Senior Citizen

http://books.google.com/books?id=jFo-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=wonderful+characters&as_brr=4&ei=d34RS56MCZecyATpk_iSDQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

We know when Henry Jenkins died: Dec. 9, 1670. What we don’t know is when he was born. The Bolton laborer claimed to remember driving a cartload of arrows to North Allerton as a boy at the Battle of Flodden Field. That would mean he had been born in 1501 and was 169 years old at his death. Whether that’s true is anyone’s guess, but that’s the age that’s engraved on his tombstone.

If it is true, one author reckons, he certainly led an eventful life:

In his time the Invincible Armada was destroyed; the republic of Holland formed; three queens beheaded, Anne Boleyn, Catharine Howard, and Mary Queen of Scots; a king of Spain seated upon the throne of England; a king of Scotland crowned king of England at Westminster, and his son beheaded before his own palace, his family being proscribed as traitors; and, last of all, the great fire in London, which happened in 1666, toward the close of his wonderful life.

Indeed, to be a dutiful subject of the crown, he’d have had to change his religion eight times:

http://books.google.com/books?id=mkEFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA242&dq=%22mirror+of+literature%22+%22henry+jenkins%22&ei=JOANS8S2A56MzgTm-Z2DDQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

((From The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Oct. 17, 1829.)

| History · Oddities

Forewarned

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HG_Wells_Land_Ironclads_1904.jpg

H.G. Wells’ 1903 story “The Land Ironclads” imagined a bold new war machine — a massive armored vehicle, “something between a big blockhouse and a giant’s dish-cover,” that ground remorselessly across the battlefield and gunned down enemy infantry:

They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. The engineers directed the engines under the command of the captain, who had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and who could also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a small cabin of peculiar construction, and these cabins were slung along the sides of and before and behind the great main framework, in a manner suggestive of the slinging of the seats of an Irish jaunting-car.

Thirteen years later, the first British tanks appeared at the Somme.

See The War Ahead.

| History · Technology

A Bad Week

On Aug. 6, 1945, Mitsubishi engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima visiting the company shipyard when the Enola Gay‘s atomic bomb exploded overhead.

Badly burned, he spent the night in an air raid shelter and then returned to his hometown.

He was explaining the ordeal to his supervisor there when “at that moment, outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over.”

He lived in Nagasaki.

| History · Oddities

Slow Maltreated Wailing

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William Gladstone was cursed with a well-balanced name, one that his political enemies found well suited to anagrams. The conservative-minded Lewis Carroll found that WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE can be rearranged to spell both WILD AGITATOR! MEANS WELL and WILT TEAR DOWN ALL IMAGES?

The prime minister might have shrugged this off as a coincidence — “wild agitator” might mean anything, after all — but a more painstaking student found that RIGHT HONOURABLE WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE spells I’M A WHIG WHO’LL BE A TRAITOR TO ENGLAND’S RULE.

Which is rather too specific to disown.

| History · Language

Tempus Edax Rerum

Visiting Rome in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain reflects on “the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame.” He imagines how the people of 5868 A.D. will remember Ulysses S. Grant:

URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT — popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’

“These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”

| History · Literature

The Ni’ihau Incident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Niihau_sep_2007.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

You don’t hear much about the smallest Hawaiian island, Ni’ihau — it’s been privately owned since 1864, and it’s inhabited almost entirely by native Hawaiians.

So everyone was largely unprepared when a Japanese fighter plane crashed on the island on Dec. 7, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

What followed would make a gripping screenplay. The natives took the pilot’s pistol and papers, and then endured a week’s terror as he roamed the island trying to retrieve them. Ni’ihau had no electricity or telephones, so the desperate natives tried signalling Kauai with lanterns and a bonfire and finally sent a party to row the laborious 10 hours for help. By the time they returned, their friends had killed the pilot in a climactic battle.

The pilot’s Japanese hometown has erected a stone column in his honor. It claims that he died in battle, and says “his meritorious deed will live forever.”

| History

Right Cross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kungsgatan_1967.jpg

On Sept. 3, 1967, every car in Sweden came to a stop at 4:50 a.m., carefully switched from the left side of the road to the right, and proceeded at 5 a.m.

The whole nation switched to right-hand traffic overnight. And to the planners’ immense credit, no fatal accidents were associated with the change, and accident rates went down in the year that followed.

| History · Oddities · Society

Unimpressed

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincolnatgettysburg.jpg

This is the only confirmed photo of Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken about three hours before he gave his address. Not everyone loved the speech:

  • Chicago Times: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
  • Harrisburg Patriot and Union: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
  • London Times: “Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.”

Lincoln delivered the 10-sentence, 3-minute speech only after a 2-hour, 13,607-word oration by former secretary of state Edward Everett. When Everett sent Lincoln his compliments the next day, the president replied, “I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”

| History