Rupert, Vermont, a haze was already gathering beyond the New York border. Beginning about nine “...a dark dense cloud gradually rose...and spread itself until the heavens were entirely covered, except at the horizon, where a narrow rim of light remained.”

One hundred miles to the northeast, on the other side of the White Mountains, in the little village of Lancaster, New Hampshire, workmen remembered the sun had risen with a “strange enchanting hue”. Despite the odd air to the air, they quickly got down to digging a foundation and cellar for Jonas Wilder’s new home.

A little past nine that morning, widower Samuel Savage noticed there “came on an appearance over the whole visible heavens…a light brassy hue, nearly the color of pale cider.”

By about 10:00 am the gathering gloom had reached Cambridge, Massachusetts (above), 150 miles to the south – a speed of about 25 miles per hour. A half hour later 37 year old Harvard College professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, Samuel Williams, decided to begin taking notes on the darkening phenomena.

Wrote farmer Savage, “By ten o'clock the sun had almost entirely disappeared”, and “…songbirds that cheered the day only hours before, now fell silent. Fowls retired to their roosts, or collected together in clusters...cocks crowed and crickets shook their fiddles. It was all as if night was falling”. About 11:00 that morning the darkness was so thick the laborers in Lancaster could no longer see well enough to dig Mr. Wilder's foundation.

A ship's captain, 200 miles southeast of Boston had observed the approach of the blackest cloud he had ever seen. About ten he ordered his crew to take in the sails, but as the cloud engulfed them, they found it impossible to “find their way from one mast to the other”. By eleven he was obliged to steer by lantern light upon his compass.

According to the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, several amateur scientists in Ipswich Hamlet, Massachusetts, being "...gentlemen of liberal education", noted that at half past eleven “…in a room with three windows…open toward the southeast and south, large print could not be read by persons of good eyes.” By noon, “…a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall, as that profiles were taken…”

In the gathering  twilight on Boston Common a man rushed up to a nervous crowd, shouting that the tide in the harbor had “…ceased to flow.” A panic almost ensued, but was stopped by a Mr. Willard who calmly drew his pocket watch and dryly observed, “So it has…for today. It is past twelve o’clock.”

In Harvard, Professor William recorded a light rain had begun to fall “..thick and dark and sooty”.  Jeremy Belknap (above) , a visiting minister and historian, noted that the rain gave the air the “ smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln".  Noted another observer further north in Maine, “... Woodcocks…whistled as they do only in the dark. Frogs peeped. In short, there was the appearance of midnight at noonday”.

The rabble – rousing “Massachusetts Spy” paused their political harangues to record “...that at about 12 o’clock…the day light was not greater...as that of bright moon-light” and that “no object was discernible but by the help of some artificial light.” And a man riding through the 4,000 high foot hills above Penacook, in south central New Hampshire suddenly found himself among black clouds so thick he could barely breathe. Nearby, Mr. Samuel Tenny noted that a sheet of paper “…held within a few inches of the eyes was as black as velvet.”

Back in Ipswich the amateurs noted that “About one o'clock…the darkness was greater than it had been for any time before…We dined about two…two candles burning on the table.” Another wondered if “..every luminous body in the universe had been shrouded in impenetrable darkness, or struck out of existence...”

Approaching two o’clock, while standing at a window, farmer Samuel Savage could no longer read his own watch. His neighbor was forced to cease fertilizing his crops when he could no longer “...discern the difference between the ground and the dung.” About the same time, forty miles south west of Boston, in Killingly Connecticut, Joseph Joslin jr., who had worked as a teamster for the Continental Army, was forced to abandon work on a stone wall for want of light.

Schools across New England were dismissed and churches were filled. Many could not help but remember their scripture, in particular Revelations, Chapter 6, verse 12 and 13; “...The sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became as blood. The stars of the sky fell to the earth, like a fig tree dropping its unripe figs when it is shaken by a great wind."

