OTTAWA’S PROPHET
His visions were more powerful than accurate
One of Ottawa’s most colourful characters, Ezekiel Stone Wiggins was a schoolteacher and headmaster, church warden, scientist, scholar, medical doctor, historian and author, and was hand-picked by John A. Macdonald to serve in the federal Finance Department following his return to power in 1878. Interested in astronomy and the natural world, Wiggins, who was among Britannia’s earliest residents, also regularly opined on celestial matters and their effects here on Earth, predicting storms and earthquakes that he believed were caused by planetary attraction. He was convinced that the sun was dark and cold, and that planets close to it were colder than more distant ones. He claimed, too, the existence of a second, invisible moon revolving around our planet. He was equally sure that the Jurassic-era marine reptile Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus was not extinct, but thriving in Rice Lake, near Peterborough. And when a meteorite struck Binghamton, N.Y., in 1897, Wiggins believed it contained a message from Mars in the form of hieroglyphs. “If we lived on Mars and possessed the scientific knowledge of the people there,” he said, “we might easily send a projectile to another planet.” His theories and predictions appeared in newspapers as august as the New York Times and as far away as New Zealand’s Auckland Star, stirring panic, concern and, often enough, ridicule. He was known as the “Ottawa Prophet.” A New Brunswicker by birth, Wiggins had already, at the tender age of 24, written “Architecture of the Heavens,” a 300-page treatise that, in his words, proved “that the sun is not a body of heat which imparts light and heat to space, but it is a dark body of electricity which creates, by electrical force, light and heat in the atmosphere of planets. Between the planets there is neither light nor heat. “It was many years before the old fogy school of astronomers would renounce the ‘fire theory’ and adopt mine,” he added. “But while they have at last admitted that the sun’s photosphere is electric, they still believe that all the space of the solar system is illuminated by the sun. Why, if this were so the heavens would be as bright to us at night as by day. This is why we cannot see our second moon, because it has no atmosphere to create light by friction with the solar rays.” By his own account, the “fact” that atmosphere-free planets were invisible to the eye was an indication that “worlds might travel in orbits not more distant than the nearest planet and yet never be open to the view of the astronomer.” Wiggins, however, earned his reputation largely as a predictor of storms, many of which he blamed on planetary attraction. His most closely followed predictions came regarding the winter of 1883, when he predicted massive storms in early February and March, including one — on March 9 — he promised would be accompanied by a great hurricane and tidal wave. So severe was the pending storm that he warned the federal government to keep all sailing vessels in port from March 5 to 11, and sent a letter to U.S. president Chester Arthur with similar advice. There appears to have been at least a little truth in this, in that a storm did occur around then. The Auckland Star reported that “a severe gale, accompanied by a heavy fall of snow” was experienced over much of England on March 7. But the big biblical one never transpired. According to the Star, New Zealand’s own weather prophet, Captain Edwin, “whose forecasts are conspicuously wrong five times out of six unless made when everyone else has seen the storm brewing, telegraphed throughout the colony yesterday that from observations made he could ‘find no traces of the storm which Mr. Wiggins, of Ottawa, says will pass over the Australian colonies tomorrow.’” Still, many fisherman heeded Wiggins’ warning and stayed ashore, later complaining of the financial costs of his incorrect prediction. The death of a 12-year-old, Ada Wolfe, of Buffalo, N.Y., meanwhile, was attributed to meningitis brought on by extreme worry about the coming storm. “Reports have been received from different parts of America and Canada of people being driven to insanity through brooding over the fallacious storm prophecy of Prof. Wiggins,” wrote the Ottawa Citizen, “and now Buffalo has a far sadder case, that of the death of a young girl, to be attributed to no more cause than fright.” Wiggins’ failed storm predictions a month earlier had already dealt his reputation a blow. The San Francisco Bulletin wrote: “A prophet is commonly without honour in his own country, and a weather prophet is complacently regarded with humorous derision. Of all the prophets that have sprung up lately, Wiggins, the Canadian weather sharp, has fallen to the lowest depth of prophetic disgrace and dishonor.” Following the March 9 nonstorm, the Topeka Daily Capital added its name to the list on nonbelievers, writing, “We have seen how absurd an augur as Wiggins has managed to make the fishermen afraid all along the coast of Massachusetts; how he has made two or three prudent men dig caves in the earth to keep the rock and mountains from falling on them; and how he has driven diverse women to distraction with his fantastic predictions.” The Memphis Daily Appeal described him as a “contemptible nincompoop” and a “stupendous fraud.” The U.S. Chief Signal Officer, Brig. Gen. William Babcock Hazen, was perhaps even less kind when he said of Wiggins’ predictions, “Such statements fill lunatic asylums, and those who make them are enemies of society.” Wiggins’ response, according to the New York Tribune, did not invite the possibility that he was wrong. “It is evident from the failure of my predictions,” he said, “that something is wrong with the solar system, if not with the Cosmos.” He blamed the aforementioned invisible moon for essentially tampering with his calculations. Nonetheless, Wiggins eventually abandoned storm prognoses. In January 1886, when asked why he failed to warn of a large storm three months earlier, he insisted that he was on his way to tell an Associated Press agent of the coming storm, but turned back. “There is too much mental wear and tear to make these predictions, even when you know you are right. “Oh,” he added, “there is nothing in storm predictions only the abuse of the press! Even when a prediction is fulfilled they won’t acknowledge it, and will abuse you afterwards. I’m tired of predicting storms.” Instead, he switched to earthquakes, which he similarly attributed to planetary attraction. Large celestial bodies such as the (visible) moon and Jupiter caused shifts in the Earth’s centre of gravity, which caused the quakes. Following a large earthquake in Charleston, West Virginia, in August 1886, Wiggins predicted an even larger one the following month. When it failed to transpire, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, in a humorous, but cutting, vein, published this joke: “’Father,’ said Rollo, “why do we call Wiggins, the weather man, a prophet, when the last prophets dies nearly 400 years before the Christian era?’ “’Well, my son,’ replied Rollo’s father, ‘That is just why. Because Wiggins seems to know just about as much as a man who has been dead 2,000 years.’” Wiggins and his wife, writer Susan Anna Wiggins, lived on Daly Street from 1878 until 1892, when they built Arbour House in Britannia, where they lived until the Ottawa Prophet’s death in 1910. He is buried in New Brunswick. His wife joined him in 1921. In 1994, the City of Ottawa designated Arbour House a heritage property.