Tucked away on Islesboro is a modest historical marker. “First Eclipse of the Sun, 1780,” it states. The granite monument commemorates the first scientifically recorded solar eclipse on the North American continent. This testament to a little-known piece of history is located on the east side of Penobscot Bay at the Narrows, known in 1780 as Long Island, or Winslow. Oct. 27, 2005, marked the 225th anniversary of this event.
The solar eclipse monument sits prominently in the fields of the Trautmann property, which in 1780 would have been owned by Islesboro’s first settler, Shubael Williams. This section of the island physically resembles an hourglass, and is also known as Shubael’s Landing.
Trees obscure the bay on the shore side of the road, but in 1780 it would have afforded a clear view of Bounty Cove where in 1780 THE LINCOLN, an old row galley of about 250 tons, landed with a scientific team from the American Academy of Arts and Science and the University of Cambridge (Harvard) to observe the Oct. 27 total eclipse of the sun.
To commemorate the occasion, Islesboro middle school students from Sheila Coombs’s language arts classes gathered at the island site for a class-designed informal ceremony. Students prepared by researching primary sources, studying maps and discussing early science of the Revolutionary War era.
On the afternoon of Oct. 27, 2005, under a cloudy sky, those gathered together around the monument mused on what it would have been like in 1780, at the first recording. Students read excerpts from the publication, Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, written by Rev. Samuel Williams, Hollis professor of Mathematics at Harvard College. Williams was the leader of a scientific team consisting of himself, three colleagues and six students who set up their instruments near the house of Shubael Williams.
Rev. Samuel Williams (no relation to Shubael) wrote that there were clear skies for the eclipse observations, and that the air was also clear, except for being a little hazy. “From the beginning of the eclipse until the time of the greatest obscuration, the color and appearance of the sky was gradually changing from an azure blue to a more dusky color, until it bore the appearance and gloom of night,” Rev. Williams wrote. “As the darkness increased, a chill and dampness was very sensibly felt. In one hour and nineteen minutes, when the light and heat of the sun were rapidly decreasing, there fell two-thirds as much dew as fell the night before or the night after the eclipse. To this we may add, so unusual a darkness, dampness and chill, in the midst of day, seemed to spread a general amazement among all sorts of animals. Nor could we ourselves observe such unusual phenomena without some disagreeable feelings.”
The American Revolution was underway, and the American universities involved, along with the Massachusetts legislature, applied for special British consent to send an expedition of observers to the enemy territory. That consent was granted, but later restricted by a British commander, who instructed the scientific group to “have no communication with any of the inhabitants and to depart on the 28th, on the day after the eclipse.”
THE LINCOLN anchored in Bounty Cove on Oct. 19 and the team, along with their costly equipment, were rowed to the beach where they hauled everything up the hill to Williams’s barn. In their possession were 12 superb scientific instruments, most of them made for Harvard in London. Why Islesboro? One reason was that Bounty Cove was a deep harbor, needed for the heavy instruments, and the British had pledged them safe passage. Most importantly, Samuel Williams had calculated that the center of the eclipse would pass over Fort Halifax and out to sea over Penobscot Bay in a southwesterly direction, making Long Island the perfect spot to observe the center of the path of totality. As it turned out, Williams had miscalculated the center of the eclipse by about fifty miles too far to the southwest. If he had correctly predicted the center of the eclipse, Machias would have been an excellent choice for the observation.
Williams himself put the blame for the miscalculation on his maps. He said they placed Islesboro 30 miles farther north than it really was.
So the scientific team did not observe a total eclipse of the sun. At 12h-31m-18s into the eclipse it became apparent that they were not going to see totality. Their disappointment is not recorded for posterity, but Williams did make a new scientific discovery.
In Williams’s description of the appearance of the sun at the time of maximum eclipse at 12:29 p.m., he discovered the phenomenon that 80 years later would be named “Baily’s beads.” In his words, “immediately after the last observation, the Sun’s limbs became so small as to appear like a circular thread … both the ends lost their acuteness, and seemed to break off in the form of small drops or stars…”
The 2005 ceremony that Islesboro students put together wasn’t the first one to commemorate this historic event. In 1963 there was a total eclipse of the sun on July 20. Reporters Terri Bates and Jim Moore of the Maine Sunday Telegram wrote that Islesboro was expected “to attract its share of the thousands who will come to Maine for the total eclipse of the sun.”
No further word is reported as to how the 1963 observation went on Islesboro, but it is known that rain greatly hampered the viewing that day. Oct. 27, 2005, was a chilly autumn day – a good day to remember and reflect at this important historic site tucked away on Islesboro.