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  In August 1839 a lavish catalog of the private collection of pearls and precious stones owned by Henry Philip Hope was printed in England. Hope, for whom the alluring blue stone had been named, was a gem and art collector. He came from a prominent Amsterdam banking family that had emigrated to London during the Napoleonic Wars and earned a vast fortune. Hope’s brother Thomas, an author, was notable, apart from his books, for being parodied with his wife in French artist Antoine Dubost’s 1810 portrait of Beauty and the Beast.

  How did Hope acquire the blue diamond? Perhaps in a private sale from the estate of King George IV after his death, through his connections with the court—the king died leaving enormous gambling debts. Henry Philip Hope himself died very shortly after the printing of the catalog, which offered a vivid description of the blue gem.

  The diamond stayed with the Hope family through the end of the nineteenth century. After Hope’s death, it passed to his nephew, Henry Thomas Hope, and then to his nephew’s grandson, Lord Francis Pelham Clinton Hope (Hope’s great-niece required him to use the Hope name to obtain the inheritance). A spendthrift, Lord Francis repeatedly petitioned the court for permission to sell it but was blocked by his siblings. The court finally granted approval, and Lord Francis sold the diamond in 1902 to a New York jewelry firm, Joseph Frankel and Sons.

  In 1908 Frankel let it be known that the gem was for sale, and a Syrian dealer named Selim Habib, of whom very little is known, purchased it for a tremendous price. Habib took the Hope back to Paris with him unset, and soon after, in June 1909, mounted an auction, in which the Hope was offered as part of a group of very opulent, famous diamonds.

  The auction was a complete failure since none of the bids reached any of the reserve prices. Habib immediately canceled the entire proceedings and very quickly sold the Hope to an associate of Pierre Cartier, the jeweler. Habib himself was ruined by the auction and was never able to recover from the loss.

  The firm of Pierre Cartier acquired the stone, and set it in what is believed to have been a pearl necklace, and Cartier showed it in 1910 to Edward and Evalyn Walsh McLean of Washington, D.C., when they were on a visit to Paris. The couple were from fabulously wealthy families, Edward the son of a newspaper magnate and Evalyn the daughter of a gold miner who had “struck it rich” out west.

  Over breakfast at the McLeans’ hotel, Cartier tried to dazzle the couple with tales about the stone’s curse. In her autobiography, Father Struck It Rich, Evalyn Walsh McLean says Cartier ran through a litany of stories—from the French trader Tavernier having stolen the diamond and later being devoured by rabid dogs to Selim Habib drowning shortly after he sold it. There is no documentation for any such stories, and it was (and maybe still is) not uncommon for dealers to play up myths attached to jewels to enhance the jewels’ image and their salability. In any case, Mrs. McLean wasn’t scared off by the stone’s reputation—“Bad luck objects for me are lucky,” she told Cartier—but she said she didn’t like the setting, and that was the end of that.

  Cartier then had the stone reset in the setting in which it is presently seen and brought it to Washington, D.C., in 1911. He asked the McLeans if they would keep it over the weekend. This time Mrs. McLean decided she wanted it, and negotiations were commenced. It is difficult to give the exact purchase price since the contract states $180,000 (excluding interest), while in her autobiography Mrs. McLean gives the price as $154,000, less some jewelry she was returning to Cartier.

  Because she knew her mother-in-law would object to her purchasing the diamond with the renowned curse—it is not known exactly when the McLeans took possession of the Hope, but the contract is dated February 1912—Evalyn took the precaution of having Cartier make the sale final. But not long after she called her mother-in-law about the purchase, the mother-in-law died, as well as the woman she was with when Evalyn called. It was only at this point that Evalyn decided it might be prudent to have a priest bless the gem. In her autobiography she writes about the experience.

  We were in a small side room of the church, and Monsignor Russell donned his robes and put my bauble on a velvet cushion. As he continued his preparations, a storm broke. Lightning flashed. Thunder shook the church. . . . Across the street a tree was struck and splintered. . . . Monsignor Russell’s Latin words gave me strange comfort. Ever since that day, I’ve worn my diamond as a charm.

  Yet it was with Mrs. McLean that the Hope’s legend of bad luck grew. After she acquired the stone, her father became an alcoholic and died; her father-in-law lost his wits; her son, Vinson, died in 1918 at the age of nine in a car accident; she separated from her husband, Edward, who suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed in 1933 to a mental institution where he later died; her daughter, a senator’s wife, died while still in her twenties.

  Was this stone cursed? Certainly, Evalyn Walsh McLean knew tragedy before acquiring the diamond. Her younger brother, Vinson (for whom her son was named), died in an automobile accident in which she was also injured; a subsequent operation took an inch off one of her legs and left her addicted to drugs for a time.

  But the tragedies that befell the McLean family while the Hope was in their possession were not so unusual; misfortune can plague any family. During the time that the Hope family possessed the diamond, other than the spendthrift Lord Francis running through money and being desperate for more, having his wife leave him, and incurring sundry other, more minor misfortunes—all not so unordinary occurrences in life—the family suffered no real bad luck or tragedy.

