historic·day

Before dawn on the twelfth of October in the year of our Lord 1492, three small ships of the Castilian flag closed upon a low, sandy island in the western ocean. The watch on the Pin­ta caught the white reef-line under a waxing moon and called out to the deck. The vessels hove to and waited for the sun, that decent witness, before any landing was made. We record the hour because the hour was kept.

The party that came ashore in the longboat — the Admiral Cristóbal Colón, Martín Alonso Pinzón at the head of the Pinta, his brother Vicente Yáñez at the Niña, and the secretary Rodrigo d'Escobedo with quill and royal order — planted the standard of the Catholic Sovereigns in soft sand and named the island San Salvador. The inhabitants, of the Lucayan branch of the Taino, came forward gently and traded parrots and cotton thread for hawk-bells and red caps. The Admiral observed that they had no iron, and that they would, by his estimation, make good servants.

That single line in the journal, written by candle in the great cabin a few hours later, has cast its shadow forward through five centuries. It is not the role of an almanac to instruct the conscience — we are not, after all, the moralist — but neither is it our role to forget. The arrival on Guanahaní was the first hinge of an immense and asymmetric meeting. Empires rose by it; whole peoples were unmade by it; and the ledger remains open.

The fleet remained in the Bahamian shoals for some weeks, threading reef and key, before turning south to Cuba and Hispaniola. The Santa María would not see Castile again; she went aground on the night of Christmas Eve, and her timbers became the fortress of La Navidad. By the time the news reached Barcelona, in March of the following year, the world the European mind had inhabited had a new and unmapped half.

At twenty minutes past eight in the evening of the twentieth of July, 1969, Eastern Daylight Time, a small four-legged craft built of aluminium and gold-blanket foil came to rest on the basalt plain known to selenographers as the Mare Tranquil­litatis. Within the cabin, two men wrote down numbers and waited for the dust to settle. The descent had been managed in the last seconds by a co-pilot named Aldrin reading altitudes aloud while the commander, Armstrong, flew by hand around a boulder field neither of them had expected.

Some six hours later, in the small hours of the twenty-first by the clock at Houston, Armstrong descended the ladder. The boot prints he left in the regolith are, by chance and by physics, likely to remain visible for some millions of years; the moon does not weather, and there is no rain to wash them. He spoke a sentence which had been considered, but not rehearsed, and forgot a word: that one small step was for a man, and the giant leap was for mankind.

We record the moment with the same patience as we record the landfall at Guanahaní, and for related reasons. It was a day on which a familiar sky became, for some hours, an inhabited place. It was also a day on which the apparatus of state had managed, for once, to send people somewhere that did not require their conquest. The two crewmen left a plaque: “We came in peace for all mankind.” Whether the sentiment is honored is, like all such matters, an open ledger.

Down on the planet, an estimated six hundred million people watched the grainy slow-scan television transmission. The image was relayed from a parabolic dish in Honeysuckle Creek, in the eucalypts outside Canberra, then on to the world. In a thousand small towns the citizens left their porches, and the night was, briefly, very quiet.

In the workshop of Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, on the Hof zum Humbrecht in Mainz, the first complete copy of the Latin Vulgate set in movable type was finished, by tradition, on the twenty-third of February in the year 1455. The exact day is contested; printers seldom dated their colophons, and Gutenberg's account-books speak of the press as a long, shifting effort rather than a single fired round. What is not contested is that, sometime in this winter, the page was lifted out of its forme and held to the light.

The press was a converted wine-press; the type a careful alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that cooled fast and held a fine stroke. The ink, oil-based, was rolled by hand. Each completed sheet went to the rubricator's bench, who painted in the chapter initials with brushes of ermine hair. Some copies were on paper of the Cardinal d'Estouteville's mill; some on calfskin vellum from the abattoirs of Lower Saxony.

The book is, by general assent, the first European book of any consequence printed with movable type. From this winter, the book ceased to be an object made one at a time. The intellectual consequences are not for the almanac to enumerate; they are everywhere. We will note only that the thirty-five copies which survive on vellum are, at present, the most valuable printed objects in the world, and that one of them lives in Mainz, which is appropriate.

Gutenberg himself was, by this date, already entangled in litigation with his financier, Johann Fust, who would shortly take the press, the type, and a good portion of the credit. The inventor died, twelve years later, in some obscurity. The book outlived him. The book outlives most things.

The twenty-third of April, in the year 1564, is the day traditionally given for the birth of William Shakespeare in the small market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. The actual birth is not recorded; only the baptism, three days later, on the twenty-sixth, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church. The convention of three days, and the symmetry of the saint's day — St George's, also the day of the poet's death fifty-two years later — have together sealed the date in the calendar.

John Shakespeare, the father, was a glover, a wool-dealer, and at this date a man of small but rising standing in the borough. The mother, Mary Arden, was the youngest of eight daughters of a yeoman farmer of Wilmcote. Their child was the third born to them and the eldest to survive infancy. Two earlier daughters had died, one before her second year. Plague had been in Stratford the previous summer, and would return.

That this child would, in the course of a working life, write some thirty-eight plays of which the language would not be exhausted in four hundred years — that he would compose one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, of which the seventy-third describes the very season in which he died — this could not be foreseen, and was not foreseen. He was a provincial child, raised in a half-timbered house by a yard where his father salted hides. The first work of his we possess in print is from his late twenties.

The almanac records the day with reserve. We do not know what hour he was born, nor whether the spring was forward or late. The trees on the Avon, by the testimony of the parish, had not yet leafed. Somewhere nearby, the river was running high with the late thaw. The poet, in time, would set scenes by such rivers.