11 minute read
The Night The Stars Fell: James Dawson
The Night the Stars Fell The Great Meteor Storm of 1833 by James Dawson
The skies of the Eastern Shore are often full of unexpected wonders. We are far enough from big cities to have nice dark starry skies, and being on the east edge of the East Coast, we have a front-row seat to get a good view, as it were. You never know what you might see here, or when it might happen: comets, eclipses, fireballs, auroras, meteor showers and more. Sometimes even
a rare meteor storm, which is like the more common meteor shower, but on steroids.
One such outstanding astronomical event occurred 187 years ago, and an 11- or 12-year-old slave girl in Dorchester County was one of the first to witness it.
After working for her master all day, young Araminta “Minty” Ross, accompanied by one of her brothers,
walked over to visit her mother, who was a slave on a nearby farm. Even though the moon was almost full, it was an unusually dark night, which was good because they did not have permission to leave their farm. Nocturnal visitations and assemblies were part of the secret world of slaves that the whites knew little or nothing about. So long as they were back by dawn, no one would be any the wiser. As it turned out, these nocturnal trips were good training for what Minty would be known for later in life. That is, if she didn’t get caught. Fortunately, she never was. While her brother stayed outside to watch for any gangs of whites looking for errant and runaway slaves, Minty went inside the small cabin to see her mother. The visit was going fine until her brother suddenly called for her. But it wasn’t because of slave patrols ~ he called her to come out and see the stars, which were “all shooting whichaway.” Going outside, Minty saw hundreds of falling stars in the sky, which was so frightening that they all thought the world was ending.
What they saw was the beginning of the Great Meteor Storm of 1833, probably one of the greatest meteor storms ever seen. The little girl whom the world would soon know as Harriet Tubman would remember it all her life. She said it taught her to always follow the North Star,
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which came in handy later on when she was leading runaway slaves to freedom.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Talbot County, a slave on Edward Covey’s farm near St. Michaels was also a witness to these strange stars. Fifteen-year-old Frederick Bailey, whom the world would know as Frederick Douglass, recorded the event in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom:
I left Baltimore, for St. Michael’s in the month of March, 1833. I know the year, because it was…the year of that strange phenomenon, when the heavens seemed about to part
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with its starry train. I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle, and was awe-struck. The air seemed filled with bright, descending messengers from the sky. It was about daybreak when I saw this sublime scene. I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and, in my then state of mind, I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer. I had read, that the “stars shall fall from heaven,” and they were now falling. I was suffering much in my mind. It did seem that every time the young tendrils of my affection became attached, they were rudely broken by some unnatural outside power; and I was beginning to look away to heaven for the rest denied me on earth.”
The Bible passage Douglass made reference to was Mark 13:25, “And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.”
Samuel Harrison, who lived near Easton, remembered later that the shooting stars looked like “a snow storm of fiery flakes ~ so thick and numerous were they.” It was his impression that “superstition attached a disastrous meaning to this appearance. The end of the world was thought to be drawing near.”
Whites and blacks alike thought it was Judgment Day! And who could blame them? In both the North and
the South, many thought it was a Divine warning about the evils of slavery.
Just recently, I found a long-forgotten account of the event in, of all places, The Life and Times of Hon. Elijah Stansbury, published in 1874. Among other things, Stansbury was a veteran of the War of 1812 and mayor of Baltimore from 1848 to 1850, He wrote:
“It was on Wednesday, the 13th of November, of this year [1833], we had the extraordinary meteoric phenomena, known as the “Falling Stars.” It was the good fortune of the writer to witness the wonderful display, a description of which will doubtless prove interesting to the reader.
About five o’clock in the morning, the sky being perfectly serene, and not a cloud observable, the heavens were illuminated by thousands of flying meteors, or what are commonly called shooting stars, descending towards the earth with a profusion and continuity closely resembling a shower of fire, or, if you will allow the comparison, “a golden snow.”
Occasionally a meteor would burst precisely after the manner of a sky-rocket, leaving behind it a stream of light. It is said, the meteors were seen to shoot soon after midnight, and that they continued to increase in number and intensity until they faded away before the light of day. However that may be, at that time we witnessed the
extraordinary phenomenon, the heavens presented a spectacle peculiarly grand and imposing.
The light was so bright and brilliant that one could tell the hour of the morning by [a] watch. Occasionally a large meteor would whirl through the atmosphere, and without noise burst asunder, scattering millions of fiery particles through the surrounding air. This phenomenon was not local, but extended over the United States, and was seen on the ocean.
It created much speculation, and gave rise to much discussion among scientific men. Some of the credulous predicted the end of the world-others of more stern souls were sure that it, at least, prognosticated dreadful war; whilst the philosopher, smiling at their simplicity, calmly viewed the phenomenon, wonderful as it was. The newspapers were filled with articles concerning it.”
The light from the meteors was so bright that many woke up thinking it was dawn, while in Annapolis, the Rev. Hector Humphreys was awakened by his wife who thought their house was on fire! And he wasn’t the only one. The event was witnessed by thousands of others all across the country, including Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. The aerial display even terrified horses. An estimated 240,000 meteors fell over a nine-hour period, and it
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was seen over the entire continental United States. At the peak hour, up to 100,000 meteors/shooting stars were estimated to have fallen. That’s over 1,600 a minute, an incredible 27 per second. By comparison, you might be lucky to see 27 an hour in an average meteor shower.
If a meteor shower has over 1,000 meteors an hour, then it’s called a meteor storm, so you can just imagine what 100,000 an hour might look like. One hundred times more dramatic!
Despite their panic-inducing appearance, the meteors were harmless, most no bigger than grains of sand, and burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere long before they could have hit the earth. And every one fell in perfect silence.
This was actually part of the Leonid Meteor Shower, which is an annual event peaking around Nov. 17 and 18. In fact, this 1833
meteor storm prompted astronomer Denison Olmsted to realize that meteors came from outer space. Astronomers say that this shower is the result of debris from the comet Tempel-Tuttle, which was co-discovered by Wilhelm Tempel and Horace Parnell Tuttle in the 1860s.
If you discover a comet, it is named for you. However, the Leonids got their name because they appear to originate from the constellation of Leo the lion. They brighten into a meteor storm every 33 years, which is how long it takes the comet T-T to orbit the sun, and for whatever reason, the Leonid Meteor Storm of 1833 was probably the greatest meteor storm ever witnessed. The last 33-year event was in 1998, and the next one is due in 2031. I hope to see you then.
One other dark night sky event seen in Talbot County turned out to be man-made, when on the night
of Feb. 3-4, 1904, Charles Willis Sr. saw a big glow in the northeast from his farm in Trappe. He found out the next day that this illumination was from the Great Baltimore Fire, which practically leveled the city. Baltimore was 50 miles away across the Chesapeake Bay.
The most unusual thing in the night sky I ever saw was a huge fireball at about 8:47 p.m. on September 17, 1966. I was out for a night saunter and saw a big red glow from the corner of my eye that got my attention. It lasted for about 2 seconds and was the size of 1/8 of a full moon before it disappeared behind some trees. At first I thought an airplane had
exploded, but since it had fallen in perfect silence and I saw no smoke, I realized that it must be a fireball, which is a meteor or falling star big enough to hit the earth.
Later on, there was a report in the newspaper that it had fallen over Canada and northern Indiana, and they even found some pieces. When chunks of meteors hit the earth, they are called meteorites. Big ones are uncommon. And valuable.
So keep watching the skies! You never know what you might see, and hopefully you will have time to duck.
James Dawson is the owner of Unicorn Bookshop in Trappe.
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