  Evalyn Walsh McLean had a fondness for gems and enjoyed the spotlight, and the Hope Diamond satisfied and promoted both interests. A social lioness, she gave splashy dinner parties and visited wounded servicemen in the hospital. And what better way to provide thrills and amusement than by offering a glimpse of the famous cursed blue diamond suspended around her neck? She even let the volunteers at the hospital wear the gem.

  Mrs. McLean wore the Hope Diamond almost every day after acquiring it. She died of pneumonia in 1947 at the age of sixty-one. Two years after her death, the jewels of Evalyn Walsh McLean were purchased by the diamond merchant Harry Winston. During the time he owned it, Winston sent the Hope to numerous shows and benefits as a part of his showcase of exquisite jewels, which hired models would wear; this was essentially an advertising and public relations effort. In 1958, nine years after acquiring it, Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution. The famous diamond dealer mailed the Hope to the Smithsonian (the postage came to $2.44), insuring the package privately for $1 million. For insurance reasons he couldn’t be photographed, but there later was a presentation ceremony, which his wife attended.

  Throughout its history the Hope Diamond has been described as a perfect gem. Using modern analytical technology, the Gemological Institute of America in 1988 graded the Hope Diamond a VS1 in clarity because of several small blemishes and whitish graining in the body of the stone. (VS1 stands for “very slightly included” and is characterized by minor blemishes or minute crystals that can be found in the diamond under 10x magnification.) Nevertheless, the Hope Diamond is visually exquisite and exhibits the rare property of phosphorescing a strong red after being exposed to shortwave ultraviolet light.

  The legend of the Hope Diamond’s curse is so embedded in the lore of the stone that it has virtually displaced the gem’s real, marvelous history. And it is a history in which some mysteries still persist: The night the diamond was stolen from the Garde Meuble in 1792, why was the metal bar not fastened in the window? What happened to the diamond for the twenty years it disappeared, from 1792 to 1812, and who cut it to its present shape? Was it John Francillon? In the remote possibility that the Hope is not the French Blue, what happened to the French Blue and where did the Hope come from? These questions may never be answered, but the imagination is stirred by the gallant, ice-blue Hope Diamond, which belonged to three French kings and was stolen at the end of the French Revolution. It was never recovered but was almost certainly taken to Engl
and, re-cut in secrecy, and probably belonged to a fourth king while in England. Eventually, this fabulous stone found its way to America, where it rests quietly today, as radiant as ever.

  While the mysteries of the diamond may never be solved, one thing is known for sure: it is a magnificent jewel whose fame and beauty and true history are surpassed by few other gems.

  LOCATION: National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.

  EDMOND HALLEY’S ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATION NOTEBOOKS

  DATE: 1682.

  WHAT IT IS: The two notebooks in which the great English astronomer and natural philosopher recorded his observations of the comet that was named for him.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The primary notebook contains about two hundred folios and measures approximately 9 inches high by 8 inches wide by 2 inches thick. The other notebook has some ninety folios of linen rag paper and measures 7⅝ inches high by 6¹/₁₀ inches wide by ¾ inch thick. Both notebooks were restored in 1986, their decaying bindings each replaced with a cream-colored vellum binding.

  Dear God: Save us from the devil, the Turk, and the Comet.

  —Pope Calixtus III, 1456

  As Edmond Halley peered into the heavens through his telescope in 1682, he could hardly have dreamed that the spectacular comet he was following would one day be his ticket to immortality. Although he would eventually come to suspect that the moving body was a regular visitor to our part of the solar system and had been for centuries, science at the time was not yet advanced enough to provide a clear explanation, much less a mathematical proof.

  Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was in the throes of scientific revolution. Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus fired an early salvo in this revolution by offering an alternative to the long-held Aristotelian theory that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo agitated the papacy in Rome by offering observational evidence for the Copernican view of a sun-centered universe gathered by the first astronomical use of a telescope. (Ultimately the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of promulgating sacrilegious beliefs and forced him to make a retraction.) Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Newton’s law of gravitation further supplanted old beliefs, creating a new science from traditional astronomy and eroding ecclesiastical dogmas.

  Up to that time, humankind’s fascination with the cosmos was characterized by a belief that the positions of planets and stars were augurs of good or bad fortune on Earth. The appearance of a comet was an evil omen: disastrous events such as wars or assassinations seemed always to be accompanied by the recent or impending arrival of a comet. When the Turkish army was marching across Europe in the fifteenth century, for example, Pope Calixtus III interpreted the appearance of a comet in the night sky as a sign of defeat for the enemy and was able to rally his forces to repel the invaders at Belgrade. Earlier, in 1066, as Duke William of Normandy was mounting a fleet to cross the English Channel and seize England from King Harold, a comet graced the heavens. A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry shows the comet blazing over King Harold as his vassals point to the sky in fright. (It bears the Latin caption ISTI MIRANT STELLA, which may be translated as, “these people gaze in wonder at the star.”) Harold was defeated by the Normans in the brutal and bloody Battle of Hastings. (The comet of 1066 depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry is Halley’s Comet during its return to the vicinity of the sun in that year.) As a general point about the astrological significance of comets, what was considered bad news for one side—Harold or the Turks in these cases—is good news for the other—Duke William or Calixtus.