In the small Massachusetts village of Sutton, 72 year old Reverend David Hall (above) noted in his diary, “People came flocking to the meetinghouse requesting my presence (to guide them in prayer)." Two hundred and twenty years later you can still almost see the leader of the First Congregational Church smile as he added,"The people were very attentive.” In Salem, the 42 year old Presbyterian minister Nathaniel Wittaker told his flock the blackness was God's judgment upon their “cumulative sin”, while another, braver, local preacher admitted to his flock that he was “as much in the dark as they were”.

Salem lawyer William Pynchon, grandson of one of the colonies' Puritan founders, observed most of his fellow citizens were filled with “melancholy and fear” except for a small knot of drunken sailors, “hallooing and frolicking throughout the streets” heckling women and urging them to remove their clothing. Pynchon even quoted them. “Now you may take off your rolls and high caps, and be damned.” Sailors, it seems, have been the same since time began and were determined to remain so even at it's end.

Meanwhile, further south in Hartford, the Connecticut Colonial House of Representatives was so shaken by the dark they voted to adjourn. A similar motion was introduced in the upper house, the Governor's Council, which was debating a bill to regulate shad fishing. But the Councilor from Stamford objected. 

Colonel Abraham Davenport declared, “The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty.” Shamed by his logic, at least part of the government of Connecticut decided to go forth and regulate the fishes by candle light.

The incident inspired the Quaker anti-slavery poet, John Greenleaf Whittier to write, “... All ears grew sharp, To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter, The black sky... Meanwhile in the old Statehouse, dim as ghosts, Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut, Trembling beneath their legislative robes. 'It is the Lord's great day! Let us adjourn,' Some said; and then, as with one accord, All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport”

Back in Morristown, with the Continental Army, Connecticut Corporal Joseph Plumb Martin, a six year veteran at the age of 21, admitted, “...it has been said that the darkness was not so great in New Jersey...but I know that it was very dark where I then was...fowls went to their roosts, the cocks crew and the whip-poor-wills sang their usual serenade; the people had to light candles in their houses to enable them to see to carry on their usual business...”

When the superfluous night fell the full moon was due to rise at nine, but did not appear, until 1:00 A.M., and then it shown, high in the sky and blood red. Shortly afterward dim stars began to appear. 

Then, “About three o'clock the light in the west increased, the motion of the clouds more quick, their color higher and more brassy…There appeared to be quick flashes…not unlike the aurora borealis.... About half past four the company of Ipswich amateurs, “who had passed the darkness very cheerfully together” staggered home to their beds, not afraid but none the wiser.

With the dawn on Saturday, 20 May, 1780, New England struggled to return to normal. The day was light and the night was dark again, at least for the present. But few could look upon that evening's setting sun with absolute assurance that it would reappear. But that morning, the workmen in Lancaster, New Hampshire returned to their labors. If they did not work, they did not eat. And like all practical men, they knew they would be hungry tomorrow.

With time, came a return to reason, for some. On 22 June, 1780, another Boston paper, The Independent Chronicle, printed a letter from a royalist medical doctor. Samuel Stearns, who claimed a special knowledge of "... philosophy and astronomy." He assured readers the darkness could not have been a solar eclipse, since “...the moon was more than one hundred and fifty degrees from the sun all that day.”  Besides, the moon, sun and earth are all spinning, meaning the longest it is possible for the moon to block out the sun at any spot in earth is 7 minutes and 32 seconds. In Boston The Great Darkness had lasted, “...for at least fourteen or fifteen hours."  In any case, American colonists had seen eclipses before, in 1776, 1777 and 1778.  Few still thought eclipses portended doomsday.

Some suggested the dark cloud had been volcanic. But the New England farmers were not so ignorant of what lay beyond their horizon, as to have missed sulfur spewing mountains hidden among the Appalachians. Two hundred years later it would be known that sometime around 1780 there had been eruptions in the Cascade range, 3,000 miles to the west. But none of these produced ash clouds large or high enough to have crossed the Rocky Mountains and blanketed New England.

