"On the night of the 4th of May, a fire, supposed to be the work of an incendiary, broke out in the city of Hamburg, the great commercial emporium of Germany, and continued to rage till the morning of the 6th, when, by blowing up a number of houses with gunpowder, the progress of the flames was arrested. Several hundred lives were lost, from 1500 to 2000 houses were laid in ruins, and the total loss of property is estimated at not less than forty or fifty million dollars."^[2]

1. Λ The daguerreotypes of the devastation of the Hamburg fire were thought to have been taken by Carl Ferdinand Stelzner but are now known to be by Hermann Biow. 
     
   
2. Λ William M. Gouge, 1842, The Journal of Banking, from July 1841 to July 1842 (Philadelphia: J. Van Court), pp. 391-392