Excerpts from "Saints and Strangers"

An interesting, detailed, and heavily annotated read for those curious about the aspects of early American history that are not typically discussed in high school or collegiate classrooms.  Saints and Strangers focuses on the Pilgrims, distinguishing them from the Puritans and other early colonists.  It is well written with a captivating style; these excerpts may whet your interest in reading the entire book.

"Far from being Victorians, they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan, and in their lives reflected many of the qualities of that amazing age – its restlessness and impatience with old ways, its passionate enthusiasms, its eager curiosity and daring speculation in all fields, its boldness in action, its abounding and apparently inexhaustible energies."

"Pilgrims were Elizabethan, too, in their acceptance of the simpler joys of life.  The practiced no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial.  They appreciated the pleasures of the table and of the bottle, liked both “strong waters” and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills.  They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate.  Only on the Sabbath did they go about in funereal blacks and grays.  Ordinarily they wore the russet browns and Lincoln green common among the English lower classes from which they sprang."

"But the passengers [on the Mayflower] had one bond in common.  All were lower class from the cottages, and not the castles of England, a strong cohesive force at a time when society was still rigidly stratified, with rights and privileges concentrated at the top. There was not a drop of blue blood to be found anywhere among them on the Mayflower, as these Pilgrims were all too aware from the poverty and other disabilities that they suffered. They were of the common people and in conscious revolt against the autocratic principle - a fact which seems to have escaped some of their descendants with their pathetic interest in coats of arms and proofs of blood."

"There was a fourth and much larger group sharply set off from all the others - the indentured servants. These were not servants in our sense of the word. They were not housemaids, butlers, cooks, valets, or general flunkies to wait upon the personal needs of the Pilgrims. On the contrary, they were brought along to do the heaviest kind of labor. They were to fell trees, hew timbers, build houses, clear fields and plough them, tend crops, gather the harvest, and do whatever their masters ordered. During the period of their indenture, which usually ran for seven years, they were fed, clothed, and housed by their masters, but received no wages, being virtually slaves, and were frequently bought, sold, and hired out as such."  [later]: "In 1627, Wollaston gathered up some servants, sailed for Virginia, and there sold them to local tobacco planters for the period of their indenture."  "In New England servants were "sold upp and Downe like horses..." [later] "Early in the war Captain Church had persuaded the Indians around the town of Dartmouth not to join Philip but to follow him to Plymouth; here they were seized and shipped off to Tangiers to be sold as slaves."  "As Indian captives - men, women, and children - continued to pour into Plymouth, all were sold into slavery, some to local planters, the majority in the West Indies."

"As is evident from the merest glance at the history of Plymouth, the Pilgrim leaders did not believe in equalitarian democracy though they were moving in that direction.  They favored a change in the hierarchical structure above them, but not below."

[after taking stores of corn saved by the native Americans for the winter]:  "This was just plain larceny, of course, but the Pilgrims were inclined to regard it as another special providence of God.  And in a sense it was, for without this seed corn they would have had no crops the next year, "as ye sequell did manyfest," and all would have starved to death... The Indians needed it for the same purpose, but if this thought ever occurred to the Pilgrims, they brushed it aside, pleading their necessity."

[they also dug into mounds they knew to be graves]  "Still musing upon the mystery of the yellow-haired man, the Pilgrims closed the grave, having removed "sundrie of the prettiest things" to take away with them."

[lack of planning] "As yet they had "got but one cod," largely because these aspiring fishermen had failed to bring along proper gear, specifically wanting nets and small hooks."

"Neither now nor later did the Pilgrims build log cabins, for the good reason that they did not know how... the log cabin, apparently so  native to the American scene, is actually a foreign importation, Scandinavian in origin..."

"A combined Massachusetts and Connecticut force had wreaked a terrible vengeance upon the Pequot.  Trapping some severn hundred of them - men, women, and children -... the English... fell upon the encampment with fire, sword, blunderbuss, and tomahawk... Flames consumed almost all, and it was a fearful sight, said the Pilgrims in phrases quoted with delight and without acknowledgement by Cotton Mather, "to see them thus frying in ye fyer, and ye streams of blood quenching ye same, and horrible was ye stinck and sente thereof; but ye victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave prayse therof to God."  "Male prisoners were shipped to the West Indies and sold as slaves.  Young squaws and maidens were divided among the soldiers."

"The right to vote was restricted to freemen, and it was not easy to attain that status.  All had to pass a minute examination of their religious views and moral character... In 1643, when the colony contained some 3,000 people, there were just 232 freemen.  Nor were all of these entitled to vote.  The franchise was limited to those with a rateable estate of at least [$1,000]."

"... many pewter dishes pots, and flagons - but no forks, for the Pilgrim Fathers and their families, like everybody else at the time, ate with their fingers or their knives."

"A confession should never be forced by putting the accused on oath, but on occasion - and this was one - the magistrates "may proceede so farr to bodily torments as racks, hot-irons, &c."

"Abandoning this fundamental [voluntary fellowship of church] of their faith, they now made support of the church compulsory, a legal obligation upon all - one of the "tyrannies" they had found so intolerable in the Anglican church."

[children] " were guilty, too... of sitting down during two-hour prayers..."

"And to keep Anglicans in their place, it was now a crime... to celebrate Christmas by "forbearing of labour, feasting, or in any other way."... Nor did they follow the Puritans in slicing off the Quakers' ears, branding them with hot irons, flaying them with tarred ropes, beating them senseless with iron rods, burning their books, and confiscating everything they owned in guise of a fine."

"Though New England had no public school system worthy of the name for almost two centuries..."

"... Bradford had denied the 'libel' that women had acquired any new rights or privileges at Plymouth.  "Touching our governemente," he wrote indignantly, "you are quite mistaken if you think we admite weomen... to have to do in the same, for they are excluded, as both reason and nature teacheth they should be."  Education of girls was a vain and idle thing, the Pilgrim Fathers agreed.  At best, it was a silly affectation; at worst, a danger to the established order."

"Supper was much like breakfast, with the addition of gingerbread, cake, cheese, or pie - all washed down with beer, which was drunk at all meals, even by younger children."

[re getting land from the native Americans]:  "Captain Standish, Constant Southworth, and Samuel Nash obtained a tract fourteen miles square at Bridgewater for seven coats, eight hoes, nine hatchets, ten and a half yard of cotton cloth, twenty knives, and four "moose" skins.  One day, when exploring the Cape beyond Eastham, a party of pilgrims pointed to a particular section and asked the Indians who owned it.  "Nobody" was the Indians' reply, meaning everybody.  "In that case," said the Pilgrims, "it is ours."

But the English attitude toward the natives' rights was never more succinctly expressed than by a town meeting at Milford, Conecticut, in 1640:  "Voted, that the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints."