To the pragmatic New England Puritans the answer was staring them in the face, since the one thing – other than rocks – Europeans battled ever day in the new world were trees. North America, was covered by forests. And it was noted for several days after the Great Dark, that the Merrimack River, the largest stream flowing out of New Hampshire, was coated with a black scum. Some also claimed to have smelled burnt leaves and wood smoke – odors familiar before the 21^st century. But if you passed over such observations, the mystery of The Great Dark, remained a mystery.

So the descendants of Puritans were eager to accept only one explanation for The Great Dark, and in the end the loyalist Doctor Sterns assigned responsibility for the frightening 19 of May, 1780, to “...Him that walketh through the circuit of heaven, who stretcheth out the heaven like a curtain, who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” In other words, God almighty. Yaway, the vengeful Hebrew God. Elahim, the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. That God. A God who might destroy an entire universe out of wounded pride. And such was the power of religion that after  the living memory of the Great Darkness faded,  it would be two centuries before humans dared to actively look for real evidence.

At the turn of the 21^st century a group of scientists working out of the University of Missouri finally began gathering chronicles of Dendrochronologists who had counted tree rings upwind from places struck by the Great Darkness.

And 300 miles north northwest of Samuel Savage's farm, they found the answer patiently awaiting them, north of the finger lakes of New York State, across the cold expanse of Lake Erie, north of Alexander Bay and the source of the St. Lawrence River, among the 3,000 square miles of coniferous and deciduous forest surrounding Opengo Lake, in Ontario, Canada.

The tree rings found there tell those who can read them that the deep snows of New England in 1780 had been balanced by a scarcity of precipitation in Ontario. They cannot tell us, at least not yet, what started the great fire. It may have been lightening, it may have been an Algonquin or a French Canadian burning out a new canoe's interior, or flushing game or a human enemy, or slashing and burning to clear land for a farm. But once started there was no rain that spring to stop 35 square miles of old growth forest from burning.

This was not the first time this forest had burned, as shown by the lack of clutter around each tree. This was shown by the  lowered temperature of the conflagration, which allowed perhaps half of the trees in the forest to survive even though the fire licked at their bark. 

Still, the trauma left scares on the survivors (above). And in following years their growth rings were wider, showing they benefited from a sudden lack of competition. This had all happened before, of course. But what was particular about 19 May, 1780 was not merely the fire, but also the weather.

The calm at the center of a persistent high pressure zone atop Ontario, which had caused the drought which fed the fire, also allowed the smoke to climb vertically and deprived the flames of the influx of oxygen and super heating which a steady wind would have. A low pressure cyclone turning around the Ohio/Pennsylvania border would have drawn the Flammagenitus clouds - “often grayish to brown in color”- southeastward . 

Gradually the massive soot cloud cooled and dropped and slowed to about 20 miles an hour. And when it encountered the 4 to 6,000 foot high barrier of the White Mountains, it became what was called at the time a “timber fog”.

On the east side of the mountains the timber fog collided with a dense ocean fog, carried onshore from the Atlantic. And where these two air masses, dry smoke and salt air fog, collided, they bloated out the sun for a full day. About midnight the natural coastal patterns of morning on shore and afternoon off shore winds pulled the fog and smoke out to sea, where it dispersed. It was all a perfectly natural, if unusual chain of natural events.

By Wednesday, 26 July, 1780 the workers in Lancaster, New Hampshire, were able to raise the frame for the new home for Jonas Wilder's family, 10 children – 5 sons and 5 daughters. It was the first two story house built in New Hampshire, and still stands. It is now called the Wilder-Holton House, and houses the Lancaster Historical Society, and a small museum. It stands as a monument to those who have faith in the future, because if doomsday does not rescue us from our mistakes, we are condemned to continue living with them.

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