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A classic engraving of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pliny the Younger survived, Pliny the Elder perished.
ABOVE:
Ironically, Pompeii’s destruction has given historians the best preserved collection of Roman frescoes. 14__________100 Letters That Changed the World
Pliny the Younger to Tacitus (AD 106) Pliny the Younger (AD 61-c107) was a Roman lawyer and magistrate. Pliny the Elder was his uncle, an author celebrated in his lifetime for the first natural history encyclopedia. Both men witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii in AD 79, and the nephew’s letters describing the events are history’s earliest personal eye-witness accounts.
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ow many letters must Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger have written in his life, for as many as 247 of them to have survived? He was a prolific correspondent, and historians value his insights into the life of imperial Rome. His letters to and from the emperor Trajan about the legal position of early Roman Christians are fascinating documents of their time. Pliny the Younger’s father died when he was a boy, and he was raise in Rome by his uncle, whom he greatly admired. Pliny the Elder had a post in charge of the Roman naval fleet at Misenum, west of Naples. While the nephew and his mother were visiting the uncle in AD 79, Mount Vesuvius on the other side of the Bay of Naples began to erupt. When Pliny the Elder heard that people were in danger he set sail from Misenum with a fleet of light ships to rescue them from the shore below Vesuvius. Faced with the fear and panic of those around him when he arrived, he tried to soothe them by appearing unconcerned – coolly taking a bath, a meal and a nap. This delay to his return to Misenum was fatal. Almost trapped in his bedroom by falling debris, he escaped to the shore but was overcome by noxious fumes and fell down dead. Twenty five years later the Roman historian Tacitus wrote to the younger Pliny to ask about his experiences of the eruption. In two replies, Pliny gave such detailed and accurate descriptions of the unfolding disaster that today volcanologists describe similar volcanic events as Plinian eruptions. As so often with history, it is the little moments affecting ordinary people that make Pliny’s recollections leap off the
page. He notes the flight of people from their houses, which are shaking from the earthquakes, to the fields where ‘the calcined stones and cinders fell in large showers, and threatened destruction. They went out,’ Pliny recalls, ‘having pillows tied upon their heads with napkins; and this was their whole defence against the storm of stones that fell round them.’ The terror of the population is palpable. ‘You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands … some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part now convinced that there were no gods at all and that the final endless night of which we had heard had come upon the world.’ Of his uncle’s relaxed approach to rescue he paints a very human picture. ‘It is most certain that he was so little disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep; for his breathing, which on account of his corpulence was rather heavy and sonorous, was heard by the attendants outside.’ Pliny the Elder is, for a moment, no longer a natural historian of repute but a fat man snoring. Of the letters themselves, he tells Tacitus, ‘You will pick out whatever is most important; for a letter is one thing, a history quite another. It is one thing writing to a friend, another thing writing to the public.’ But in fact, such is the quality of Pliny’s writing that he has done both. LEFT: The collected letters of Pliny the Younger published in the 18th century.
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Columbus letter to Luis de Santángel (1493) On the return leg of his first voyage of discovery to the New World, Christopher Columbus writes a letter describing what he has found. It creates a sensation throughout Europe, and until the nineteenth century, it remains his only known written first-person account of the historic events of 1492–93.
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efore returning to Spain from his maiden voyage of 1492–93, the Genoese explorer Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) penned a report dated February 15, 1493, while aboard his caravel, La Niña, off the Canary Islands. In it he described what he had found on his journey in search of an ocean route to Asia. Columbus wrote that he had headed west across the Atlantic, reaching the first island on the 33rd day, and other islands after that. At the time he thought he was in the (East) Indies, thus describing the native inhabitants he had encountered as “Indians.” In fact, he was describing Caribbean islands now known as San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, as well as Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and the mainland he heard rumors about from the natives was not Cathay (China) but the Americas. Shortly after Columbus arrived back in Spain, a printed version of the letter in Spanish appeared in Barcelona. A month after that, a Latin translation of a nearly identical version appeared in Rome and was widely distributed by the Church. The document announced, “I discovered many islands inhabited by numerous people. I took possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance.” His letter also provided observations about the natives’
vulnerability to conquest, saying “they are destitute of arms, which are entirely unknown to them, and for which they are not adapted; not on account of any bodily deformity, for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror.” The explorer brought back several of the Indians as prisoners (only eight of twentyfive survived the trip) to demonstrate what such strange peoples were like. Columbus depicted the New World as a paradise of exotic creatures and abundant fruits, spices, and gold, gushing that the rich territory was Spain’s for the taking and its inhabitants could be easily conquered, enslaved, and converted to the Christian faith. His initial account was so enticing that the crown quickly outfitted him for a return voyage with a massive fleet that departed on September 24, 1493. He made two more return voyages after that. Original versions of Columbus’s letter, written by his hand, have never been found. Only the printed editions—Spanish and Latin—are known. However, a third version of the letter, contained in a 16th-century manuscript collection known as the Libro Copiador, was discovered in 1985. This manuscript version differs in several significant ways from the printed editions and, although its authenticity is still tentative, many believe the Copiador version to be a closer rendition of Columbus’s original missive.