Language in John Cheever's "The Wapshot Chronicle"

Not an exciting plot.  The book is a narrative describing the lives of members of a New England family, so the events recorded are domestic, conventional, and frankly rather prosaic.  It's as though you were to go to a dinner party, sit next to a neighbor you've never met, and ask them to "tell me about your life."  But Cheever does tell a story well, and he received the National Book Award for this, his first novel.  I can understand why he was a best-selling novelist and a popular writer for The New Yorker and other magazines.

So, no reason to discuss the content, but I will share some words and phrases that were new to me.

"... as if he, bred on that shinbone coast and weaned on beans and codfish..."  Despite a lot of searching I couldn't find a clear explanation of this term.  Most links came back the quote from this book.  There are scattered references to Shinbone Alleys from Maine to Missouri (discussed - but not explained - here).

"Captn Webb's little boy was trod upon by a horse and died before candlelight."  Obvious meaning in context, but an interesting phrase I've not previously encountered.

"... proud of his prowess in negotiating the dilapidated and purblind vehicle over the curving roads..."  Partially blind, or obtuse.  Not sure how it applies to a vehicle unless the headlights are inadequate.

"It is one of those [bus] lines that seem to carry the scrim of the world - sweet-natured but browbeaten women shoppers, hunchbacks and drunks."   ??? couldn't find this in anything that matches the sense of the sentence.

"Put that [lobster] down, Miss Honora," he shouts.  "They ain't pegged, they ain't pegged yet."  The Penobscot Maritime Museum explains that prior to today's rubber bands, lobster claws were immobilized with whittled wooden plugs.

"...  and they had had a brace or more of those days when the earth smells like a farmer's britches - all timothy, manure and sweet grass."   Of course I know what "britches" are, but I had to look up the etymology.   It's a variation of "breeches," which goes back to Middle English and were typically "smallclothes" (knee-length).

"On the other half was the farm at St. Botolphs, the gentle valley and the impuissant river..."  Impotent (puissant related to Latin posse [be able]); presumably means a slowly-flowing river.

"... how they would have burned the furniture, buried the tin cans, holystoned the floors, cleaned the lamp chimneys..."  "As a scouring stone... from its association with Sunday cleaning, from its users' adoption of a kneeling position similar to prayer, and (least likely) from their original provision by raiding graveyards for tombstones.

"Leander looked into the bushes and found what he wanted - an old duck-shooting battery."  Not sure how it's defined; here's a floating one.

"The rector was a pursy man in clericals, and sure enough, while they stood there, he began to scratch his stomach."   Short-winded, especially from corpulence.  "Late Middle English reduction of Anglo-Norman French porsif, alteration of Old French polsif, from polser ‘breathe with difficulty’, from Latin pulsare ‘set in violent motion’."

"Writer's epistolary style (Leander wrote) formed in tradition of Lord Timothy Dexter, who put all punctuation marks, prepositions, adverbs, articles, etc., at end of communication and urged reader to distribute same as he saw fit."   A real person (see the link).

"One more Indian.  Joe Thrum.  Lived on hoopskirts of town."  We all know what the "outskirts" of town are.  Would "hoopskirts" be under (inside) the outskirts???

"It was a chance to see the countryside and the disappointing southern autumn with its fireflies and brumes..."  Mist, fog.  "from French brume "fog" (14c.), in Old French, "wintertime," from Latin bruma "winter, winter solstice," perhaps with an etymological sense "season of the shortest day," from *brevima, contracted from brevissima, superlative of brevis "short"."

"Never told her facts in case.  Laconism, like blindness, seems to develop other faculties.  Powers of divination."  Extreme brevity in speech.  Derivation from a place name (Lakonia) in Greece, which was near Sparta.  Interesting in that "spartan" also means sparing or limited.

"Listened all night to troubled speaking; also moiling of sea.  Seemed from sound of waves to be flat, stony beach."  Churning, swirling.  From French and Lain words connoting softness.

"It was after supper and the latrines were being fired and the smoke rose up through the coconut palms."  (U.S. armed forces in South Pacific).  Does anyone know if it was a military custom among U.S. (or other troops) to set fire to latrines??  [answered with an interesting link in the Comments]

"... for here all the random majesty of the place appeared spatchcocked, rectified and jumbled; here, hidden in the rain, were the architect's secrets and most of his failures."  A way of preparing eel or chicken meat by splitting it open - but the term also means "a rushed effort."

"... like West Farm, a human burrow or habitation that had yielded at every point to the crotchets and meanderings of a growing family."  Whim or fancy [archaic].

"At another turn in the path a man as old as Leander, in the extremities of eroticism, approached him, his body covered with brindle hair.  "This is the beginning of all wisdom," he said to Leander, exposing his inflamed parts."  Streaked or striped when referring to animal coats.



Quite a few interesting words in a rather brief novel.  By contrast, Stephen King's Doctor Sleep yielded only five new words in 500+ pages:

"Let's see if Danny's up and in the doins."  Probably awake, active, doing things.

"... Walnut, the True's jackleg doctor..."  Amateur, incompetent.

"Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart..."  A Canadian expression meaning out in the boondocks "It is a respelling of "tule," one of a couple species of bulrush, found especially in California. The word is from the Aztec "tullin." So "the tules" are swamps. "Tule fog" is fog over swamps or other low ground."

"... when the True Knot moved across Europe in wagons, selling peat turves and trinkets."  Plural of turf.

"The key to survival in the world of rubes was to look as if you belonged, as if you were always on the goodfoot..."  Meaning implicit in the usage, but I couldn't find any info elsewhere.

Language used by Wilkie Collins in "The Moonstone"

A classic and well-written book, considered by many to be the original detective novel.  Dorothy Sayers considered it "very probably the finest detective story ever written." 

One of the features that made The Moonstone a success was the sensationalist depiction of opium addiction. Unbeknownst to his readers, Collins was writing from personal experience. In his later years Collins grew severely addicted to laudanum and as a result suffered from paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a doppelganger whom he dubbed "Ghost Wilkie". 

Herewith some interesting words and phrases I encountered while reading the book.

"... my lady's second sister, I say, had a disappointment in love; and taking a husband afterward, on the neck or nothing principle, made what they call a misalliance."  [elsewhere]: "Judge from this what motives he had to run the risk which he actually ran.  It was "neck or nothing" with him - if ever it was "neck or nothing" with a man yet."  The meaning of all-or-nothing is obvious, but why this choice of words?  Perhaps conflated with "risking one's neck??"

"In society he was constantly making mistakes, and setting people unintentionally by the ears together."
I couldn't find a good explanation of this one.  Idioms are hard as heck to look up.

"... plying her confidentially with a glass of hock."  A Rhenish wine, the name coming from the town of Hochheim am Main.

"The other women took to their Bibles and hymn-books and looked as sour as verjuice over their reading..."

"This was the first attack of the megrims that I remembered in my mistress..."  Depression, unhappiness, moodiness.  Interestingly, derived from Middle French migraigne, in turn from Latin hemicrania referring to migraine.

