What if Christopher Columbus had been killed in the Caribbean? At one moment in history, on the night of February 29, 1504, the fate of the world we now know depended on the alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth in the form of an eclipse.
Columbus was in the midst of his fourth and final voyage to the New World when his aging ships became wrecked on the north shore of Jamaica. Initially the castaways found succor from the locals, but as the days turned to months their appetites outstripped everything available. Facing days on end without food, Columbus’s crew mutinied and set upon the Jamaicans, who immediately rose in rebellion.
Whatever his gifts as a navigator, Columbus was a terrible ruler of men; he had already been fired as governor of the Indies for his incompetence and cruelty. Fearing for his life, he consulted the astronomical almanacs he used for navigation. In them he found that three days later, on the evening of the 29th, there would be a total lunar eclipse when the Moon passed through the shadow of the Earth. At those moments, the Moon takes on the reddish color of sunlight filtering through the Earth’s atmosphere. Astrologers call this a “blood moon” for obvious reasons.
Assembling the Jamaican chieftains, Columbus told them that God was angry at their rebellion and would make His displeasure known by causing the Moon to be “inflamed with wrath.” That night, when the Moon finally rose, a dark shadow had already begun to spread across its face, and the assembled islanders looked on in horror as the darkness spread. Eventually the Moon became the dark coppery color of blood.
Make it stop, the chieftains pleaded. To which Columbus replied that he’d need to retire to his cabin to pray on their behalf. In reality, he went there to keep watch on his hourglass, as his almanac had also revealed that it would take forty-eight minutes for the Moon to move through the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow. When at last the sand ran out, Columbus stepped outside and proclaimed that God had answered his prayers. He would forgive their rebellion, provided they once more brought food for his men. In the midst of the Jamaicans’ relief, totality ended, and the dark red blemish drained from the face of the Moon.
Almost four hundred years later, Mark Twain made use of this event for the purposes of a story in which a time-traveling Connecticut Yankee foretells a total solar eclipse, when the moon passes between Earth and Sun, to scare the medieval knights of King Arthur’s court and save himself from execution. For the majority of human history, eclipses have been terrible apparitions. For people lacking knowledge of astronomy, they occur without explanation or warning. Many cultures throughout history have therefore constructed complex myths and rituals to explain why they happen to bring sense to the senseless, and to describe how those who are deserving can avoid the doom they seem to portend. From careful observation, however, we have discovered that these events are not random. In fact, they repeat in predictable cycles, and over time we have used their appearance to measure our world and reveal the mysteries of the universe.
Columbus’s fate on that night in 1504 lay at the intersection of fear and calculation, mysticism and science, all of which are at the heart of how we humans experience eclipses. The fact that history balanced that night on the alignment of worlds (and the calculations of a man who had no idea where he really was) makes it all the more remarkable that today people travel the planet to experience those few fleeting minutes of totality, and when it is over, wonder when they can see another. Eclipses have made the transition from omens of doom to sought-after moments of awe. This is that story.