A Last Performance

Charles Guiteau, James Garfield’s assassin, read a poem at the gallows:

I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad. I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad. I am going to the Lordy, Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! I am going to the Lordy!

I love the Lordy with all my soul, Glory hallelujah! And that is the reason I am going to the Lord. Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! I am going to the Lord.

I saved my party and my land, Glory hallelujah! But they have murdered me for it, and that is the reason I am going to the Lordy. Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! I am going to the Lordy!

I wonder what I will do when I get to the Lordy, I guess that I will weep no more when I get to the Lordy! Glory hallelujah!

I wonder what I will see when I get to the Lordy, I expect to see most splendid things, beyond all earthly conception, when I am with the Lordy! Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! I am with the Lord.

He asked for an orchestral accompaniment, but it was denied.

11/18/2023 UPDATE: Improbably, Guiteau eventually got his accompaniment — in Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins, his character sings part of the poem while cakewalking up and down the scaffold:

(Thanks, Molly.)

| Death · History

Interlopers

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Hidden on the back of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is an engraving of Kilroy, the ubiquitous graffito that accompanied American GIs through Europe and, later, around the world. Some earlier inscriptions:

Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia has stood since 537, built by Justinian I as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople. It wasn’t until 1964 that runic inscriptions were discovered in the southern gallery, apparently engraved by members of the Varangian Guard during the Viking Age. Their meaning isn’t certain, but one may have read “Halfdan carved these runes” and the other “Ári made the runes.” More may yet be found.

The Piraeus Lion, one of four marble lion statues now at the Venetian Arsenal, bears runic inscriptions apparently made by Scandinavians in the 11th century, when it had stood in Athens. One reads, “Asmund cut these runes with Asgeir and Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, at the request of Harold the Tall, though the Greeks considered about and forbade it.” The other reads, “Hakon with Ulf and Asmund and Örn conquered this port. These men and Harold Hafi imposed a heavy fine on account of the revolt of the Greek people. Dalk is detained captive in far lands. Egil is gone on an expedition with Ragnar into Romania and Armenia.”

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Images: Wikimedia Commons
| History

Misc

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  • The Dutch word for cease-fire negotiations is wapenstilstandsonderhandelingen.
  • Rearrange the letters in ONE THOUSAND KILOS and you get OH, SOUNDS LIKE A TON! (Hans-Peter Reich)
  • 1167882 + 3211682 = 116788321168
  • The Irish for chess, ficheall, derives from the Old Irish fidchell, “wood intelligence.”
  • “Life is a school of probability.” — Walter Bagehot

A tiny detail that I hope is true: In Time in World History (2019), historian Peter Stearns writes that before watches became affordable, some European soldiers “took their own roosters with them so they would wake up on time.”

| History · Language · Quotations · Science & Math

Signature

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In the 13th century, in England’s Worcester Priory, an anonymous scribe worked at inserting interlinear notations into Old English manuscripts. Though his identity has been lost, his shaky, leftward-sloping handwriting is so distinctive that he’s noted among scholars more than 700 years later. He’s known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester.

The cause of the tremor is uncertain, but its identifiable character has shed light on the evolution of the language and on the ability to read Old English in this period. “For us at least,” writes literary scholar Christine Franzen, “his infirmity was fortuitous — if his hand had remained steady and unchanged throughout his glossing career, it might have been impossible to distinguish the layers of glossing, but as it is, we can watch his methods and knowledge develop along with his tremble.”

(Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester, 1991.)

| History · Language

Renewal

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After Archimedes’ death in 212 B.C., his tomb in Sicily fell into obscurity and was eventually lost. It was rediscovered by, of all people, Cicero, who had been sent to the island in 75 B.C. to administer corn production:

When I was Quaestor, I tracked down his grave; the Syracusans not only had no idea where it was, they denied it even existed. I found it surrounded and covered by brambles and thickets. I remembered that some lines of doggerel I had heard were inscribed on his tomb to the effect that a sphere and a cylinder had been placed on its top. So I took a good look around (for there are a lot of graves at the Agrigentine Gate cemetery) and noticed a small column rising a little way above some bushes, on which stood a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately told the Syracusans (some of their leading men were with me) that I thought I had found what I was looking for. Slaves were sent in with scythes to clear the ground and once a path had been opened up we approached the pedestal. About half the lines of the epigram were still legible although the rest had worn away.

“So, you see, one of the most celebrated cities of Greece, once upon a time a great seat of learning too, would have been ignorant of the grave of one of its most intellectually gifted citizens — had it not been for a man from Arpinum who pointed it out to them.”

(From Anthony Everitt, Cicero, 2003.)

| History · Science & Math

Impromptu

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Image: Royal Academy of Music

This is charming: Looking for a place to practice her drawing one day, an anonymous child in the 1700s chose the blank spaces in a music book. In doing so, she made herself immortal, as the music is now held in university collections.

