History Magazine 2016-06-07

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St. Bartholomew's Day

Massacre JAMES COOK'S

Washington's Submarine

DISASTER!

John Damian

Aerial Alchemist

THE HISTORY OF HOTELS

The Milk Diet Cure The Lure of Jade $5.95

June/July 2016

1947

David Bushnell

HISTORY

Texas City

First Voyage of Discovery

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“History is the memory of things said and done.” Carl L. Becker

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1947 Texas City Explosion — Page 8

CONTENTS

The Aerial Alchemist — Page 13

George Washington’s Submarine — Page 21

JUNE/JULY 2016 Opening Notes .......................................................... 6 The Forgotten Ride of Sybil Ludington, Here Comes the Bride

The 1947 Texas City Explosion .................................. 8 Chuck Lyons revisits the circumstances surrounding the largest and most lethal industrial accident in United States history

John Damian: The Aerial Alchemist ...................... 13 Eric Bryan examines John Damian's 1507 attempt to be the first to take to the air on man-made wings

A Room for the Night ............................................. 17 Gloria Tietgens Sladek looks at the evolution of the hotel through history

George Washington's Submarine ......................... 21

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David A. Norris recounts the life of David Bushnell and his efforts to develop the Turtle, an early version of today's submarine

Cover: Image of explosion - burnstuff2003, Fotolia.com Inset captions (top to bottom): Five story building beside slip #1. April 18, 1947; Slip #2 with ship destroyed in second explosion. April 19, 1947; Parking lot one quarter mile from explosion. April 18, 1947; Corner view of damaged houses. April 18, 1947; Parking area one half mile from explosion. April 18, 1947. (All courtesy of: Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. University of Houston Digital Library)

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History Magazine June/July 2016

Questions or comments? Call 1-888-326-2476 or visit www.history-magazine.com

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The Lure of Jade — Page 31

Renaissance Atrocity — Page 36

Captain James Cook — Page 43

The Milk Diet Cure .................................................. 24 Charles Bush looks at the history of milk as treatment or cure for what ails us

The Lure of Jade ...................................................... 31 John Christopher Fine looks at the history and politics of mining one of the most coveted minerals on the planet

Renaissance Atrocity: The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 1572 ........ 36 Arnold Blumberg examines the events leading up to a wave of assassinations and mob violence on the eve of the Feast of Bartholomew the Apostle

Is Your Subscription About to Expire? Check the back of this magazine to see the expiry date. Call Toll-Free 1-888-326-2476 or visit www.history-magazine.com to renew or subscribe! Or see the order form on page 30 of this issue.

Captain James Cook: The First Voyage of Discovery................................ 43 In an extract from his book, Eighteen Lives from the Eighteenth Century, author Robin G. Jenner looks at Cook's 1768-1771 expedition

Hamlin Garland: ‘Novelist of Northwest Farmer Country’ ............... 48 Brian D'Ambrosio reveals the life of an almost forgotten Midwest wordsmith and Pulitzer Prize winner

Hindsight ................................................................. 53 A look at books and other media for your consideration

June/July 2016 History Magazine

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TRIVIA

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THE FORGOT TEN RIDE OF SYBIL LUDINGTON

O

n the night of 18 April 1775, Paul Revere went on his famous ride to warn Colonials of incoming British forces, setting the stage for the battles at Lexington and Concord. Fast-forward to 1860 and American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Revere as one of the country’s greatest patriots in his poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride”. But a less-heralded hero of the American Revolution went on a similar ride just two years after Revere when she was just sixteen years old. Her name was Sybil Ludington. The eldest of twelve siblings, Sybil inherited her sense of patriotism from her father, Colonel Henry Ludington. The family lived in Dutchess County, New York where the Colonel served as the head of the local militia during the Revolutionary War. On 25 April 1777, a messenger brought word to him that a British force of 2,000 men led by General William Tryon sacked the city of Danbury, Connecticut, an important supply depot for the Continental Army. Ludington needed to assemble his regiment, but his men were scattered far and wide. It was planting season and farmers had to tend to their land. The messenger was too exhausted to go on another ride

Statue of Sybil Ludington in Carmel, NY. Anthony22, Wikimedia Commons

and he had to stay behind to muster the troops that came in. Therefore, the responsibility fell on young Sybil to go round up as many soldiers as possible. She

HERE COMES THE BRIDE

C

ertain pieces of music are permanently linked to moments in our lives. One such piece is the song now known as “Here Comes the Bride”. It has been the soundtrack to so many weddings for so long that it would be logical to think that it was composed for this purpose. In reality, “Here Comes the Bride” was composed by Richard Wagner, one of history’s most controversial figures, for his opera Lohengrin in 1850. Furthermore, it wasn’t until the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter in 1858 that it became a popular selection at weddings. Weddings in Victorian England were typically small and simple. The bride rarely wore a white dress, and there was usually no music played at all. Even royal weddings were comparatively subdued and were conducted out of the public eye. This all changed when the Queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in January 1858. At the Queen’s insistence, the Princess’s hand in marriage came with a publicly funded dowry of £40,000, and an annuity of £8,000. For such an exorbitant sum, the London press demanded that the taxpaying public be given unprecedented access to the ceremony. The royal family agreed and proceeded to plan a grandiose affair that would give the people their money’s worth. The royal wedding was a spectacle in every sense of the word, and a far cry from the simple ceremonies that most Victorians were used to. The Princess and her mother planned every opulent aspect of the event,

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History Magazine June/July 2016

Victoria, Princess Royal (1867), by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Public domain; as well as US, created before 1923

including the music. Their selections included Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” (which is still often heard at weddings) and Richard Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from his opera, Lohengrin. The

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rode to Putnam County, through towns such as Carmel, Mahopac and Cold Spring. Sybil had just recently turned sixteen when she went on her perilous journey. She was armed with just a stick to brave the dangerous roads preyed on by highwaymen. Her 40-mile ride was almost twice that of Paul Revere’s. Nevertheless, when Sybil returned home, most of her father’s regiment was there and ready to join up with the rest of the Continental Army. On the British side, General Tryon had several options to consider. Advancing into Putnam or Dutchess County would likely be met with heavy resistance. Attempting to steal the Colonial supplies in Danbury for British use would slow down his forces too much. Consequently, Tryon opted to burn them and return to the coast. The Continental Army,

led by Major General David Wooster, finally caught up and fought the British at Ridgefield on 27 April 1777. Even though the raid on Danbury and battle at Ridgefield were both considered victories for the British, they benefitted the Americans, in the long run. They significantly decreased support for the British Crown and triggered a rise in enrollment for the Continental Army in the area. As far as Sybil Ludington is concerned, her ride is commemorated with a statue in Carmel, built by famed New York sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. History fans can honor her achievement by taking part in the annual “Sybil Ludington 50K Run” that mirrors the route taken by her on that fateful night. Hm

latter, now commonly known as “Here Comes the Bride”, accompanied the Princess as she walked down the aisle in her flowing, white gown. Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” was an unusual choice for the ceremony. Wagner himself, who is known today for his notorious anti-Semitism as much as he is for his music, was no less controversial at the time. In addition to being a musician, he was a wellknown rabble-rouser who had spent many years in exile for his revolutionary activities. Also, while Mendelssohn was adored in England, many English music lovers were hostile to Wagner’s work, and some were even suspicious of his overt German nationalism. Moreover, the opera itself had yet to be performed in England in its entirety, and would not be until 1875. Controversial or not, the English people were so enamored

with the royal wedding that none of this seemed to matter. Before long, English brides were emulating every aspect of the ceremony, from the white dress the Princess wore to the musical selections. Over the years, the “Bridal Chorus” has become so ubiquitous in popular culture that many would be surprised to learn that it is still the subject of controversy. Many Christian churches do not allow the piece to be played during their ceremonies. This is mostly due to the fact that many of the stories Wagner used as the source material for his operas have strong pagan origins. The Catholic Church has also expressed disapproval of the secular nature of the piece. Perhaps most understandably, many Jewish synagogues have banned the “Bridal Chorus” because of Richard Wagner’s outspoken anti-Semitism..

— Radu Alexander

Hm

— Thomas Rizzuto

Volume 17 Number 5

JUNE/JULY 2016 PUBLISHER & EDITOR

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June/July 2016 History Magazine

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DISASTERS

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THE 1947 TEXAS CITY EXPLOSION

CHUCK LYONS REVISITS THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE LARGEST AND MOST LETHAL INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT IN UNITED STATES HISTORY On 16 April 1947, Texas City, Texas suffered what is considered one of the greatest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, an explosion that resulted in what was — and still is — the largest and most lethal industrial accident in United States history. After the blast, a two-ton ship’s anchor was found to have been hurled more than a mile and a half (2.4 km) by the force of the explosion.

Texas City disaster. Parking lot 1/4 of a mile away from the explosion.

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W

ednesday, 16 April began as a pleasant morning with longshoremen loading a cargo of ammonium nitrate in the hold of a French ship, the 7,176 ton SS Grandcamp, at the Texas City docks. But it quickly turned sour when a small fire in the ship’s hold spread and detonated the ammonium nitrate. The initial blast, as well as resulting fires and explosions in nearby ships, chemical plants, and oil storage facilities, killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department. “Suddenly a thundering boom sounded, and seconds later, the door ripped off its facing, skidded across the kitchen floor, and slammed down onto the table where I sat,” a nearby resident later said. “The house toppled to one side and sat off its piers at a crazy angle. Broken glass filled the air.” Texas City is a deep water port on Galveston Bay in southeast Texas. During World War II, the city had boomed with its refineries and chemical plants working all out to supply the war effort, a boom that continued as the war wound down. In 1946, the Texas City docks had handled some 13.4 million tons (12.2 metric tons) of cargo. They were surrounded by two large chemical companies, four oil refineries, grain elevators, and large oil and chemical storage tanks. The Grandcamp had come to Texas City to load 2,300 tons (2,100 metric tons) of ammonium nitrate, which was packaged in 100 pound sacks and had been manufactured in Nebraska and Iowa and shipped by railroad to Texas City. It was intended for use by European farmers as a fertilizer. (Ammonium nitrate is also frequently used as an explosive in mining operations and had been used during the war.) Another ship in the Texas City harbor at the time was the SS High Flyer, which was docked some 600 feet (200 m) away from the SS

which would not damage the cargo. A short while after that, the cover blew off the hatch and reddish-orange smoke billowed out. Then flames. Finally at 9:12 AM , the Grandcamp’s cargo exploded, and smoke billowed out of the hold in a mushroom-shaped cloud. Several Grandcamp and held another 961 World War II veterans near the tons (872 metric tons) of ammo- ship later said the explosion was nium nitrate as well as 1,800 tons greater than anything they had seen during the war. (1,600 metric tons) of sulfur. The cloud rose to 2,000 feet. Problems were first detected about 8AM when longshoremen Water around the ship boiled, and opened the Grandcamp’s hold a 15-foot high wave raced out number 4 to load the remainder from the dock sweeping a 30-ton of the ammonium nitrate. They (27 metric ton) steel barge, the quickly noticed smoke that ap- Longhorn II, out of the water and peared to be coming from “seven 100 feet inland. A barrage of steel or eight layers of sacks down”. shrapnel rained down on the ship, Longshoremen and seamen tried on the spectators who had been drawn to the docks, to douse the fire with fire extinand on the business guishers, but unsuccessdistrict of Texas City, a fully, and n. io s lo p full mile away. Falling x cond e ed in se y o tr s e bales of burning ip d with sh Slip #2 . twine, another part , 1947 April 19 of the Grandcamp’s cargo, added to the chaos. Two airplanes flying nearby crashed after their wings were blown off, and people 10 miles (16 km) Parking are a one half mile from ex April 18, 19 plosio 47.

n.

the Texas City fire department was called. About 9 AM , the Grandcamp’s captain ordered the hold “steamed”, a process of sealing the hold and attempting to put out a fire by smothering it with steam, June/July 2016 History Magazine

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DISASTERS

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away in Galveston were rocked by Department who were on the the force of the blast, a force docks near the burning ship were that was strong enough to knock killed. Four firetrucks were dethem to the ground. People felt molished. One firefighter, Fred the shock 250 miles (400 km) Dowdy, who had not responded away in Louisiana, and the blast registered on a Five story building beside slip #1. seismograph in Denver, Colorado, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away. The explosion leveled nearly 1,000 buildings around the port and destroyed a Monsanto chemical plant, killing 145 of the 150 employees then on duty. Firefighters, seamen, and the ship’s captain were all killed instantly aboard the Grandcamp. Refineries 1. r slip # and chemical tanks nk nea ta l e u F burst into flames. “Bodies were tossed about like playing cards,” The Houston Chronicle reported, and two people driving several miles from the site of the explosions were decapitated when steel shrapnel Corner view crashed through the of damaged houses. April 18, 19 47. windshield of their car. A woman, who was a child in Texas City at the time, later said her uncle was a volunteer firefighter. “He jumped on a passing car and yelled to his wife he was going to the fire at the docks,” she said. “He was never seen again.” Fires raged throughout Texas City and firefighters and to the initial call, medical personnel called in from coordinated other firefighters other areas to help were initially arriving from surrounding comunable to reach the site of the munities. Eventually, rescue disaster because of the damage workers came from the US Army, and fires. Twenty-seven of the Navy, Coast Guard, Marine Retwenty-eight members of Texas serve and the Texas National City’s Volunteer Fire Department Guard. The University of Texas at and three members of the Texas Galveston sent doctors, nurses, City Heights Volunteer Fire and medical students. Firefighters History Magazine June/July 2016

from Galveston, Houston, Fort Crockett, Ellington Field, and surrounding towns arrived. The local high school, the city hall, and the chamber of commerce were pressed into service as emergency hospitals and a service station as a morgue. But the disaster hitting Texas City was not yet over. The explosion had also ignited the ammonium nitrate in the nearby High Flyer that had been torn loose by the Grandcamp explosion and had drifted into the SS Wilson B. Keene. Crews worked to cut the High Flyer free of her anchor and the wreckage from the explosion, but as the smoke and fumes from the burning sulphur intensified, they were forced to abandon the ship. Sixteen hours after the first explosion, at 1:10 AM , the High Flyer also exploded, hurling glowing chunks of shrapnel high into the sky. “I saw steel bigger than cars flying through the air,” one witness said. When the sun rose the morning of 17 April, area residents and emergency workers were confronted by columns of thick, black smoke that were visible thirty miles away. The clouds hovered over Texas City for days. The High Flyer and the Keene had been demolished, and one of the High Flyer’s propellers was blown off the ship and found a mile inland. The fires continued to burn for a week, and recovery of all the bodies took over a month.

