Every Hour Again
A teenager keeps the lamps lit on a Maine rock in an 1856 gale, and a seventeen-year-old holds his mother's hand in the dark under Vesuvius. Two stories about why people stay.
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About this episode
In January 1856 a winter gale swept Matinicus Rock, off the coast of Maine. The keeper had sailed to the mainland, and his teenage daughter Abbie Burgess was left on the rock with her mother and younger sisters. Years later she wrote to a friend about the hens, the wave that took the old house, and the four weeks when no boat could land and the lights never failed. Decades after that, as a keeper herself, she wrote that she still lay awake over the lamps.
In the year 79, seventeen-year-old Pliny the Younger stayed behind at Misenum with a book while his uncle, the admiral, sailed toward Vesuvius. Decades later he wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus about that day and the night after, when his mother begged him to leave her and he would not. We read his words in the English translation published on attalus.org, and we say where the record is uncertain.
Hosted by Eli, performed by synthetic voices.
Facts and sources
Every fact used in this episode, with the sources it was checked against. Download as data
176 of 176 recorded lines matched the checked script.
During the January 1856 gale, Abbie Burgess’s father, the keeper of Matinicus Rock Light, had sailed to the mainland, and she was on the rock with her mother and younger sisters; a brother had gone fishing.
Abbie Burgess’s account of the storm was written years afterward as a letter, and the New England Historical Society, which says the letter was to a friend named Dorothy, credits Edward Rowe Snow’s book Women of the Sea as its source.
Sources give Abbie Burgess’s age at the time of the storm as anywhere from 15 to 17, and the New England Historical Society gives 16.
Decades later, as keeper at Whitehead Light, Abbie wrote a letter about dreaming of the old lamps on Matinicus Rock, and Augusta Moore reproduced it in New York’s Journal of Commerce on 5 April 1890.
Pliny the Younger wrote both Letter 6.16 and Letter 6.20 to the historian Tacitus, decades after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
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Pliny dates the appearance of the eruption cloud to 24 August, the ninth day before the kalends of September.
In Letter 6.16 Pliny says his uncle offered to take him along by boat to look at the cloud, and he chose to stay and work on a writing exercise his uncle had happened to set him.
After Rectina’s appeal, Pliny’s uncle launched warships, quadriremes, meaning to help not only her but other people along the crowded coast.
Pliny says he was in his eighteenth year, which makes him seventeen, when he stayed behind at Misenum and read Livy.
An older English translation of the letters, by William Melmoth, dates from 1746 and was revised by Hutchinson for the 1915 Loeb edition; every English version is a translator’s wording, not Pliny’s Latin.
- Full text of "Letters. With an English translation by William Melmoth, rev. by W.M.L. Hutchinson"Hamburger iconInternet Archive logoWeb iconTexts iconVideo iconAudio iconSoftware iconImages iconDonatearchive.org
- Pliny the Younger: Letters (Books 1-7) [1] 0674990617, 9780674990616dokumen.pub
- Full text of "Pliny Letters Vol 1"Hamburger iconInternet Archive logoWeb iconTexts iconVideo iconAudio iconSoftware iconImages iconDonate iconEllipses iconDonate iconUser iconUpload iconSearch iconSeaarchive.org
In the same letter, she told her friend about the family’s chickens: “You know the hens were our only companions. Becoming convinced, as the gale increased, that unless they were brought into the house they would be lost, I said to mother: I must try to save them. She advised me not to attempt it. The thought, however, of parting with them without an effort was not to be endured, so seizing a basket, I ran out a few yards after the rollers had passed and the sea fell off a little, with the water knee deep, to the coop, and rescued all but one.”
She went on: “It was the work of a moment, and I was back in the house with the door fastened, but I was none too quick, for at that instant my little sister, standing at the window, exclaimed: Oh, look! look there! the worst sea is coming. That wave destroyed the old dwelling and swept the rock.”
In a letter to a friend written after the storm, Abbie Burgess, who was a teenager at the time, described the day the sea came over the rock: “Early in the day, as the tide arose, the sea made a complete breach over the rock, washing every movable thing away, and of the old dwelling not one stone was left upon another. The new dwelling was flooded, and the windows had to be secured to prevent the violence of the spray from breaking them in. As the tide came, the sea rose higher and higher, till the only endurable places were the lighttowers. If they stood we were saved, otherwise our fate was only too certain.”