LEFT TOP:
The addressee of Columbus’s Spanish letter was the Escribano de Ración—at that time, Luis de Santángel. An official position of the Crown of Aragone.
LEFT: The letter provides very few details of the oceanic voyage itself, and covers up the loss of the flagship of his fleet, the Santa María, by suggesting Columbus left it behind with colonists.
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ABOVE:
The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written by John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries. While facsimiles like the one shown here abound, the original letter is thought to have been destroyed by the newspaper editor of the Boston Evening Transcript after its first publication or by Mrs. Bixby herself, who may have been a Confederate sympathizer. 150__________100 Letters That Changed the World
Abraham Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby (1864) In the autumn of 1864, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew wrote to President Lincoln asking him to express condolences to a widow believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War. Lincoln’s note, sent to Lydia Bixby of Boston on November 21, 1864, soon became both a national sensation and a mystery.
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he letter was short and to the point. The writer said what he had to say to the grieving mother, who had apparently lost five sons in the Civil War, and then he signed off with very little flair. “Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,” he wrote. “A. Lincoln.” The letter has long been legendary among students and scholars of Lincoln. The eminent Lincoln authority James G. Randall declared that it “stands with the Gettysburg Address as a masterpiece in the English language.” The letter soon became a national sensation after it was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 25, 1864. As quickly as it swept the country—reprinted in newspapers, copied, and sold as souvenirs—the original letter disappeared, spawning a mystery that has straddled more than a century. The original letter is thought to have been destroyed by the newspaper editor after publication, or by Mrs. Bixby herself. Copies of the letter have been circulating for many years, but the whereabouts of the original remains unknown. Lincoln penned the letter, scholars say, at the request of a Massachusetts official who had heard of Bixby’s plight. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, Bixby’s losses had “excited much sympathy” in town, and Lincoln’s letter was well received. As the paper described it at the time, “her lonely abode was made cheerful” by Lincoln’s words. The letter was soon reprinted in other newspapers, adding to the legend of Lydia Bixby. But, in part,
the story was just that: a legend. Bixby, 61 at the time, lost only two of her five sons in the war. The third was a prisoner of war; the fourth a deserter; and the fifth appeared to have been discharged from the military, his fate unknown. Also unclear is just how much Bixby welcomed the letter. Not only was she illiterate, but she is believed to have been a Confederate sympathizer, or at least not a fan of Lincoln, who had been narrowly reelected just two weeks before he wrote the letter. And then there were questions about who really wrote it. The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written instead by John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries. While Hay, not Lincoln, may be the true author of what several scholars describe as “the most beautiful letter ever written,” Lincoln’s literary reputation remains intact. The author of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural will always command the world’s admiration. As a journalist wrote in 1925, “If under the merciless hand of investigation it should be shown that this remarkable document was not only based upon misinformation but was not the composition of Lincoln himself, the letter to Mrs. Bixby would still remain … ‘One of the finest specimens of pure English extant.’” The letter can never diminish the status of Lincoln, but it might serve to elevate that of John Hay. And of course it has long since won Mrs. Bixby a most unlikely immortality.
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RIGHT:
The young Helen Keller with her inspirational teacher, Anne Sullivan. 152__________100 Letters That Changed the World
Alexander Graham Bell to Anne Sullivan (1892) Alexander Graham Bell saw the invention of the telephone as interfering with his work in researching aids for the deaf. Both his mother and wife were deaf, so when he heard about the extraordinary Helen Keller he was anxious to find out more about the astonishing child prodigy and how she was taught
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orn in Scotland to a deaf mother (Eliza Grace) and a father who taught speech, Bell (1847–1922) grew up with a passion for communication and music. Despite her deficit, his mother had become an accomplished pianist, in part by feeling the vibrations. Alexander communicated with her via a special ear horn and endeavoured to learn more about acoustics. After moving to Boston in 1871, he attempted to amplify sound in ways that would enable the deaf to hear. One of his goals soon became trying to create a “harmonic telegraph” that could transmit more than one message at a time, based on the principle that several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch. While working with his assistant on June 2, 1875, Bell discovered that he could hear a distinct sound over a wire. The first sound he heard was that of a twanging clock spring which had been transmitted from a nearby room. Based on this experiment, he reasoned that it was possible to transmit the sound of a human voice over a wire. In 1876 Bell sketched a crude diagram capturing his idea in three scribbled scenes. “As far as I can remember,” he would later write, “these are the first drawings made of my telephone—or ‘instrument for the transmission of vocal utterances by telegraph.’” The most important view, shows a person speaking into the wide end of a cone, just as Bell had done by talking into his mother’s hearing horn. The cone sends and focuses the sound vibrations over a wire onto a diaphragm at the opposite end. When the sound waves vibrate the diaphragm, an armature also vibrates, inducing electrical signals via the electromagnet that is contained in a small box at the narrow end of the cone. These signals travel across the circuit to the electromagnet on the right and induce the armature on that side to copy the vibrations
sent by the left armature, and these vibrations, in turn, are mimicked by the diaphragm on the right. Thus the listener on the right hears a true reproduction of the original utterance. Bell drew up a more refined version of the diagram and included it with his patent application, which was granted on March 7, 1876. On March 10, 1876, Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, demonstrated that the idea was successful. He recorded the breakthrough in his journal: “I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: ‘Mr. Watson, come here— I want to see you.’ To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.” Within a year, Bell founded his own telephone company. The telephone turned out to be the most lucrative patent ever granted—and arguably one of the greatest
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Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill (January 1941) Britain had been holding out against the German Reich for over a year, but wartime premier Winston Churchill feared that Britain would not hold out without greater support from the United States. And President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hands had been tied by Congress.
