Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher who served as a commander in the Roman army with a notable experience in naval warfare. His most notable work is the Belle Germaniae, a history of the German War that is no longer an extant publication. It was a follow up to another historian's work, Libri Belle Germanici by Aufidius Bassus. Gaius Plinius Secundus spent much of his free time studying, writing, and investigating natural and geological phenomena. In 79 AD, as the sky blackened from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius he took a vessel on a mission of rescue upon receiving a message from a friend, Rectina who had been stranded in Stabiae while attempting to flee the city of Pompeii. As Pliny the Elder's vessel approach Herculeum cinders and pumice began to fall upon it and the helmsman advised turning back to which Pliny the Elder replied, "Fortune favors the bold, steer to where Pomponianus is." There they found Senator Pomponianus and alas the winds that carried the ship to shore prevented it's departure. The group would have to await for a change in winds before they could depart. The specific regarding how Pliny the Elder died is disputed. In the oldest account a noxious cloud began to over take the building they where waiting in and Pliny the Elder was engulfed in it as the group fled only for his body to be found three days latter with no external injury. The historian Suetonius claimed that Pliny had approached the disaster merely out of scientific interest rather than rescue. In this account the heat was so severe that Pliny the Elder ordered a slave to kill him which contradicts all other accounts that Pliny the Elder lacked external injury. In 1859 the historian Jacob Barlow examined a letter to Tacitus from Pliny the Younger, the nephew latter adopted son of the Elder, and concluded from it that it wasn't the cloud nor an external injury that killed him rather Pliny the Elder while fleeing with the others from the cloud suffered a heart attack and collapsed, dying alone as it took the others three days to return to that place.