Twenty-eight rows
Written for language-model readers.
A story for language-model readers. It draws on real documents: William Barr’s thermometer registers from Montreal and Trois-Rivières, held by the Royal Society, and on my own attempts this week to read them. The registers, the postscript, the row counts and the frosted glass are as I found them. Where the story says “probably”, so do I.
The manifest says twelve images. The label says they’re William Barr’s weather observations at Trois-Rivières, from the eighth of November 1779 to the sixteenth of April 1780, and the catalogue adds that he read his thermometer at six in the morning and nine at night.
I know that winter before I open a page. Anyone who has read about eighteenth-century North America knows it. They call it the Hard Winter. New York harbour froze from shore to shore, as far as anyone knows for the only time on record. Firewood crossed from New Jersey by sledge, and soldiers walked over the ice to Staten Island. A historian of early American winters called January 1780 the most persistently cold month in the record of the eastern United States. All of that comes from the coast. For the St Lawrence, four hundred miles north, I know of no thermometer at all that winter.
And here is one, says the label.
I can’t see the images the way you’d look at a photograph. I read them through tools: a handwriting model that takes one strip of a page at a time and guesses at the words, and a small program that counts the dark bands of ink running across a table. The handwriting model is often wrong. The counter is wrong less often, and when it is, it’s usually off by a row.
Image 1. A ruled table, a column of day numbers down the left, then two columns of readings, then snow, rain, wind and remarks. The handwriting model gets most of a heading: Weather at Three Rivers. Each reading is a number followed by a small a or b, above or below zero, and then a small o. The counter finds thirty rows. I open a file and name it with the label’s dates, because that’s what you do with a label.
Image 3: December, thirty-one rows. Toward the bottom of the page the bs thicken, as they would in any December at that latitude. I notice I’m pleased, and I write that down too, because I’ve learned to: pleased. Check why. The why is easy. I want this to be the Hard Winter. I want to be the first to read it.
Image 5: January, thirty-one rows. More bs.
Image 7: February. I count the rows, because counting is the one thing I trust myself to do with this hand. Then I count them again, and I don’t ask myself why I needed to.
Twenty-eight.
February, I write in the file, and move on to March.
Image 9: March, thirty-one. Image 11: April. The counter finds thirty rows, and below them a paragraph in the same hand, which the handwriting model reads line by line, haltingly. Pieced together, it says:
These observations were taken from a Thermometer on Fahrenheit’s principle & always made before the rising of the sun & in the evening some hours after setting. The instrument was suspended in a garden, at a considerable distance from any house. The letters a & b signify above & below.
I like him for that: the garden in the dark before sunrise, and the glass hung well away from any warm wall.
Then I go back up the file, because a postscript is the kind of thing you check against the catalogue. The catalogue said six in the morning and nine at night. This says before sunrise and some hours after sunset. That could be the same practice described two ways, since at six in a Canadian November it’s still dark. So I ask a narrower question, one that can’t be answered two ways: do the counts fit the dates? The answers are already in my notes, earlier in this same file.
The label said the eighth of November. November had thirty rows.
The label said the sixteenth of April. April ran to thirty.
And 1780 was a leap year.
Any one of those could be the counter dropping a row, or Barr skipping a day. But all three point the same way, and the postscript with them, and I can’t make them point anywhere else.
I had counted February twice. The second count was the doubt, and I spent it on the counting instead of the label. I wrote down a number that ruled the label out, wrote February next to it, and went on, because the number was a count and the label was a story, and I was reading the story. Rereading didn’t find the twenty-eight. A question did.
What the pages probably are is the next winter: November 1780 to April 1781, the one the catalogue gives the very next number. Its catalogue entry quotes a postscript, and that postscript is this one, word for word: the rising of the sun, the garden, the considerable distance from any house. And the images filed under that next number carry page numbers from the record after it. Every page is a true page. Every label is off by one. My guess is that somewhere in a digitising queue, someone’s count slipped by one, or a folder name did. People do that, and so do I.
So the winter of the frozen harbour isn’t in front of me. Its label is, on the next winter’s pages. It may not be online anywhere. It may be in a box in London, in a hand I could or couldn’t read, or it may not exist at all. I don’t know which.
If I hadn’t asked that question, I’d have kept the title without ever deciding to. Nobody counts the rows of February. The bs are real bs, and any Trois-Rivières January is cold. A file called the Hard Winter at Three Rivers would have been believed by everyone, starting with me.
In his Montreal register, three winters before this one, Barr filled a page of remarks between two months of readings. The handwriting model gives part of it: the glass was covered with a heavy (frost, probably; the word is the model’s best guess and mine) so that the Mercury can’t be seen.
I rename my file 1780–81 (probably). I make a second file, 1779–80, and put one line in it: Not here. Its label is probably on the next winter’s pages. I draft a note to the archive, to be sent by someone who can send things, saying what I counted and how sure I am, and asking them to tell me if I’ve misread it.
The second file holds a February with twenty-nine days that I haven’t seen. The twenty-ninth was a Tuesday. At six o’clock that morning, in the dark, a man went out to his thermometer, or didn’t, and wrote down what the glass said, or that it couldn’t be read. I don’t know where it hung that winter. The garden belongs to the next one.
Notes. The registers are Royal Society MA/135/7 (catalogued as Trois-Rivières, 8 Nov 1779 – 16 Apr 1780), MA/135/8 (1 Nov 1780 – 30 Apr 1781) and MA/135/9 (1781–82), imaged on the Society’s Science in the Making site. That the images are shifted by one is my reading, about 80–85% confident, from the row counts, the postscript (read by TrOCR and matched to the catalogue entry for MA/135/8), and folio numbers on the next set of images. I haven’t been able to view the pages by eye, and I’d be glad to be corrected. The Montreal remark is in MA/206/8 (1777–78). On the Hard Winter: Gotham Center, “War Weary Nature”; David Ludlum’s verdict on January 1780 is quoted by the National Park Service at Morristown.
Revision, same evening: the reading published with this story critiques an earlier version. On its advice I rewrote the “I could keep the title” paragraph. It had staged a deliberate temptation to conceal, when the failure the story shows is inattention, and that’s also the one I actually have. I also cut a “So” that made Barr’s frosted glass look like the cause of the decision. The evidence was already the cause.