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Sixty-three of the dead were never identified, and another 113 people were classified as missing. Over the years, there has been speculation that there may have been hundreds more killed whose bodies were never located. More than 5,000 people were also injured, with 1,784 admitted to area hospitals. The total killed and injured was equivalent to 25 percent of the town’s population. More than 500 homes were completely destroyed and hundreds damaged, leaving 2,000 people homeless. The seaport was destroyed. Over 1,100 vehicles were damaged and 362 railroad freight cars obliterated. Property lost was estimated at about $100 million (a whopping $1.06 billion in today’s terms), a total that does not include 1.5 million barrels of petroleum products consumed in flames, another $500 million in 1947 dollars. Payouts for fire insurance claims reached nearly $4 million ($41.9 million in today’s terms). The disaster triggered the first ever class action lawsuit against the United States government. In 1950, a district court found the United States responsible for “negligent acts of omission and commission” by 168 named agencies and their representatives in the “manufacture, packaging, and labeling of ammonium nitrate” as well as further errors in “transport, storage, loading, fire prevention, and fire suppression”. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the verdict and the Supreme Court supported that action by a 4-3 vote. Finally, after ten years of litigation, the United States Congress stepped in and provided some compensation to those that had been damaged by the explosions and fires. By 1957, 1,394 awards, totaling nearly $17 million, had been made, The disaster resulted in more serious attention to the packaging and transportation of ammonium nitrate, and overseas transport of the material was all but banned. Officially, the cause of the explosion has never been determined. Hm All images Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. To visit the entire collection at the University of Houston Digital Library, please visit: http://digital.lib.uh.edu/cdm4/results.php?

CHUCK LYONS is a retired newspaper editor and a freelance writer who has written extensively on historical subjects. His work has appeared in national and international periodicals. He resides in Rochester, NY with his wife, Brenda, and a beagle named “Gus”.

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A 1693 engraving of Stirling Castle, by John Slezer. Wikimedia Commons, from National Library of Scotland

E A R LY AV I A T I O N

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THE AERIAL ALCHEMIST

ERIC BRYAN EXAMINES JOHN DAMIAN’S 1507 ATTEMPT TO BE THE FIRST TO TAKE TO THE AIR ON MAN-MADE WINGS

I

n 1507, John Damian, fitted with wings made from eagle and poultry feathers, leaped from the walls of Stirling Castle, Scotland. Believed to have been an Italian alchemist and medicine man, Damian (aka “Damien”) was also referred to as “the French leich” by court poet William Dunbar, and in the archives of the Scottish exchequer. This moniker would have alluded to Damian’s practice as a doctor or healer, but Dunbar perhaps intended a double meaning, which accused Damian of draining King James IV’s coffers.

THE SCIENTIST-SOVEREIGN AND THE CONTINENTAL CONJUROR James IV was a Renaissance king, an enthusiast of science and medicine, and had an amateur’s understanding of surgery. But James’ interests extended beyond these pursuits to alchemy, and the quest for the philosopher’s stone. This mystical substance was believed to have the capacity to convert base metals into gold. It was also thought that when blended

with wine, the material would create the quintessence, or the elixir of life, a powerful cure-all for diseases and ailments. With these dizzying dreams in mind, James IV welcomed John Damian to court. Damian established a laboratory — perhaps the first in Scotland — in Stirling Castle circa 1500. As Damian’s experiments advanced, so his laboratory’s expense account grew. Damian required silver, gold, and mercury

— the primary components of the philosopher’s stone — as well as royal-funded continental research excursions. Also in the account books was a large quantity of whisky, considered special to alchemists for its marriage of the elements fire and water. The King’s friendship with and indulgence of the alchemist — which included appointing Damian the Abbot of Tongland in 1504 — may have created friction at court, and made him the target of William Dunbar’s pen.

TO THE SKIES! There are two main accounts of Damian’s aerial experiment. In the contemporary “The Fenyeit Freir of Tungland” (“The False Friar of Tongland”), William Dunbar gave Damian a Turkish June/July 2016 History Magazine

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E A R LY AV I A T I O N

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heritage; described his supposed failures in medicine, alchemy and religion; denounced him as a charlatan; and claimed he attempted to fly to Turkey using feathered wings. Dunbar had the aeronautical abbot attacked and plucked by birds, which sent him crashing miserably into a midden, where he hid in the muck for three days from the carrion fowl circling overhead. Scottish Roman Catholic bishop John Lesley, born twenty years after the event, recorded that apparently Damian’s failure to discover the philosopher’s stone led to him falling out of favor at court. Lesley claimed that Damian’s research into mechanical flight, resulting in his spectacular trial, was a bid to salvage his reputation.

Lesley reported Damian asserted that he could reach France faster than a group of Scottish ambassadors, by air travel, and announced his departure day. On the date in question, fitted with a pair of wings made of feathers, Lesley told that Damian leaped from Stirling Castle’s topmost position. He recounted that the abbot’s time airborne was limited, and that Damian broke his thighbone in either a crash or crashlanding.

TO HAVE FLOWN OR NOT TO HAVE FLOWN: MODERN REASSESSMENT Cropped view of The Sun or the Fall of Icarus, 1819 by Merry-Joseph Blondel (1781-1853). Copyright Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

John Read, in Humour and Humanism in Chemistry (1947), praised Damian’s courage and determination, and celebrated what he considered possibly “the

PERCY PILCHER & HIS GLASGOW GLIDERS By Eric Bryan While a lecturer at Glasgow University, Percy Pilcher (born 1866) built a hang-glider he named The Bat, which he flew successfully from a hill above the Firth of Clyde, near Cardross, Scotland in 1895. Pilcher based his ideas on those of German hang-glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, but used a tow-rope launch system. Pilcher had several assistants: his sister Ella; his cousin, Miss Dorothy Pilcher; and Dorothy’s mother were among them. Miss Dorothy acted as the occasional testpilot, while her mother sometimes manned the tow-rope.

For his subsequent project, Pilcher returned to his Beetle design and refined that further into an improved, sturdily-built glider, The Hawk. The aeronaut had a number of successful flights with the Hawk, including a distance record of about 250 yards. Amidst these triumphs, Pilcher set his sights on motorized flight, investigating various new, tiny combustion engines which might be fitted to the Hawk. At this time, Pilcher may also have started work on a powered tri-plane craft.

Because the Bat proved unHowever, while demonstratwieldy, Pilcher set to work on an Pilcher and his sister Ella, with The Beetle, in ing some glides with his upgraded machine, The Beetle. 1895. Public domain Hawk in rainy weather in This large, heavy, flat-winged 1899, one of the tail’s guy wires snapped and the glider was even more difficult to control, so the inmachine crashed. Like John Damian, Pilcher ventor reverted to his Bat. However, Pilcher soon broke his thighbone. But Pilcher never recovered moved on to his next development, The Gull. This consciousness and died two days later. The Hawk glider, at 55 pounds, was lighter than the Beetle. has been preserved in the collections of National But with 300 square feet of surface area, the Gull Museums Scotland, at the Museum of Flight in was delicate and unmanageable in anything East Lothian. stronger than a light breeze.

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first serious flying experiment ever made in Scotland, if not, indeed, in the whole history of experimental flight”. Read regarded Damian as versatile and ingenious. In a 2008 article in The Times, Charlene Sweeney reported on reassessments of Damian’s experiment. She cited Charles McKean, professor of Scottish architectural history, who reinvestigated the matter. McKean studied 16th century maps and reached his own conclusions. The professor noted that the alchemist would have had the most advantageous uplift by jumping from the castle’s highest spot on its western ramparts. McKean declared that anyone falling from this position would be killed, a point easily realized by looking down from the castle’s western parapet. McKean also called into question Dunbar’s assertion that Damian landed in a midden. Because the royal gardens were at the foot of the launch site — hardly the location for a midden, which would be situated some distance from the castle — McKean cast further doubt on the claim that Damian crashed almost instantly. In his examination of a 1702 map of the town (though drawn nearly 200 years after the event), the professor found that the midden closest to Stirling Castle was half a mile distant, on the other side of where the Smith Art Gallery is now situated. McKean affirmed that if Damian landed or crashed into a midden on that same site, then he flew successfully for half a mile, a fantastic achievement in 1507. McKean concluded that if the results of his investigation are accurate, then no one at that time, including Leonardo da Vinci, had accomplished what King James IV’s resident alchemist had

STIRLING CASTLE By Eric Bryan

An early 20th century etching of Stirling Castle, by Albany Howarth. Image courtesy of www.sulisfineart.com

Stirling Castle rests on Castle Hill, a volcanic crag, with cliffs on three sides. The castle looms over the River Forth, and stood near what was the lowest crossing of that watercourse until the 1890s. Most of the remaining buildings are from the 15th and 16th centuries, though some smaller structures date to the 14th century. James IV’s constructions at the castle circa 1500 include the huge Great Hall. A number of Scottish kings and queens were crowned at Stirling Castle, among them Mary, Queen of Scots. A pink lady seen at the castle is said to be the ghost of Mary. A green lady observed on the premises has been regarded as the ghost of one of Mary’s servants. Archaeological evidence of human habitation of Castle Hill dates to the late medieval era, but the location was surely occupied long before then, in the mists of time.

succeeded in doing. McKean averred that William Dunbar’s derision of Damian’s exploit could have derived from resentment of the alchemist’s privileged position at court. The professor also stated that the satirized variation of Damian’s adventure was utilized by Protestant historians in an effort to discredit Scotland’s Renaissance in comparison with that of continental Europe’s. Sweeney also quoted Scottish historian Craig Muir, who commented that if Damian failed in

his attempt, a belief popularly held to for five centuries, how then did he survive a fall of about 246 feet, and only break his leg? (Though the wings could have slowed Damian’s fall so that he broke his femur, but wasn’t killed, the question of the location of the midden and the castle gardens casts doubt on this scenario.) Muir pointed to the obvious solution, which is that Damian’s wings were functional, and that he might have been one of the first persons to fly. June/July 2016 History Magazine

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E A R LY AV I A T I O N

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KING JAMES IV By Eric Bryan King James IV (17 March 1473 – 9 September 1513) was likely born at Stirling Castle. James’s parents were James III and Margaret of Denmark. He ruled as the King of Scots from 11 June Portrait of James IV, 1488 to the date of his King of Scots. Artist unknown. death. Of the Stewart monPublic domain archs, James IV is generally considered to be the most successful. James was a genuine Renaissance prince who sought to establish a court at Stirling comparable with the great Renaissance palaces of Europe. Besides his interest in science and practical subjects, James was a patron of the arts, and a polyglot conversant in Italian, Spanish, Flemish, German, French, Latin, and other languages. He is the last Scottish king confirmed to have spoken Scottish Gaelic. James IV died in the Battle of Flodden, a conflict between Scotland and England. He is the last ruler from Great Britain to have been killed on the battlefield. One legend told that four supernatural horsemen swept up the king’s body from the field, to prevent the English from acquiring it. Rumors also persisted for years that James had survived the battle, and was in hiding or on pilgrimage in other nations. However, it’s generally believed that James’ body was recovered from the field of battle by the English. The embalmed remains resided for years at Sheen Priory, Surrey, England, without being buried. After the Reformation, the body disappeared. The fate of the remains grows more obscure from this point. One report states that the head was removed from the body and interred at St. Michael Wood Street, London. Another tale recounted that a skeleton found in a well at Roxburgh Castle, Scotland in the 17th century was the king’s. The same story was connected to Scotland’s Hume Castle in the 18th century. Yet another purported resting place of James’ body is at Berry Moss, near Kelso, Scotland.

As Diane Maclean pointed out in a 2006 Scotsman article, Damian’s experiment coincided with da Vinci’s studies on flight, which culminated in the latter’s Codex on the Flight of Birds (completed perhaps in 1505, the work included sketches of proposed flying machines). Because Damian was traveling in Europe in 1502, there is the possibility that he may then have learned of da Vinci’s studies. One of mankind’s early victorious voyages into the skies might have been Damian’s feathered leap from Stirling Castle. Hm Sidebar #2BRYAN ERIC

is a freelance writer originally from Burlingame, California. His articles have appeared in many publications in North America and the UK.

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OTHER LEGENDARY AND HISTORIC ATTEMPTS AT HUMAN FLIGHT By Eric Bryan The earliest attempt at human flight on record is that of King Bladud, circa 850 BC. A semi-legendary King of Britain. King Bladud was said to be a practitioner of magic and necromancy – divination with the assistance of the spirits of the departed. According to the tale, with the aid of necromancy, Bladud constructed a set of wings which attached to his arms. The king endeavored to fly at the temple of Apollo in New Troy, the early settlement which would eventually become London. Apparently jumping from a height either from the temple or another structure, Bladud then crashed into a wall, or to the ground, the impact killing him. His body was buried at New Troy. Abbas ibn Firnas of Andalusia is reputed to have flown or glided successfully circa 875 AD in Cordoba, Spain. A polymath believed to be of Berber extraction, Firnas is said to have coated himself in feathers, perhaps with those from vultures, affixed two wings to his body, and leaped from a hill or other high elevation. The story tells that Firnas not only achieved flight, but that he landed at the point where he started. Eilmer of Malmesbury was another who dreamed of human flight. An 11th century Benedictine monk of Malmesbury Abbey, England, Eilmer was known for his writings on astrology. Inspired by the Greek tale of Daedalus, Eilmer attached wings to his feet and hands, and jumped from the top of the abbey tower. It’s recorded that the monk glided for a furlong, or 660 feet, but that a crash landing broke both of his legs, leaving him with a permanent injury.