"... and making a sudden snatch at the heap of silver, put it back, holus-bolus, in her pocket."  Said to be "pseudo-Latin" meaning the "whole" bolus, the latter directly from the Latin for a big lump.

"Bating her lame foot and her leanness... the girl had some pleasing qualities..."  "Apart from", related to bate/abate to reduce the force of.

"She was always in the habit of feeding the bird herself.  Some groundsel was strewed on a table which stood immediately under the cage."  A plant related to ragwort and asters.

"I cast the miserable trammels of worldly discretion to the winds, and spoke with the fervor that filled me..."  Something that impedes activity, from the French tramail for a type of fishnet.  We're more familiar with the converse "untrammeled."

"... there he was in the old corner, on the old bee-hive chair, with his pipe in his mouth..."

 "I looked at the once lively, rattle-pated, humorous little doctor..."  Apparently using pate to mean head, rattle would imply empty-headed.

"His gypsy complexion, his fleshless cheeks, his gaunt facial bones, his dreamy eyes, his extraordinary party-colored hair..."  [I believe elsewhere in the book his hair was referred to as particolored]  Meaning multicolored - probably the parti indicating different parts in different colors.

"I could have taken my oath that I saw Mr. Luker pass something to an elderly gentleman in a light-colored paletot."  French word for loose outer jacket.

"Light this halt of the pilgrims by the wild red flames of cressets and torches..."  Again French, referring to a lamp with burning pitch suspended from a pole.

And finally two good turn of phrases [or should that be turns of phrase?]:

"There's a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life.  We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world.  And we are all of us right."

"What a case!" I heard him say to himself, stopping at the window in his walk, and drumming on the glass with his fingers.  "It not only defies explanation, it's even beyond conjecture!"

"The Reason Why" (Cecil Woodham-Smith, 1953)

Another book I saved from 15 years ago to reread "someday."  And well worth doing so, because it is a fascinating and well-written book.

"Some one had blunder'd   

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die: 

Into the valley of Death  

Rode the six hundred."   

                    --- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The passage above is basically all that I knew about the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War.   This book filled in the missing details.

The opening chapters present a devastating takedown of British command and control at the time of the Crimean War, thoroughly castigating the commanding officers for their utter lack of judgement.  She provides a surprisingly lucid discussion of the longstanding but outdated logic behind allowing commanding officers to buy their positions rather than qualify for them (basically a British fear that a powerful military might subvert the government and it would be better to have "quality" officers with a stake in the future of the country).  It had been seventeen years since Lord Lucan, for example, had managed a regiment, even on a parade ground, and the verbal orders had changed; he didn't know the new ones and required his cavalry to relearn the old ones.

In addition to battlefield ineptitude, the aristocratic military leadership showed a abysmal lack of understanding of logistics.  The British fleet sailed into the Black Sea to a hotbed of cholera with no preparations for such.

"Men who died of cholera were flung into the sea with weights at their feet, but the weights were too light; as the bodies decomposed they rose to the surface, the weights kept them upright, and they floated head and shoulders out of the water, hideous in the sun."

Men were packed into transport ships way too small, with no sanitary facilities.  Four thousand baggage animals were left behind (and starved to death), so the men had to transport their own tents and supplies to the battlefields.  There had been no reconnaissance of the battle sites; command was attempted from hilltops that had a half-an-hour lag time for transmission of messages to the battlefield by aide-de-camps.

The actual "charge of the light brigade" is presented in a chapter or two near the end. The charge was made toward a battery of cannons, with additional cannon fire from both flanks, as Tennyson described:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot & shell,
Boldly they rode & well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

And when they were forced to retreat...

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them...

Bruce Catton said of this book "Here is battle writing as good as the best."

I'll close with one caveat: the book will be difficult reading for anyone with a proper respect for horses.  Transport from England to Crimea was on ships not suited for horses, with inadequate restraints and supports ("only head ropes") resulting in a grievous morbidity and mortality in high seas; 43 horses on one side of the ship's hold would be dashed against their mangers and against the 43 on the other side "and this occurred every five minutes during the night."  Upon arrival there was inadequate grain for feed in the Black Sea ports.  At the battlefield...

"On Saturday, November 11, the horses had one handful of barley each as their day's food and the same the next day.  They were standing knee-deep in mud, with the bitter Crimean wind cutting their emaciated bodies.  They ate their straps, saddle flaps, and blankets, and gnawed each other's tails to stumps.  An order  had been issued that no horse was to be destroyed except for a broken limb or glanders, and horses, dying of starvation, lay in the mud in their death agony for three days, while no one dared shoot them."

I'll stop now and move on to some interesting words:

"He was very handsome, so handsome that it was feared his good looks would turn him into a coxcomb, and very gay, "the gayest of gay gallants," a contemporary calls him."  Or "cocks-comb," derived from the name of a cap worn by licensed professional fools.

"Parliament has never sought to attract to the command of the army men dependent on their pay... it was laid down that "the pay of an officer is an honorarium, not a merces..."  Pay, wages, from merx (related to merchandise, and of course mercenary).

"Though the 15th was a notably efficient regiment, the new commanding officer viewed it with disgust.  He demanded more glitter, more dash, and he set to work to drill, polish, pipeclay, reprimand, and discipline the 15th to within an inch of their lives."  A fine white clay used to make pipes, but in this sense, used to whiten leather.

"... a young officer of the Hussars who joined his regiment with a stud of blood-horses, three grooms, and two carriages, one of which carried his plate and linen."  From Old English stod ("herd of horses"), also obviously applied to horses individually and to the breeding process.

This book is the result of monumental research on Cecil Woodham-Smith's part.  She delved not only into public records and Parliamentary documents, but also into the private correspondence of the officers involved and their families.  There is frankly TMI to try to consume this in detail, but it can be skimmed to select out the best parts.

After finishing this reread, I've marked the author's other books for future reading.  She wrote an award-winning biography of Florence Nightingale, a biography of the early life of Queen Victoria, and more notably The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 about the "Celtic Holocaust" of the potato famine.

"I Contain Multitudes" - Ed Yong

A tip of the hat to the TYWKIWDBI reader who recommended this book in a comment.  Ed Yong is a multi-award-winning science journalist currently on staff at The Atlantic.   In this book he expands upon a number of his previous essays related to the microbial world and presents a ton of information which I only had time to quickly browse.  Herewith some excerpts:

"To allow our first microbes to colonise our newborn bodies, a special class of immune cells suppresses the rest of the body’s defensive ensemble, which is why babies are vulnerable to infections for their first six months of life. It’s not because their immune system is immature, as is commonly believed: it’s because it is deliberately stifled to give microbes a free-for-all window during which they can establish themselves...

And this:

Milk is a mammalian innovation, common to platypuses and pangolins, humans and hippos, its ingredients varying according to what each species needs. Human milk is a particular marvel. Every mammal mother produces complex sugars called oligosaccharides, but human moth­ers, for some reason, churn out an exceptional variety: so far, scientists have identified more than two hundred human milk oligosaccharides, or H.M.O.s. They are the third-most plentiful ingredient in human milk, after lactose and fats, and their structure ought to make them a rich source of energy for growing babies—but babies cannot digest them.