  With the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, or On the Revolutions, scientific reasoning began to usurp astrologically based beliefs. That the Earth was a ball rolling around in space must have been a bit difficult to digest in those days, but the theory eventually gained support and laid the foundation for modern astronomy. It was in this climate of scientific investigation that astronomers began the more careful study of comets. Previously, comets in the solar system were believed to travel in a straight line toward the sun, where they would either burn up or move away. Could they instead be making orbiting journeys in the solar system? Scientists worked long hours to answer this question; it was not until Edmond Halley put his mind to the problem that the answer was found.

  Edmond Halley was born in London in 1656. He displayed a penchant for science early in life and attended the Queen’s College of Oxford University. At nineteen he published a treatise on the movement of planets, and then he traveled to the south Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Helena off Africa to catalog the uncharted skies of the Southern Hemisphere. He became a member of the Royal Society and was made England’s second Astronomer Royal in 1720. In addition to being a distinguished astronomer, Halley was noted for his accomplishments in geology and cartography. But what Halley would most be remembered for is identifying a single comet seen repeatedly by human beings since at least 240 B.C.

  Renowned scientists of the day believed that celestial motion was based on immutable physical laws, but they could not come up with the mathematical proof. Scientists such as Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke were stumped. Halley sought out Cambridge mathematician Isaac Newton to engage his help with this apparently insoluble riddle and was stunned to find out that Newton had already worked it out—several years earlier!

  Halley was so impressed with Newton’s brilliance that he provided the money to publish Newton’s work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematical, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in which Newton quantified the gravitational force between two bodies, and which is now considered one of the great scientific works of all time.

  Using this conclusive proof of gravitational attraction, Halley was able to draw a remarkable conclusion. With the force of gravity, comets in the solar system traveled in elliptical paths around the sun, returning to it as they completed each orbit. Halley was able to determine that the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were one and the same, and that this faithful space traveler had probably been illuminating the sky throughout the ages, striking fear in the observers below.

  A page from Edmond Halley's notebook in which he recorded his observations of the comet of 1682.

  Some of Halley’s early work was set down in notebooks of linen rag paper, a durable but expensive writing surface made, as its name suggests, by pulping rags of linen. As a writing medium Halley favored iron-gall ink, a type of ink that had been in use for a thousand years. It was made by steeping oak galls, the galls formed on the roots of oak trees as a result of the infestation of wasp larvae, in a solution of ferrous sulfate. Ink thus made could vary in color from sepia to deep black, depending on the amount of tannin introduced into the mixture from the oak galls.

  Halley’s principal observation record of the comet named for him, sometimes referred to as the Islington notebook after the small village north of London where Halley was living at the time (Islington today is a borough of Greater London), contains a miscellany of writing, including tabulated lists of the astronomer’s observations of the 1682 comet in his own hand, historical observations of the comet, and a set of rules of elementary arithmetic. In the other notebook, which mostly contains mathematical calculations, Halley put down some observations of the 1682 comet, but this notebook does not have the tabulated observations of the primary record. In each notebook, Halley wrote in both Latin and English.

  Halley’s observations of the 1682 comet, along with those of the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, enabled him to determine that the comet returns to the vicinity of the sun and passes Earth’s orbit every seventy-five or seventy-six years. He predicted the comet would be visible again in 1758.

  Edmond Halley died sixteen years before that landmark date. Had he lived, he would not have been disappointed. Sometime after sundown on Christmas Day of that year, an amateur German astronomer named Johann Palitsch observed a faint glow in the sky. Over the next few months, this dot grew to splendid luminescence, as people eve
rywhere looked to the heavens and witnessed the return of Halley’s Comet.

  LOCATION: Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, England.

  THE DECLARATION OF

  INDEPENDENCE

  DATE: 1776

  WHAT IT IS: The manifesto in which the congressional representatives of the thirteen original American colonies avowed the need to dissolve their bands of alliance with Great Britain and declared their right to be free and independent states.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The engrossed document (as opposed to the draft) that contains the signatures of the members of the Continental Congress is a single sheet of parchment measuring 29¾ inches long by 24¼ inches wide.

  If there is one sublime symbol of the principles of liberty and equality, it is that most venerable of American democratic instruments, the Declaration of Independence. But while the grand principles of the Declaration have inspired generations of citizens to stake their lives on the doctrine of liberty, the document’s own history has been blighted by homelessness, itinerancy, and a desperate struggle for its very own survival.

  By the spring of 1776, after numerous injustices had been imposed by England upon those under its rule in the New World, the colonies had come to the conclusion that independence from the British Empire was imperative. The colonists had repeatedly petitioned their British brethren for fair treatment, but their pleas were arrogantly ignored. The question had been debated in Congress on June 7, when Virginia’s senior delegate, Richard Henry Lee, moved that the united colonies become “free and independent states,” with any political connection to Great Britain “totally dissolved.” Three days later a committee was formed to express Lee’s resolution in a formal declaration.