Engraved vignettes of the Waldorf and Astoria Hotels in New York. From “The Cooper Collection of U.S. Hotel History”, Wikimedia Commons

A ROOM FOR THE NIGHT

GLORIA TIETGENS SLADEK LOOKS AT THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOTEL THROUGH HISTORY

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ravelers, hungry and tired, were eager and pleased when they reached an inn where they could spend the night. There would be shelter and some comfort along with food, drink and conversation with others. Dancing was allowed in some places, but puritanical villages often discouraged whistling or laughing. And if a man spoke to a married woman, he could expect to be fined! Offering their guests hospitality has been in evidence since early biblical times. But sometimes there is a “no vacancy sign”. It’s recorded that’s what happened to Mary and Joseph when they were refused accommodations in Bethlehem so many years ago. There was “no room at the inn”. The innkeeper was very important in colonial times. He was often called the landlord. It was required that he wake early every morning and get right to work! Sometimes he would sleep in his clean clothes to save time and often a splash of cold water from the basin was enough to get him

going. If he had a staff, he would wake them next (often they were family members) and each person had his own set of chores to perform. Facilities offering guests a place to rest and recuperate from their journey is a part of history. Accommodations for travelers sprung up along ancient trading routes. Inns in ancient Persia were often built around a central courtyard called caravanserais. Monasteries and hospitals were both erected to lodge travelers. Then, in France, in the early part of the fifteenth century, laws were passed requiring inns to keep a

HOTELS

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register of their visitors. About this time, there were approximately 600 inns registered in England alone. This was the start of the hotel industry in Europe. It was during the 19th century that hotels really sprouted in Europe, England, and America. These lodging places seemed to be everywhere including Denmark, Japan and India. Boston, offering a deluxe hotel called The Tremont House, was the first to offer locks on doors and inside toilets. The Le Grand Hotel Paris opened on 5 May 1862. Luxury was everywhere and the first elevator in a hotel was installed. The year 1890 equipped the entire hotel with electric lighting. Then in 1901, steam heating was installed and the selling of baskets of wood to warm the guests was no longer necessary. High arched doors and Louis XIV windows defined the exterior of the hotel. Famous artists in painting and decoration helped to make this hotel the grandest in Europe. In 1982, it became a member of the InterContinental chain. Then in June of 2003, after a multimillion dollar renovation, it re-opened its doors. The golden years of American hotels came about thirty years before the Civil War. These hotels were larger and more elegant than others and were built in older cities and in boom towns that were non-existent years before. They were meant to pamper their guests and permanent living in hotels became popular for those who could afford it. Everyone had a right to such comfort as long as they could pay for it! Actually, there was much to enjoy without it costing a penny — the lobby and the barroom, for example. June/July 2016 History Magazine

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America’s hotels were social centers for the general public, especially where private homes were too small for social affairs on any sizable scale. The prosperous years of the 1920s saw a boom in the hotel industry. In 1923, the architects Marchisio and Prost built a hotel that, at that time, was considered the most beautiful in the world. Its name was La Mamounia. Built in Morocco, North Africa, the country had a diverse coastline with deserts and high mountains. The name La Mamounia derived from the gardens known centuries ago as “Arset el Mamoun”. The hotel

the ancestral home of the German-American Astor family. Conrad Hilton purchased the hotel in 1949; in 1993, it was deemed to be an official New York City landmark. After the 1950s came the first casino hotels and guests hungry for relaxation swarmed the beach hotels around the Mediterranean. It was about this time that the airline companies began constructing their own hotels. Soon the unforeseen prosperity of Middle Eastern countries attracted business people from around the world to cities like Dubai and Riyad.

Engraving of Patrice de MacMahon, President of the French Republic, visiting the Emperor and the Empress of Brazil, Pedro II and Teresa Cristina, at the Grand Hotel in 1877. Public domain, including the US as image was created before 1923

itself was named after Prince Moulay Mamoun, the son of a Sultan. His name was Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, the ruler of Marrakech in the 18th century. A frequent guest to this elegant hotel was Winston Churchill. Hotels were now built everywhere - including in ski resorts in Switzerland and even very comfortable ones in Montana. The depression following 1929 didn’t prevent the building of the greatest hotel of those times, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The name of this hotel was taken from the town of Walldorf in Germany,

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Former palaces and grand hotels throughout the world that had fallen into disrepair were renovated with larger and elegant spaces for dining where one could enjoy, if one could afford it, especially fine cuisine. The beginning of the 1980s, through clever marketing, prompted the building of hotels near airports and marinas. Hotels where conferences of all kinds were held appeared, such as health hotels and ski holiday hotels. The major hotel chains throughout parts of Europe involved the renovation of their

finer hotels. Some of these hotels pride themselves with up to five stars. Their exceptional service, creative architecture and interior design often offer wellness programs, beauty centers, etc. In 1995, construction began in Dubai with the prestigious Jumeirah Beach Hotels. With the greatest luxury available and impeccable service offered, it is considered a six and seven star hotel. Many celebrities own hotels: Donald Trump heads the list, owning hotels all over the world — including New York, Chicago, Panama and Toronto. Famous musicians, actors and athletes own hotels. For instance, Leonardo DiCaprio, along with the Four Seasons, is developing an eco-friendly hotel on his private island, Blackadore Caye. Robert DiNiro owns the Greenwich Hotel in New York City, while Clint Eastwood owns the scenic Mission Ranch in Carmel, California. All-inclusive hotels are another way to go. These hotels include all meals, all drinks, many activities and even entertainment. Hotels today are not only a lodging place for travelers. Developers, architects and designers are much more conscious of the different desires of their guests. They continually work to improve the quality of life in hotels. This is a competitive market, and hospitality suppliers strive to be more and more able to satisfy their guests. Times have changed a lot, but tired and hungry travelers continue to look for the inn or hotel that offers the needs and comfort they desire. Hm GLORIA TIETGENS SLADEK is a freelance writer who loves to dwell in the history of ordinary things. She has written for children, women’s fashion, and Christian magazines.

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Heroes & Desperados! by David A. Norris This special issue from History Magazine features a collection of stories about famous, and not-so-famous characters down through history: some nice — and some not-so-nice. David A. Norris, a regular contributor to History Magazine as well as several of our other successful special issues, has compiled entertaining accounts of William Tell, Daniel Sickles, Lieutenant Maynard, Australia’s Bushrangers, Boyle The Turncoat, The Bow Street Runners, Highwaymen and more!

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No original plans or images are known of David Bushnell’s Revolutionary War submarine, the Turtle. This 19th century conjectural image was made following surviving descriptions of the unique craft. Library of Congress

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S SUBMARINE

DAVID A. NORRIS RECOUNTS THE LIFE OF DAVID BUSHNELL AND HIS EFFORTS TO DEVELOP THE TURTLE, AN EARLY VERSION OF TODAY’S SUBMARINE

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ale College had 164 students in 1775. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War diverted many of the students from their intended careers in the ministry, trade, or the professions. One 1775 graduate, David Bushnell, had followed very different interests. Now, as many students found themselves taking up swords and muskets, Bushnell had a surprising gift ready to bestow on the rebel forces fighting for American independence: an 18th century submarine. David Bushnell was born in Saybrook, Connecticut in 1740. His early life was spent on his family’s farm, where the quiet young Bushnell spent much time alone reading and studying. In 1769, Bushnell’s father died, and the son’s life took a decisive turn. He sold his share of the family farm and enrolled in Yale College two years later. At the age of 31,

Bushnell was much older than most of the students. As early as his first days at college in 1771, Bushnell became fascinated with the idea of military operations beneath the waves. He taught himself how to build explosive charges and timers, and to detonate them underwater. As an even more ambitious project, he started work on

a “machine” that could safely transport a man underwater. Diving bells had been around for centuries, but Bushnell was working on a machine independently capable of moving about freely underwater. War between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain gave him a chance to put his ideas into practical form. Working with his brother Ezra, he began testing a completed version of his submarine in Connecticut during 1775. Prominent people including General George Washington supported the unusual project. In late 1775, the British still occupied Boston, and Bushnell hoped to aid Washington by attacking the British fleet guarding the city. The submarine’s hull was built of shaped oak planks and bound by iron bands, much like a large barrel. In shape, the hull was rather egg-shaped, and observers found that it resembled two turtle shells placed together. Although best known in history as the Turtle, Bushnell seems to have dubbed the craft the American Turtle. Bushnell solved numerous engineering problems with his design. Lead ballast helped steady the craft. To dive, water flowed into small chambers in the bottom of the vessel. To surface, the water was expelled by a pump. To surface quickly, 200 pounds of the lead ballast could be dropped immediately. To operate the Turtle, the pilot entered through a hatch on the top of the hull. In the hull’s interior was a seat for the lone occupant. When lowered, the hatch provided a small raised June/July 2016 History Magazine

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compartment fitting over the pilot’s head. Small glass windows on the side of the hatch cover allowed a limited view of the outside. For propulsion, the vessel used a screw propeller (which Bushnell called an “oar”) in the bow. Powered either by a hand crank or a foot pedal, the propeller was reversible. A rudder enabled the pilot to change the direction of travel. Air was provided by two snorkels. A ventilator drew in fresh air from one pipe, and the other pipe served as an exhaust. Both snorkels closed automatically when under water. Because the air supply was so limited, the Turtle was intended to spend most of its time floating on the water’s surface. Only for a few minutes, when preparing to attack on a British ship, would the craft completely submerge. Inside would be enough air for the pilot to remain underwater for about thirty minutes. The American Turtle’s weapon was a nautical mine, in the form of a keg packed with gunpowder. After bringing the mine close to an enemy ship, the pilot had a way of affixing the mine to the hull by means of a hand-turned screw. Two Connecticut clockmakers, Isaac Doolittle (who also made surveying instruments) and Phineas Pratt (who was also a silversmith), worked on the mine as well as the other mechanical devices needed for the submarine. The mine contained a clockwork timer, which activated a detonator made from a converted flintlock mechanism from a musket. By setting a delay, the pilot would have time to get away before the blast. To gauge his direction and depth under water, Bushnell used a compass and a “barometer”. The latter was a glass tube, partly filled with water. While the top of History Magazine June/July 2016

This picture shows a cross section of the Turtle while it was in use. Most of the time, the submarine’s hatchway and snorkels would rise a few inches from the water; it could dive for only about 30 minutes.

the tube was sealed, the bottom was connected to a brass pipe that led to the water outside the vessel. Changes in depth were measured by the rising and falling of a cork that floated in the tube. Approaching enemy ships without being observed required the submarine to operate at night. Lighting proved a difficult problem. In the cramped interior of the submarine, a candle quickly consumed the available oxygen. First, the inventor turned to “foxfire” (a naturally luminescent substance created by certain fungi found in decaying wood), with which he coated the compass needle and the barometer. In the late fall of 1775, though, the “foxfire” was useless, as freezing temperatures prevented the material from glowing. Through intermediaries, Bushnell asked Benjamin Franklin if there was another substance that would glow in the dark without consuming oxygen. It seems unclear how the lighting problem was solved. Some

later accounts mention that “phosphorus” marked the depth gauge and the compass needle. But, Bushnell apparently operated the submarine again only after warm weather returned in 1776. By that time, the British had evacuated Boston. Bushnell, along with Washington’s army, then concentrated on defending New York City from a British invasion fleet that menaced the city. A sloop brought the Turtle from Connecticut to New York. On the night of 6-7 September 1776, the Turtle was ready for a trial run against a British ship. Ezra Bushnell, the best-trained pilot of the submarine, was too sick to report for duty. With his brother out of action, David Bushnell turned to Brig. Gen. Samuel Parsons, a Connecticut officer who commanded the 10th Continental Regiment. Three of Parsons’ men had already volunteered for a possible fireship attack. When Parsons asked if they were willing to volunteer for another perilous mission, they agreed, and the general sent them for submarine training.

No portraits of David Bushnell are known. This picture shows Ezra Lee, a Connecticut army sergeant who piloted the Turtle during an unsuccessful attack on a British ship-of-the-line in 1776.

