Fotheringhay, Before Dawn Around two in the morning on February 8, 1587, Mary Stuart sat down to write a letter. She was forty-four years old, confined to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, England, and she had been informed the night before that she would be executed that morning. She had been a prisoner in England for … Read more
The City and the Mountain In the spring of 1902, Saint-Pierre was the commercial and cultural capital of Martinique, the “Paris of the Antilles”, with a population of 28,000 to 30,000. Mount Pelée, a stratovolcano reaching 4,583 feet (1,397 m), stood roughly 4 to 6 miles (7 to 10 km) to the north. The volcano … Read more
What the Knife Was Not Allowed to Touch Every ophthalmologist uses the word “retina.” It comes from the Latin for net. Before that Latin rendering, it was the Greek word amphiblestroides, coined by a physician named Herophilus, born around 330 BCE in Chalcedon (today: Kadıköy, Istanbul, Turkey), who thought the membrane lining the back of … Read more
One Coat, Twenty Days In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a basic coat cost £1, roughly twenty days’ wages for a skilled tradesman. It was not a luxury item; it was the only coat he was likely to own. Working and middling-class people in this period typically kept one or two outfits. A … Read more
The Signal in the Cathedral Easter Sunday, 26 April 1478. High Mass was under way inside Florence’s cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. At approximately 11 a.m. a bell rang to mark the elevation of the host, the moment when every head in the building bowed. That bell was the signal. Two clerics, Antonio Maffei … Read more
What the King Carried In the autumn of 1216, King John of England kept his treasury close. A civil war had been grinding for over a year, Prince Louis of France held London and much of the south and east, and no fixed location was safe. The wealth traveled with him. What that wealth amounted … Read more
The Last Known Position On May 29, 1925, at a jungle waypoint in the Brazilian Mato Grosso called Dead Horse Camp, Percy Fawcett handed a packet of letters to the guides he was about to dismiss and told them to carry it back to civilization. One letter went to his wife, Nina. He expressed confidence … Read more
What Stands in Hope Cemetery Hope Cemetery occupies 65 acres on the edge of Barre, Vermont, a granite-cutting city 45 miles southeast of Burlington that has carried the informal title “Granite Capital of the World” for more than a century. Established in 1895, the cemetery holds more than 10,000 memorials, nearly all cut from Barre … Read more
What the Camera Caught at Stromboli, 1987 In 1987, the PBS Nature series broadcast The Volcano Watchers, showing two French scientists at work on Italian volcanic sites: two figures in metallic heat-reflective suits and astronaut-style helmets, standing at crater rims where volcanic gases were corrosive enough to dissolve ordinary fabric. Chlorine, carbon dioxide, and sulfuric … Read more
What He Carried Across the Isthmus In 1680, William Dampier crossed the Isthmus of Darien (present-day Panama) with a party of 44 buccaneers over 21 days, raiding alongside crews who were there for plunder. He was also filling notebooks. At river crossings, he sealed them inside a bamboo tube stopped at both ends with wax … Read more