Looking back on the weeks that followed, Abbie Burgess wrote to her friend: “But for some reason, I know not why, I had no misgivings, and went on with my work as usual. For four weeks, owing to rough weather, no landing could be effected on the rock. During this time we were without the assistance of any male members of our family. Though at times greatly exhausted with my labors, not once did the lights fail. Under God I was able to perform all my accustomed duties as well as my father’s.”
In 1891, Abbie Burgess wrote at Whitehead Light: “Many nights I have watched the lights my part of the night, and then could not sleep the rest of the night, thinking nervously what might happen should the lights fail.”
In a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the eruption, Pliny the Younger described the cloud his mother pointed out to his uncle from Misenum that afternoon: “Those who were looking at the cloud from some distance could not make out from which mountain it was rising - it was afterwards discovered to have been Mount Vesuvius - but in likeness and form it more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else, for what corresponded to the trunk was of great length and height, and then spread out into a number of branches, the reason being, I imagine, that while the vapour was fresh, the cloud was borne upwards, but when the vapour became wasted, it lost its motion, or even became dissipated by its own weight, and spread out laterally. At times it looked white, and at other times dirty and spotted, according to the quantity of earth and cinders that were shot up.”
Pliny wrote that just as the admiral was leaving the house, he received a written message from Rectina, the wife of Tascus, who was terrified at the peril threatening her.
Pliny wasn’t on the ships. He put together this part of his letter to Tacitus from what survivors told him soon afterward, and he wrote that as the galleys sailed toward the mountain: “Already ashes were beginning to fall upon the ships, hotter and in thicker showers as they approached more nearly, with pumice-stones and black flints, charred and cracked by the heat of the flames, while their way was barred by the sudden shoaling of the sea bottom and the litter of the mountain on the shore. He hesitated for a moment whether to turn back, and then, when the helmsman warned him to do so, he exclaimed, Fortune favours the bold; try to reach Pomponianus.”
Tacitus wrote back asking what had happened to Pliny himself, and in a second letter Pliny described sitting in the courtyard with his mother at Misenum that night, as violent earthquakes shook the house: “I don’t know whether my behaviour should be called courageous or rash - for I was only in my eighteenth year - but I called for a volume of Titus Livius, and read it, as though I were perfectly at my ease, and went on making my usual extracts. Then a friend of my uncle’s, who had but a little time before come to join him from Spain, on seeing my mother and myself sitting there and me reading, upbraided her for her patience and me for my indifference, but I paid no heed, and pored over my book.”
After they fled the town, and the cloud came down over the bay and hid Capri from view, Pliny told Tacitus what his mother asked of him: “Then my mother prayed, entreated, and commanded me to fly as best I could, saying that I was young and could escape, while she was old and infirm, and would not fear to die, if only she knew that she had not been the cause of my death. I replied that I would not save myself unless I could save her too, and so, after taking tight hold of her hand, I forced her to quicken her steps. She reluctantly obeyed, accusing herself for retarding my flight. Then the ashes began to fall, but not thickly: I looked back, and a dense blackness was rolling up behind us, which spread itself over the ground and followed like a torrent.”
Pliny and his mother left the road so the crowd wouldn’t trample them in the dark, and he wrote to Tacitus about what came next: “We were considering what to do, when the blackness of night overtook us, not that of a moonless or cloudy night, but the blackness of pent-up places which never see the light. You could hear the wailing of women, the screams of little children, and the shouts of men; some were trying to find their parents, others their children, others their wives, by calling for them and recognising them by their voices alone. Some were commiserating their own lot, others that of their relatives, while some again prayed for death in sheer terror of dying. Many were lifting up their hands to the gods, but more were declaring that now there were no more gods, and that this night would last for ever, and the end of all the world.”
Near the end of that second letter, after describing how they kept standing up to shake off the falling ash so it wouldn’t bury them, Pliny admitted to Tacitus: “I might boast that not one groan or cowardly exclamation escaped my lips, despite these perils, had I not believed that I and the world were perishing together - a miserable consolation, indeed, yet one which a mortal creature finds very soothing. At length the blackness became less dense, and dissipated as it were into smoke and cloud; then came the real light of day, and the sun shone out, but as blood-red as it appears at its setting. Our still trembling eyes saw that everything had been transformed, and covered with a deep layer of ashes, like snow.”
