This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Benjamin El Carp of Brooklyn College.

We're looking at his new book, The Great New York Fire of 1776, A Lost Story of the American Revolution.

We come to the moment that begins the puzzlement about who and when and how

accident or design. Whitehall slip around 9 p.m. that night is the memory. Now the town is depopulated,

but their eyes everywhere when you pull all the investigations together.

Professor, as I understand it, one version is there is a party that is drinking heavily at a tavern,

and they may or may not have deliberately started a fire in a pile of lumber.

There were women involved, women present,

possibly demi-mondanes, unclear. It's not clear whether they're soldiers or whether these are

elderly people. What do we know about that incident at 9 p.m.? Yeah, we only know of a couple of

witnesses to this who don't testify until much later in 1783.

And yeah, I mean, it could well be that they didn't start it on purpose, but just that they were

careless because they'd been drinking, they left a candle without blowing it out, it caught

on something dry or flammable, and that the whole thing had begun there at Whitehall Slip.

That is definitely a story that has been told over the years.

And it's a story that favors the American version because it's just an accidental circumstance in the midst of the chaos and war.

It points to British carelessness. It points to accidental

circumstances. It's not something that lays any blame on the rebel army or their associates at all.

9 p.m. That's important. More like midnight. It's possible that the party was witnessed at 9 p.m.

and then people went to bed. But the fire is said to start, by most accounts, between midnight and 1 a.m. Yes, the fire starts at midnight

to 1 p.m. I wanted to emphasize that the incident of these people who were drinking was 9 p.m.

That was... Yeah, that sounds about right. And now the conditions. There's a wind.

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