The Skeleton in the Bale

The Atlanta Constitution of Oct. 2, 1892, contains this lurid tale from the Civil War. Discharged after losing a leg in battle, Confederate colonel Clay Clayton had returned to Sans Souci, his Alabama plantation, when a portion of the Union army established camp nearby and the Yankee officers made Clayton’s mansion their headquarters. During the occupation, Frederick Jasper, a disreputable captain from a Massachusetts regiment, pursued Clayton’s beautiful daughter, Virginia, who rejected his proposal of marriage. Virginia’s two brothers and lover learned of this during a visit to the plantation immediately after the Union troops left.

When the war ended, Clayton’s sons returned to Sans Souci and Virginia married her lover and settled on an adjoining plantation. Cotton had risen to a high price, and Clayton had two bales in his ginhouse, but he vowed not to sell them for less than $1 a pound, and they lay there unregarded for years.

In 1866 a Boston lawyer appeared looking for any trace of Jasper. The captain had separated from the Union troops after they had departed the plantation, taking with him a sergeant and promising to return in half an hour. He was never seen again, and now the lawyer sought to establish his fate in order to settle his estate. Clayton could tell him nothing, and he returned to Boston.

Twenty years later Clayton died, and the brothers and Virginia’s husband finally sold the ginhouse bales, which were stamped with the plantation’s mark and sent to Russia.

When it came to the turn of these two bales from old Colonel Clay Clayton’s Alabama plantation they were opened and the cotton dumped out on the floor of the factory. One was shaken up, there was a flash of blue and something bright, and a rattle of something on the floor. What was it? It was a skeleton in the uniform of a captain of the army of the United States of America. Sword, watch, money, buttons, some rotten cloth and bones. That was all. On the watch were the words, ‘Frederick Jasper, Boston.’

The sergeant’s body was found in the other bale. When the Boston lawyer returned to Alabama to investigate, Virginia’s husband told him everything: He and the Claytons had discovered Jasper assaulting Virginia on the plantation and carried him and the sergeant to the ginhouse.

The cotton was lying ready to be baled. We started the press and filled it. Into the middle of the bale of cotton went the wretch Jasper, begging like a hound to be killed first. But no. He went into the bale alive and was pressed with it. The other man, seeing the fate in store for him, shot himself, while we were at the press and he was lying wounded on the ground. Then he went in the other bale.

The Claytons then retained the bales with the excuse that they were waiting for a high price. But they were unrepentant: They had killed a Union soldier on Southern territory during wartime, and one who had behaved “vilely” despite their hospitality. “I cannot blame you at all,” said the lawyer, who returned to Boston and delivered Jasper’s fortune to his heirs.

The whole thing is so melodramatic that I think it must be fiction, but the Constitution ran it as a news story with the notice “Every particular of this incident can be verified by legal papers on file in Boston courts and by the testimony of witnesses yet living.” Make your own judgment.

| History

Overthinking

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When I was a child, it was believed that animals became extinct because they were too specialized. My father used to tell us about the saber-tooth tiger’s teeth — how they got too big and the tiger couldn’t eat because he couldn’t take game anymore. And I remember my father saying, with my brother sitting there, ‘I wonder what it will be with the human beings that will be so overspecialized that they’ll kill themselves off?’

My father never found out that my brother was working on the bomb.

— Richard Feynman’s sister Joan, quoted in Christopher Sykes, No Ordinary Genius, 1994

| Science & Math

Fate Fall

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Triple Divide Peak, in Montana’s Glacier National Park, sits at the meeting of two continental divides (red and green on the map above). A drop of rain that lands on the mountain might arrive at any of three oceans — the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Arctic.

| Trivia

Breakdown

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When Charlie Parker’s 2-year-old daughter Pree died of pneumonia on March 6, 1954, he was in Los Angeles fulfilling a week-long engagement at the Tiffany Club. His wife, Chan, sent a wire from New York to let him know that they had lost her, and received four telegrams in reply:

4:11 a.m.:

MY DARLING MY DAUGHTER’S DEATH SURPRISED ME MORE THAN IT DID YOU DON’T FULFILL FUNERAL PROCEEDINGS UNTIL I GET THERE I SHALL BE THE FIRST ONE TO WALK INTO OUR CHAPEL FORGIVE ME FOR NOT BEING THERE WITH YOU WHILE YOU ARE AT THE HOSPITAL YOURS MOST SINCERELY YOUR HUSBAND CHARLIE PARKER.

