The world’s largest population of feral camels is in … Australia.
Thousands were imported between 1840 and 1907 to help explore the continent’s arid interior — it’s said that the first piano in Alice Springs arrived on a camel’s back. (A world away, the same thing was happening in the United States.)
The animals were gradually obviated by automobiles, but as many as a million still wander the country in herds — so many, ironically, that Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.
In October 1871, the American steamer Polaris began to leak, and 19 men, women, and children crowded onto an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. The ship got away from them and, incredibly, they spent the whole of the arctic winter riding the melting floe down the Greenland coast. Excerpts from the journal of steward John Herron:
Oct. 15. … We remained shivering all night. Saved very little provisions.
Nov. 6. Joe caught a seal, which has been a godsend. … Mr. Meyer made a pack of cards from some thick paper, and we are now playing euchre.
Dec. 2. Boiled some seal-skin to-day and ate it–blubber, hair and tough skin. The men ate it; I could not.
April 14. Our small piece of ice is wearing away very fast; our provisions are nearly finished. Things look very dark; starvation very near.
April 25. … We are all soaking wet, in everything we have, and no chance of drying anything. … All is dark and dreary, but, please God, it will soon brighten up.
Finally, as hope was fading, they were picked up on April 30 by a Newfoundland sealer near Labrador. In six months they had drifted more than 1,440 miles — but all survived.
In 1952, a stray cat wandered into Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, Calif. He seemed to be about 7 years old, skinny but healthy, and he was apparently determined to live at the school. The students quickly adopted him, feeding him from their sandwiches, and he made a home in classroom 8, disappearing each night but turning up again in the morning.
The sandwiches must have been pretty good, because “Room 8” stayed at the school for 15 years, reappearing mysteriously at the end of each summer vacation. Thanks to widespread media coverage, including features in Time and Look, he’s said to have received 10,000 letters in that time, which the children dutifully answered. And every year his picture was taken with the graduating class of sixth graders.
Wherever he came from, it seems he’d found what he wanted. He died in August 1968, and his pawprints grace the sidewalk in front of the school.
On Friday morning of the week before last, early risers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, witnessed a peculiar sight in the shape of a shower of birds that fell from a clear sky, literally cluttering the streets of the city. There were wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, and many birds of strange plumage, some of them resembling canaries, but all dead, falling in heaps along the thoroughfares, the singular phenomenon attracting many spectators and causing much comment.
The most plausible theory as to the strange windfall is that the birds were driven inland by the late storm on the Florida coast, the force of the current of air and the sudden change of temperature causing the death of many of the little feathered creatures when they reached Baton Rouge. Some idea of the extent of the shower may be gathered from the estimate that out on National Avenue alone the children of the neighborhood collected as many as 200 birds.
— St. Louis newspaper, quoted in The Osprey, December 1896
British statesman Charles James Fox managed to have two aunts who died 171 years apart:
Fox’s grandfather married twice — once at 27 and once at 76. A baby produced by the first marriage died in 1655, and a son produced by the second marriage married a woman whose sister died in 1826.
Fox himself died in 1806, but his widow survived until 1842 — nearly 200 years after the death of her aunt-by-marriage.
Malta is criss-crossed with ruts like these. No one knows who made them, when, or why. If they’re cart ruts, why are some 60 centimeters deep? If it’s an irrigation system or some kind of astronomical undertaking, what was its purpose?
The most popular theory is that ancient sledges hauled limestone to build local temples. But why then do some ruts lead straight into the sea?
London faced a surreal emergency on Oct. 17, 1814, when a giant beer vat ruptured in a St. Giles brewery. The resulting wave collapsed the neighboring vats, and 323,000 golden gallons poured into the West End.
“All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent, which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath,” wrote a correspondent to the London Knickerbocker. “A roar, as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils.”
The flood filled neighboring basements and causing several tenements to collapse. In all, eight people were killed — “by drowning, injury, poisoning by porter fumes, or drunkenness.”
American disasters are sweeter but less stimulating.
Between 1834 and 1874, proud New Englander James Johns published the Vermont Autograph and Remarker, an irregular collection of history, essays, verse, and fiction. It was irregular because Johns wrote each issue in pen, in a beautifully lucid newspaper font with no erasures. Johns bought a small hand press in 1857 but rarely used it — he found he was actually faster with the quill.
In January 1890, a tremendous blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada, paralyzing a Southern Pacific Railroad train and trapping its 600 passengers in their cars for three weeks. On Jan. 31 one of them, George T. McCully, began publishing a newspaper, the Snowbound, “issued every week-day afternoon by S. P. Prisoner in Car No. 36, blockaded at Reno, Nevada.” We know that McCully offered to sell copies of the hand-penciled four-page daily for 25 cents each; it’s not clear whether he got past the first issue. Perhaps he ran out of paper.
This walking hero [Daniel Crisp] on Sept. 21, 1802, walked one mile in seven minutes and fifty seconds, on the City-road, London.—July 16, 1817, commenced walking backwards forty miles daily for seven days, and completed 280 miles by that retrograde motion, on Wormwood Scrubs, near London, one hour and a quarter within the given time, to the surprise of thousands who witnessed the performance. … April 23, 1818, commenced walking from London to Oxford, to and fro by way of Datchet, Windsor, and Henley, the distance of sixty-one miles daily for seventeen successive days, and completed the 1037 miles on the 9th of May at eight minutes after eleven at night, being fifty-two minutes within the given time; during the performance of this arduous undertaking it rained heavily for ten days, which caused the Thames to overflow on the road to the depth of two feet and a half, and a quarter of a mile in length, which he was obliged to walk through for five days.
— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822
The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 traveled 200 miles through the American Midwest, killing nearly 700 people.
Along the way, it drove a 1×5-inch board through a 2×6-inch plank.
