At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (20 page)

Certainly, travel after dark, apart from brief excursions, often hinged upon moonlight. In the view of Henry David Thoreau, who ruminated upon the “infinite” varieties of moonlight, even a “faint diffused light” supplied “light enough to travel.” Time and again, persons wrote of visiting friends, performing errands, or returning home by the moon. “Rather late with us before we got home as we waited some time for moonlight,” commented Parson James Woodforde of dinner at a friend’s. In Paris, a pair of physicians in 1664 consented to visit a feverish patient, “it being about full moon.” Many cities and towns that had once required pedestrians to carry lanterns or torches no longer did so by the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, restrictions went unenforced. Londoners, including men of property, routinely traveled by “brave mooneshine,” as Pepys called it. Of a coach ride to the Lord Treasurer’s home for dinner, Jonathan Swift related, “The moon shone, and so we were not in much danger of overturning.” Conversely, a night’s entertainment, in the moon’s absence, might be canceled or postponed. “He would not dine with us on account of there being no moon,” wrote Nancy Woodforde in 1792 of a Norfolk neighbor.
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Even then, there was often the natural light of the stars, whose glow, though fainter, was more reliable. “It was neither dark nor light; it was a starlight night,” observed a man in 1742. In some parts of England, the first “star” after sunset, Vesper (actually the planet Venus), was called the “Shepherds-Lamp” because of its bright glow above the western horizon. “The shepherd’s lamp, which even children know,” penned John Clare in the early nineteenth century. Besides seeming brighter than today, stars appeared vastly more plentiful, likely totaling on a clear night in excess of two thousand. Like the moon, their light was capable of casting shadows. Wrote the poet Robert Herrick, “Let not the dark thee cumber: / What though the moon does slumber? / The stars of the night will lend thee their light.” A Londoner recounted in the mid-eighteenth century, “Between 11 and 12 it being a fine star-light night, I put my sword and cane under my arm and walked.”
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Unless haze interfered, the Milky Way, a broad swath of white light, stretched from one horizon to another, dividing the sky in two: “The region seems to be all on a blaze with their blended rays,” described a writer in the
Universal Magazine of Knowedge and Pleasure
in 1753. Although Chaucer and others early on employed the expression Milky Way, it was used interchangeably with the names of different highways, whose routes, depending upon the season, ran in the galaxy’s general direction. Early pilgrims kept to such roads as the “Walsingham Way” in East Anglia and the “Strada di Roma” in Italy by eyeing the sky. “By us,” wrote the astronomer Thomas Hood in 1590, “it is called the Milke way: some in sporting manner doie call it Watling streete,” the ancient Roman road that ran from the outskirts of London to Wroxeter near the Welsh border.
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In the end, neither moon nor stars but clouds regulated the flow of celestial light. Thus Thoreau wrote of the moon’s “continual war with the clouds” on the traveler’s behalf.
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The density and velocity of cloud formations were vital considerations. “Moon shines, tho’ clouds are flying,” noted Elizabeth Drinker on a June evening. The Irish draper Humphrey O’Sullivan referred regularly to nights that were either “thin” or “heavy” clouded. Only on clear evenings could one be confident of protracted light, for within minutes the sky might dramatically change. Observed a passing visitor to Scotland in the late eighteenth century, “During some part of this ride the moon was so much obscured I could scarcely see if I was upon the road, at other times it shone so bright as to give me a distinct view of the country.”
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The blackest nights, when clouds blanketed the sky, inspired numerous expressions—“pit-mirk,” “lowry,” “darkling,” and, of course, “pitch-dark” in reference to the tarry resin of pine trees. “As dark as pitch,” Pepys remarked upon returning home at 2:00
A.M.
on a January evening in 1666.
Nóche ciéga
, Spaniards called “blind nights.” Winter temperatures, due to cloud cover, might be warmer, but vision on such evenings was severely impaired. The sky, let alone distant objects or their colors, was barely visible. “It was such a dark night I could hardly see my finger,” described a London resident in 1754.
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Options for travel were few, with most people all the more inclined to remain safely at home. Some, if possible, employed torches or lanterns, for which they were said to be “belanter’d.” “We were obliged to have a lantern,” wrote Parson Woodforde in 1786, “being very dark.” But, invariably, occasions arose when overcast skies caught individuals off-guard or winds extinguished a candle or torch. Passing through Palaiseau in France, a group of men, finding their lamp broken, canvassed the occupants of an inn for a lantern, for which they exchanged a bottle of wine. “We got a lantern with a rushlight in it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way darkling.”
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Thomas Bewick,
Benighted Traveler
, n.d.

