MUSKETS
In both Siberia and North America, Europeans armed with muskets had an advantage over native peoples armed with arrows and spears.
When the first muskets appeared in the late fifteenth century, it wasn’t clear that they were an improvement over the bow. They were less accurate, had a shorter range, and were useless on horseback. A skilled archer could fire six or more arrows in the time it took a musketeer to make one shot. The psychological effect of the noise and the flash was often a greater weapon than the shot itself. Nonetheless, early muskets had two clear advantages over bows. A musket ball could penetrate thick armor, and muskets were easy to learn to use.
Most early muskets were matchlocks, fired using a two- to three-foot-long piece of rope, called the “match,” that had been treated with a saltpeter solution so it would burn slowly and steadily. The match was lit at both ends so it would not go out accidentally; musketeers had to be careful to keep it away from their gunpowder. When a matchlock man pulled the trigger, it lowered the match and ignited gunpowder in a priming pan outside the barrel. A spark from the priming powder ignited gunpowder inside the barrel, which propelled the bullet.
The flintlock, adopted in the late 1600s, eliminated the burning “match.” Pulling the trigger created a spark by striking flint against steel. The spark ignited the priming powder, which in turn ignited the main charge. Because it was easier to use, a hunter or soldier could fire it more quickly. Accuracy remained a problem. Even the most skilled shooter could not count on hitting a target more than a hundred yards away.
More improvements followed, making the musket safer to use, more reliable in wet or windy weather, and easier to load. By the end of the eighteenth century, when American revolutionaries faced the British army at Lexington and Concord, a marksman working alone could fire his musket five times a minute: the same rate at which a skilled archer could shoot his bow.
Captain Gosnold trades with the Indians, Virginia, 1634
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS TRIED to make sense of the world around them. Science, religion, and magical thinking all begin from the same questions. How did the world begin? What causes rain, thunder, and the sun to rise? What makes crops grow? What causes the plague, the measles, and the common cold? What can we do to make crops grow better and to heal the sick? Sometimes the answers have led us to make sacrifices or offer prayers to the gods—or to a single God. Sometimes they have led us to blame malevolent forces: demons or witches and malicious spirits. At other times, we have sought answers in physical experiments designed to show us how the world works in mechanical terms.
In seventeenth-century Europe, and its American colonies, people did all those things. The 1600s were a time of intellectual and religious ferment. A time marked by witch trials, the scientific revolution, and acrimonious debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics about sacraments, ritual, miracles, and the power of the saints. The vast majority of people, educated and uneducated alike, believed that witches, demons, angels, fairies, and ghosts were real creatures that affected our everyday lives. The Old World view, a mixture of ideas from Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the Bible, tottered and cracked under the barrage of information about new plants, animals, and people, and belief systems that flowed back to Europe from the New World and Asia.
Between 1570 and 1680, roughly 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and from 40,000 to 60,000 were executed. Most of the accused were women. Black magic, maleflcum, was a capital crime, clearly defined by law.
SALEM WITCH TRIALS
MARCH 21, 1692. SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS. The small wooden meetinghouse is packed. In the past, the meetinghouse was used for town meetings and the occasional session of the county court. For the last few months, it has been the scene of dramatic accusations. Salem is in the grip of a witch hunt driven by terror. Its citizens live in fear of God. They fear the devil even more.
A group of young girls take their seats in the front row. Looking around the room, they giggle and whisper to one another. There is a sly, self-satisfied look in their eyes. They have power, and they know it.
Judge John Hathorne takes his seat at the front. He has already sent three people to the gallows for witchcraft.
The room goes silent as the jailers bring in Martha Corey. Her family, friends, and neighbors have branded her a witch. Her primary accusers are three teenage girls: seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, and eleven-year-old Ann Putnam. The girls have suffered violent fits. They have been stricken mute or deaf. Strange marks have appeared on their bodies. When the local doctor is unable to cure their symptoms, he diagnoses them as suffering from witchcraft.
Sixty-five-year-old Martha Corey seems more defiant than afraid. Three women have already been accused and found guilty: an African slave, a beggar, and a quarrelsome old woman who had not attended church in over a year. Martha believes her case is different. The devil would have needed little effort to make witches of such idle slothful persons as those already executed. Martha is a well-respected member of the community, the wife of a prosperous farmer, and an avid member of the Salem Village church.
Mistress Corey seldom hesitates to voice her opinion. She does not hesitate now. “We must not believe all that these distracted girls say,” she begins, then stops and bites her lip.
The girls scream that they are being bitten.
Hathorne demands, “Why do you hurt these persons?”
Martha grasps her hand. The girls cry out that she is pinching them.