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resident Roosevelt wrote this letter to Churchill in January 1941, quoting from the Longfellow poem “The Building of the Ship.” It was then hand-delivered to the British Prime Minister by Wendell Wilkie, Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the 1940 Presidential election. Churchill, desperate for U.S. support, found the letter “an inspiration” and told Roosevelt that he would have it framed. The letter hung for a long time at Chartwell, Churchill’s home, hence it has faded from the original green of White House stationery to brown. I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
RIGHT: Six months after Roosevelt sent his supportive note. the pair met up for the Atlamtic Conference, held in Plancentia Bay, Newfoundland, August 1941.
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ABOVE:
Virginia Woolf left two farewell notes to her husband Leonard, and another to her sister Vanessa Bell.
RIGHT:
Virginia Woolf outside her country cottage, Monk’s House, in Sussex.
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Virginia Woolf to husband Leonard (1941) Virginia Woolf had been an inspiring figure in women’s literature, but in the early 1940s she was suffering from unshakeable depression; the voices in her head had returned and she feared she was going mad. She wrote a farewell note to her husband and then walked into the river Ouse with pockets full of stones.
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hroughout this memorable day I have been uplifted and sustained by the knowledge that your thoughts and prayers were with me. I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity. … The ceremonies you have seen today are ancient, and some of their origins are veiled in the mists of the past. But their spirit and their meaning shine through the ages never, perhaps, more brightly than now. I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust. In this resolve I have my husband to support me. He shares all my ideals and all my affection for you. Then, although my experience is so short and my task so new, I have in my parents and grandparents an example which I can follow with certainty and with confidence. There is also this. I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the
living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire; of societies old and new; of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God’s Will, united in spirit and in aim. Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen. The ceremonies you have seen today are ancient, and some of their origins are veiled in the mists of the past. But their spirit and their meaning shine through the ages never, perhaps, more brightly than now. I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust. In this resolve I have my husband to support me. He shares all my ideals and all my affection for you. Then, although my experience is so short and my task so new, I have in my parents and grandparents an example which I can follow with certainty and with confidence.
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Edward Snowden Files (2013) A 29-year-old computer wizard working for America’s super-secret spy agency becomes the biggest whistleblower in US history, leaking huge caches of classified documents that expose his nation’s “unconstitutional” and “illegal” cyber surveillance. Foreign leaders protest, but reaction in the US is polarized.
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n 2006, a young American computer expert named Edward Snowden (1983–) went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency as a technician/IT specialist with top-secret clearance. Over the next six years he moved on to other positions in cyber intelligence, employed by Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton as cover for his high-level administrative work for the National Security Agency. As Snowden became more aware of the nature and scope of US cyber spying, he expressed concerns to multiple coworkers and two supervisors about the program’s apparent violations of US and international law. However his superiors ignored his complaints and told him to simply continue doing his job, which increased his crisis of conscience. In 2012 and early 2013 he began downloading classified documents that exemplified his concerns. As a Hawaii-based “system administrator” with special security clearance, Snowden enjoyed direct access to the NSA central computer in Ft. Meade, Maryland, with the ability to look at any file he wished as a “ghost user,” making his actions hard to trace. He was able to use simple thumb drives, “web crawler” software and other relatively unsophisticated technology to “scrape
ABOVE: The temporary passport that gave Snowden exile in Russia from 2013 to 2014. LEFT: Snowden’s letter of October 31, 2013 claims that he “witnessed systemic violations of law” by his government that “created a moral duty to act.”
data” from the NSA systems, downloading many large and extremely sensitive files. Some of the agency’s secret surveillance included programs which harvested millions of emails, contact lists, cell phone locations and other data from hundreds of millions of Americans’ Google and Yahoo accounts. The NSA was spying on top corporate executives, foreign heads of state, the chief of the European Union, and other important figures, monitoring their personal and official communications. In some instances, it was seeking sexual information in order to discredit certain individuals. In 2012–13 Snowden furnished copies of selected classified documents to top reporters in the US, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Brazil, Sweden, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Australia. He also insisted that his identity be publicly revealed. The disclosures generated considerable controversy and caused Snowden to be charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. His US passport was revoked in 2013 and since then he has been living in exile in Russia. As of 2015 attempts are still being made to extradite him so that he can stand trial back in the United States. The full extent of Snowden’s disclosure is unknown, but US intelligence sources have estimated the number of files at 1.7 million. Several news organizations and reporters have won major prizes for their reports based on some of the documents. At the same time, Snowden remains a controversial figure and public opinion about him has been divided. The impact of his whistleblowing on government spying remains to be seen.
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