March 1504 lunar eclipse

Visibility

The eclipse was visible after sunset on February 29 from most of North America, all of South America, as well as across Europe, Africa, and western Asia on the morning of March 1.

Observations

On 30 June 1503, Christopher Columbus beached his two last caravels and was stranded in Jamaica. The indigenous people of the island welcomed Columbus and his crew and fed them, but Columbus' sailors cheated and stole from the natives. After six months, the natives halted the food supply. Columbus had on board an almanac authored by Abraham Zacuto of astronomical tables covering the years 1475–1506. Upon consulting the book, he noticed the date and the time of an upcoming lunar eclipse. He was able to use this information to his advantage. He requested a meeting for that day with the Cacique, the leader, and told him that his god was angry with the local people's treatment of Columbus and his men. Columbus said his god would provide a clear sign of his displeasure by making the rising full Moon appear "inflamed with wrath".

The lunar eclipse and the red Moon appeared on schedule, and the indigenous people were impressed and frightened. The son of Columbus, Ferdinand, wrote that the people:

Columbus went into his cabin to "pray" and timed the eclipse with his hourglass, and shortly before the totality ended after 48 minutes, he told the frightened indigenous people that they were going to be forgiven. When the Moon started to reappear from the shadow of the Earth, he told them that his god had pardoned them.

Longitude

Columbus was maybe the first to put into practice an idea proposed by Hipparchus, to use a lunar eclipse to determine one's geographical longitude. A lunar eclipse is visible across half the globe, and everyone sees it begin and end at the same moment. But the times when measured in the local solar time will differ, because everyone is in a different timezone. The local time is determined by observing the rise, culmination, or setting of the Sun. Now an almanac will predict an eclipse for some place at a certain geographical longitude at a specific local time there. The same event observed elsewhere will occur at a different clocktime. The difference in time is proportional to the difference in geographical longitude, by 15 degrees per hour.

Columbus had no accurate means to determine how far he had travelled West on the globe. He observed the lunar eclipses of 15 September 1494 near Hispaniola (Dominican Republic), and that of 29 February 1504 from Jamaica. In the latter case he reported in his journal that Jamaica was 7 hours and 15 minutes from Cadiz in Spain - well on his way to China. However his site at Jamaica is actually at a longitude 4 hours 44 minutes from Cadiz. How Columbus could make such a large error of 2 ¹⁄₂ hours remains puzzling, but D.W. Olson proposed a reconstruction.

Columbus presumably used the Calendarium from Regiomontanus. This almanac gives the time of mid-eclipse at Nuremberg, but if Columbus erroneously interpreted the listed time as that of the beginning of the partial eclipse, then his 2 ¹⁄₂h error could be explained. One can imagine that such false evidence confirmed Columbus in his belief he had reached China, overlooking the fact that he discovered an entire unknown continent.

Fictional variations

In 1885, H. Rider Haggard used an altered version of the real story of the rescue of Columbus in his novel King Solomon's Mines, where hero Allan Quartermain and his companions recruit supporters for their cause from the local tribe by predicting a lunar eclipse.

In Mark Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the protagonist, Hank Morgan, a time-travelling 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, escapes being burned at the stake by predicting a solar eclipse early medieval England during the time of the legendary King Arthur. Bolesław Prus' historical novel, Pharaoh, written in 1894–95, also uses this trope.

A similar plot also features in The Adventures of Tintin comic, Prisoners of the Sun.