To make the most of black nights, wayfarers displayed a rough-hewn resourcefulness. In 1661, overtaken by darkness in mountainous countryside, a mounted party placed a rider on a white horse in front to lead the way. “We followed his trace,” described the servant Robert Moody. The member of another body of travelers recounted a “pit dark” night near Durham: “We was forced to ride close on one another, otherwise we should have losed one another.” And whenever darkness descended on a Georgia plantation, Aunt Sook wore “a white cloth ’round her shoulders” to lead fellow slaves from the fields.
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Just as trees blazed by axes charted paths at night through dense woodlands, so, too, did seasoned travelers get their bearings by viewing the dark silhouettes of coppices and trees against the skyline.
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By contrast, where soil contained large quantities of sand or chalk, men and women scanned the ground around them. In the Down-country of southern England, villagers heaped mounds of chalky soil, known as “down-lanterns,” to mark routes through open fields. Heading south from Edinburgh in 1745, Alexander Carlyle and his brother traveled along the shoreline “as there was no moonlight . . . and the sands always lightsome when the sea is in ebb.”
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On the worst nights, ordinary folk relied heavily upon secondary senses, including their powers of hearing, touch, and smell. Although today the large bulk of our sensory input is visual, sight’s sister senses, for much of the early modern era, remained critical to everyday existence, particularly at nighttime. On overcast evenings, individuals often were forced to navigate, not with their eyes, but with their ears. The nocturnal experience was heavily aural. “The day has eyes, the night has ears,” affirmed a Scottish proverb. After sunset, reliance on hearing was so pronounced that in East Yorkshire the verb “dark” meant “to listen.”
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Nighttime, as contemporaries understoood, was well suited to communicating sound. Although the moist air could have a damping effect, impairment of sight naturally sharpened one’s hearing. Observes Hermia in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, “Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, / The ear more quick of apprehension makes. / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense.” In addition, nocturnal silence gave heightened resonance to isolated noises. With a less complex soundscape, it was easier for a cocked ear to detect the source and direction of separate sounds.
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Unfortunately, hearing, unlike sight, is a passive sense, and sound can be intermittent at best. “Sounds come and go in a way that sights do not,” John M. Hull, the blind author of
Touching the Rock
, has recently noted. At night, noises become more sporadic. On the other hand, hearing is a more pervasive sense than sight, not limited to a single direction; nor is it as easily blocked by an intervening obstacle such as a building or a tree. And with the range of earshot extended at night, preindustrial sounds represented the aural equivalent of landmarks.
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Overtaken by darkness on an unfamiliar road outside the Scottish town of Paisley, a set of travelers “proceeded with great caution and deliberation, frequently stopping to look forward and listen.” Where wind and rain, by their sounds, could help to reveal the contours of a landscape, familiar noises afforded welcome wayposts. The “clattering” of their horses’ hooves told visitors to Freiburg that they were entering “a large pavd town.” Bleating ewes and bellowing bulls provided bearings, as did tolling church bells. In 1664, Richard Palmer of Berkshire bequeathed funds for the village sexton to ring the great bell at eight o’clock each night as well as in the morning, not only to encourage “a timely going to rest” but also that persons “might be informed of the time of night, and receive some guidance into their right way.” Most helpful were dogs, whose barks pierced the air. Like a homing signal, the noise increased in volume and intensity the closer that one approached. “We lost our road,” wrote a traveler in France, “and about midnight, directed by the sound of village dogs, dropt upon Fontinelle.” Noted a colonist in seventeenth-century Maryland, “It was a remarkable circumstance, as dogs are used to keep men away from dwellings, but served to bring us to them.”
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Even smells could help to orient persons to their locations, all the more at night when noses grew more sensitive and odors lingered in the damp air. “The whole air of the village of an evening is perfumed by effluvia from the hops drying in the kilns,” commented Gilbert White on a late summer night in 1791. For individuals intimately familiar with their environs, the fragrance of a honeysuckle bush or a bakery on a warm evening or, conversely, the stench of a dunghill afforded invisible signposts, as did smells associated with horses, cattle, and other farm animals.
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Touch, on the other hand, enabled individuals to navigate at close quarters, warily shuffling their feet as they advanced with outstretched arms. “Better walk leisurely than lie abroad all night,” advised a familiar saying. Deprived of their sight, pedestrians grew intensely conscious of their limbs and extremities. “We groped about, like a couple of thieves, in a cole hole,” described a London resident. Few persons, admittedly, navigated on all fours as the agricultural writer Arthur Young did one night in Italy. With his lantern extinguished by wind, Young was forced to crawl to avert falling over a cliff. It was not unusual for drivers to halt their coaches in order to gauge the road. “Mr. Taylor,” described a passenger in Scotland, “was oft obliged to descend from the carriage to
feel
whether we were upon the road or not.”
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Fingers and feet were employed to best effect on well-marked paths, whereas, on a “blind road,” the surface differed little from the shoulders. Smooth, open spaces, such as a pasture or commons, also provided few orienting clues, in contrast to rough, uneven surfaces, despite the threat of tripping. Visiting a patient without the aid of a lantern, the New England midwife Martha Ballard removed her shoes to feel the path in her stockings. “Steerd as strait a coars as I could,” she recorded of her safe arrival.
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In cities, differences in pavement could alert pedestrians to their location, as they struggled to keep to the beaten track. Of navigating London’s streets, Gay wrote, “Has not wise nature strung the legs and feet / With finest nerves, design’d to walk the street? / Has she not given us hands to groap aright, / Amidst the frequent dangers of the night?”
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Canes and staffs gave a feel of the road by extending one’s reach. Among all social classes, these appear to have been commonplace, intended as much for navigation as for self-defense. “No doubt you have had the experience of walking at night over rough ground without a light, and finding it necessary to use a stick in order to guide yourself,” wrote Descartes. “You may have been able to notice that by means of this stick you could feel the various objects situated around you, and that you could even tell whether they were trees or stones or sand or water or grass or mud.”
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With or without a cane or staff, the experience of traveling by foot on dark evenings could be daunting, particularly for the upper classes, accustomed to horseback or coach. Fanny Boscawen in 1756 wrote her husband Edward, the admiral, “I have made such profession of my aversion to
groping
that at length I seem to have obtained a dispensation never to visit in the dark.” A traveler to the Swiss city of Lausanne, to his great dismay, was forced “to walk gropingly like a blind man.”
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IV

There is a proper time and season for every thing; and nothing can be more ridiculous than the doing of things without a due regard to the circumstances of persons, proportion, time and place.