A Mysterious Darkness: The Day the Sun Went Out in New England

The Colonial Williamsburg Journal ^ | Summer 2005 | Andrew G. Gardner

[quidnunc]

The nineteenth day of May, 1780, began in New England like any other pretty, late-spring morning. Fruit blossoms dangled heavy in the warm, newly risen sun. The scent of nectar brought drowsy honeybees from their straw hives. The dawn chorus of songbirds chirped and echoed across the sleepy countryside as farm laborers yoked their horses to heavy wooden ploughs and carts ready for the day ahead. But by mid-morning the pastoral calm would be turned on its head. Laborers and schoolchildren would be scurrying home for shelter. By noon, birds would be roosting in the trees and bats would be taking to the sullen skies. A mysterious darkness descended over a large swath of New England … a darkness so dense and unnaturally black and fearful that the God-fearing folks of the northeast felt in their bones that the Day of Judgment had finally arrived.

With the benefit of more than two hundred years, hindsight, it is probably fair to say that the good people of New England were a little deceived, at least as far as the timing of the biblical prophecy. But what of the cause of such a phenomenon that managed to put the fear of death into so many people? These many years later, is there any way of knowing just exactly what transpired that bright May morning?

There are written accounts of what people saw and heard that day. Most of the witnesses agree that the course of events started about 10:30 that morning. A Massachusetts resident reported:

In the morning the sun rose clear, but was soon overcast. The clouds became black and ominous, and as they soon appeared, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and a little rain fell. Toward nine o'clock, the clouds became thinner, and assumed a brassy or coppery appearance, and earth, rocks, trees, buildings, water, and persons were changed by this strange unearthly light. A few minutes later … it was as dark as it usually is at nine o'clock on a summer evening. Fear, anxiety, and awe gradually filled the minds of the people. Women stood at the door, looking out upon the dark landscape; men returned from their labor in the fields; the carpenter left his tools, the blacksmith his forge, the tradesman his counter. Schools were dismissed, and tremblingly the children fled homeward… . "What is coming?" queried every lip and heart.

At eleven of the clock the Connecticut Governor's Council was meeting in Hartford. When the darkness became overwhelming, it was suggested the men adjourn their deliberations. Colonel Abraham Davenport objected. "Either the Day of Judgment is at hand or it is not," he said. "If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I wish to be found in the line of my duty. Bring me candles."

The sketchy information available says that the Darkness stretched south from on the Canadian border to Falmouth on Cape Cod in the east, covering most of Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the area west to Albany. This was no localized phenomenon.

"The obscurity was deepest about 12 to 1 o'clock," wrote Bishop Edward Bass, a Massachusetts man of the cloth. "It was however, at the lightest, darker I think than a moonlit night." New Hampshire Judge Dr. Samuel Tenney said, "The darkness could not have been more complete. A sheet of white paper held within a few inches of the eye was equally invisible with the blackest velvet." And an enterprising young Harvard student, Nathan Reid, recorded that by 11:00 A.M. a Mr. Wigglesworth couldn't read a Bible when standing by the window. By 12:21 P.M. the blackness was so intense he couldn't even read the title page.

In several accounts of that morning are embellishments of the general theme: "A melancholy gloom overcast the face of Nature"; "Birds sang their evening songs, disappeared, and became silent; fowls went to roost; cattle sought the barnyard; and candles were lighted in the houses."

By the time mid-afternoon rolled around, and the gloom began to dissipate, the populace must have breathed a sigh of relief. And by early' evening there was a hint of sunshine to raise beleaguered spirits. But the ordeal was not over.

As soon as the sun had bedded itself in the west, clouds rolled in, and dusk turned to night at a furious pace. Even the light from an almost-full moon was snuffed out. Imagine the trepidation these New Englanders felt. Just when they thought the ordeal of the day was over, an inexplicable, bat-black witching hour was upon them.

It was described as "a kind of Egyptian darkness which seemed almost impervious to the rays." In fact, different accounts talk about an Egyptian darkness, described in the Book of Exodus, that Moses rustled up as an encore to the plague of locusts that forced pharaoh to release the Israelites. Perhaps New England's Day of Darkness didn't have quite the historical clout of the Moses episode, yet whatever was to blame for these weird goings on, the effect was to stay in many minds for many years. "It was the darkest Nite that ever was seen by us in the World," said Phineas Sprague of Melrose, Massachusetts. The Boston Chronicle nodded in agreement and trotted out the Day of Judgment theory: "a portentous omen of the wrath of Heaven in vengeance denounced against the land … the immediate harbinger of the last day, when the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light."