4:13 a.m.:

MY DARLING FOR GOD’S SAKE HOLD ON TO YOURSELF
CHAS PARKER

4:15 a.m.:

CHAN, HELP
CHARLIE PARKER

7:58 a.m.:

MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD. I KNOW IT. I WILL BE THERE AS QUICK AS I CAN. MY NAME IS BIRD. IT IS VERY NICE TO BE OUT HERE. PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VERY NICE TO ME OUT HERE. I AM COMING IN RIGHT AWAY TAKE IT EASY. LET ME BE THE FIRST ONE TO APPROACH YOU. I AM YOUR HUSBAND. SINCERELY, CHARLIE PARKER.

He never forgave himself for being absent during Pree’s death. “Bird detached from things to save himself, which meant that in a way the sadness between them was very powerful,” recalled his stepdaughter, Kim. “I’ve seen very sad photographs of them … shortly after Pree’s death, and there’s just a complete space between them, and I think it was just the beginning of the end, really.” A year later he too was dead.

| Death

A Sky Duel

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

On March 31, 1943, Army Air Corps second lieutenant Owen Baggett’s B-24 was hit by Japanese fighters while en route to destroy a railroad bridge in Burma. Baggett and four others bailed out before the bomber exploded, and the fighters began strafing them as they descended. Two of the parachutists were killed, and Baggett’s arm was grazed. He drew his .45 and sagged in his harness, hoping the Japanese would think him dead.

Presently a Zero approached him at near stall speeds and the pilot opened his canopy to get a better look. Baggett fired four rounds into the cockpit and the fighter dropped out of sight.

Had he downed a fighter with a pistol? It’s impossible to know for certain. Baggett was captured by the Burmese and spent two years in a Japanese prison camp and eventually retired from the Air Force as a colonel. When journalist John L. Frisbee contacted him in 1996, he was reluctant to talk about the incident — he believed he had hit the pilot but acknowledged that the evidence for this was indirect and circumstantial. Frisbee wrote that a few months after Baggett’s imprisonment, “Col. Harry Melton, commander of the 311th Fighter Group who had been shot down, passed through the POW camp and told Baggett that a Japanese colonel said the pilot Owen Baggett had fired at had been thrown clear of his plane when it crashed and burned. He was found dead of a single bullet in his head. Colonel Melton intended to make an official report of the incident but lost his life when the ship on which he was being taken to Japan was sunk.” Make your own judgment.

| History · Oddities

“Anglo-Foreign Words”

Walter Penney of Greenbelt, Md., offered this poser in the August 1969 issue of Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. Below are five groups of English words. Each group appears also in a foreign language. What are the languages?

  1. aloud, angel, hark, inner, lover, room, taken, wig
  2. alas, atlas, into, manner, pore, tie, vain, valve
  3. ail, ballot, enter, four, lent, lit, mire, taller
  4. banjo, chosen, hippo, pure, same, share, tempo, tendon
  5. ago, cur, dare, fur, limes, mane, probe, undo
Click for Answer
| Language · Puzzles

A Thankful Village

The township of Thierville, in Normandy, has not lost any service personnel in France’s last five wars — the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, either world war, the First Indochina War, or the Algerian War.

It was the only community in France in which no war memorial was erected between 1919 and 1925 — the only one with no dead to mourn.

| History

In a Word

elephantocetomachia
n. a fight between an elephant and a whale

Anthony R. Wagner uses this word in his foreword to G.D. Squibb’s 1959 book The High Court of Chivalry to describe the controversy in early 20th-century England over the right to bear arms:

I therefore soon found myself studying the whole subject with close attention and in time I came to two conclusions. The first was that the original controversy had been an elephantocetomachia, a fight between an elephant and a whale, incapable of decision because the adversaries lived in different elements and could not come to grips. Oswald Barron, a historian, was trying to settle a legal question by reciting history. [A.C.] Fox-Davies, a lawyer, hoped to settle history by quoting law.

Wagner doesn’t claim to have coined it, but I can’t find it anywhere else except in quotations of that passage. That’s a shame — it’s a useful word.

(Thanks, Julian.)

| Language