When German first learned this, he was gobsmacked. Why would a mother expend so much energy manufacturing these complicated chemicals if they were apparently useless to her child? Why hasn’t natural selection put its foot down on such a wasteful practice? Here’s a clue: H.M.O.s pass through the stom­ach and the small intestine unharmed, landing in the large intestine, where most of our bacteria live. What if they aren’t food for babies at all? What if they are food for microbes?...

Human milk has evolved to nourish the microbe, and it, in turn, has evolved into a consummate H.M.O.vore. Unsurprisingly, it is often the dominant microbe in the guts of breast-fed infants.

Or this:

Akkermansia muciniphila, one of the more common species of gut bacteria, is over 3,000 times more common in lean mice than in those genetically predisposed to obesity. If obese mice eat it, they lose weight and show fewer signs of type 2 diabetes.

Gut microbes also partly explain the remarkable success of gastric bypass surgery – a radical operation that reduces the stomach to an egg-sized pouch and connects it directly to the small intestine. After this procedure, people tend to lose dozens of kilograms, a fact typically accredited to their shrunken stomachs. But as a side-effect, the operation also restructures the gut microbiome, increasing the numbers of various species, including Akkermansia. And if you transplant these restructured communities into germ-free mice, those rodents will also lose weight.

All of which makes this more ominous:

"[Antibiotics] are so wantonly used that, on a given day, between one and three per cent of the developed world takes an antibiotic of some kind... even short courses of antibiotics can change the human microbiome..."

Gleanings from The Island of the Colorblind

I've had Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Colorblind on my bookshelf for 20 years now, awaiting a final re-read, which I got done this week.  Herewith some excerpts and interesting bits...

"... and a brilliant yellow lichen on some of the trees.  I nibble at it - many lichens are edible - but it is bitter and unpromising." 

He is braver than I am.  But a search yielded this info:  Iceland moss "forms a nutritious and easily digested amylaceous food, being used in place of starch in some preparations of cocoa."  Rock tripe "is the common name for various lichens of the genus Umbilicaria that grow on rocks. They can be found throughout northern parts of North America such as New England and the Rocky Mountains. They are edible when properly prepared and have been used as a famine food in extreme cases when other food sources were unavailable, as by early American northern explorers."  I found several others on a websearch, but I never expect to be that hungry.

This in a chapter discussing the amazing site Nan Madol.

"He did not refer to, and probably did not know of, the other megalithic cultures which dot Micronesia - the giant basalt ruins in Kosrae, the immense taga stones in Tinian, the ancient terraces in Palau, the five-ton stones of Babeldaop bearing Easter Island-like faces..." 

Today I (re)learn that some plants can generate heat other than by basking in sunlight:

"Botanists  have known for about a century (and cycad gatherers, of course, for much longer) that cones may generate heat - sometimes twenty degrees or more above the ambient temperature - as they redy for pollination.  The mature cones produce heat for several hours each day by breaking down lipids and starches within the cone scales..." (since Sacks is British, he is probably referring to degrees Celsius here!)

More about cycads:

"It was true that cycads had the largest growing apices of any vascular plant, but, equally to the point, these delicate apices were beautifully protected by persistent leaf bases, enabling the plants to be fire resistant, everything resistant, to an unusual degree, and to reshoot new fronds, after a catastrophe, sooner than anything else. And if something did nonetheless befall the growing apices, the plants had an alternative, bulbils, which they could fall back on. Cycads could be pollinated by wind – or insects, they were not choosy: they had avoided the path of overspecialization which had done in so many species over the last half-billion years. In the absence of fertilization, they could propagate asexually, by offsets and suckers (there was a suggestion too that some plants were able to spontaneously change sex). Many cycad species had developed unique ‘cor-raloid’ roots, where they symbiosed with blue-green algae, which could fix atmospheric nitrogen for them, rather than relying solely on organic nitrogen from the soil. This struck me as particularly brilliant – and highly adaptive should the seeds fall on impoverished soils; it had taken legumes, flowering plants, another hundred million years to achieve a similar trick.

Cycads had huge seeds, so strongly constructed and so packed with nourishment that they had a very good chance of surviving and germinating. And they could call on not just one but a variety of vectors for their dispersal. All sorts of smaller animals – from bats to birds to marsupials to rodents – attracted by the brightly colored, nutritious outer coat, would carry them off, nibble at them, and then discard the seed proper, the essential inner core, unharmed. Some rodents would squirrel them away, bury them – in effect, plant them – increasing their chances of successful germination. Large mammals might eat the entire seed – monkeys eating individual seeds, elephants entire cones – and void the endosperm, in its tough nut, unharmed in their dung, often in quite far-removed places."

And two more blogworthy items:

"It was only in 1986 that Guam's 'ecological murder mystery' was solved and the bird-eating tree snake, Boiga irregularis, was proved to be the culprit... It was estimated in the mid-eighties that there were now thirteen thousand snakes to the square mile, three million on the whole island.  Having consumed all the birds by this time, the snakes turned to other prey - skinks, geckos, other lizards, and even small mammals..."

"... branchial myoclonus, arising from lesions in the brain stem.  Here there occur rhythmic movements of the palate, middle-ear muscles, and certain muscles in the neck - an odd and unintelligible pattern, until one realizes that these are the only vestiges of the gill arches, the branchial musculature, in man.  Branchial myoclonus is, in effect, a gill movement in man..."

Credit for the cycad photo to San Diego Zoo.

The conspiracy to assassinate George Washington

Last night I finished reading this rather interesting book, which I learned about from an article in Smithsonian:

Mere days before the Declaration of Independence was signed in July 1776, 20,000 spectators gathered in a field where Manhattan’s modern-day Chinatown lies. All together, soldiers and citizens alike, they amassed the largest crowd to watch a public execution in the colonies at the time. Two days earlier Thomas Hickey, a member of the elite guard responsible for protecting George Washington, was convicted of mutiny and sedition, and on the morning of June 28, 1776, was hanged for his crimes.

Although he was the only one executed, Hickey, it turns out, was part of a much larger scheme, one concocted by British loyalists to assassinate Washington, who at the time was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

This from a review at NPR:

The book is also extremely well-researched. Meltzer and Mensch cite an impressive number of primary sources, including letters from Washington and others, as well as a heroic number of history books. Nothing about the book is phoned in; the amount of research behind it is genuinely remarkable.

If there's one thing that doesn't quite succeed, it's Meltzer and Mensch's prose, which at times tends toward the breathless. Writing about Tryon, for example, the authors declare, "He has money. He knows the city as well as anyone. He has friends in high places ... and low places." And on the Declaration of Independence, they write, "In a few days, the Congress will vote whether to ratify this document — and potentially change the war ... and the world ... forever." These kind of sentences, which always come at the end of their chapters, sound like a narrator of a television series dramatically teasing the next segment of the show right before a commercial break.