This biblical prophecy of a Great Darkness that foretells the end of the world goes back to the Old Testament's Book of Joel, and crops up later in the Gospel of St. Matthew in slightly different form. "The sun," Joel said, "shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before the terrible day of the Lord come."

May 19, 1780, did in fact produce several eyewitness reports of the sky's "strange yellowish and at times reddish appearance" as well as the moon later appearing like blood. Of course, how much of this embellishment was recorded after the fact cannot be known. Molding reality to fit prophecy is not unheard of But history tells us that New Englanders awoke next morning — May 20, 1780 — to a world that was familiar and delightful. And they were still alive. The Day of Judgment had, it appeared, come … and gone. Or maybe it hadn't come after all. Maybe there is another explanation for that dark day and even darker night?

The first idea that comes to a rational mind is to determine whether the darkness could have been caused by a solar eclipse. The degree of darkness, if not a figment of overactive imaginations, would have matched such an event. NASA has a complete record of solar and lunar eclipses stretching back to 1999 B.C. But a scan of the data shows no solar eclipse in sight that May 19. A lunar eclipse covering 96.7 percent of the surface of the full moon — apparently a pretty rare occurrence — had taken place the previous night, May 18. Though it is fanciful to dwell on this slight coincidence, there is little mileage to be gained.

Next we turn to evidence that extreme weather was to blame. Today, whenever we discuss extremes of weather, we talk about "since record keeping began." In the United States, comprehensive meteorological records started in the mid-1800s. May 19, 1780, didn't make the cut. Even a glance at eyewitness accounts shows that an enormous thunderstorm enveloped the region. "Weird coppery light," "black and ominous" clouds, thunder and lightning and rain are surefire signs. But there must have been more. New Englanders would have recognized a thunderstorm, so why the panic? They wouldn't be quaking in their boots at the mere rumble of thunder. If the evidence is to be believed, the darkness was almost total. Yet, for meteorologists, it is inconceivable that a thunderstorm, even on the grandest scale, with 35,000 feet of the blackest cumulonimbus cloud stacked up over New England, could have caused such a frightening total blackout.

There is a suggestion that smoke from forest fires could have been the cause. It has been said that fires were burning to the north. But to blanket the entire area with smog so thick as to blot out the sun and the moon would have required a fire that gave even Hell a run for its money. Nor would it just appear for twenty-four hours and vanish. What's more, a fire of that magnitude would have left traces in the backwoods. But no such trace seems to exist. Yet it has to be said that some of the descriptions tally with the idea of sunlight filtered through dense smoke. Just remember the last bonfire you lit in your yard. ''Yellowish,'' "coppery red" smoke against the sun. But then there is a nagging question that still lingers, a bit like wood smoke: Wouldn't they have smelled it?

There is a letter from a Boston resident, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, who wrote, "The atmosphere was not simply dark, but seemed full of the smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln … . The precipitation that fell was found to be thick, dark and sooty." Both these observations are intriguing. The sooty fallout seems to add fuel to the forest-fire suggestion, but the smells described do not. The pungent odor that comes from coal burning is sulfur. What's more, malt houses and brewing equipment have long been sanitized with sulfur compounds, so perhaps what the good doctor remembered was a nasty nose-full of sulfur dioxide. By contrast, there's no evidence of even a whiff of smoke from a forest fire. No one in New England that day complained that the smell of wood smoke was everywhere. So perhaps it was something else.

In 1783 an Icelandic volcano, Lakuggar, exploded, spewing out three cubic miles of lava, covering an area almost four times the size of Washington, D.C., to a depth of seventy feet. For long months, day and night, smoke belched from the very guts of the Earth into the atmosphere. Iceland was devastated. Half the island's horses and cattle died. Eighty percent of the country's sheep — two hundred thousand animals — perished, and one quarter of the human population died of hunger as a result. But the smoke that snuffed out the northern sun wasn't just a local disaster. For two long years all of Europe had an extension of winter. Benjamin Franklin, the United States's [sic] first ambassador to France, remarked on the "greatly diminished summer" that resulted from the eruption. In addition, "The winter of 1783-84 was more severe than any that had happened for many years." The thick smoke spread far and wide. In Italy, you could look at the summer sun directly through the gloom. It's said that the smoke was even seen as far away as Syria, more than three thousand miles southeast of Iceland.

