May 24: The Signature Behind the Declaration, A Bridge Between Two Boroughs, Three Men Survived

Connection — its making and its breaking — runs through May 24 like a thread. A wealthy Boston merchant is unanimously elected to lead a congress of colonies that needed someone to hold it together. A suspension bridge links two boroughs that had been separated by a river and a decade of construction, making a new kind of New York possible. And a German battleship fires on a British warship in the Denmark Strait, and in four minutes the ship is gone and 1,415 men are dead, the connection between them and the surface of the world severed in seconds. Three events, three very different scales of human experience — the political, the architectural, and the mortal — meeting on the same date.

Mr. President

On May 24, 1775, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia just five weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord had opened the Revolutionary War, unanimously elected John Hancock of Massachusetts as their president — the presiding officer of the body that would, over the following year, make the most consequential decisions in American political history. Hancock was thirty-eight years old, one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, and one of the most prominent targets of British authority: his sloop Liberty had been seized by customs agents in 1768 on charges of smuggling, triggering riots in Boston, and he had been among the colonial leaders specifically targeted for arrest in the orders that sent British troops marching to Lexington in April 1775. His election as president of the Congress was both a political statement — a declaration that the colonies would not yield their most prominent voices to British intimidation — and a practical one: Hancock was a skilled administrator whose wealth and organizational ability were assets the Congress badly needed.

Hancock served as president of the Continental Congress until October 1777, presiding over the passage of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and affixing to it the signature that became, in American culture, the most famous penmanship since Moses carved the commandments — large, bold, and ornate, written, according to legend, so that King George could read it without his spectacles. The legend may be apocryphal, but the signature is real: nearly six inches long, executed with a flourish that no delegate matched, it became the defining image of a man who understood that some acts of commitment need to be visible from a distance. Hancock later served as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, presided over the state convention that ratified the Constitution, and remained one of the most influential political figures in New England until his death in 1793. His name became, in American English, a synonym for a signature itself. Few founding fathers can claim a more permanent imprint on the language.

The Eighth Wonder

On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public after fourteen years of construction and a cost in both money — $15.5 million, the equivalent of roughly half a billion dollars today — and in lives that the official record has never fully accounted for. The bridge had been conceived by John Roebling, a German immigrant engineer who had pioneered wire cable suspension bridge technology, and was completed under the direction of his son Washington Roebling, who contracted caisson disease — the bends — during the construction of the bridge's underwater foundations and directed the final years of the project from his Brooklyn Heights apartment through binoculars, relaying instructions through his wife Emily, who became, in effect, the project's field supervisor for much of its final phase. When the bridge opened, Emily Roebling was the first to cross it. The workers who had built it — laborers, many of them immigrants, working in compressed-air caissons at dangerous depths — had no comparable ceremony.

At the time of its completion, the Brooklyn Bridge had the longest main suspension span in the world — 1,595 feet — and its twin Gothic towers, rising 276 feet above the river, were the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland attended the opening ceremonies; the bridge was immediately acclaimed as the eighth wonder of the world. What it made possible was a transformation of New York City's human geography: the boroughs that the East River had separated were now physically continuous, and the daily movement of hundreds of thousands of people between them that the ferry system had accommodated imperfectly became a new kind of urban routine. Brooklyn, until then a separate city with its own identity, would be incorporated into New York City in 1898, a consolidation the bridge had made imaginable. Today, more than 100,000 vehicles and thousands of pedestrians and cyclists cross it every day. The bridge that opened on May 24, 1883, is still carrying the load.

The Hood

On May 24, 1941, HMS Hood — the Royal Navy's largest warship and, for most of the interwar period, the largest warship in the world — engaged the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Strait, the passage between Iceland and Greenland through which the German ships were attempting to break out into the North Atlantic to attack Allied shipping. The battle began at approximately 5:52 a.m. At 6:00 a.m. — eight minutes later — Hood was gone. A German shell, believed to have penetrated to her after magazine, triggered a catastrophic explosion that broke the ship in two and sank her in approximately three minutes. Of her crew of 1,418 men, three survived: Midshipman William Dundas, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn, and Ordinary Signalman Ted Briggs, who were pulled from the freezing North Atlantic after more than two hours in the water. The rest — 1,415 men — went down with the ship or died in the frigid sea.

The sinking of HMS Hood was among the most shocking single losses the Royal Navy sustained in the entire war. The ship had been a symbol of British naval power for twenty years — launched in 1918, she had toured the world in the 1920s as a floating demonstration of imperial authority, and her destruction in minutes by a battleship that had been at sea for barely a week sent a convulsive wave through British public and strategic confidence. Winston Churchill's response was immediate: "Sink the Bismarck." The pursuit that followed was one of the most dramatic naval operations of the war — the Royal Navy committed dozens of ships, Bismarck was eventually located by a Catalina patrol aircraft, and on May 27, just three days after the sinking of Hood, she was cornered and sunk. Of her crew of over 2,200, just 114 survived. The North Atlantic winter had been pitiless in both directions. The three men who survived the Hood — Dundas, Tilburn, and Briggs — carried the memory of those eight minutes for the rest of their lives. Ted Briggs, the last survivor, died in 2008. With him went the final living witness.