But that's a minor complaint — it's easy to overlook the occasional histrionic writing when the story is so fascinating.

I totally agree with the observation about the overly dramatic prose style, but overall that didn't detract from the interesting story.  It's an easy read that can be completed in a couple evenings, and it's worth the time.

We don't have DNA from all of our ancestors

This past week I've been reading a very interesting book - Who We Are And How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the Science of the Human Past, by David Reich.  It examines the history of the spread of mankind using information not from bone morphology or artifact similarities, but from the arguably more rigorous basis of DNA sequences.  Human migration is charted out of Africa (and back into it), up to Eurasia, and across to the Americas.  Correlations are drawn with languages and artifacts, but it's the DNA that overturns Clovis First and other older schema.  There is a lot of hard science, much of it way over my head, but it was clearly worth the browse, even just for the insight on Sally Hemings and the progeny of Genghis Khan.  The final chapters discuss the question of "what is race?" - a more complex question than most people realize.

The most interesting insight for me is reflected in the diagram embedded above (via), and this paragraph from the opening chapter:

’The Bible and the chronicles of royal families record who begat whom over dozens of generations. Yet even if the genealogies are accurate, Queen Elizabeth II of England almost certainly inherited no DNA from William of Normandy, who conquered England in 1066 and who is believed to be her ancestor twenty-four generations back in time. This does not mean that Queen Elizabeth II did not inherit DNA from ancestors that far back, just that it is expected that only about 1,751 of her 16,777,216 twenty-fourth-degree genealogical ancestors contributed DNA to her. This is such a small fraction that the only way William could plausibly be her genetic ancestor is if he was her genealogical ancestor in thousands of different lineage paths, which seems unlikely even considering the high level of inbreeding in the British Royal family.’

So, to oversimplify it for myself:   As you go back through the generations of your ancestry, the number of ancestors you have begins to increase exponentially.  For the first 6 generations back (to your great-great-great-great grandparents) there is "room" in your genome for some DNA from each of them.  But once you are back a dozen generations, with 4,096 ancestors (barring consaguinity), only a minority of them will have any sequences reflected in your genome.

Interesting stuff.  A hard read, but a good browse.  I think the book is available fulltext online here.

This is an interesting book

Jonathan Rauch is a highly-respected journalist (New York Times, Washington Post) and contributing editor of The Atlantic.  After enduring and overcoming a mid-life stressful period, he extensively researched the psychosocial and behavioral science literature on happiness, and summarized it in this book.  I had seen several favorable reviews, but wasn't expecting much new insight into an admittedly nebulous concept of happiness/unhappiness.  I was wrong; this was a good read.

The book begins with several introductory chapters exploring the definition of happiness and unhappiness, discussing the measurement tools and the strengths and weaknesses of survey data, and examining the effect of various life experiences.

"All the evidence says that on average people are no happier today than people were fifty years ago... Yet at the same time average incomes have more than doubled... how you feel about your life does not necessarily reflect how one might suppose you should feel, at least by the materialistic standards of homo economicus... People who are in very fast-growing economies are less happy than people in slower growing economies... Rapid change makes people very unhappy... the paradox of frustrated achievers and happy peasants."

The U-shaped curve featured on the book cover has been recognized for decades and reproduced in a multitude of studies.  The reason for that shape is less clear, and is the focus of Rauch's book.  If you are in a hurry with little time to read, I recommend skipping to chapter 6 - "The Paradox of Aging: Why getting old makes you happier."

"Stress declines after about age fifty... trying to explain what caused stress to decline so sharply, they adjusted for about twenty variables... The pattern didn't change.  In fact, it grew stronger, as if age itself were reducing stress... Emotional regulation improves... part of the reason emotional weather tends to settle down with age may be the accumulation of life experience... "I don't let that stuff bother me anymore"... Older people feel less regret... healthy aging helps people accept what they can't control..."

There's way more to discover in the book, which can be read in a couple evenings, but I think it is deserving of a more leisurely perusal, leaving oneself time for self-reflection.  If nothing else, just the knowledge that the axioms "this too shall pass" and "things will get better" have some statistical validity is rather reassuring.

The Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

This is an impressive book.

In the 1800s, robber barons raped the United States of its virgin forests.  The process which started in the Northeast had spread to the Midwest by the 1870s.  Forests were not only clearcut, but after separating the trunks from the crown and branches, the timber crews left the "slash" behind in massive tangles of deadwood that stretched for hundreds of miles.

In 1871 drought and high temperatures had turned the harvested forests of northern Wisconsin into tinder, and a massive fire obliterated the town of Peshtigo, killing 1200 people - a tragedy mostly overlooked by news reporters and history, because the Great Chicago Fire happened on the same day.

By 1894 there had been zero improvement in stewardship of the land, and the harvesting of the forests had moved west to Minnesota.  This time the victims were in Hinckley and Sandstone, communities just south of Duluth.

This book provides a detailed account of the conflagration.  It begins with a couple chapters of backstory on the communities and citizens, the timber industry, and pioneer life in the northwoods.  What impressed me was the detail the author provides regarding hour-by-hour movements of the victims and their actual conversations, which he gleaned from extensive research into first-person accounts collected by news reporters and preserved in diaries and correspondence of the survivors.

This was not just a "forest fire" - it was a "firestorm," in which the massive heat (1600-2000 degrees Fahrenheit) creates its own weather, with fire tornadoes and hurricane-force winds.  I was particulary awed by the report of one man who took his family to seeming safety in a boat on a lake; the convective forces of the fire column pulled in surrounding air so fiercely that their boat was blown back to the flaming shore, where they perished.

The details are brutal: 

(after the fire) "First, they came across the half-burned trunk of Peter Englund lying in his front yard.  Then, when they approached Englund's well, they were met by an overwhelming stench.  Peering down into the well, they could make out the top layer of what would turn out to be a stack of eighteen bodies - Englund's wife and his seven children and nine other people, most of them neighborhood children..."

After the fire, trainloads of sightseers came to gawk at the devastation, including ghoulish opportunists who scavenged the wasteland for safes and cashboxes, stripping jewelry from the bloated corpses.

This is not a "pleasant" read, but the book is well-written and the accounts, while grim, do not seem exploitative or sensationalized.   I found a copy at our local library, planning to browse it, but wound up reading cover-to-cover in a couple evenings.  It is perhaps better reading for a beach vacation than at a cabin in the woods.

More reading on The Great Hinckley Fire, The Hinckley Fire Museum, and firestorms in general.

The Adventures of Pinocchio

My only prior knowledge of Pinocchio came through the 1940 Disney movie.  The book on which that movie was based is The Adventures of Pinocchio, written in the 1880s by Italian author Carlo Collodi.

According to extensive research done by the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi in late 1990s and based on UNESCO sources, it has been adapted in over 260 languages worldwide. That makes it the most translated non-religious book in the world, and one of the best-selling books ever published. According to Francelia Butler, it remains "the most widely read book in the world after the Bible". 