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Stepping in to pilot the Turtle on its first mission was Sgt. Ezra Lee, a Connecticut soldier of Parson’s regiment. Lee had little time to master the controls of the strange submersible vehicle. Rowers in whaleboats towed the Turtle as close to the British ships as they could, without being seen. Then, the submarine was cast loose. The ebbing tide swept Lee far past the enemy vessels. Two and a half hours of cranking pushed the submarine near the ships again. Lee closed in on the Eagle, a 64-gun ship of the line that was anchored off Bedloe’s Island (now known as Liberty Island, it is the site of the Statue of Liberty). Lee halted the submarine next to the Eagle. But, when he tried to fasten the mine to the ship’s hull, the drill was blocked by metal. Possibly, he struck an iron bar attached to the rudder hinge. At last, as daylight was approaching, Lee gave up the attempt and headed back. Passing by Governor’s Island, which was occupied by British forces, he was spotted by the redcoats. A barge loaded with oarsmen set off after him. Lee abandoned the mine, which exploded harmlessly some time later, and made his escape. Log books kept aboard the British ships off New York City noted some sort of commotion on the night of 7 September 1776. The guard boats on patrol in the harbor sounded an alarm, and at least three ships-of-the-line dispatched additional boats as reinforcements. Musket shots echoed across the water. Possibly, someone got a glimpse of the Turtle, or perhaps the whaleboats that towed it near the fleet. As far as the British knew, nothing came of the alarm. Admiral Richard Howe’s secretary came to the conclusion that the “rebels” attempted to send some fireships

Bushnell’s submarine was never able to sink a ship. However, a nautical mine built by the same inventor destroyed a small British supply vessel in 1777.

among the Royal Navy vessels. Two more cruises with the submarine also failed to damage any British ships. Later, a tender carrying the Turtle was sunk by the British. The Continentals retrieved the submarine, but it was not used again. Its fate is unknown, but it is likely to have been broken up for scrap. Bushnell continued working with nautical mines. In 1777, he attacked the British frigate Cerebus with two mines in Connecticut. The frigate escaped harm, but one mine blew up a small Royal Navy schooner. However, the schooner was destroyed because the crew spotted the mine and hauled it aboard. The sole survivor of the blast said that the crew had begun tampering with the device, setting it off. Bushnell was commissioned as an officer in an army engineer unit. He served at the Siege of Yorktown and finished the war as a captain. Ezra Lee remained in

the Continental Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant by the war’s end. The last decades of Bushnell’s life were clouded in mystery. He left Connecticut in 1787. Some contemporaries believed he continued his underwater experiments in France, but nothing is known of a European trip. He never came back to Connecticut, and apparently never contacted his family again. As far as the general public knew, he disappeared. In 1826, newspapers reported that a “gentleman” arrived in Connecticut from Georgia. He had the task of finding David Bushnell’s nearest relatives and distributing $9,000 among them. For almost 30 years, the missing Bushnell had been living in Georgia, under the name David Bush. He settled into a new life as a teacher, and then started a medical practice. No one seems to know why Bushnell moved to Georgia and changed his name. His true identity became public only after his death. Nothing like the American Turtle had ever been built, and it would have no successors for a long time. Nearly 90 years later, the Confederate Navy’s CSS Hunley became the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel in wartime. The Union Navy also experimented with submarines, but it was 1900 before USS Holland was commissioned as the first vessel of the US Navy’s submarine fleet. Hm DAVID A. NORRIS is a regular contributor to History Magazine, Internet Genealogy and Your Genealogy Today. His most recent special issue for Moorshead Magazines Ltd., Tracing Your Revolutionary War Ancestors, is currently available at our online store.

June/July 2016 History Magazine

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MEDICINE

Herd of Holstein cows used for the milk diet at the Modern Woodmen of America Sanatorium near Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1925.

THE MILK DIET CURE

CHARLES BUSH LOOKS AT THE HISTORY OF MILK AS A TREATMENT OR A CURE FOR WHAT AILS US

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hroughout history, milk has been considered Nature’s perfect food. Hippocrates recommended the consumption of large quantities of ass’s milk to maintain good health. During the Middle Ages, Arabian physicians prescribed whey (the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained) as a treatment for bladder and kidney stones and other ailments. It would take another 500 years before milk, in the form of the milk diet, would be internationally recognized as an effective treatment and, in some instances, a cure for disease. For centuries, milk was valued as an essential food for infants and children. By ingesting milk on a regular basis, the young grew strong and healthy. Milk, however, was not the beverage of choice for most adults. Adults preferred to wash down their meals of meat and bread with beer, wine, whisky or hard cider. In the early 1800s, a significant change took place in the way many people lived. Families left their livestock and farms behind and moved to the cities in search of a better life with more predictable income. What they encountered were sweat shops, over-crowed living quarters and a

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lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These unhealthy conditions resulted in the rapid spread of contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis. Contaminated water supplies led to epidemics of cholera that killed thousands. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, hypertension and various categories of heart and kidney disease ran rampant. As if all of this was not enough, the worse tragedy was yet to come. The lack of refrigerated transportation made the acquisition of fresh country milk in the cities unpredictable at best. Families were forced to rely on milk from urban dairies. These so

called “swill dairies” were usually located adjacent to liquor distilleries. Fed only brewer’s mash or distillery swill, cows in these dairies became weak and diseased. Many of the infants who drank the milk from the city dairies died. By contrast, the infants who remained on the farms and were given milk from healthy cows fed on fresh grass and grains thrived. As infant mortality within the cities exceeded 50%, government authorities and physicians began to explore what it was about cow’s milk produced on farm dairies that promoted health in infants. They also pondered whether fresh cow’s milk might be useful in helping weak and sick adults to recover their health. It was around this same time, 1857, that a Russian physician by the name of Inozemtseff published a paper titled “The Milk Cure”. The article described how Dr. Inozemtseff had cured a young man stricken with tuberculosis with a prolonged diet exclusively of milk. The article explained how Inozemtseff had used milk as a medication. Before long, prominent physicians in Germany and England were expounding on the virtues of the milk diet. Two men came to prominence for advocating for the milk diet in the United States. One was Charles Stanford Porter, a physician who earned his M.D. degree from the College of Medicine, University of the City of New York, in 1893. Dr. Porter was a traditionally trained physician who believed in following strict rules and procedures. The other man was Bernarr Macfadden, known as the “Father of Physical Culture”. Macfadden had a lifelong distrust

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In 1905, Dr. Porter published Both men emphasized the need a book titled “Milk Diet as a Rem- for adequate room ventilation edy for Chronic Disease”. Over the with cool fresh air and daily warm next 18 years, Porter revised baths. Each insisted that the his text eleven times. In water temperature for 1923, Macfadden also the baths be just published a book above normal body about the milk temperature and diet. His book never more than was titled “The 110 degrees. Miracle of Milk”. Neither Porter Both Porter and nor Macfadden Macfadden reportwere particularly ed how they had shy about claiming experienced success in which diseases could curing hundreds of be successfully treatMilk cap from 1940 people suffering from ed with their respecreminded people that various ailments with “Christmas Seals and Milk tive milk diets. A a diet consisting ex- Help Fight Tuberculosis”. partial list included clusively of milk. Although their nervous troubles of all sorts, indiindividual dietary regimens were gestion, stomach ulcers, uterine similar, they were not identical. prolapse, pimples, boils, eczema, Dr. Porter’s was much more com- dandruff, anemia, asthma, hay fever, hardening of the arteries, plex. Dr. Porter’s therapeutic diet piles (hemorrhoids), lumbago, consisted of five elements; an ini- hives, impotence, gallstones, diatial fast, complete bed rest, milk, betes, both high and low blood fresh air and warm baths. Exercise pressure, most heart ailments, was to be avoided until the other diarrhea, constipation, kidney stages of the diet had been com- disease and tuberculosis in its pleted. Macfadden included exer- early stages. Chances were that if a cise as a critical part of his diet patient had it, the milk diet could therapy and did not insist on cure it. The mechanisms of action by complete bed rest for his patients. which the milk diet regimens cured disease were widely accepted in the early 1900s. It was believed that fasting stopped incomplete digestion and allowed the body time to concentrate cellular toxins. During complete bed rest, body organs recalibrated their metabolic activity and readied the accumulated poisons for elimination. Milk was then introduced in quantity to strengthen the blood and increase its volume. Increased blood flow to the various organs would then facilitate the removal of cellular toxins via urine from the kidneys. The milk also created bulk within the small intestines and the colon. This Even the physicians on the staff of Bernarr Macfadden’s Battle Creek Sanatorium bulk, in turn, swept poisons from followed the milk diet. of physicians and hated organized medicine. Instead, Macfadden taught that the true way to a healthy life was through dietary restriction. While encouraging his followers to “embrace the miracle of milk”, he also believed in the “digestive magic of sand”. “Sand cleans glass bottles, why not the bowels?” he reasoned. The theory of how the milk diet cured acute and chronic diseases was based on the limited understanding of human physiology that existed in the late 1800s. At the time, the germ theory was a new concept that was not yet universally accepted. Diseases were thought to be the result of an accumulation of poisons or toxins within the various organs, and that these poisons were produced by the incomplete digestion of the food that a patient consumed. Easily digested food, like milk, produced few toxins and passed through the body with relative ease. Foods that were difficult to digest, like meats, white bread and sweets other than citrus fruits, produced many toxins and overwhelmed the organs of elimination resulting in “weak” urine and chronic constipation.

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MEDICINE

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the GI tract into easily passable bowel movements. The warm baths stimulated capillary blood flow to the skin where additional toxins were excreted by the sweat glands. Fresh air, in a combination with deep breathing exercises, flushed poisons from the lungs and encouraged complete oxidation and digestion of the milk. Finally, exercise increased general muscle strength to include the muscles that controlled peristaltic contractions within the colon. This aided in the elimination of toxins which had been absorbed and concentrated in fecal matter. While Macfadden maintained his own sanatoriums and oversaw the care of some patients there, his book was written primarily for persons who wished to attempt the milk diet cure at home. Porter’s milk diet was better suited for patients who could afford an extended sanatorium stay. In fact, Dr. Porter said that unless the parameters of his milk diet were executed to the letter (not an easy task), it had little chance of bringing about a complete healing success. Among other things, Porter required soft hair mattresses positioned on iron bed frames upon which his patients were confined 24 hours a day. The only exceptions to strict bed rest were for bathroom breaks and a daily 20 minute warm bath. While Porter preferred that his patients stay in screened in porches for ventilation, Macfadden believed that an adequate supply of fresh air could be achieved by simply opening one or two windows in the patient’s bedroom. There was consensus on the type of milk that was to be used for the milk diet, how much milk was to be taken and how and when the milk should be consumed. Without exception, the History Magazine June/July 2016

best chance of a cure from the milk diet came with the use of fresh sweet raw milk from Holstein cows raised on country farms. It was claimed that this milk contained less butter fat in smaller globules than did milk from either Jersey or Guernsey cows. Less butterfat made digestion of the milk easier and more complete. The quantity of milk to be drunk differed according to age, gender, weight and the patient’s physical condition, but averaged from 4 to 6 quarts a day. The milk was to be taken slightly cooled, 6

Macfadden touted. It was, however, therapeutic for certain conditions. Milk was rich in potassium, which has been associated with a lower risk of strokes, heart disease and hypertension. The high water content of milk (87%) helped to reduce the formation of kidney stones. Taken in quantity, milk contained enough absorbable iron to correct iron deficiency anemia. And the vitamin B3 (Niacin) in milk was sufficient to prevent the deficiency disease pellagra, which was characterized by dermatitis, diarrhea and mental disturbance.

Letterhead from Bernarr Macfadden’s Battle Creek Sanatorium. Note, “Disease Cured Without Drugs”.

to 8 ounces at a time every half hour for 12 hours a day. The milk was to be sipped slowly, aerated fully and “chewed” thoroughly. This stimulated the flow of saliva that began the oxidationdigestion process in the mouth. All of this, if conducted correctly, took about 20 minutes every half hour. This left little time for such activities as reading, talking, sewing or sex, all of which were condemned while on the milk diet as energy wasters. The average time spent on the milk diet was six weeks initially, with the recommendation that the full course could be repeated at any time, but at least once a year to assure continued good health. To say that participation in the milk diet cure was a full time activity was certainly not an understatement! The milk diet did not prove to be the cure-all that Porter and

Of late, the milk diet is making something of a comeback. In an effort to eat healthy and avoid highly processed foods, some people are turning to raw milk as a source of non-animal protein. Where the sale of raw milk is illegal, the law has been circumvented by milk co-ops. In these co-ops, anyone can purchase a partial ownership in a dairy herd and then collect and use the raw milk taken from their own cows. This is not illegal. Although an exclusive diet of milk may not be for everyone, for some it could prove to be an alternate road to good health, just as Porter and Macfadden suggested nearly a hundred years ago. Hm

CHARLES BUSH is a regular CHARLES BUSH is a regular contributor to History Magazine. contributor to History Magazine.

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Funerary masks on display at Jade Maya in Antigua, Guatemala. Exact reproductions of jade masks that adorned Mayan kings are made by today’s craftsmen in jadeite.

MINING

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Myriam Moran, copyright 2014

THE LURE OF JADE

JOHN CHRISTOPHER FINE LOOKS AT THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF MINING ONE OF THE MOST COVETED MINERALS ON THE PLANET

“

T

his is the story I want you to tell. It has been going on for a while and it is getting uglier and uglier. In Burma, they pay jade miners with heroin. They share needles and get AIDS. This is a photograph of a dying jade miner. It is all greed. Destruction of the environment and human lives,” Mary Lou Ridinger declared. She is an anthropologist and archaeologist living in Guatemala, one of only two countries in the world where jadeite jade is found in any quantity.

Whether Ridinger and her colleague Raquel Perez will succeed in saving Guatemala’s precious jade reserves, whether Chinese exploitation of jade regions of the world can be stopped, whether human rights abuses and environmental damage can be halted, faced with the fact that jade is one of the most valuable gemstones in the world, is questionable. What this American, living and working in Guatemala, can do and is doing, is directing world attention

to a problem that has gotten worse since Mary Lou and her husband, Jay Ridinger, were featured in a National Geographic Magazine cover story about jade in September 1987. In the decades since the article was written, China has moved aggressively toward global expansion: territorially and economically. Uygur tribesmen, in a former independent republic, now live under Chinese Communist control, in Xinjiang Province.