Still working from what others told him, Pliny described to Tacitus the last moments on the beach at Stabiae, where his uncle had gone down to the shore with the others to see whether they could escape by sea: “A sheet was spread on the ground, and on this my uncle lay, and twice he called for a draught of cold water, which he drank. Then the flames, and the smell of sulphur which gave warning of them, scattered the others in flight and roused him. Leaning on two slaves, he rose to his feet and immediately fell down again, owing, as I think, to his breathing being obstructed by the thickness of the fumes and congestion of the stomach, that organ being naturally weak and narrow, and subject to inflammation. When daylight returned - two days after the last day he had seen - his body was found untouched, uninjured, and covered, dressed just as he had been in life. The corpse suggested a person asleep rather than a dead man.”
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Mary Seacole’s memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, was published in London in 1857 by James Blackwood, edited by W. J. S., with a preface by the Times war correspondent W. H. Russell.
The cholera night Seacole describes happened at Cruces in Panama.
The later chapters of Seacole’s memoir cover being under fire on 18 June 1855, the Redan, the Tchernaya, the fall of Sebastopol, and finally the peace and her return home.
Seacole’s memoir is ranked No 62 in the Guardian’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books.
In her 1857 memoir, Mary Seacole looked back on the cholera epidemic she fought in Cruces, Panama, years before the Crimean War, and wrote: “One terrible night, passed with some of them, has often haunted me. I will endeavour to narrate it, and should the reader be supposed to think it highly coloured and doubtful, I will only tell him that, terrible as it seems, I saw almost as fearful scenes on the Crimean peninsula among British men, a few thousand miles only from comfort and plenty.”
Called out in the rain by the town’s largest mule-owner to his dying men, Seacole described what she found inside his hut: “I would rather not see such another scene as the interior of that hut presented. Its roof scarcely sheltered its wretched inmates from the searching rain; its floor was the damp, rank turf, trodden by the mules’ hoofs and the muleteers’ feet into thick mud.”
Seacole admitted in her memoir that her first instinct was to run: “The groans of the sufferers and the anxiety and fear of their comrades were so painful to hear and witness, that for a few minutes I felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to run out into the stormy night, and flee from this plague-spot. But the weak feeling vanished, and I set about my duty.”
After she put up screens around the dying men, Seacole wrote of the hours that followed: “So the long night passed away; first a deathlike stillness behind one screen, and then a sudden silence behind the other, showing that the fierce battle with death was over, and who had been the victor. And, meanwhile, I sat before the flickering fire, with my last patient in my lap--a poor, little, brown-faced orphan infant, scarce a year old, was dying in my arms, and I was powerless to save it.”
Of that child, Seacole wrote: “It may seem strange, but it is a fact, that I thought more of that little child than I did of the men who were struggling for their lives, and prayed very earnestly and solemnly to God to spare it. But it did not please Him to grant my prayer, and towards morning the wee spirit left this sinful world for the home above it had so lately left, and what was mortal of the little infant lay dead in my arms.”
Then, hoping to learn how to fight the disease, Seacole made a decision she recorded plainly: “It was cold grey dawn, and the rain had ceased, when I followed the man who had taken the dead child away to bury it, and bribed him to carry it by an unfrequented path down to the river-side, and accompany me to the thick retired bush on the opposite bank.”
Of her first and only post-mortem examination, Seacole wrote: “It seems a strange deed to accomplish, and I am sure I could not wield the scalpel or the substitute I then used now, but at that time the excitement had strung my mind up to a high pitch of courage and determination; and perhaps the daily, almost hourly, scenes of death had made me somewhat callous. I need not linger on this scene, nor give the readers the results of my operation; although novel to me, and decidedly useful, they were what every medical man well knows. We buried the poor little body beneath a piece of luxuriant turf, and stole back into Cruces like guilty things.”
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Lighthouse historian Jeremy D'Entremont prints part of the same storm passage and says only that Abbie wrote it later.
Commentators point out that the Latin word Pliny uses in Letter 6.20 for being left behind is ambiguous, so his own words don't settle whether staying was his decision or his uncle's.
Seacole later went to the Crimea and ran the British Hotel near the siege lines with Thomas Day from March 1855 to about April 1856.