The figure at left is scrawled in John Wilbye’s Second Set of Madrigales, now at the Royal Academy of Music; the one on the right is in Thomas Weelkes’ Balletts and Madrigals at Harvard. Drawings and handwriting exercises apparently by the same child appear in music books at UCLA, Huntington Library, and the University of Illinois. (The drawings all appear in tenor books, which suggests that these copies had been bound in one volume when the girl drew the pictures.)

The child’s identity is unknown, although the name Eliza Richardson accompanies one practice alphabet. She seems to be drawing the same woman consistently, recognizable by her prominent nose, strong chin, and thick neck. It’s not clear when the drawings were made, but the woman appears to be wearing a sack-back gown, a style that was most popular between 1720 and 1770. According to Durham University music professor David Greer, “The dense patterns, small cap, and closely dressed hairstyle suggest the early part of this period.” But I believe that’s all we know.

(David Greer, Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music, 2015.)

| Art · History

Another World

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In Maps Are Territories (1989), David Turnbull offers this as an example of a map that “can only be understood within the cultural specifics of the circumstances that it portrays.” It’s a Chippewa land claim presented to the U.S. Congress in 1849. The rightmost figure is the totem of the chief, who is of the Crane clan. Following him are members of allied clans — Martens, Bears, Man-Fish, and Catfish.

“To the eye of the bird standing for this chief, the eyes of each of the other totemic animals are directed as denoted by lines, to symbolize union of views,” explained ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft. “The heart of each animal is also connected by lines with the heart of the Crane chief, to denote unity of feeling and purpose. If these symbols are successful, they denote that the whole forty-four persons both see and feel alike — that they are one.”

The line drawn forward from the crane’s eye denotes the course of his journey, and another line is drawn backward to a series of small lakes for which he is seeking the grant. The long parallel lines below the figures represent Lake Superior, and the small parallel lines that diverge from this represent a path from its shore to the villages and interior lakes where the Chippewa hope to live.

Schoolcraft wrote in 1851, “The entire object is thus symbolized in a manner which is very clear to the tribes, and to all who have studied the simple elements of this mode of communicating ideas.”

(H.R. Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, Volume I, 1851, 416-417.)

| History · Language · Society

Chain Reaction

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In 1827, during a tense standoff in the Greek War of Independence, a single musket shot set off a cataclysm:

A British frigate sent its cutter to ask one of the Turkish ships to make space by moving its anchorage [in Navarino Bay]. The boat was unarmed, but a trigger-happy Turkish marine decided it was hostile and fired a single musket shot. His aim was good and he hit the boat’s officer. In return the frigate’s marines gave covering musket fire and, on hearing the fusillade, an overexcited Egyptian cannoneer fired at the French flagship, which replied with a full broadside.

Like Nelson’s engagement at Aboukir Bay, this was a duel between anchored gun batteries, rather than a conventional fleet action. Muzzle-to-muzzle, the two sides blazed away at each other with heavy guns and carronades. When the smoke cleared, the Anglo-Franco-Russian Alliance — with fewer, but larger and more heavily-gunned ships — had sunk or destroyed more than three-quarters of the Turco-Egyptians, inflicting tremendous loss of life, but suffering fewer than 700 casualties themselves.

“In a stationary fight that involved neither tactics nor sailing skill, nominally friendly powers had destroyed, or damaged beyond repair, more than 60 warships.”

(From David Blackmore, Blunders and Disasters at Sea, 2004.)

| History

The Aberdour Heroine

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In 1884 the S.S. William Hope was traversing the northeast coast of Scotland when its engines failed in a ferocious storm and it was driven into Aberdour Bay. In a mill on the shore was Jane Whyte, a mother of nine whose husband, a farm foreman, had already left for work. Despite high winds and hail, she rushed to the shoreline, retrieved the end of a rope thrown by the sailors, wrapped it around her body, and held it as the 15 crewmen disembarked. When they were safely ashore she took them to the mill and gave them dry clothes, hot tea, and a warm meal.

The owners of the ship gave her a sum of money in gratitude, and she received an award from the Shipwrecked Mariners Benevolent Society, a silver medal from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and a bronze medal for gallantry from the Board of Trade.

| History

In a Word

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forgettery
n. a faculty or facility for forgetting; faulty memory

ascesis
n. the practice of self-discipline

retrospection
n. the action, process, or faculty of looking back on things past

evanid
adj. liable to vanish

“King Darius, so as not to forget the harm he had received from the Athenians, had a page come every time he sat down to table and sing three times in his ear: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians.'” — Montaigne

Cato the Elder ended each speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

Tertullian observed that a slave was stationed in the chariot of a triumphant Roman general to whisper in his ear, “Remember that you are human.”

A nomenclator was “a slave with a good memory who accompanied a public figure when he went out and whispered in his ear the name of anyone important he was about to meet.” (Anthony Everitt, Cicero)

Much later, Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager, James Farley, would keep a file on everyone Roosevelt met so that the candidate might later ask after a spouse or child. Modern politicians maintain “Farley files” for the same purpose.

| History · Language · Society