So, the intriguing question is: Could the Mysterious Darkness of May 19, 1780, have been the result of smoke from a volcanic explosion? The answer is: Possibly. Certainly the sulfurous smell of the coal-kiln would make sense. But what about the volcano? New England is not renowned for fiery, Lord of the Rings volcanic vistas. But at the other side of the North American continent, the west coast Cascade Range still has active volcanoes that are part of the so-called Ring of Fire circling the Pacific Ocean. Mount St. Helens is the best known, with its spectacular eruption May 18, 1980, exactly two hundred years less a day after New England's blackness. Another active volcano is Glacier Peak. And guess what? According to the United States Geological Service, and some native legends, Glacier Peak last blew its top "sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century." The exact date is a mystery. It would be decades before the white man set eyes on this magnificent range of mountains. But the year of 1780 is in the ball park.

So unseen by paleface eyes, the gas and volcanic ash of an erupting Glacier Peak might have filled the western sky, rising tens of miles into the air, before being swept across the continent by the jet stream. The theory is just as plausible as the forest fires, if not more so. Imagine dark, thunder-laden skies hanging heavy, mixed with layers of volcanic debris, miles thick, stretching into the stratosphere. As it rolls eastward over New England, the darkness deepens, some might say into the realm of myth and legend. But then the thunderous deluge begins, and acid rain, with that unmistakable smell of sulfur — the "Brimstone" of old, the very sign of Hell itself — falls from the sky, bringing with it a sooty, well-traveled volcanic ash.

Fact or fiction?

Who can say?

Andrew Gardner, who writes on Canada's Salt Spring Island, contributed to the spring 2004 journal an article on Spain's participation in the American Revolution.

[hershey]

A few years ago New England didn't really have much of a summer. Temps were decidedly lower, not much sun, and a volcanic eruption was probably the culprit.

[topsail]

I would say that a volcano eruption is the probable cause.

The story is almost the same as the event that I, and tens of thousands of others, experienced in June of 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. Even the time of day is similar.

The first eruption, a small one, occurred on Wednesday around noon. It was beautiful, a light colored, mushroom shaped cloud contrasting with a bright blue sky. Everyone came outside to see it. It soon drifted away and was considered to be a good show !

The next eruption, somewhat larger, occurred on Friday afternoon. After work I had gone to the barrio for a little recreation (San Miguel beer & billiards) and noticed that it was getting dark earlier than usual. I went to the door and saw that the sky was overcast and rain had begun to fall. There was a typhoon to the east of us so this weather was somewhat normal for the situation. I did decide that I should get myself home before the weather became worse. When I went outside to my car I found that the rain had become something else, what was falling from the sky, then, was mud. The rain from the typhoon was mixing with the volcanic ash in the air and coming to earth as mud with about the same consistency as wet cement. So heavy that the windshield wipers could not remove it, and I had to drive home with my head and left arm and shoulder out the window in order to see. When I arrived home my wife said that, covered with grey mud, I looked like a statue.

Next morning, Saturday, at work we had scheduled lifting some heavy equipment with a crane but decided to postpone it because of the light covering of slippery wet ash. Around 9am as I headed up the hills toward home I saw a black cloud coming over the small mountains toward our location. I made it home just as the cloud arrived. Once inside the house, I could feel earth quaking and the mud ,again, began to fall from the sky. By noon time everywhere was as dark as midnite, the sky was filled with thunder and balls of fire as the ash cloud created it's own weather system. The frequent earth quakes, accompanied by rumblings in the earth and the thunder and balls of fire in the sky and the rain of mud continued throughout Saturday night and into early Sunday morning.

Sometime before scheduled sunrise the eruption ceased and Sunday morning was relatively bright with no dark clouds, and no rain, and only an occasional tremor. The thing I noticed right away was the silence. No sounds of civilization. No sounds of cars, or machines of any kind, no one talking, no radio or TV, No birds singing. No electricity or water. Only the occasional sound of a breaking tree limb caused by the weight of the heavy mud that had coated everything.