I was delighted recently to locate a 2005 edition published by The Creative Company.  Nobody will be surprised to learn that the 19th century text differs from the Disney version.  Collodi's Pinocchio encounters assassins who hang him (top image) when they are unable to stab his wooden body with their "long, horrid" knives (he's rescued by a blue fairy who lives in the distant house).

And he does meet a talking cricket, but after being reprimanded for his behavior, he grabs a wooden mallet and squishes the cricket:

After one rebellious episode, Pinocchio returns home exhausted and rests his muddy feet on the cookstove. 

"Then he fell asleep.  And while he slept, his feet, which were wooden, caught fire, and little by little they burned away."

That's probably not in Disney, nor is the fact that Geppetto is hauled off to prison for child abuse for reprimanding Pinocchio.  And I don't remember in the Disney version Pinocchio biting off the hand of one of the assassins who attack him.

The book is an easy read for an adult - you can finish it in one sitting, but if you're going to read it to a child at bedtime or rainy-day storytime, it would need to be spread out over several sessions.

There are of course countless printings of this original story, many of which are available fulltext online.  The strength of this particular edition is the artwork of illustrator Roberto Innocenti.

I've embedded several sample images, but there are also multiple two-page spreads depicting Italian village scenes and the engulfment by the whale/shark.  This Creative Company version is a visual treat.  I'm now looking for several other publication of theirs featuring the same illustrator (Cinderella, Rose Blanche, and four others).

(And I've written to them to inquire about the unusual typography on the front cover)

"There will be no war..."

"There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing."

A Russian joke from the 1950s, cited by John le Carré in A Legacy of Spies, which I just finished reading.   For those who read and enjoyed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and the other Smiley novels, this is a well-crafted prequel.  For someone unfamiliar with those works, this would be a more difficult read.

Meiofauna

"Among the grains of sand in the surf zone you will in time find... entoprocts, gastrotrichs, gnathostomulids, kinorhynchs, nematodes, nemerteans, priapulids, sipunculans, and tardigrades."

Encountered in Chapter 13 of E.O. Wilson's newest book, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life.  It's a plea for habitat conservation and the preservation of our planet's biodiversity.  Most of the information is familiar, but for the TL;DR crowd I can highly recommend Chapter 15 ("The Best Places in the Biosphere"), for which Wilson polled "eighteen of the world's senior naturalists, each with international experience and expertise in biodiversity and ecology, and asked their opinion on the best reserves, those sheltering assemblages of notably unique and valuable species of plants, animals, and microorganisms."  The resulting compilation of about 35 locations is a joy to read.

Including this about the scrubland of southwestern Australia:

"Possessing a mild, Mediterranean-type climate and molybdenum-deficient soil that excludes species other than those adapted to the deficiency, the scrublands have evolved much like the flora of an oceanic island."

You learn something every day.

Selections from "The Aztec Treasure House"

I've just finished re-reading The Aztec Treasure House, one of the most interesting books I've encountered in a long time, replete with an abundance of "things you wouldn't know."

The author is Evan S. Connell, who in 2009 was nominated for a Man Booker International prize for lifetime achievement.  This book is a collection of 20 essays on an enormous variety of topics from history and science - Antarctica, El Dorado, Atlantis, the Northwest Passage, the Children's Crusade, Prester John, the Olmec, and many more.

Herewith some excerpts:

There are several Etruscan words that have survived in modern English: tavern, cistern, letter, person, ceremony, lantern ("but except for these, only about 100 Etruscan words have been deciphered")

New word: "Chests found by archaeologists at Herjolfsnes are made of pine, deal, and larch." According to Wiktionary, deal is "wood that is easy to saw (from conifers such as pine or fir.)"

Sir Douglas Mawson's solitary ordeal in Antarctica: "He had not taken off his socks for quite some time... The thickened skin of the soles had become entirely detached, forming a separate layer... He smeared his raw feet with lanolin, tied the soles in place with bandages, put on six pairs of thick wool socks, fur boots, and finally his crampon overshoes... He walked for a while on the outside of his feet, then on the inside, and when he could not endure the pain either way he went down on all fours and crawled - towing his sledge... Presently he got caught in a blizzard... The next special disappointment occurred the following day when he slipped into a crevasse..." (p. 104-8)

"Harappa and Mohenjo [archaeology sites in Pakistan] are twins, so much alike that archaeologists believed they could have been built by the same ruler... they were planned as deliberately as Brasilia or Salt Lake City and are just as predictable.  Everything was arranged.  The mechanical, conservative, windowless, unchanging architecture - block after block after block - implies a totalitarian attitude... 2,500 years before Christ... came these unimaginative, dark, flat-nosed builders who knew exactly what a city should look like.  And they lived in their geometrical barracks for ten centuries without changing a thing.  The style of building never changed.  The language did not change.  The first carved amulets are the same as the last."  (p. 144)

Giordano Bruno, at the beginning of the 17th century: "We know that he did speak his mind.  He spoke defiantly, imaginatively: "In space there are countless constellations, suns, and planets.  We see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark.  There are also numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less inhabited than this globe of ours..."" (p. 172)

Some early astronomers recorded their discoveries as anagrams:

"And in December of that year, 1610, Galileo perceived that Venus underwent phases - from sickle to full disc - which was proof that it revolved around the sun.  He made no public announcement of this; instead he contrived a baffling anagram:

"Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o.y."

His purpose was to establish himself as the discoverer, but at the same time conceal what he had learned so that nobody else might profit by it.  He filed this anagram with Giuliano de Medici, whom he trusted and who would be a powerful witness on his behalf. Properly arranged the letters read:

"Cynthiae figuras aemulatur Mater Amorum."

Cynthis being the moon - a generally understood poetic metaphor - whose figures or shapes were emulated by Venus, Mother of Love.

This kind of business was not uncommon.  The Dutch astronomer Huygens, for instance, protected an important discovery by writing in his book Systema Saturnium: "aaaaaaa ccccc d eeeee g h iiiiiii llll mm nnnnnnnnn oooo pp q rr s ttttt uuuuu."

A cryptographer might deduce that the letters should be organized as follows: "Annulo cingitur, renui plano, nusquam cohaerente, ad eclipticam inclinato."  In other words, obviously, Saturn is encircled by a flat ring inclined to the ecliptic and nowhere touching the planet." (p. 191-2)

More:

Albert Einstein was once asked what governed his taste in clothes.  He replied "Indifference."