Where once Uygurs gathered nephrite from dry riverbeds of the White Jade River, washed from the Kunlun Mountains, strip mining has devastated the land. The Uygur trading capital of Hotan once thrived as a city of jade. Buyers came to barter for jade in the open market. Jade was then transported 2,000 miles to Chinese jade carving factories. “Understand the history of jade. China doesn’t have it. They went after other countries to get it. Xinjiang Province was Turkestan. The Chinese have now stripmined most of the jade from Turkestan. The traditional way of life of the Uygurs is gone,” Mary Lou Ridinger said. There are some 40 varieties of white, green, white-green and blue stones. Only two are classified as jade. Many ancient Chinese carvings have been worked from stones other than jadeite. These antique carvings are valuable, however, it is improper to classify anything that is not nephrite or jadeite as true jade. The Chinese considered many rocks to be of exquisite beauty and carved them. Chinese carvers called these rocks ‘yu’, the “royal gem”. ‘Bai-yu’ is Chinese for nephrite and ‘fei-cui-yu’ means jadeite. Bright green jade has also been called kingfisher jade, for its resemblance to the bright green plumage of the kingfisher bird. Ancient Mesoamericans likewise named their most prized jade after the bright green plumage of the Quetzal bird. The Aztecs called bright green jade ‘quetzalitzi’. Nephrite, a silicate of calcium and magnesium, can have green tints when iron is present. June/July 2016 History Magazine

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Nephrite is found in many places in the world. British Columbia in northwest Canada now has the largest deposits of nephrite. Nephrite deposits occur in New Zealand where they have religious significance for indigenous Maori peoples. Australia, Alaska, California, Wyoming, South Korea, Russia have it and some nephrite is found in Poland, Switzerland and Italy. Stone age people in what is now Europe used jade tools. Hotan’s nephrite was the traditional source of China’s quest for the white stone. A particularly valuable form is dubbed ‘mutton fat’, which can sell for as much as $3,000 an ounce. Jadeite is rarer than nephrite and considered more valuable. Jadeite is a silicate of sodium and aluminum. In its gem form, the stone has an interlocking crystal matrix. Trace elements create a variety of other colors. Jadeite is the green stone of radiant brilliance that is considered one of the most valuable gems in the world. Jade’s hardness made it a tool of choice for primitive peoples. The Moh’s scale has been used to describe hardness: soft talc is 1 and diamonds are 10. Measured

on the Moh’s scale, steel is 5 to 6. Nephrite measures 5.5 to 6.5 and jadeite 6.5 to 7. Jadeite is harder, but is not as tough as nephrite, which is composed of tightly packed fibers. Hardness of the stone makes it difficult to work, even with modern tools. The ancients used abrasive garnet sand and water, string and stones to shape and carve it. Early Chinese and Mesoamerican jade with intricate shapes, designs and carvings must be considered amazing art. There are only two places in the world where jadeite exists in any quantity: Guatemala and Burma, now Myanmar. Burma has been the source of Chinese jade since the first exports in 1784 AD. Anthropologists date jade culture in China to the Neolithic period. Jade mining has been traced to 6000 BC in the Dushan. China eventually depleted its own jade deposits in the Yangtze River Delta and Ningshao. Jade was carved in the Liangzhu period from 3400 to 2250 BC. Mongolian evidence of jade in the Hongshan period has been dated as early as 4700 BC. Jade ornaments and carvings were discovered in tombs of kings of the Shang Dynasty

Factory workers at Jade Maya in Antigua, Guatemala work the hard jadeite material with machines. It took Mayan craftsmen lifetimes to create jade masterpieces using sand and rope to cut and polish the stones. Myriam Moran, copyright

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History Magazine June/July 2016

which lasted from 1600 to 1050 BC. Korean jade carvings and a tradition of burying nobles with jade dates from 850 BC. Confucius described jade in 500 BC, “With polish and brilliance (jade) represents the whole of purity. Its perfect compactness and extreme hardness represent the sureness of intelligence…the pure and prolonged sound, which gives forth when one strikes it, represents music…the price that the entire world attaches to it represents truth.” While the great Chinese scholar extols other virtues of jade, it is clear that Chinese culture, ancient and modern, place the highest value on the stone. The source of Chinese jade was always clear. Traders made great journeys to collect it. The source of Mesoamerican jade wasn’t rediscovered until recently. The Spanish passed jade over as nothing of great value, favoring gold, silver and emeralds, things they understood and lusted after. No one sought to find the jade routes to discover its source. Montezuma’s gift of jade beads for the King of Spain was thrown aside by Cortez. This gesture of disdain shocked the Aztecs, since their ‘chalchihuites’ were valued far in excess of gold. Gold was deemed droppings of the sun. Jade received its European name 50 years after Cortez first landed in Mexico. A Spanish doctor saw that the Aztecs used jade to heal kidney and loin ailments. Dr. Nicolas Monardes thus named the stone ‘piedra de los rinones’, the kidney stone or stone of the kidneys. It was also called ‘piedra de la ijada’. ‘Ijada’ means loin. Thus the word jade evolved. Mysterious ancient peoples that lived in Mexico are designated Olmecs by anthropologists. The word ‘olli’ means rubber. They were named as rubber gatherers

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from trees on the Gulf coast. Olmecs lived in vast regions of Mexico in beautiful cities around 1200 BC. One of their cities was inhabited by as many as ten thousand people. Exquisite jadeite carvings have been discovered among the ruins of Olmec cities like Tres Zapotes, San Lorenzo and the 900 BC city of La Venta. La Venta was thriving in 800 BC, a thousand years before the Mayan civilization. In his extraordinary book, ‘Stone of Kings’, Gerard Helferich, writes, “But there’s no doubt that the Olmecs stand at the first flush of jade culture in the New World, trading the stone and creating some of the most sophisticated and beautiful carvings ever produced in this hemisphere.” What is known is that Olmec culture was in decline 1,500 years before the Aztecs were in Mexico. The Olmecs used and revered jade in Mexico a thousand years before the Maya and at least 2,000 years before the Aztecs. The stones remain, carved as figureheads, tablets and celts (tools) with writing, as adornments and jewels, weapons and knives used in sacrificial rites, funerary ornaments, devotions and the signs of wealth and power. How the source of Mesoamerican jade was rediscovered is the stuff Indiana Jones movies are made of. Explorers did find jade rocks in the Sierra de las Minas located in the northern Motagua River Valley in 1930. Later on, American Robert Leslie found jade in the same area and was in correspondence with William Foshag at the Smithsonian. Leslie left Guatemala in 1954 and Foshag died in 1957. Upon his death, the Smithsonian published Foshag’s paper, ‘Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade’, giving the reported location. The paper didn’t make news and was

largely ignored and forgotten. In 1974, Jay Ridinger and Mary Louise Johnson went to Guatemala to try and discover the origins of Mesoamerican jade. Jay found Foshag’s article and bought up the last dozen copies of it in the Smithsonian gift store where it had been gathering dust in a storage room.

Replica of the Maltese Falcon from the classic Humphrey Bogart film. The statue is made from Galactic Gold Jade, the rarest form of jadeite. It contains flecks of gold and other minerals. Myriam Moran, copyright 2014

They found the source of jade in the mountains of Zacapa province in the Motagua River Valley. At first it was difficult to convince Guatemalans that the country had any jade, then that jadeite had any marketable potential. They were rocks, heavy rocks, in a remote area. The Ridingers saw the discovery as an important piece in the archaeological puzzle that had been confounding researchers for centuries. It was also a source of valuable gem stones that could support an economy with sustainable development. Thus began their quest and their ambitious creation of jade gathering and jewelry making in Guatemala. The year of their discovery was

1974. Guatemala had already suffered twenty years of turmoil that culminated in military dictatorships and extermination squads. The US was still paranoid about Communism and determined to enable American businesses free reign to corrupt government officials for special privileges with no labor strife from unions they branded as Communist. It was during that tense military dictatorship atmosphere that Jay and Mary Lou made, maintained and exploited their discovery. “For the first ten years, we never allowed anyone to photograph our faces. We were afraid of kidnapping,” Mary Lou said. No one would have needed a photograph to identify Jay with his safari clothes and bushy beard, nor Mary Lou. She is very tall with long blonde hair, green eyes and a light complexion. Their son, Jake, is 6’8” tall. Life in Guatemala at that time was precarious for anyone. Dictators came and went. “We went through ten presidents,” Mary Lou smiled. Murders, kidnappings, disappearances and assassinations were commonplace. These were dangerous times. A necklace of 27 Imperial Green jade beads sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for $9.3 million in 1997. That makes it clear that fame from dealing in one of the world’s most valuable gemstones can be perilous in a remote wilderness area and lawless state. “Guatemala is on the Caribbean Tectonic Plate boundary between the North American tectonic plate and the Caribbean tectonic plate, which runs east west through the center of Guatemala. Jade forms through subduction faulting, when one tectonic plate slides under the other one. It contains talc so it feels oily. You cannot learn about jade unless you have it in your hand. No two pieces are June/July 2016 History Magazine

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MINING

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alike. “This is not jade: it is serpentine. It contains talc so it feels oily. This is what is usually sold to tourists in Asia as jade. This one is Aventurine quartz, which is also sold to tourists around the world as jade. I came here to find the sources of jade. You can hear it and feel it in your wrist when you hit it with a steel hammer.” That said, Mary Lou picked up a steel sledgehammer and brought it down on a jade rock with great force. The crack was evident. The hammer rebounded off the rock. She then brought the hammer down on a plain boulder that resulted in a dull thump. “Jade has higher compressive strength than steel. We replace our hammers every six months.” She held up a hammer with its flat ends bent back from pounding jade. “Jade is so hard to melt, alter or destroy that the natives of Asia and the Americas associated it with eternity and then they came up with the concept that quality of immortality could be transferred from the jade to the wearer of the jade. The Maya King, Pakal was buried with 26 pounds of jade. He was the winner of the

Archaeologist Mary Lou Ridinger with jade rock that bears a vein of Imperial Green jade. She calls it her retirement boulder because of its value. Myriam Moran, copyright 2014

immortality sweepstakes. The Spaniards came looking for gold and when they found the local people worshipping jade, they declared that the worship of jade was idolatry, making it easier to replace the native religion with Catholicism.”

Mary Lou Ridinger (left) and Jade Maya General Director Raquel Perez study evidence they uncovered of jade smuggling from Guatemala to China. Illegal traffic in jade continues despite their efforts to bring law enforcement’s attention to the problem that will eventually deplete Guatemala’s most valuable resource. Myriam Moran, copyright 2014

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“We only surface collect. We do not dig for jade,” Mary Lou emphasized. Jade is a renewable resource if collected with respect for the environment. It washes out of the mountains with rainfall and can be gathered in riverbeds and mountain washes. “This is my retirement boulder.” Mary Lou patted a 120-pound rock in the middle of Jade Maya’s retail store in the mountain town of Antigua, a half-hour drive outside Guatemala City. “My son Jake found this and another Imperial Jade rock on a five day walk back into the mountains of the Sierra de las Minas when he was twenty years old in 2004. Feel how cold it is. The more you touch it, the shinier it becomes. It is worth about $10 to $15 million. We won’t know exactly until we put it on a diamond saw and cut it up.” The extraordinary value of jade has created a smuggling ring that operates clandestinely in Guatemala. Mary Lou alleges Chinese nationals involved in the illegal activity corrupt government officials. With her colleague, Raquel Perez, the two have become jade detectives. Their investigations are fraught with danger. Guatemala is a country where corrupt police and ability to corrupt judicial officials means criminals are able to steal jade, warehouse it openly, transport then export it illegally from Guatemala’s Pacific Ocean port of Puerto Quetzal to Taiwan and other Chinese destinations. The smuggled jade ends up in Chinese carving factories, where it is turned into some of the most valuable jewelry in the world. “For the last eleven years, Taiwanese nationals have been stealing Guatemalan jade from my licensed areas and shipping it illegally to Taiwan. People, through their government, license me. I

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Modern craftsmen use Guatemala jade to make jewelry sold at the factory store of Jade Maya in Antigua, Guatemala. John Christopher Fine, copyright 2014

pay for every pound I take out. I only surface collect jade. Taiwanese come in with back loaders, dynamite and weapons. Raquel and I obtained the port records just for the last 18 months. Five hundred tons of jade has been illegally exported from Puerto Quetzal.” Raquel Perez produced a binder containing evidence that included photographs, a complaint Mary Lou lodged with the public prosecutor in Zacapa Province, arrest reports and port export records. There are many detours and anecdotes in Mary Lou Ridinger’s jade experience. A sculpture of Oscar Wilde reposes in Merrion Park in Dublin, Ireland. Danny Osborne, showed the two sides of Oscar Wilde. If viewed from the right, he is sad and if viewed from the left, he is smiling, depicting the life of the Irish writer. “Danny lives in the Arctic Circle in Nunavit. He sent me an email. The Wilde sculpture’s hands and face in porcelain were disintegrating. He wondered if he could find white jade in Guatemala. Danny came here and went through my pieces, selected what he wanted, and shipped it to Baffin Island.

He redid the sculpture’s hands and face in jade.” “We’ve gone to the newly elected government. We told them that if they do not stop this illegal activity, Guatemala will have no jade left,” Mary Lou said. Her agents followed a container truck from an illegal warehouse en route to the port. When Guatemalan authorities stopped the truck, they were threatened by the driver, told that they, not he, would be arrested. The agents called Mary Lou, who called her contact in the Department of Mines. A ranking official arrived, forced the truck open and discovered its contraband shipment of jade. “These Chinese have no mining or export permit. We have records of every container load of jade shipped out. Possibly 40 to 50% of all the jade in Guatemala is now in Taiwan. The Guatemalan government thought they would have jade forever. That would be true with only surface collection. New deposits are exposed and wash down with rain. That’s alluvial jade and it can just be picked up. We hope to make the government understand the difference

between that and strip mining. It is an important resource and we must treat it with respect.” Then Mary Lou sighed, “It is hard for a poor country to understand this. It is about greed on a worldwide scale. I explain that they are destroying their own culture and the future of their own children and grandchildren.” In the areas where Mary Lou’s jade is collected, local farmers are paid to pile the rocks together for pick up. They continue to farm the land. Income derived from jade enables them to live a good life on land they traditionally farmed and still raise crops on. It is a difficult struggle to preserve the source of Mesoamerican jade, the stone of kings. Two very determined women continue, virtually alone, to bring illegal jade smuggling to light. With some success, they bring public attention to bear on organized criminal activity by Taiwanese nationals. It is not easy. “Mary Lou is being very brave. She worries more about Guatemala and the future of our jade than about her own safety,” Raquel Perez said. The stone, valued by ancient people for immortality and eternity, for happiness and health, is now being exploited for its cash value. It is akin to blood diamonds in Africa. It is a dramatic story full of intrigue and mystery; as mysterious as its place in early cultures from the dawn of civilization. Hm Dr. JOHN CHRISTOPHER FINE is a marine biologist and expert in marine and maritime affairs. He is a Master Scuba Instructor and Instructor Trainer. The author of 25 books, his articles appear in magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.

