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Columbus and the night of the bloody moon
In 1504 while Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica, he used his foreknowledge of a lunar eclipse to fool the natives into provisioning his men. Knowledge is power. When dealing with a less scientific society, our ancestors had no qualms about using advance predictions of celestial events like eclipses to con the natives.
After the American colonies had broken away - 1776 and all that - Britain still fought a long rearguard action, trying to undermine the fledgling United States in whatever way possible.
Knowledge of an impending total solar eclipse due to cross North America in 1806 provides an example.
As the settlers gradually moved west, the indigents were resentful, with good reason. British agents in Canada seem to have connived against the Yankees by telling the Shawnee tribe of Ohio and Indiana when the eclipse would occur, and their leaders used this to stir an uprising, saying that a sign was due from the Great Spirit in the Sky. It all ended in tears at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, but the eclipse provided the focus.
Mark Twain seems to have known of this episode, and used it as a basis for a segment of his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Reversing the Shawnee episode Twain has Hank Morgan, the Yankee in the title (and Bing Crosby in the movie version), hoodwinking the ignorant folk in King Arthur's England by invoking prior knowledge of a solar eclipse due in June of AD 528, even stating the precise time of totality. He used his imagination, though: there was no eclipse around that epoch.
Total solar eclipses are spectacular, but they do not last for long, and may be seen from only within a narrow band drawn across the Earth's surface.
Lunar eclipses may be seen from the whole nightside of the planet, though, and last for hours. Not only that, but during such an event the Moon turns the colour of blood, with obvious implications for the less-sophisticated. (It is the biblical report of the Moon turning blood-red as it rose a few hours after Jesus died on the Cross which allows us to date the Crucifixion to April 3 in AD 33, when a lunar eclipse occurred.)
In 1504 Christopher Columbus, on his fourth trans-Atlantic voyage, had been stranded with his men on the north coast of Jamaica, their last two ships riddled with marine worms.
Having sent a small party to Spanish-occupied Hispaniola, a hundred miles to the east, paddling canoes hewn from local timber, Columbus awaited rescue. But their food had run out, and the Jamaicans who had been pleased to provision them when they first arrived had tired of the trinkets the Spaniards could offer in exchange. Luckily Columbus had astronomical tables with him, which indicated a lunar eclipse was due on February 29.
Calling the local chiefs together, Columbus gravely told them that the God of the Christians was all-powerful, and very displeased with the Jamaicans' refusal to keep them fed, and as a sign of His wrath the Moon would be darkened and turned the colour of blood that evening.
Many of the natives laughed, although others were not so sure. All were convinced when the eclipse began as Columbus had told them it would. To add to the effect, Columbus retired to his cabin, to consult with God and ask Him to withdraw His sign, or so the Admiral told them. In fact he was timing the eclipse with his sandglass, re-emerging at the appropriate juncture. The outcome was as Columbus had anticipated. Convinced of the power of this God, the Jamaicans fell to their knees begging forgiveness. The stranded Europeans did not want for anything again before their rescue six months later.
When he realised that the tracks would cross England, Halley set about deriving their paths and extent, and drew up a map. His stipend at Oxford was inadequate, so he published anonymously (price sixpence) a pamphlet entitled The Black Day or a prospect of Doomsday exemplified in the great and terrible eclipse which will happen on April 22, 1715. If the simple information that an eclipse was due didn't rustle up public interest, that pamphlet was sure to do so.
Actually Halley got that track slightly wrong, due to the contemporary inadequacy of the measurements of solar and lunar distances (Cook's transit observations in 1769 were supposed to fix this). His error was about three miles in the northern edge, which brushed through Wales and central England, but almost a score miles for the southern edge, which he expected to meet the coast near Portsmouth but actually arrived well east of Brighton.
This was the last total eclipse to cross London. By 1724 Halley was doing better, both prediction-wise and economically, having been made Astronomer Royal in 1720. The map shows both the actual course of the 1715 eclipse, and his anticipated track for 1724.
As there are some centuries between total eclipses at any particular location, isn't it unusual to get two within nine years? The answer is definitely yes and no. Total eclipse tracks are long bands across the face of the Earth which must cross somewhere. The August 11 eclipse bisects Turkey. In 2006 another track will traverse Turkey from southwest to northeast, intersecting this year's path near the Black Sea coast. Hoteliers there are delighted. Before that are two eclipses separated by merely 18 months which meet over Angola. People there are not necessarily so pleased, some societies taking a dim view of eclipses, thinking of them as evil portents.
Referring to the map, the 1715 and 1724 central lines intersected over Somerset, but parts of Devon and Cornwall being visited this year (such as Plymouth) were also blessed back then, giving them three eclipses in three centuries, during which Scotland (bar the Shetlands) have had none. But on May 31 in 2003 the Highlanders at least have the chance to see an annular eclipse (the Moon obscures all but a bright ring around the periphery of the Sun), if they go far enough north.
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