In 18th-century England, wealthy landowners would sometimes hire people to live as hermits in secluded corners of their estates. In today’s show we’ll explore this odd custom and review the job requirements for life as a poetic recluse.
We’ll also meet a German novelist who popularized an American West he had never seen and puzzle over some very generous bank robbers.
At Labuan, a British possession in North Borneo, there are only two English officials, Governor Leys and Lieut. Hamilton. The latter gentleman combines in himself the offices of colonial secretary, postmaster, treasurer, magistrate, inspector of police, inspector of the prison, chief commissioner of woods, colonial engineer, and master attendant. In these various capacities he corresponds from himself to himself in the most stately official style, and carefully copies and registers his numerous despatches.
— Poverty Bay Herald, Feb. 24, 1888
In his 1880 autobiography, Henry Armitt Brown recalls a strange incident from his student days. While a law student in November 1865, he had gone to bed one midnight and dreamed that he was lying on the cobblestones of a narrow street, held down by a “low-browed, thick-set man” who was bent on killing him. He threw the man off and bit at his throat, but the man smiled and brought out a bright hatchet. Brown’s friends leaped to his aid, but as they did so “I saw the hatchet flash above my head and felt instantly a dull blow on the forehead.” He tasted blood and seemed to hover in the air over his own body, where he could see “the hatchet sticking in the head, and the ghastliness of death gradually spreading over the face.”
The following morning, as they walked to school, a friend of his remarked that he’d had a strange dream that night. “I fell asleep about twelve and immediately dreamed that I was passing through a narrow street, when I heard noises and cries of murder. Hurrying in the direction of the noise, I saw you lying on your back fighting with a rough laboring man, who held you down. I rushed forward, but as I reached you he struck you on the head with a hatchet, and killed you instantly.” At Brown’s inquiry he described the murderer as “a thick-set man, in a flannel shirt and rough trousers: his hair was uncombed, and his beard was grizzly and of a few days’ growth.”
A week later Brown called at a friend’s house in New Jersey:
‘My husband,’ said his wife to me, ‘had such a horrid dream about you the other night. He dreamed that a man killed you in a street fight. He ran to help you, but before he reached the spot your enemy had killed you with a great club.’
‘Oh, no,’ cried the husband across the room; ‘he killed you with a hatchet.’
“I remembered the remark of old Artaphernes,” Brown wrote, “that dreams are often the result of a train of thought started by conversation or reading, or the incidents of the working time, but I could recall nothing, nor could either of my friends cite any circumstance ‘that ever they had read, had ever heard by tale or history,’ in which they could trace the origin of this remarkable dream.”
In 1903 Serbian king Alexander I and his queen were murdered in their palace. Alexander’s successor, Peter Karageorgevich, rescinded postage stamps bearing the dead king’s portrait and marked his own coronation with this stamp, depicting twin profiles of himself and his ancestor Black George, a Serbian patriot:
If he’d hoped this would allay suspicion, he was mistaken. In Through Savage Europe (1907), writer Harry De Windt notes that when the stamp is turned upside down, “the gashed and ghastly features of the murdered King stand out with unmistakable clearness”:
That’s a bit overstated. Here’s Alexander’s original stamp and the purported “death mask” — gaze at it blankly and Alexander’s features will emerge from the noses, brows, and chins:
“Needless to state, the issue was at once prohibited.”
In 1916 an American circus elephant named Mary was hanged before a crowd of 3,000 onlookers. In this week’s podcast we’ll review the sad series of events that led Mary to a Tennessee railroad crane.
We’ll also get an update on a very inventive bank robbery and puzzle over the escalators in London’s Tube stations.
When British traveler Richard Gordon Smith reached Japan’s Lake Biwa in 1906, he asked a local cook whether he could prepare the rare dish koi-no-ikizukuri (“a carp cut up alive”), which had been offered at nobles’ feasts in ancient times. The cook, delighted, brought in a red lacquered tray decorated to resemble the sea bottom. On it lay a carp that opened and shut its mouth and gills as if it were swimming in water. “The dish was really pretty in spite of the gasping fish which, however, showed no pain, and there was not a sign of blood or a cut.” But “Now we are ready,” said the cook, and he dribbled some soy sauce into the fish’s eye:
The effect was not instantaneous: it took a full two minutes as the cook sat over him, chopsticks in hand. All of a sudden and to my unutterable astonishment, the fish gave a convulsive gasp, flicked its tail and flung the whole of its skin on one side of its body over, exposing the underneath of the stomach parts, skinned; the back was cut into pieces about an inch square and a quarter of an inch thick, ready for pulling out and eating.
“Never in my life have I seen a more barbarous or cruel thing,” Smith wrote, “not even the scenes at Spanish bull fights. Egawa [his interpreter] is a delicate-stomached person and as he could eat none, neither could I. It would be simply like taking bites out of a large live fish. I took the knife from my belt and immediately separated the fish’s neck vertebrae, much to the cook’s astonishment and perhaps disgust.” He asked them to take it away. “You have certainly operated beautifully,” he said, “but the sooner a law is brought in to prevent such cruelty the better.”
(From Travels in the Land of the Gods: The Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith, 1986.)
In 1764 a French engineer on a tiny African island claimed that he could see ships beyond the horizon. In today’s show we’ll review the strange story of Étienne Bottineau and consider the evidence for his claims to have invented a new art.
We’ll also ponder a 400-year-old levitation trick and puzzle over why throwing a beer can at someone might merit a promotion.
At age 13 Marie-Jean-Léon Lecoq, Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, discovered a rare talent: He could recognize a dream state while he was experiencing it, and could move and act lucidly within the dream. Eventually he filled 25 notebooks with descriptions and illustrations of his adventures in the dream world. These are now lost, but his 1867 book Les Rêves et les Moyens de Les Diriger describes some of his feats:
I change a porcelain vase into a rock-crystal fountain, from which I desire a cooling drink — and this immediately flows out through a golden tap. Some years ago I lost a particular ring whose loss I felt deeply. The memory of it comes to mind, and I should like to find it. I utter this wish, fixing my attention on a piece of coal that I pick up from the fireplace — and immediately the ring is on my finger. The dream continues in the same way until one of the apparitions I have called up charms and captivates me so much that I forget my magician’s role and plunge into a new, more realistic series of illusions.
Saint-Denys believed that almost anyone could learn to do this. One of his suggestions was to keep a dream diary and to make a daily habit of completing it. Like the rest of the student’s life, this habit would then itself become the raw material for his dreams — eventually he would dream of recording a dream. And if he noted the details of a dream he was recording, he would virtually be dreaming lucidly, having smuggled himself into his own slumbers.
In the early 1900s, Prussian authorities forbade Danes living in North Frisia from raising the Danish flag, above.
So they bred flag-colored pigs, below. The “Danish protest pig” was probably developed by crossbreeding Jutlandian and Holsteinian marsh pigs, red individuals from the Angeln Saddleback breed, and Tamworth pigs from England. Only around 140 individuals exist worldwide, but Schleswig-Holstein is trying to preserve the breed for its cultural value.
In his 1607 Rich Storehouse, or Treasurie for the Diseased, Matthew Blower offers “a present medicine for the hickop”:
Take thy finger ends, and stop both thine ears very hard, and the hickop will surcease immediately.
I found this in Julian Walker’s How to Cure the Plague and Other Curious Remedies (2013), a collection of historical cures for various maladies. He says, “I tried it, and it worked.”
