“To read History is to run the risk of asking, ‘Which is more honorable? To rule over people, or to be hanged?'” — J.G. Seume
History
Homeward
Perhaps the most touching story is told by a Canadian, Flight-Commander R. Leckie, D.S.O., in a letter home, published in an American paper. After an engagement with hostile aircraft over the North Sea he came down, his seaplane riddled with shrapnel, over fifty miles from land, and then had to act as rescuer and host to the crew of an aeroplane, wrecked by engine failure. Six men were then adrift in a doomed machine, with no food and little water. The Commander had four pigeons; one was released at once, a second on the next day, a third on the third day. All failed to reach home, perishing over the waste of waters. The fourth, set free in a fog, hungry and thirsty, struggled over the fifty miles of sea without a landmark and without a rest. He could not reach his loft, but fluttered down in a coastguard station, and there fell dead from exhaustion. But his message was delivered, and six men were saved.
— Bird Notes and News, Winter 1918
Spirit
In November 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a volume of Apuleius from the Bristol Library.
In the borrowers’ register, in place of the date, he wrote, “9 Dutch ships taken, with 3000 troops Bravo.”
Plan A
The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.
Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.
“The Greedy Robbers”
In his 2007 history The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker reports that sharks would sometimes follow slave ships entirely across the Atlantic, “that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard,” in the words of veteran captain Hugh Crow. Observer Alexander Falconbridge wrote that sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes.”
A notice published in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1785 reads, “The many Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become extremely dangerous, even above town.”
In a natural history of sharks published in 1774, Oliver Goldsmith tells of a “rage for suicide” aboard one ship, whose captain made an example of one woman by lowering her into the water:
“When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.”
Bother
Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly the Duke of Wellington sent this letter to the British War Office during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814:
Gentlemen:
Whilst marching to Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your request which has been sent by H. M. ship from London to Lisbon and then by dispatch rider to our headquarters.
We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents, and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.
Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensive carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may have come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen at Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability but I cannot do both:
- To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance
- To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
Your most obedient servant,
Wellington
The Portuguese Fireplace
This unusual memorial stands in the New Forest National Park near Lyndhurst, Hampshire. At the start of World War I, manpower shortages prevented England from importing enough Canadian timber to supply the war’s needs, so English forests had to be felled to meet the requirement. The local foresters were away fighting, so a Portuguese Army unit with the Canadian Timber Corps lent its aid. The fireplace is all that remains of their cookhouse, and has preserved to honor their contribution.
The plaque reads, “This is the site of a hutted camp occupied by a Portuguese army unit during the first World War. This unit assisted the depleted local labour force in producing timber for the war effort. The Forestry Commission have retained the fireplace from the cookhouse as a memorial to the men who lived and worked here and acknowledge the financial assistance of the Portuguese government in its renovation.”
Operation Cornflakes
To disrupt German morale during World War II, the Allies hatched a plan to send anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through the mail. They quizzed prisoners of war about the German postal service and drew on local telephone directories to identify 2 million addressees who might receive forged letters and subversive material. Then the letters were loaded into counterfeit mailbags and dropped near destroyed trains in the hope that they’d be collected and delivered.
By 1945 twenty missions had been completed, but by then many German homes had been destroyed and their inhabitants killed or displaced, so the operation had limited effect. Above is a striking stamp prepared for the effort — the subscript on the “death head” stamp reads “Futsches Reich” (ruined empire) rather than “Deutsches Reich” (German Empire). Altogether 96,000 stamps were prepared for the effort, but the “death head” stamp may never have been used.
In the Fold
Just found this on Wikimedia Commons — “Where Is the Fifth Pig?”, an anonymous puzzle created in occupied Holland in 1940:
Two Dire Punishments
Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water.
In his Life of Artaxerxes, Plutarch describes an ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism in which vermin devour a victim trapped between mated boats:
Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lie down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, then forcing him to ingest a mixture of milk and honey before pouring all over his face and body. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed.
Happily Plutarch seems to have based his account on a report by the Greek historian Ctesias, whose reliability has been questioned, so perhaps this never happened.