Part 16

Another Prussian army was overcome at Maxen, where 13,000 Prussians were taken.

Altogether, during this year’s campaigns, several hundred thousand soldiers lost their lives.

It was the worst year of the Seven Years’ War for Frederick the Great and his soldiers, who attributed their bloody defeats to the ill omen of the Comet.

In other parts of the world, likewise, the coming of the Comet was followed by widespread war and bloody fighting.

For the French, the Comet signalled disaster after disaster. After their armies had been beaten in Germany, their navy was defeated on August 17 in a great sea fight in the Bay of Lagos, on the coast of Portugal. Six weeks later there was another bloody sea fight between the British and French, when Admiral Pocock inflicted a telling defeat on the French fleet.

Then came the final French naval disaster off Quiberon, in the Bay of Biscay, when Admiral Hawke destroyed French naval power by sinking or blowing up over a score of the French fighting ships. This bloody defeat was a disaster of untold consequences to the French, since it meant the loss of India.

But this was not all that this Comet of ill omen had brought to the French.

On September 13th of that year the French lost their strongest hold on America in the disastrous defeat inflicted upon them by General Wolfe in the bloody battle on the Plains of Abraham, where Wolfe himself fell fighting. On the French side, General Montcalm, the Commander-in-Chief, was mortally wounded. This meant the loss of Quebec and of all Canada to the French, an event of far-reaching importance that has changed the destiny of all America and of the modern world.

1682

The Comet which put Halley on the right track in his theories of Comets, first came into view on the night of August 15, 1682. It was first detected by Flamsteed’s assistant at the Greenwich Observatory, while searching the northern heavens with a telescope.

Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, and Halley, his successor, kept a close watch upon the Comet every night, and followed its course over the sky. Others who watched it were Sir Isaac Newton, Cassini, Picard and La Hire in Paris, Baert at Toulon, Kirch and Zimmermann in Germany, Montanari at Padua, and Hevelius in Dantsic. They observed that the tail lengthened considerably as the Comet came nearer the sun. Later a jet of luminous matter was seen shooting out toward the sun, which afterward fell back into the tail. Hevelius has left us a drawing of this phenomenon.

On November 11th, Halley found that the Comet had come within a semi-diameter of the path of our earth. This startling discovery caused Halley to reflect what might happen if the earth and the Comet had arrived at the same time at the spot in space where their two orbits intersect. Assuming as he did that the mass of the Comet was considerably larger than our earth, he declared: “If so large a body with so rapid a motion were to strike the earth—a thing by no means impossible—the shock might reduce this beautiful world to its original chaos.”

TRANSLATION OF INSCRIPTION:

“THE STAR THREATENS EVIL THINGS—ONLY TRUST! GOD WILL MAKE IT TURN OUT WELL.”]

Others beside Halley took alarm at the Comet. They called it “The Chariot of Fire.”

Dr. Whiston—he who succeeded Newton in the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge—in a moment of prophetic vision fervently declared that this Comet was God’s agent that would bring about the General Conflagration by involving the world in flames.

In America, the Rev. Increase Mather, President of Harvard College, on the appearance of the Comet in New England, preached his great sermon on “Heaven’s Alarm to the World ... wherein is shown that fearful sights and signs in the Heavens are the presages of great calamities at hand.”

Increase Mather’s warning was handed down as an inspired prophesy, in view of the fact that the English settlers in North America soon afterwards got into bloody warfare with the Indians. The war raged at its fiercest in the Carolinas, where the English settlers made war upon the redskins simply for the purpose of taking them captive and selling them into slavery in the West Indies.

To the Indians the Comet appeared as a sign of ill omen, as shown by their frequent references to it during the parleys with the white men.

The Comet was shining at its fiercest when the six greatest chiefs of the Susquehanna nation were enticed into a pretended council of peace with the white men, only to be foully murdered with all their followers.

While this was going on in America, the Comet gave the signal in India for the first hostilities there upon the white settlers from Portugal, as well as for the outbreak of the bloody Mahratta War, which ravaged India for a generation to come.

Nearer East, the Turks, under the leadership of Mohammed Bey, ravaged Egypt, while, on the other side, a Turkish army under Kara Mustapha carried war into Hungary, to the very gates of Vienna, until Emperor Leopold felt constrained to call for help from Sobieski, the warrior king of the Poles.

In Europe the French overran Alsace, and suddenly seized the German city of Strasburg.

At the same time the bubonic plague broke out in North Germany. In the little university town of Halle alone, within a few days, 4,397 people died out of a total population of ten thousand.

It was then that medals were struck off in Germany with a design of the comet on their face, and an inscription imploring God to avert the evils threatened by the Comet:

“The star threatens evil things; Only trust! God will make it right.”

1607

The Comet this year was seen all over Europe. The best observations of it were made by Kepler and Longomontanus (Langberger). It was seen at its brightest in England.