For the first time Martha seems to understand how dire her situation is. Her voice cracks as she defends herself. “I never had to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am an innocent person.”
The girls grow increasingly agitated. They writhe and screech over her testimony.
Martha’s answers become more confused, but she insists on her innocence. “I am a gospel woman.”
Mercy Lewis shrieks and points an accusing finger, “You are a gospel witch!”
In those days, many adverse events lacked an obvious cause. People suddenly sickened and died. Crops failed, and animals stopped giving milk. It was natural to believe that there was a supernatural cause for these otherwise inexplicable events. Witch hunts began with suspicions, rumors, and fear, then moved into accusations that the suspected witch had consorted with the devil and used witchcraft to harm her neighbors’ health, property, children, or livestock. In a culture that believed in witches as firmly as modern society believes in germs, the successful identification and prosecution of a witch in a village could trigger a hysterical search for others.
The Pilgrims sought religious freedom and independence from tyranny in the New World, but brought with them Old World superstitions and scapegoating
In the New World, Pilgrims sought religious freedom and independence from tyranny, but brought with them Old World superstitions and scapegoating.
In January 1692, when the great witch hunts in Europe were almost at an end, the town of Salem was shaken by accusations of witchcraft. Two young girls began to suffer from fits that they and their elders attributed to witchcraft. In the following months, more and more accusers came forward, claiming to have been tortured by the apparitions of witches or to have seen ghosts that accused witches of killing them. Many of the accused were cantankerous older women with dubious reputations who fit the seventeenth-century stereotype of the witch. Others were close relatives of those who had already been charged.
Between February 29, 1692, and late May 1693, when the last suspects were tried, the courts took legal action against at least 144 people, including a four-year-old girl. Fourteen women and five men were hanged, including Martha Corey; a sixth man was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to submit to a witchcraft trial.
Some of the most educated colonists were troubled by the proceedings. Minister and scientist Cotton Mather wrote to the court, begging that testimony about dreams and visions not be accepted as evidence. Several months later, as the convicti
ons continued, Increase Mather, then president of Harvard, joined his son in condemning the use of “spectral evidence” in the trials, saying, “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.” In response, Governor William Phips convened a new court that disallowed spectral evidence and eventually pardoned all those in jail as a result of the trails.
Within five years of the end of the trials, one judge and twelve jurors formally apologized for their roles in the events. Within two decades, the Massachusetts legislature apologized for what were by then viewed as unjust proceedings and voted to compensate the survivors of the trials and the descendants of those who had been executed.
Witch hunts were brutal and dramatic, but they were not the only attempt to control how people behaved and what they thought. Galileo Galilei was put on trial twice, in 1615 and in 1632—not simply for his assertion that the earth moved around the sun, but because he rejected the Catholic Church’s literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.
Galileo remained under house arrest from 1633 until his death in 1642, but religious and political authorities were not able to confine mankind’s curiosity. Astronomers worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky with mathematical precision. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to motion. Physicians explored the structure of the human body. Naturalists created new systems for classifying plants and animals that did not fit into existing categories. The development of scientific instruments allowed students to see new worlds in a drop of water and scan the skies with a clarity not possible with the naked eye. Most important, natural philosophers (the name used by scientists at the time) began to perform experiments in a way that could be repeated and verified by others, laying the foundation for modern scientists.
The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes.
—Galileo Galilei
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy, playing on the seashore . . . diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
—Sir Isaac Newton
Galileo explaining his new research at the University of Padua, Italy, painted 1873
The division between magic, religion, and science was never clear. Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics and possibly the best-known figure of the scientific revolution, spent as much time on alchemy and interpreting biblical prophecies as he did on the scientific theorems for which he is famous. William Harvey, who discovered how blood circulates in the body, carefully dissected one witch’s toad familiar, looking for the source of its supernatural power. Johannes Kepler, the great German astronomer, spent six years defending his mother against witchcraft charges after her arrest. Witch hunters and demonologists were for the most part scholars and rationalists. The investigation of witchcraft, magic, and miracles was as much a part of the scientific revolution as was the study of gravity and electricity. The traditional respect for the Bible and ancient texts as absolute authorities was replaced by a new belief in the importance of direct observation and a concern with what constituted reliable evidence. Together, scientists and witch-hunters developed the scientific method and laid the foundation for modern science.
examples of various glass work
THE ABLLITY TO MAKE MORE AND more sophisticated tools had been a critical element in our story from the beginning. By transforming one of Earth’s most common elements, silicon, into glass, humans unlocked invisible worlds for the first time.