"Neutrinos dance through lead walls the way mosquitoes dance through a chicken wire fence... the yellow star Arcturus is about forty light-years away... Now listen. A lead wall forty light years thick would almost stop a neutrino.  Not quite, but almost."  (p. 212)

"The core of these [pulsars] is magically small.  Some are thought to be no more than a mile in diameter... As for weight, a chunk the size of a matchbox, if you put it down gently, would break through he crust of the earth and keep right on falling toward the center... Expressed another way, a rock the size of a sugar cube would weigh more than a fleet of battleships." (p. 213)

"Astrophysicists seem perplexed by the information they have been gathering from quasars because some of these objects emit 100 times more energy than the largest galaxies in the universe.  In other words, to generate that amount of energy a quasar must annihilate a mass equivalent to one billion suns every second." (p. 216)

"Animals birds, and butterflies are said to have joined the French crusade.  Butterflies, bearers of the soul, were especially significant.  Much later Jeanne d'Arc would be asked during her examination: "Is it true that you and your banner go into battle among a cloud of butterflies?" (p. 273)

"He had watched the Tartars building and coloring their gigantic tents, which were transported on carts, twenty-two oxen drawing each cart.  The oxen were yoked in two ranks, eleven abreast.  And the shaft of the vehicle, he said, was as long as the mast of a ship." (p. 285)

Slavery viewed as a Christian virtue:

"One of [Prince Henry the Navigator]'s retainers, who called himself Lancarote - Lancelot - was awarded the first slave-hunting licence.  His caravels anchored at an island off the Guinea coast and raided a village: "And at last our Lord God, who rewards every noble act, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service... they took captive of these Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished or were killed."...

Henry, as sponsor, was entitled to a royal fifth, but he gave his share of the slaves to friends and courtiers.  The successful voyage pleased him more than any profit, we are told, and he reflected "with great pleasure" upon the salvation of those souls which before were lost.

How remote it sounds, this medieval morality in which lives and bodies lay at the disposition of Christians.  Azurara observes that the lot of Moorish slaves "was now quite the contrary of what it had been, since before they had lived in perdition of soul and body... And now consider what a reward should be that of the Infante at the hands of the Lord God, for having thus given the the chance of salvation..." (p. 297)

And a few more:

"It's odd that [in the fifteenth century] nobody knew the shape of Africa.  Egypto-Phoenician explorers during the reign of Necho II, about 600 B.C., had sailed completely around the continent: they went down the Red Sea, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean at Gibraltar." (p. 300)

"A few years ago I was talking to a dealer in pre-Columbian artifacts who mentioned that Venetian glass beads sometimes are found in Sinu [people of Colombia] tombs.  He said he had seen lots of them in Colombia, but he did not buy any because they had no market value.  I asked how he could be sure it was Venetian glass, and he replied that he knew those beds when he saw them because he used to live in Venice.  Besides, Sinu Indians never made glass beads.  All of which means very little, unless you know that Sinu tombs date from about the twelfth century." (p. 315)

A test for a unicorn: "On this West shore we found a dead fish floating, which had in his nose a horne streight and torquet... being broken in the top, where we might perceive it hollow, into the which some of our sailors putting spiders they presently died.  I saw not the triall hereof, but it was reported unto me of a trueth: by the vertue whereof we supposed it to be the sea Unicorne." (p. 326)

New word: "I was shot in with a bullet at the battery alongst the huckle bone..."  (??? I've seen it defined as a hip bone and as a small ankle bone like the talus/astragalus).

Inca treasure:  "Replicas of Indian corn, each gold ear sheathed in silver, with tassels of silver thread.  Innumerable gold goblets.  Sculpted gold spiders, gold beetles, gold lobsters, gold lizards.  A gold fountain that emitted a sparkling jet of gold while gold animals and gold birds played around it.  Twelve splendid representations of women, all in fine gold... The list goes on and on, as Durer said, until one can hardly relate all of what was there.  Nevertheless, after the death of Atahualpa, some Inca nobles Poured a bucket of corn in front of the Spaniards, and one of them picked up a grain and said, "this is the gold he gave you."  And then, pointing to the heap on the ground: "This much he has kept." (p. 399)

"On Saint John's Day, June 24, 1527, Paracelsus surpassed himself.  Into the traditional campus bonfire went the accumulated rubbish of a year, whatever the students did not need or like.  And into the fire this year - at his command - went a gigantic book, the greatest of all medieval medical books, the Canon of Avicenna.  It was too big to be carried; it had to be dragged to the ceremonial fire. "There is more wisdom in my shoelaces," said Paracelsus, "than in such books."

The book is available on Amazon for about $14.  My gently-used copy is currently listed on eBay with a starting bid of $1.00.

"The Elements of Eloquence"

If you're going to write a book, and the chapter titles will include: "Polyptoton," "Aposiopesis," "Merism," "Hyperbaton," "Anadiplosis," "Diacope," "Hendiadys," "Epistrophe," "Tricolon," "Epizeuxis," "Syllepsis," "Enallage," "Zeugma," "Chiasmus," "Catachresis," "Litotes," "Metonymy," "Pleonasm," "Epanalepsis," and even "Scesis Onomaton," then you'd better have excellent skills as a wordsmith, because your potential audience will undoubtedly be wary of what is expected to be boring material.

Fortunately this author (Mark Forsyth) has those skills, and he uses the rhetorical devices to explain them.  Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter on pleonasm:

"Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn't require them.  It's repeating the same thing again twice, and it annoys and irritates people...

People who think like this lead terrible lives.  They have never married, simply because they couldn't bear to hear the words:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony.

They can't enjoy Hamlet because of the unnecessary "that" in "To be or not to be, that is the question."

An interesting anecdote in the chapter on merism:

"In the medieval marriage service "sickness and health" were followed by: "to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death do us part."... How could a wife guarantee that she would be buxom?... the word buxom has changed in meaning over the years.  The first citation in the OED comes from the twelfth century and is defined as "Obedient; pliant; compliant, tractable."  The sense then changed to happy, then to healthy, and thence to plump.

Re hyperbaton:

"The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can't end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash.  In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can't end a sentence with up, should be told up to shut.  It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it's one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to."

Re periodic sentences:

John of Gaunt's death scene in Richard II, which begins with "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle..." adds nineteen additional lines before presenting the main verb: "...Is now leased out..."

We all know someone who uses parataxis:

"Parataxis is like this.  It's good, plain English.  It's one sentence.  Then it's another sentence.  It's direct.  It's farmer's English.  You don't want to buy my cattle.  They're good cattle.  You don't know cattle.  I'm going to have a drink.  Then I'm going to break your jaw.  I'm a paratactic farmer.  My cattle are the best in England."

There's nothing wrong with parataxis.  It's good, simple, clean, plain-living, hard-working, up-bright-and-early English.  Wham.  Bam.  Thank you, ma'am."

Re versification:

In addition to the familiar iamb (te-TUM), trochee (Tumty), anapaest (te-te-TUM), and dactyl (TUM-te-ty) there are "strange feet like the choriamb (TUM-te-te-TUM) and the molossus (TUM! TUM! TUM!).  But these strange ones have never really worked well in English, apart from the amphibrach (te-TUM-te), which is the basis of the limerick: "There was a young man from Calcutta..."