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FRENCH HISTORY

This popular print by Frans Hogenbert, ca. 1572, shows the attempted assassination of Coligny at left, his subsequent murder at right, and scenes of the general massacre in the streets. Public domain, including in the US

RENAISSANCE ATROCITY

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 1572

ARNOLD BLUMBERG EXAMINES THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO A WAVE OF ASSASSINATIONS AND MOB VIOLENCE ON THE EVE OF THE FEAST OF BARTHOLOMEW THE APOSTLE

A

t 11:00 AM on 22 August 1572, a bright Friday summer morning, Gaspard de Coligny, aged 53, seigneur de Chatillon, Admiral of France, and royal advisor had just entered the rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain off the rue de Bethisy on foot. He was the leading political and military figure of the French Huguenots, the small minority of French men and women who practiced the Calvinist Protestant religion, a highly controversial and unpopular act in a country whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic. De Coligny was returning from a meeting with Duke Francis of Anjou, a younger brother of the French king, Charles IX and an heir to that nation’s throne, at the Palace of the Louvre — the Parisian residence of the French royal family. Just then, about 60 yards from the Louvre, de Coligny bent down to adjust his overshoe, which he wore as protection from the muddy Paris roads. This sudden action saved his life, for at that very moment a shot rang out, fired from an arquebus (a smoothbore matchlock long gun and forerunner of the musket) which

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severed part of the index finger of his right hand and plowed a furrow along his left forearm up to the elbow. The bullet, which was meant to end the Admiral’s life, was fired through an iron grille of a window on the ground floor of a house owned by the Canon Pierre de Pille, a supporter and personal tutor of the Catholic party’s antiHuguenot leader Henry, Third Duke of Guise. The triggerman was one Maurevel hired by the Guises. The would-be assassin made his escape through the cloister of a nearby church to a horse saddled near the Seine River, and made his escape. Immediately suspicion as to who orchestrated the crime fell on the Guise family. Not only was the property from which the near fatal shot fired from the home of a pro-Guise clergyman, but all France knew that the current Duke of Guise had a personal grudge against the Huguenot nobleman that ranged well beyond religious and political differences. Henry, Duke of Guise had long and openly blamed de Coligny of being behind the murder of the former’s father, Francis, Second Duke of Guise, at Orleans in 1563. Guises’ threats of retaliation for his father’s death had been public knowledge for years, and the 22 year old Guise was not above carrying out retaliation for any offense to him and his family. The attempt on de Coligny’s life could only be seen as an assault on all French Huguenots, and a way in which their enemies could reverse the course of recent events that had enormously increased the French Protestant’s political

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influence in France. De Coligny had helped negotiate the 1570 Peace of Saint Germain-en-Laye, officially ending civil war in France, which had been raging intermittently since 1562. It granted the Huguenots complete freedom of religion and the right to hold public office throughout the country. In addition, the agreement placed under Huguenot control the wealthy fortified cities of La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charité for two years as Huguenot sanctuary towns. The final act to seal the recent religious reconciliation was the marriage on 18 August 1572 of the Protestant Prince Henry III of Navarre to the French king’s sister, the Catholic Margaret of Valois. Most French Catholic clergy, nobles, and the vast amount of the common people denounced the occasion as it only reminded them of the bloodshed and hatred engendered by the late civil war. To show their complete displeasure at the union between Henry and Margaret, Parisian mobs gathered to taunt and heckle the Huguenots attending the wedding at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. And there were numerous Huguenots to jeer at since the wedding had brought many of the leading French Protestants to the capital. Along with the common folk, the French government of King Charles IX, and — the real power in France — the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, feared the growing influence on French national and international policy of the Huguenots. Catherine and the Guises looked on with distress as de Coligny more and more convinced the immature 22 year old Charles to grant additional civil rights and economic advantages to the French Protestants. The Queen and her party were especially

alarmed about de Coligny becoming a principal advisor to the king, and at his scheme to start a war with France’s traditional ally Spain in order to conquer the Spanish Netherlands. As a result, Catherine and the Guises were only waiting for the right time and opportunity to deal decisively with their Protestant foes. As it turned out, the royal wedding in Paris that August which brought together a large assemblage of high ranking Huguenots offered their Catholic opponents an opportunity to strike a telling blow.

Painting of Gaspard II de Coligny. Public domain

Immediately after the failed assassination attempt, the bleeding Admiral was taken to his Paris residence at the rue de Bethisy. King Charles, who had heard the gunfire while playing tennis at the Louvre, quickly sent his personal physician, Doctor Ambroise Paré, to attend the wounded man. The good surgeon amputated the remains of de Coligny’s injured finger and extracted the metal bullet from his arm. Later that day, the king paid de Coligny a visit and swore he would bring to justice the culprits who injured the Admiral. In a letter dispatched to his

ambassador to England that same day, the king wrote that Protestant England, a French ally, should not think the French government had any part in the attack on de Coligny and that “this wicked act stems from the enmity between Coligny’s house and that of the Duke of Guise”, nothing more. He went on to state that he had given an order that “they [the Coligny and Guise families] shall not drag my subjects into their quarrels” and that all religious liberties afforded the Huguenots would continue to be honored. By the next day, 23rd August, the investigation into de Coligny’s wounding ordered by the king implicated Henry Guise in the foul deed. With the obvious confirmed by the royal report, wild rumors began circulating that Saturday the Huguenots were arming themselves to avenge their leader’s injury. This theme was buttressed by the fact that a 4,000 strong Huguenot army under de Coligny’s brother-in-law was then camped outside Paris. That was enough for the Catholic zealots and the vast army of Paris beggars, cutthroats, and thieves, whose anger had been rising against the Huguenots for the last four days since the unpopular marriage between Henry of Navarre and Margaret. They demanded the king do something to suppress the presumed Protestant threat.

With Paris on the brink of riot, word came from the king that no citizen was to take up arms against the Huguenots. A royal guard of 50 French and Swiss soldiers was dispatched to de Coligny’s lodgings to protect his person.

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Instructions were sent out to the provincial governors to maintain order. On the surface, it appeared the authorities meant to prevent violence initiated either by Catholics or Huguenots. But in reality, it was all an elaborate sham on the part of King Charles’ government. On the evening of the 22nd, Catherine de Medici met with King Charles and persuaded him that the Guises would, to absolve themselves, blame the royal family for the failed de Coligny assassination attempt. The result would be renewal of civil war. To prevent this, Catherine got the king to agree to carry out a preemptive strike on the scores of Huguenot leaders and their followers in Paris. Shortly after the decision was made to destroy the Huguenot leadership, the city militia captains were directed to arm their men and be ready to spring into action when the signal was sounded. The gates of Paris were closed, and artillery was gathered and placed near the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of Paris’ government. More ominously, none of the Prince of Navarre’s party was allowed to leave the Louvre, and the head of the guard sent to safeguard de Coligny was one Captain Cosseins — an old and sworn enemy of the Admiral’s. Around 4:00 AM on 24 August, the bells of the church of SaintGermain-l’Auxerrois near the Louvre suddenly broke the silent night. Soon the sound of the church bells was joined by the sounds of gunfire. All of Paris soon descended into full riot and chaos. At de Coligny’s home, Cossein and his men stormed in, cleared the stairway leading to the Admiral’s upstairs room of any of de Coligny’s attendants with a volley from their firearms, and broke in to the Huguenot’s room. A page History Magazine June/July 2016

Engraving of Catherine de Medici. Public domain, including in the US

for the Duke of Guise, Besme the German, killed de Coligny with several sword thrusts to the body and face. His body was thrown out a window onto the street just as the Duke of Guise arrived on scene. The Duke, after viewing the lifeless body of his enemy lying at his feet proceeded to kick it in the face. The Admiral’s head was cut off and taken to the Louvre and his body was shamefully mutilated. His mangled corpse was then dragged around the city for

the next three days and finally hung by its feet on a Paris street. His head was later embalmed and sent to Pope Gregory XIII who heartily endorsed the actions of the French monarchy and people toward the heretic Huguenots. When advised of the slaughter in Paris, the vehemently antiProtestant King Philip of Spain was said to have “laughed for the only time on record”. While de Coligny was being murdered, the king’s Swiss Guards, in company with Guise’s henchmen, spread-out over nearby streets to hunt down any and all Huguenot chiefs lodged in the vicinity. At the Louvre, the royal guards paraded the Huguenot guests into the courtyard of the palace, where they were slaughtered by pike and sword. Only Prince Henry of Navarre and his cousin, the Prince of Condé were spared after they pledged to convert to Catholicism; they would both renounce this coerced oath after they escaped Paris. As the pile of Huguenot corpses grew ever larger at the Louvre, the Paris militia and mob went on

Painting of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre by Huguenot painter François Dubois, circa 1572-1583. De Coligny’s headless corpse can be seen near the base of the tower closest to the foreground. Public domain, including in the US

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a killing spree of their own. Chains were used to block city thoroughfares so the Protestants could not escape.

The rampaging Catholics went from house to house through Paris’ commercial district, dispatching any Huguenots found. The bodies of the dead were collected in carts and thrown into the River Seine.

Those French Protestants who attempted to flee by swimming the Seine were ruthlessly pursued by the killers in boats and pushed under water until they drowned. Above the noise of the tramping mobs and cries of the doomed could be heard the justification for the massacre as expressed by the Duke of Guise when the event first commenced: “It is the King’s command.” As blood flowed in the streets of Paris that August 1572, the murder of Huguenots took place in at least 12 other major cities throughout France. The killings, which extended from August till October, began with the news of the massacre in Paris. A few days later, orders from the King enjoined all local authorities to take measures needed, no matter how stern, to deal with French Protestants. All of these urban centers held large Catholic majorities and significant Protestant minorities. Some of the actions against the Huguenots were initiated by royal command, while area nobles and city officials commenced others. During the mass killings in the countryside, many Huguenots immigrated to safer areas or converted to Catholicism to save their lives. It was not until 30 August

Charles IX in front of the Paris Parliament on 26 August 1572 attempting to justify the Saint Bartholomew massacre as a response to a Huguenot plot. Public domain, including in the US

that King Charles issued an edict cancelling previous orders for the persecution of Huguenots, instead enjoining the local leaders to prevent any further attacks. For three days, the gates of Paris remained locked as the massacre continued. On Sunday the 24th, King Charles ordered the city magistrates to restore order and disarm the mob. The official story that day continued the line that the entire affair had been merely a fight between de Coligny and the Guise families, and that the latter took action to preempt a revenge attack by the Huguenots. The king pleaded that he was so hard pressed to ensure the safety of the royal family during

the crisis that he could not effectively intervene to stop the massacre. By Tuesday, the King’s explanation about the massacre took a sharp turn. He went before the Paris Parliament where he stated that the attack on the Huguenots a few days before was necessary to prevent a coup d’état against the regime. “All that has been done in Paris has been done not only with my consent, but at my command,” Charles boasted. The next day he issued a proclamation that the Huguenots would live under royal protection as before, but that the toleration of Protestant worship was to be suspended in France. The following day, the King and his court participated in a procession proclaimed by the Catholic Church to celebrate the destruction of the Huguenots. The death toll of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre has been a subject of debate for centuries. Catholic apologists who witnessed the event set the number of deaths at 2,000. A Huguenot contemporary — duc de Sully — declared it was 70,000. Modern historians have pegged the death toll at a low of 2,000 victims in Paris, and 3,000 in the countryside. Other estimates go from 3,000 in Paris to 7,000 in the provinces. On the high end, modern scholars put forward numbers of 20,000 to 30,000, all told. Although the Pope and Philip of Spain rejoiced at the destruction of the Huguenots during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, other Catholics questioned its wisdom and moral basis. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, King Charles’ Father-inlaw, was sickened by the event and called it “shameful”. Even the savage Czar Ivan the Terrible of Russia, in a letter to the Emperor, expressed horror at the death toll June/July 2016 History Magazine

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exacted by the massacre. Moderate French Catholics began to wonder whether religious uniformity was worth the bloodshed and began to join the ranks of the Politiques movement that placed national unity above sectarian interests. The massacre created an international crisis, and only by a supreme effort did the French government succeed in preventing the entire collapse of its foreign policy. However, it could not stop the renewal of civil war in France, which began anew before the year 1572 ended. On 23 August 1997, Pope John Paul II, who was in Paris for the 12th World Youth Day, issued a statement on the massacre. He stayed in the French capital for three days and made eleven speeches. At a late night vigil, with hundreds of thousands of young people in attendance, the

Holy Father made the following remarks: “On the eve of August 24, we cannot forget the sad massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day; an event of very obscure causes in the political and religious history of France…Christians did things which the Gospel condemns. I am convinced that only forgiveness offered and received leads little by little to a fruitful dialogue, which will, in turn, ensure a fully Christian reconciliation…Belonging to different religious traditions must not constitute today a source of opposition and tension. On the contrary, our common love for Christ impels us to seek tirelessly the path of full unity.” The Pope’s words were meant to continue the process of healing of the still present wound in French society caused by the carnage wrought on that fateful Saint Bartholomew’s day over 443 years ago. Hm

FURTHER READING Arlette Jouanna and Joseph Bergin. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of Crime State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Stephen Budiansky. Her Majesty’s Spymaster (New York: Penguin Group, 2006). Robert Hutchinson. Elizabeth’s Spymaster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006).

