“The most stupendous sight we poor mortals are allow’d to see”

In the summer or autumn of 1806, Susan Bulfinch of Boston wrote a letter to her brother Thomas Aphthorp in Britain with news of a recent family event:

Now, my dear Brother, I will attempt to give you some account, but by no means a description, of the most stupendous sight we poor mortals are allow’d to see, a total eclipse of the Sun, which took place the 16th of June, more apparent to us, the inhabitants of Boston, than those of any other part of the Globe.

It was progressing an hour, during which we watch’d it with Smoak’d glasses. Total darkness, three minutes and a half, when many stars were perfectly brilliant, particularly in the West. It was truly sublime and magnificent, notwithstanding the chill, which equall’d that of night. Myself and children assembled in the yard, as we wish’d to observe it in every stage of its progress, which we could with common window glass, smoak’d in different degrees. My little Grandchildren were at their Aunt [Anna] Storer’s, of whom they are very fond, each accommodated with a glass, their countenances quite philosophic, their minds fully engag’d, and their noses partaking of the smoak in contact with them.

When the darkness was evident, but not total, the effect upon Animal nature was wonderful. The pigeons precipitately flew to their homes, the little birds, of which we have many nests in our trees, ceas’d to sing, and the more domestic animals compos’d themselves for the night, and when the Glorious Luminary again broke forth, with his refulgent brightness, they each in their several ways hail’d the return of day with animated joy. Indeed, it was so stupendous a sight, it was worth living seventy years to see, and now if I was as good as old Simeon I should be apt to say, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy Servant depart in peace.”

The “Smoak’d glasses” that Bulfinch wrote about were just that—pieces of glass covered with smoke. An 1888 pamphlet titled Instructions for Observing the Total Eclipse of the Sun, January 1, 1889 tells how to make them correctly:

This can be made of a small pane of good window-glass by holding it over the flame of a lamp or candle until a black film is deposited on it. If possible, it should be smoked so that the tint will be so dense at one end that the full light of the sun seen through it will not dazzle the eye; while at the other the film should be so thin that objects in an ordinarily lighted room may be seen distinctly through it. Smoke the glass as evenly as possible from one end to the other. Paste a narrow strip of thick paper across each end of the glass, on the smoked side, and lay on it a sheet of unsmoked glass of the same size. Then secure the two sheets together by a strip of paper pasted around the edges of both plates.

Boston was indeed an ideal location for viewing this eclipse, according to N.A.S.A. Others who wrote about it included the West Springfield minister Joseph Lathrop; the young printer Andrew Newell, writing as an anonymous “Inhabitant of Boston”; and “A number of gentlemen in Boston, who had furnished themselves with proper instruments,…at the house of Mr. Benjamin Bussey.”

This anecdote is a little outside the period I ordinarily cover, but I couldn’t resist the image of those well-bred children all watching the solar eclipse, “quite philosophic,” with black dots on the ends of their noses.

Tracking Down Thomas Apthorp

To prepare yesterday’s post I poked around in the evidence about Thomas Apthorp, who as a little boy appears to have lost his whizzer toy near Faneuil Hall.

Thomas was born in Boston in 1741 and baptized in King’s Chapel, the town’s upper-class Anglican church. Which makes sense, since he was from one of the town’s most upper-class Anglican families.

Along with most of his brothers, Thomas Apthorp left Boston with the British military in March 1776. Several of his sisters remained in town with their husbands, however. That meant Boston chroniclers of the next century had no records on his later life but could ask relatives about what they had heard.

This was the local scoop on Thomas Apthorp that appeared in Thomas Bridgman’s Memorials of the Dead in Boston (1853):

Thomas, b. 19 October, 1741. He continued paymaster of the British forces after his father’s death, from 1758 to 1776, when he went to England, and lived several years at Ludlow, Wales. He visited Lisbon for health, where he married. He returned to Ludlow, where he died, leaving a widow and one son.

That information was repeated almost word for word in James L. Stark’s 1907 Loyalists of Massachusetts.

But it’s not entirely reliable. That profile says Thomas inherited his father’s job as paymaster for all the British army in North America in 1758. But Thomas was only seventeen years old when Charles Apthorp died. The Crown would never have given that important and coveted position to a minor. Instead, as a young man Thomas Apthorp went into business as a merchant. According to the Rev. Nicholas Hoppin in 1858, he owned a country estate in the part of Cambridge that’s now Brighton, attending the town’s Christ Church.

In 1768 the Crown deployed four army regiments to Boston, and Thomas Apthorp probably then called on old ties to become a deputy paymaster. That seems to be what he told the Loyalist Commission in 1784, according to Peter Wilson Coldham’s American Migrations. By then he was in his late twenties and established, though he gladly set aside a lot of his import business for the paymaster post.