Others who were there, at that time, had to endure much more traumatic circumstances than I and they could tell a much more interesting recap of this event.

Could a volcanic eruption have caused the events in the posted story? Definitely, YES!

[King Prout]

while I tend to agree that volcanic eruption is the likeliest explanation, I think the author is too glibly dismissive of meteorologic possibilities.

the bizarre weather I witnessed in New Orleans on 03 March 1990 comes to mind.

[Red Boots]

Great Story. And I agree that the event in New England was most likely a volcanic cloud. But one thing I didn't notice recorded by eye-witnesses was any ash fall. I think there would be some.

[tortoise]

Reminds me of 1980, living in eastern Washington. We lived in the sticks, and didn't know that the volcano had erupted. You had to experience to believe it; a cloudly of inky blackness slowly crept from the west blotting out every speck of light. Due to the atmospheric effects, the RF reception dropped out and so we lost radio and TV where we were. People were standing in the streets of my small town wondering just what the hell was going on -- it was like watching the end of the world.

[RobRoy]

I'm thinking one of those big ships from the movie "Independence Day." A scout ship.

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

Good read, volcano seems apropos.

[U S Army EOD]

Three questions:

1. When was the super earth quake at the head of the Mississippi? It happend around that time didn't it?

2. Didn't those people drink a lot back then.

3. When did the Kennedy's show up in that area?

[quidnunc]

U S Army EOD wrote: 1. When was the super earth quake at the head of the Mississippi? It happend around that time didn't it?

there were a series of earthquakes along the New Madras (Missouri) fault during 1811-12.

The big one was on Feb. 7, 1812.

[ruoflaw]

I am glad that people kept journals back then. Thanks for posting such an interesting mystery.

[ruoflaw]

could you explain what kind of bizarre weather you experienced? Please?

[King Prout]

an arctic cold front rolled in at around four in the afternoon.
It had been almost 90degrees, clear blue sky, light breeze
then, this horizon-spanning BLACK wedge swept down from the northwest.
It was dark enough by 430pm that the streetlights came on.
the temperature dropped about 40 dergees in one hour.
it snowed that night.

[ruoflaw]

That really is bizarre weather. I have heard of extreme weather changes that occasionally happen out west but I would not expect to ever see it snow in New Orleans. I think it is great that you remembered the date.

[MHGinTN]

The darkness lasted too long ... unless an extremely odd orbital path allowed it to sweep past inward then outward of the Sun, changing direction within the earth's orbit and tracking somewhat wiht the earth's path around the Sun.

[Mr. K]

My next guess is one of those huge UFO's like on Independance day

(but thats just me)

[King Prout]

I recall the date due to the following:
I know the year from the dorm I was in.
I know it was the first Sunday in March because I found the following Monday's snow so remarkable.
I recall the shape and hue of the wedge because it floored me while I was watching it come in.
I know the vector because I know the layout of that quad.
and I recall the temperature drop largely because I found it rather amusing: there were quite a few near-nude coeds out on the quad sunbathing. several had fallen asleep in the heat. their reactions when they woke up in the gathering cold were, ah, memorable. ;)

it snowed twice in the seven years I lived in New Orleans.

[MHGinTN]

I can visualize an elliptical that would allow a large rock to sweep away from the Sun and then in again in such a way that it could cast a shadow doing what was described, approximately (need to do the mechanics to be sure). I can't entertain the 'huge spaceship' scenario. But that's just me. To each his/her own.

[SunkenCiv]

The forest fire explanation has always appeared to be the best one, and until someone comes up with a way for a volcanic cloud to remain just wide enough to not be reported outside a fairly narrow piece of the Eastern Seaboard, after having travelled more than 2000 miles (the nearest volcano is probably more distant than this), there is no resort to a volcanic eruption as an explanation for this.

[King Prout]

lack of stench, depth of shadow, and speed of clearance argues against the forest fire hypothesis.

remember that, at that time, the continent was not particularly rife with record-making people.

[blam]

"The forest fire explanation has always appeared to be the best one."

That's all I can figure too. (Forest fires smell though.)