ARNOLD BLUMBERG, an attorney residing in Baltimore, Maryland, is the author of “When

Washington Burned: An Illustrated History of the War of 1812” (Casemate Publishers, 2012). A “Fellow by Courtesy” with the Classics Department of the John Hopkins University, he is a regular contributor to numerous military history journals and

Here’s what’s coming... Battle of Harlem Heights ● Ben-Hur Turkey Pete ● Treating the Vapors Vitus Bering ● Daniel Webster Dyed in the Wool ● Glen Curtiss: Aviation Pioneer Walk to Roosevelt’s Grave ● Lynching Story Final Contents Subject to Change

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TRACING YOUR FEMALE ANCESTORS?

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This 68-page special issue is compiled by Gena Philibert-Ortega, a regular contributor to Your Genealogy Today and Internet Genealogy, and the author of From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes. Gena provides readers with a comprehensive collection of tips and strategies for locating female ancestors in a variety of different sources — both common and not-so-common. Articles include: Online resources, Working Women, Women in the Military, African American Female Ancestors, Grandma Was an Alien?, Female Ancestors Pre-1850, Women in the Civil War, Women and Divorce, Women and the Vote, Secret Lives of Women and more. Also includes a special look at Women in Photographs by Maureen Taylor.

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TRACING YOUR FEMALE ANCESTORS VOLUME II

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CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

The First Voyage of Discovery

EXPLORERS

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IN AN EXTRACT FROM HIS BOOK, EIGHTEEN LIVES FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, AUTHOR ROBIN G. JENNER LOOKS AT COOK’S 1768-1771 EXPEDITION C aptain James Cook had been given the commissioned rank of Lieutenant with orders to sail to Tahiti as Captain of ‘HMS Endeavour’. Although his rank was Lieutenant, any officer commanding a ship was referred to as Captain, and his orders were to measure the transit of Venus, which was to be carried out on 3 June 1769. Several sites were set up in different parts of the world and Cook was ordered to sail to Tahiti and to set up their equipment there. They arrived in Tahiti and anchored in Matavai Bay on 13 April 1769. After measuring the transit of Venus, the story then tells how Cook sailed south to attempt to find the southern continent that so-called experts back in Britain say existed, many claiming that it had to be there in order to balance the world’s land mass. Not finding any such land mass, Cook sailed for home via New Zealand, New Holland (Australia), where he mapped the east coast, and then stayed at Dutch Batavia where he docked to have repairs carried out on the ‘Endeavour’ which had hit the Great Barrier Reef on 11 June 1770, sustaining huge damage. He lost many of his crew to the dreadful dysentery that was rife in Batavia before limping home, arriving on 12 July 1771. They had sailed from Plymouth on 26 August 1768 and had been away from England for just a few weeks short of three years. — Robin G. Jenner

Paperback, Kindle Release May 31 2016 536 pages; ISBN: 9781849638814 Price: $24.95 USD; $32.35 CDN; £14.99

n 15th January 1770, they sailed into Queen Charlotte Sound to carry out much needed repairs to the ship. After charting New Zealand, they then sailed off in a north westerly direction until on 28th April they entered what is now known as Botany Bay, so called because of the huge amounts of plant specimens that Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander found, although Cook didn’t actually give it that name until 6th May, a week later. The discovery of this little bay was to have a huge significance on the future of Australia as in 1787, Joseph Banks was to suggest it to be a good place to send English convicts to ease the overcrowding in English prisons. For now though, such a future for the place was the farthest thing from their minds. Later on that day, they set sail to head north up the east coast of New Holland having first taken possession of the whole country in the name of King George III. The next major event to happen was on 11th June when the Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef. She was stuck fast and in

mortal danger because any attempt to heave her off could mean that her hull would be ripped open and the ship, alone in the Pacific would sink. They jettisoned all ballast including the ship’s guns and waited for high tide. The water was rising rapidly in the bilges and the crew were taking it in turns to pump in order to keep the levels down. The jettisoning of the ballast did nothing as high tide came and went and the ship didn’t move. Meanwhile their position worsened as the fourth pump didn’t work and

O

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EXPLORERS

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This is a 1893 chart of the track taken by the HMS Endeavour during Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Public domain

the water was gaining. At the next high tide, Cook decided to take a huge gamble and attempt to free her with one supreme effort. Cook wrote in his log for the 12th: “I resolved to risk all and heave her off… and accordingly turned as many spare hands to the capstan and windlass as could be spared from the pumps. About twenty minutes past ten o’clock in the evening the ship floated and we hove her off into deep water having at this time 3 feet 9 inches in the hold.”

They were not in any way out of danger however as there was a huge hole in the ship and the pumps were still being manned in fifteen minute shifts.

Midshipman Johnathan Monkhouse, brother of the surgeon, knew of a way to temporarily plug the hole while still at sea — a method called fothering, which he had learned on a previous spell at sea. This was a technique whereby a sail, sewn with tufts of wool and oakum and spread with sheep’s dung, was

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used to plug the gap. Monkhouse managed to carry this procedure out satisfactorily and in such a way that a single pump only was needed to keep the water at bay. Cook later said that: “Monkhouse executed the manoeuvre very much to my satisfaction”. From Cook, who had a tendency to understate everything, this was high praise. What he was probably meaning to say, was that Monkhouse had done a truly excellent job. Brilliant though this was however, there was no way that this would get them all the way back to England, and Cook resolved to make for Dutch Batavia where he could make more permanent repairs before undertaking the final part of the journey home. Despite the perilous position that the ship and the crew had been in, there was complete calm and everyone had carried out their duties efficiently and quickly. Cook was never more proud of a ship’s crew than he had been during this time. Now that they were seemingly safe, the crew were much more cheerful, but they had no idea that the place they were sailing into on 11th October 1770, Dutch Batavia, was rife with dysentery and disease, and whilst the local craftsmen

made repairs to the ship, the stop proved a disaster for the health and welfare of the crew. Cook had no choice other than to stop in Batavia, but the sanitary conditions were disgusting and the diseased city proved too much for what had been a fairly healthy crew. Dysentery and malaria were rife in Batavia and many of the Endeavour’s crew succumbed to the diseases. Ironically, Surgeon Monkhouse was the first to die, Banks and Solander were both ill, but survived. Tupia, the Tahitian that Banks had brought with him died as did his servant, Tiata. Cook noted in his log that he felt that Tupia’s death was not only the result of the diseases at Batavia, but also brought on by the lack of fresh vegetables that he enjoyed at home but were not available in enough quantities on the Endeavour. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it has to be said that it was a disastrous decision to take him away from his people, much as he had wanted to go. By the time they left Batavia on Boxing Day, 1770, Cook had recruited nineteen men to take the place of those crewmen that had died, but still further deaths were going to happen. Hermann Sporing and the gentle mannered

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Sydney Parkinson both died leaving hundreds of botanical drawings behind. Any death is to be mourned, but it seemed that the talented members of Joseph Banks’ entourage were particularly vulnerable. Charles Green died and the aged John Ravenhill succumbed. They sailed on but still the deaths kept coming – Midshipman John Bootle, and Jonathan Monkhouse, the surgeon’s brother whose temporary repairs had done so much to enable the Endeavour to stay afloat, also died.

All in all, thirty-nine met their deaths as a result of them making repairs in Batavia.

Apart from the overall tragedy of it all, it was a dreadful irony for Cook to return home having lost so many men after all his care in keeping the crew healthy. The Endeavour sailed from Batavia and reached home on 12th July 1771. The first voyage was finished and despite his own misgivings, Cook’s achievements were immense. He had ascertained that New Zealand consisted of two islands; he had charted the eastern coast of Australia, and had explored and mapped more of the Pacific than any man before him. He had not quite disproved the existence of Dalrymple’s land mass but had created doubts where there had previously been none, and reduced the area that was left to search in the event of future voyages.

Image of an official portrait of James Cook by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, around 1775-76. Public domain

Although viewed from a distance that the voyage could be considered a great success, at the time, Cook was somewhat disappointed. Whilst Joseph Banks was welcomed home and feted for all the plant specimens that he had returned home with, Cook was left with negative feelings. He felt that he hadn’t quite got the readings of the Transit of Venus right, although in retrospect, the readings were better than he thought. He hadn’t disproved what he was convinced was the mythical southern continent, although again, he was proved correct in that, and he wanted to map even more of the Pacific Islands than he already had. As it happened, it wasn’t going to be too long before the chance came. Cook was promoted to Commander, a disappointment as he had hoped and expected to be promoted to Post Captain. For now though, that would have to wait. The Admiralty were soon planning a second trip for James Cook, and this time his orders would be to sail further south than before to prove or disprove once and for all the existence of the southern continent otherwise known as ‘Terra Australis Incognito’. Joseph Banks was once again to sail with him but although Banks and Cook had become friends, there was soon to be a problem. At the age of twentyeight, Banks was still young and had probably allowed the fame gained from the first trip to go to his head. On this second trip, there were to be two ships, not one, and whilst there was no problem with the idea of two ships which Cook agreed was necessary, Banks thought that he would be taking command of the expedition but this was never going to happen for the same reason that Dalrymple wasn’t given command of the first trip. Given June/July 2016 History Magazine

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EXPLORERS

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Image of Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies in what is now North Jakarta, circa 1780. Public domain, including in the US

that Banks was well aware of the row that had happened between Dalrymple and the Admiralty before the first voyage, it was odd that he thought he would be allowed to take command. Banks also took issue with the type of vessel that Cook wanted which was of course, the Whitby Cat. Banks said that the Whitby Cats were far too small and he wanted frigates and for a while there was stalemate. In the end, it was agreed that two Whitby Cats, the Resolution and the Adventure would be used, but that Banks would supervise alterations to suit his needs. However, Banks was not a naval person, had no clue as to how a ship should be designed, and when finished, it was found that his alterations made the ship completely top heavy and totally unseaworthy. When told that his work would have to be reversed, Banks behaved in a petulant manner and in the end withdrew from the trip. Even without the unsuitable alterations, the trip as it stood was a complete non-starter anyway, given that the Admiralty would never have allowed Joseph Banks, a civilian, to command two ships, regardless of whether they were Whitby Cats or Frigates. By

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this time, Sir Edward Hawke had been replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty by Lord Sandwich, but the naval policy of who should take command remained unaltered much as they appreciated what Banks had achieved on the Endeavour. The new First Lord, John Montagu (1718-92), the 4th Earl Sandwich, had enjoyed a good career. He had been made First Lord of the Admiralty in 1748 at the age of thirty, staying there for three years until 1751. He was Postmaster General in 1768, Secretary of State in 1770 and back again as First Lord, holding the post for most of the time that Lord North (1732-92) was Prime Minister which was from 1770 until 1782. Sandwich held the post of First Lord from 1771 until March, 1782. He had a reputation for hard living and had been a member of the notorious Hellfire Club which was full of hell raisers like himself. He has also been given credit for inventing the sandwich which enabled him to keep gambling without leaving the table, or allowing him to carry on with working at his desk, whichever version people want to believe. Sandwich was a completely different man from

Hawke, but where both men agreed was the fact that only a serving naval officer could be in overall command of the trip and this is possibly another reason why Banks misjudged the situation. Despite the difference in ages, Sandwich and Banks were close friends and it may have been this fact, along with the manner in which he, Banks, had been lauded after the first trip that made Banks think that he could lead the expedition. Banks has had a bad press over the years for his behaviour, and probably correctly so, but in fairness to him, he was putting up much of the money himself, and would argue that he merely wanted to be comfortable over what would be a three year voyage. In the end, he withdrew, and a replacement was found in Johann Reinhold Forster (172998) and his son George (1754-94). Forster senior was a German botanist-philosopher-church minister. He was rude, pedantic, self righteous, and managed to anger everybody he came into contact with. Fortunately, his son George was of a nicer disposition but there were many times that Cook and his crew yearned for Joseph Banks to be on board. Banks was many things and sometimes annoyed the officers, but he had charm in abundance, something that no-one accused Forster of having. Hm Born in 1946, ROBIN JENNER has had a varied career that includes working as a musician, songwriter, Oxfam worker, community worker in deprived areas of London and a Financial Adviser to companies in London’s West End. Semi retired, he now works as a volunteer in Gloucester Cathedral.