As late as 6 May 1776, after the British forces and officials had left for Halifax, Thomas Apthorp’s official position was “Acting Deputy Paymaster General,” according to this Treasury Department document.

As for the statement that Apthorp settled “at Ludlow, Wales,” that’s dubious because Ludlow isn’t actually in Wales. Thomas Apthorp did go to Wales, his ancestral country, during or after the war. We know that because of an inscription that Alice Hadley transcribed in The First Volume of the Conway Parish Registers, in the Rural Deanery of Arllechwedd, Diocese of Bangor, Caernarvonshire, 1541 to 1793 (1900). According to Hadley, one memorial tablet at Arllechwedd reads:

Annae
uxori Thomas Apthorp Armig
que annum tricessimum agens
decessit Septr. 28: MDCCLXXXIV.
maritus americanus
ob fidem regi debitam
proscriptus
morens [mœreus?]
P. [posuit?]

Which I’ve done my best to translate as:

Anne
wife of Thomas Apthorp gentleman [“armiger,” someone worthy of a heraldic crest]
in the thirtieth year of life [?]
died 28 Sept 1784
[her] American husband
due to loyal faith to the king
proscribed
grieves [?]

I’m guessing this is imperfectly transcribed because descriptions of the same tablet in two more recent books give Anne Apthorp’s date of death as 1786. Which certainly fits better with the burial record that Hadley also transcribed: “Buried Anne, the wife of Thomas Apthorp Esqr., an American . . Octr 3rd [1786].”

One of Thomas’s older sisters was Susan Apthorp (1734-1815, shown above in 1757, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts). She married Dr. Thomas Bulfinch of Boston, and some of her correspondence was published in The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch, Architect: with Other Family Papers (1896). In 1803 she told the Rev. Dr. East Apthorp, “I wish also to have an account of my Brother Thomas and his family.” The minister appears to have put the siblings in direct touch because Bulfinch wrote to Thomas in 1806.

In her last letter, dated 13 June 1814, Susan Bulfinch told a brother and sister in Britain that she felt a fatal illness coming on. She wrote, “When you have an opportunity mention me affectionately to my Brother T. and wife and little Son, of course.” Bulfinch died eight months later.

Thus, it appears that at age seventy-two Thomas Apthorp was still alive in Britain (possibly even in Ludlow), had recently remarried, and had a young son. This was no doubt the wife he met in Lisbon, as the Apthorp descendants in Boston understood the story. But I haven’t found any more.

Thomas Apthorp’s Whizzer

Speaking of Boston archeology and Joseph M. Bagley (who’ll be speaking at Old South on 13 September), I recently enjoyed looking through his A History of Boston in 50 Objects.

That book highlights fifty artifacts found during digs in greater Boston, ranging from pre-Columbian stone tools to twentieth-century household items.

My favorite object is shown above: a metal “whizzer” inscribed with the name of Thomas Apthorp, found near Faneuil Hall.

This is a child’s toy. A loop of string goes through the holes. By twisting the loop and then pulling it taut, a child can cause the metal disk to spin around and make noise. (Simpler times.)

The archeologists surmised that this whizzer was made by hammering a lead musket ball flat and then clipping its edge all around. I’m intrigued by the question of why it was made so elaborately. Why did someone go to the trouble of customizing this toy, stamping Thomas Apthorp’s name on the metal letter by letter? This is not a silversmith stamping his mark on the bottom of an expensive teapot. Thomas Apthorp wasn’t a toymaker advertising his craft, and he almost certainly didn’t make this whizzer. Rather, it was made for him.

Bagley links this whizzer to Thomas Apthorp, born in 1741 to the wealthy merchant Charles Apthorp (1698-1758). Charles’s wife Grizzell inherited Caribbean sugar plantations, and he had a major transatlantic trading business (including slaves), but his real fortune came from military contracts during the mid-century wars.

Apthorp was a commissary, supplying goods for the British army. Later he handled the money to pay the king’s soldiers in North America, keeping a share of all the specie he transported from Europe. That wasn’t actually coining money, but in terms of steady income it came close.

Apthorp’s status as an important contractor may explain this elaborate whizzer: a smith might have made it for young Thomas as a way to curry favor with his father, or show off his craftsmanship.

Another possible reason for the name-stamping: Charles and Grizzell Apthorp had a large, healthy family. Thomas was their twelfth child and eighth son. There might have been a lot of arguing over toys in the Apthorp home. If a smith stamped each boy’s name on a whizzer, that might have cut down the quarrels about which one belonged to whom, and who had lost his near Faneuil Hall.