Made by melting silica, a chemical compound of the element silicon, glass is a unique material, with molecules that are arranged randomly, like a liquid, but are locked in a rigid position, like a solid. Long before humans learned to make glass, we created razor-sharp blades from obsidian, a natural glass created when the intense heat of volcanoes melts quartz deep in the earth. Ancient glassmakers added sodium carbonate to lower the melting temperature of sand and calcium oxide, also called lime, to prevent the glass from dissolving in water.
For centuries, artisans made luxury products from glass: beads in ancient Mesopotamia, glass bottles in Egypt, blown glass in Rome, stained glass windows in the Middle Ages, mirrors in the seventeenth century.
Glass was complicated enough. Lenses were even harder.
Tenth-century Arab mathematician Alhazen studied how the refraction of light through water and glass causes images to be magnified. When returning Crusaders brought Alhazen’s work to Europe three centuries later, European monks recognized the practical value of his studies. They polished pieces of rock crystal into hemispheres to make “reading stones” that they used to magnify the written word. Italian glassmakers reproduced the expensive reading stones in glass. Near the end of the fourteenth century, someone in Italy applied Islamic optical theory to glassmaking and created the first eyeglasses.
It took another two hundred years before lenses were used for telescopes and microscopes. One story says that the first telescope was invented by accident by two Dutch children who were playing with the lenses in a shop that sold eyeglasses. They put two different-shaped lenses together and looked through them: suddenly the church weather vane was huge! The store owner, Hans Lippershey, looked for himself and discovered the children were right.
Whether the children discovered the effect or Lippershey stumbled across it himself, the shopkeeper quickly realized the invention’s potential. At first he set up the lenses in his shop to attract customers. Later he enclosed the lenses in a tube, creating what he called a “look glass.” In 1608, he petitioned the Dutch government for a patent, which gave him exclusive rights to sell the new instrument for thirty years. International patent law was nonexistent. Word of the new invention spread across Europe: Galileo made one for himself shortly after Lippershey filed his patent application.
Many denounced the “look glass” as a tool of the devil. Governments and merchants saw practical uses for war and navigation. Scientists saw greater possibilities in the new tool. Galileo, in particular, turned his telescope to the sky, becoming the first man to see that the Milky Way was made up of clusters of stars, that the moon had mountains and craters, and that Jupiter had its own moons. Galileo also used his telescope as a microscope, reportedly telling a visitor, “I have seen flies which look as big as lambs, and have learned that they are covered with hair and have very pointed nails.”
Fifty years later, Italian physician Marcello Malpighi turned his microscope to things that were smaller yet. Trying to understand how blood flowed through the body, he used what he called his “flea glass” to examine the exposed lungs of a living frog and became the first man to see blood pulsing through the small capillaries that connect the arteries and the veins.
Using the new tool of the telescope, Galileo looked up into the infinite expanse of space. Malpighi used the telescope’s younger brother, the microscope, to look down at the infinitesimally small. Suddenly the universe was a bigger place than we had ever imagined.
SILICON
The chemical element silicon makes up about one-fourth of the earth’s crust, more than any other element except oxygen. Silicon is part of almost every form of rock. We use its chemical compound, silica, to make both concrete and glass, materials that seem completely different. The “silicon chips” at the heart of every computer are pure silicon crystals.
REFRACTING AND REFLECTING
Galileo’s telescope was a refracting telescope. In refracting telescopes, light passes through two lenses—one convex and one concave. The problem with refracting telescopes is that all the colors of light are bent at slightly different angles, creating fuzzy images. Sir Isaac Newton solved the problem by introducing curved mirrors to telescopes, which focused the light. Telescopes with mirrors are called reflecting telescopes.
AT THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH century, shipp
ing was the lifeblood of the new global economy, linking Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia in a complicated pattern of export, import, and reexport. Great Britain stood at the heart of it all, with an annual overseas trade worth $800 million in today’s money. British merchants brought spices and tea from India, timber and furs from New England, and sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean to the wharfs of London. They carried cloth and metalware to Africa, manufactured goods and beer to send to the British colonists in the Americas, and transported silver to India and China. What had once been luxuries, available only to the rich, were now becoming affordable to the new middle class. Life was becoming a little easier.
Galileo used the new tools of the scientific method to change our understanding of the universe. Other scientists addressed more practical issues, making it possible for merchants to carry goods—and ideas—over longer distances. Since the days of Prince Henry the Navigator, European mariners had relied on maps of the stars for navigation, but those were full of errors and hopelessly incomplete. Sailors and ships were regularly lost at sea. Mistakes cost money and lives. A few days’ delay on a ship’s arrival could slash a voyage’s profit. A shipwreck could bankrupt a man.
One man, John Flamsteed, argued that the solution was obvious: more accurate star charts would allow navigators to determine a ship’s longitude at sea.
Mankind Page 27