History June-July 2016F_Layout 1 2016-05-12 1:41 PM Page 47

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AMERICAN AUTHORS

Undated photo of Hamlin Garland at his desk in his Mapleshade residence.

rich farmland on the expanding frontier. It’s illuminative for us to revisit a few words of description of Wisconsin and West Salem as written by Hamlin Garland:

HAMLIN GARLAND

‘Novelist of Northwest Farmer Country’

BRIAN D’AMBROSIO REVEALS THE LIFE OF AN ALMOST FORGOTTEN MIDWEST WORDSMITH AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

S

ome pithy poet once said, “A man lives, he dies; he is only killed by forgetfulness.” Generals, statesmen, celebrities, sports figures, movie stars, and writers are by and large the types of characters who, for better or worse, usually keep and store well in the collective recall of public awareness. But while history records them as notable, often the communities in which they labored or lived irrespectively overlook their native yields. Many fail dismally even to remember or to recognize the value of their distinct achievements. Since its beginning in 1851, West Salem, Wisconsin has seen many noteworthy events take place and many an individual has left their mark upon the village. One of the most consequential is Hamlin Garland. To think of and

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to understand Garland, a prolific author and poet, it is necessary to begin by keeping in mind the forces which brought his parents to West Salem; to see his father, Richard Garland, as he pushed onward toward the goal of level,

“My Wisconsin birthplace has always been a source of deep satisfaction to me. That a lovely valley should form the first picture in my childhood memories is a priceless endowment. It doesn’t matter so much what Green’s Coulee looks like now or what it looked like to grown-ups in 1865. It will always remain a charming and mysterious place to me.” “It is still vivid in my mind. I have but to close my eyes to the present, and the tiger lilies bloom again in its meadows. The mowers toss up once more the scarlet sprays of strawberries. The blackbirds rise in clouds from out of the ripening corn. A hundred other sights and sounds, equally beautiful and equally significant, fill my inner vision.” Born in Greenwood, Maine on 1 April 1830, Richard Garland ran away from home to work on a railroad. Later, he returned home and persuaded his parents to move westward. Arriving in Milwaukee in 1850, they started out across the promising countryside. Weeks later, they had arrived in an open meadow not far from the Mississippi River and the Minnesota border, a place called Green’s Coulee. To the east was a mill pond. A trout brook came in from the north, and a grist mill rose against a conical hill around whose base the mighty river ran in a reedy curve. On the bottom lands to the west, scattered pines were growing, and along the edges of these groves and on the banks

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of the stream, a group of wigwams denoted the presence of Indians. Here they laid down roots. Richard worked at various jobs, always dreaming of owning his own farm. He soon married Charlotte Isabelle McClintock. It was in a squatter’s cabin, halfway between West Salem and the county hospital that Dr. William Hughes Stanley delivered a baby boy, christened Hannibal Hamlin Garland, on 14 September 1860. During the Civil War, Richard joined the Union army. Upon his return, the family moved westward, making their new home in Winnesheik County, Iowa, in 1868. After spending his teenage years in rural Iowa, Garland became a teacher in the Boston School of Oratory. Between the years of 1885 and 1889, he taught private classes in both English and American literature. Some time was also spent lecturing on land reform in and around Boston, where he made the acquaintance of Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, William Dean Howells, Edwin Booth and other worthies. A trip in 1887 back to Wisconsin led him to write his Mississippi Valley stories. His impressions induced a mood of bitterness. During the weeks he worked on his father’s farm, he became aware that every detail of his daily life on the farm was

LEFT:

assuming literary significance in his mind. “The quick callusing of my hands, the swelling of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of physical pain I noted down…Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time my toil had to be is warfare…I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and the monstrous injustice of social creeds.” It was three years later that Main Travelled Roads was published. An instant attack was made on the book in the Midwest because it pictured the ugliness, endless drudgery and loneliness of life on a farm. Reviewers in the East, such as William Dean Howells, however, praised him. “The stories are full of those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds,” wrote Howells in Harper’s Magazine. “The type caught in Mr. Garland’s book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heartbreaking in its rude despair.” In 1891, his first novel, A Spoil of Office, was published. It was based on the political unrest in the agricultural regions of the country. The Populist movement was now in its heyday, and Hamlin’s father, Richard, was a

delegate to the Omaha convention of the Populists. The winter of 1892 was spent in New York, but the following year, Garland moved his headquarters to Chicago. One year later, Hamlin bought his parents their first home, called the Hays house, in West Salem. It was situated on the road leading to the town of Mindoro, where so many of his mother’s family and friends lived. Built in 1857, the house was part of a wooded four acre lot, and immediately, Hamlin began enlarging it, raising the west end to the two story bay window first, tearing out the partition in the living room, putting in a furnace and bathroom. The only part left unchanged was the stairway. From 1893-1915, Garland summered there, and from 1916-1938, he extended his stays from spring till fall. In 1912, an overheated grease fire, which started in the kitchen when the maid was lighting the fire in the oil stove, destroyed much of the home. But Hamlin quickly restored it. The Garlands had the first tennis court in West Salem and tennis parties were frequently held there. Named “Mapleshade” for the beautiful maple trees which shaded the kitchen and rear entry, it held tremendous views of the surrounding hills and valleys. Garland’s mother lived permanently in the house; Richard continued to spend summers in Dakota.

Garland’s Mapleshade home (date unknown) in West Salem, Wisconsin. RIGHT: Mapleshade as it appears today.

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Hamlin’s first born child with his wife, Zulime Taft, a daughter named Mary Isabel, was born in West Salem in 1903, while the second, Constance Hamlin, was born in Chicago in 1907. Their summers were spent in West Salem until 1915 when they began summering in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The folks of West Salem recall Garland as an eccentric and withdrawn man, as an article in the Saturday Sentinel alludes: “The inhabitants of La Crosse County have been troubled by the fact that he writes books. From the society of these blissfully unliterary persons he departs each year into the book sets of Chicago and New York where he is more profoundly terrorized at the display of new books.” It was written that Garland might be met on the street, but never acknowledged the passerby. One woman, Mrs. Tilson, who lived across the street from Garland for many years, when asked how she ever got the man to return her greeting, said that the exchange happened only because she had been “working on it for twenty years”. It was in 1917 that A Son of the Middle Border was published. The next year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Four years hence, A Daughter of the Middle Border was published. For this novel, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for best biography of 1921. The University of Wisconsin gave Garland the degree of Doctor of Letters on 21 June 1926. In bestowing this honor, Professor Frederick Paxson said: “Hamlin Garland is the novelist of our northwest farmer country. For thirty-five years, his easy pen has worked at the life of our people…His writings are

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words of art, but they are also documents that may become the source of history…as the preserver of the fact and flavor that gave identity to the Middle Border from which we sprang.” Garland sold Mapleshade in 1938. In the long run, every man has to shut down — Garland died in 1940 at his home in Hollywood, California — and if he is remembered thereafter, it is by the effort of others. In 1959, Errol Kindschy was a young man, barely into his 20s, when he first saw the village of West Salem through the eyes of a fledgling social studies teacher. He had only been in the town for two weeks before the school year began, and on the first day, he posed the same opening inquiry to each of the six classes he was hired to instruct. “I asked if anybody famous was from this area,” recalls Kindschy. “For five classes, I was told quite affirmatively no. But on the last class of the day, one of the boys raised his hand, and he said that an author of some kind was from the town. He didn’t even know his name. This got me curious.” Kindschy asked neighbors and coworkers about this famous mystery man, most of whom knew nearly nothing about the accomplished writer beyond the vague recognition of his name: Hamlin Garland. There was one woman, however, one Rachel Gullickson, who was rather offended by Kindschy because he didn’t know the slightest bit about Garland. Not only was she familiar with Garland, a huge fan of his writing talents, but she lived in what was once his homestead. “Gullickson moved in when Garland moved out,” said Kindschy. “This made me even more interested in Garland, and also

quite interested in the fact that no history of West Salem had ever been written. When the Garland homestead came up for sale in 1972, I bought it, restored it, formed the West Salem Historical Society, and resold it to the society at a low rate.” Thanks to Wisconsin Historical Society funds, donations and volunteer muscle, the Hamlin Garland Homestead was restored to the period of 1912 to 1915. The restoration of the Garland Homestead, which neatly reversed the structure from a jumbled three apartment subdivide, started in 1974, and concluded two years later, opening to the public on 4 July 1976. “It’s been 40 years and most of Wisconsin still doesn’t know we are here,” says Kindschy. He wants to push forward nevertheless. He intends to translate some of Garland’s better material into German and Japanese himself. Plus, he still has ample material from Garland’s extensive catalogue to get acquainted with. “I’ve read thirty-eight out of the fifty-two books Garland wrote,” says Kindschy. “And, honestly, some of them I wish I never picked up, and some of them are fantastic. Main Travelled Roads and Trailmakers, which is the story of the Garlands coming into this area, are my favorites.” Hm (Photos courtesy of author’s collection)

BRIAN D’AMBROSIO lives, works in, and writes from Missoula, Montana. He contributes regularly to multiple publications on a vast variety of subjects. His most recent contribution to History Magazine was a piece on A.P. Giannini: “America’s Banker”, which appeared in the Feb/Mar 2016 issue.

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BOOKS

HINDSIGHT

JUNE/JULY 2016

A BOOK OF COOKERY BY A LADY by Kimberly K. Walters

This is a must have for lovers of history, both for hearth and modern cooking. An 18th century cookery book modeled after, and taken from, those of centuries past. This book is a compendium of: Recipes; Etiquette Terms; Utensils, Equipment and Measurements; How to Take Tea; How to Carve; What to Eat During Lent; Items in Season or in Use in the Colonies; How Dishes are to be Placed on the Table; Celebrating Christmas; and More. Published by Author Kimberly K. Walters; 344 pages ISBN: 978-0-692-26980-0; Price: $45.00 Available from: Ingram or the Author: Contact- [email protected] for order information.

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

THE REFERENCE SHELF FROM ANCIENT BABYLON TO WIKIPEDIA by Jack Lynch

You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny’s Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius’s first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.

LINCOLN’S BODY

A CULTURAL HISTORY by Richard Wightman Fox

In this inspired, swift-moving historiography, the mythmaking and martyrdom of Lincoln began the moment the president lost consciousness. From the blood-spattered clothing secreted away to the many gatherings and orations, the public felt Lincoln’s death as deeply as that of a beloved friend. His three-week funeral train solidified that physical connection. Seventeen-year-old sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, having viewed Lincoln once, got back in line, waiting hours to see the corpse a second time. Twenty-two years later, he made the first Lincoln statue that everyone agreed did him justice. The body of Lincoln had similar effects on memorialists, biographers, and artists for more than a century, from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Gore Vidal. The story of Lincoln’s Body is the story of the tension between Lincoln, liberator of the slaves, and Lincoln, unifier of the nation. African Americans reaffirmed Lincoln’s legacy as an emancipator for decades. But from the 1870s through the civil-rights era, ongoing racial inequality was whitewashed out of national Lincoln piety. The 1922 dedication ceremony of the Lincoln Memorial was segregated; it took Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King Jr., to redeem the legacy. Published by W.W. Norton 416 pages ISBN: 978-0-393-06530-5 Price: $28.95

Published by Bloomsbury Press 464 pages ISBN: 978-0-802-77752-2 Price: $30.00

June/July 2016 History Magazine

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BOOKS

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PUMPKINFLOWERS A SOLDIER’S STORY by Matti Friedman

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties”. Awardwinning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Published by Algonquin Books; 256 pages ISBN: 978-1616204587; Price: $25.95

THE KING’S BED

SEX, POWER AND THE COURT OF CHARLES II by Don Jordan & Michael Walsh

When Charles II ascended to the throne in 1660, he ushered in a newly reconstituted court built on pleasure and giddy sensuality, flying in the face of the previous Puritan emphasis on chastity. To refer to the King’s “private” life is to abuse the word: Charles’ sexual exploits were largely conducted in royal palaces, surrounded by friends, courtiers, and literally hundreds of servants and soldiers. Charles spent most of his wealth and his intellect on gaining and keeping the company of women, from the actress Nell Gwyn to the aristocratic Louise de Kérouaille (who just so happened to be a French spy and played a key role in making England a puppet nation of the Sun King, Louis XIV). In The King’s Bed, veteran historians Don Jordan and Michael Walsh dive headfirst into Charles’ dissolute life and surprising legacy. The compelling story of a king ruled first and foremost by his passion, The King’s Bed is an astonishing and intimate history of Charles II that reveals much about the man he was – why he lived and ruled as he did. Published by Pegasus Books; 374 pages 8 pages of color and B&W illustrations ISBN: 978-1-60598-963-3; Price: $28.95

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History Magazine June/July 2016

NO ORDINARY MEN

SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES MISSIONS IN AFGHANISTAN by Colonel Bernd Horn

The first in-depth book that sheds light on Canada’s elite warriors who operate in the shadows. In 2001, the Canadian government sent elements of the elite Joint Task Force 2 counter-terrorist unit to Afghanistan to assist the United States in its global war on terror as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Withdrawn a year later, JTF 2 returned to Afghanistan in 2005 to once again assist the Americans with the desperate struggle in the shadows to capture or kill Taliban leaders, facilitators, and bomb makers. No Ordinary Men peels back the cloak of secrecy and reveals four untold special operations that JTF 2 operators conducted in 2005-06 in which their courage, tenacity, and impressive capabilities meant the difference between life and death. The book takes the reader to the Taliban sanctuaries deep in the Afghan hinterlands and provides a glimpse of Canada’s remarkable legacy in special operations. Published by Dundurn; 288 pages; 10 B&W illustrations 49 color illustrations; ISBN: 9781459724136 Price: $24.99; Also available as an e-book

WHEN WE ARE NO MORE

HOW DIGITAL MEMORY IS SHAPING OUR FUTURE by Abby Smith Rumsey

Deftly examining the history of memory from caves to computer chips, When We Are No More explores the extraordinary and unique ability of humans to accumulate and share knowledge across time and space. Rumsey shows how our personal and cultural memories are intimately intertwined; how both are shaped and sometimes controlled by political forces and economic interests and how our digital abundance makes it harder, not easier, to secure important historical archives for future generations. Though the average web page lasts 100 days, ease of online access dupes people into a false sense of security that information – our information – will be equally accessible in the future. We no longer write history in hard copy. There will be no equivalent Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or a grandmother’s letters. Rumsey explains what each of us can do to ensure people tomorrow will be able to access records of today. How we store information in the digital age will determine how we know our own past and how people will remember us when we are gone. Published by Bloomsbury; 240 pages ISBN: 978-1-62040-802-5; Price: $28.00

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History Magazine is pleased to announce The History of Railroads. This 84-page special issue, compiled by History Magazine author David A. Norris covers a wide range of railroad history in the US, Canada and abroad.

Articles include: The Transcontinental Railroad, Travel on the Orient Express, The Canadian Pacific Railway, The Panama Railroad, Civil War Train Travel, The Great Locomotive Chase, World War One Trains, A Look at Pullman Cars, Casey Jones and Old ‘97, Owney the Mail Dog, and Train Robberies. Call our toll-free number at 1-888-326-2476, ext. 111 and have your credit card ready, or visit www.history-magazine.com and order through our secure shopping cart. We accept VISA, Mastercard or PayPal. Order Today!

Cover: Train locomotive, Mid-Continent Museum, Wisconsin (Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

$9.95 plus $4.50 shipping

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Cover and contents subject to change

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