Is this comment true or is it playful nonsense?  "The only reason that T.S. Eliot insisted on the middle initial was that he was panfully aware of what his name would have been without it, backwards." For a short while he became so paranoid that he decided to use his middle name instead and introduced himself as T Stearns Eliot.  The phase did not last, but it's probably why his first great poem was called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Re congeries:

"Shakespeare loved lists, especially when he was insulting people: "... you starveling, you wolf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish!  O for breath to utter what is like thee!  You tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case; you vile standing-tuck..."

The technical name for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronunciation: no letter is silent) is that you don't even need to know what any of the words mean..."

By now you already know whether you'd enjoy reading this book or not.  I did.

Posted with a tip of the blogging hat to reader Paul Parkinson, who identified this book as the source of a quote in a previous TYWKIWDBI post.

The Lobster Coast

I have visited Maine several times and always enjoyed my stay there, but had never read a proper history of the state until a friend recently recommended this book.  Particularly interesting to me was the geologic explanation for the remarkable profusion of marine life in the Gulf of Maine, and the descriptions of the staggering abundance of lobsters and fish harvested from this region in prehistory and the early post-settlement era.

"... Indians depended on the living bounty of the Gulf of Maine...they left staggering shellheaps behind; a single heap of shucked oyster shells in Damariscotta covered an area of more than sixty acres to a depth of nearly thirty feet." (p. 63)

"Lobsters were everywhere.  On their way to the Kennebec, Raleigh Gilbert's men [early 1600s] caught fifty lobsters "of great bignesse" by simply rowing a boat over shallow water and gaffing the unsuspecting lobsters with a boat hook..." (p. 81)

"The cod bit quickly in those days and a good fisherman would catch 350 to 400 in a day... they weighed over one hundred pounds apiece..." (p. 85)

"In colonial days, a small boy could bring home enough [lobsters] to feed several families by siimply wading along the shore at low tide and gaffing the huge five- and ten-pound beasts hiding among the rocks... One group of indentured servants in Massachusetts became so upset with this diet that they took their owners to court winning a judgment that they would not be served lobster more than three times a week.  Lobsters were sometimes taken in great numbers and strewn on the fields as fertilizer..." (p. 170)

"The catch in those days would astound today's lobsterman.  Portland lobstermen in 1855 averaged seven four- to six-pound lobsters in every pot, every day throughout the four-month season.  (By comparison, today's lobstermen often find only one legal-sized lobster per trap, and it typically weighs between a pound and a pound and a half).  (p. 177)

"At the height of summer, hotel owners would pay as much as five cents for a good, two-pound dinner table lobster...  Smaller lobsters were no longer discarded, as the canneries would buy them for $1 per hundredweight..." (p. 186)

"Halibut, a great flatfish that could weigh nine hundred pounds and measure nine feet in length, had once been so numerous they were "looked upon as a nuisance" by cod-seeking fishermen.. On at least one occasion, a vessel using the old hook-over-the-side method caught more than 250 in three hours..." (p. 203)

In this regard the book reminded me of the spectacularly unbelievable accounts of pre-settlement North America described in Paradise Found.

Less pleasant are the accounts in the book of the pillage of these resources (only recently modulated by regulatory restrictions) and the human-human interactions, beginning with the arrival of Europeans and continuing to the modern era as the Boston/New York population "invades" rural coastal Maine.

An interesting summer read.

The religion of Genghis Khan

"Eyewitnesses report that upon reaching the center of Bukhara, Genghis Khan rode up to the large mosque and asked if, since it was the largest building in the city, it was the home of the sultan. When informed that it was the house of God, not the sultan, he said nothing. For the Mongols, the one God was the Eternal Blue Sky that stretched from horizon to horizon in all directions. God presided over the whole earth; he could not be cooped up in a house of stone like a prisoner or a caged animal, nor as the city people claimed, could his words be captured and confined inside the covers of a book. In his own experience, Genghis Khan had often felt the presence and heard the voice of God speaking directly to him in the vast open air of the mountains in his homeland, and by following those words, he had become the conqueror of great cities and huge nations."

An excerpt from a book I've started reading - Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford. Quite interesting so far.

The "Children's Blizzard" of 1888

This week marks the anniversary of the "Children's Blizzard" (also known as the "Schoolhouse Blizzard."

When the storm hit, it caught so many settlers by surprise that between 250 and 500 people died that weekend, according to estimates by newspaper editors in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa and the Dakota Territory...

Carl Saltee, in Fortier, Minn., remembered that  “A dark and heavy wall builded up around the northwest coming fast, coming like those hevy [sic] thunderstorms, like a shot. In a few moments, we had the severest snowstorm I ever saw in my life with a terrible hard wind, like a hurrycane [sic], snow so thick we could not see more than 3 steps from the door at times.”

This was not a storm of drifting lace snowflakes, but of flash-frozen droplets firing sideways from the sky, an onslaught of speeding ice needles moving at more than 60 miles per hour. Even without the whiteout conditions — climate experts call this zero/zero visibility — many people couldn’t see because the microscopic bits of ice literally froze their eyes shut...

Schoolchildren, many of whom had left for school without coats, hats and mittens — the better to bask in the comparative warmth of a January thaw — were overcome by the blizzard. In many places, the storm made its debut just as students were walking back home from school. The air was not only filled with blowing ice, but temperatures plummeted to frightening lows. By the afternoon in Moorhead, it was 47 degrees below zero...

I first learned about this event about ten years ago when I read David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard.   It is a compelling, if sometimes unsettling, read.

The amazing value of the walrus

Excerpts from The Farfarers, by Farley Mowat (also published as The Alban Quest):

Up to fourteen feet long, superbly muscled, clad in a hide as tough as armour, adult walrus fear nothing in the ocean. Gregarious, and amiable except when roused in defence of kith and kin, they once lived in vast and far-flung tribes in all the northern oceans.

They have been known by many names. Eskimos called them aivalik; Russians called them morse; Scandinavians knew them as hvalross; Englishspeakers have called them sea-cows and sea-horses.

By whatever name, walrus have been a major source of wealth for human beings from dim antiquity.

One day in the museum of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad, a Siberian archaeologist handed me an intricately carved piece of yellowed bone. What did I think it was?

“Ivory?” I hazarded. “Elephant, or maybe mammoth?”

“Ivory, da. The hilt of a sword from an excavation in Astrakhan on the old trade route to Persia. But it is neither elephant nor mammoth. It is morse. You must know that for a very long time morse tusks were the main source of ivory in northern Asia and Europe. Sometimes they were worth more than their weight in gold.”

He went on to tell me of a Muscovite prince captured by Tartars whose ransom was set at 114 pounds of gold—or an equal weight in walrus tusks. This was no isolated example. From very ancient times until as late as the seventeenth century, walrus ivory was one of civilization’s most sought-after and highly valued luxuries. Compact and portable, the teeth in their natural “ingot” state served as currency or were carved into precious objects—some purely ornamental; some quasi-functional, as sword and dagger pommels; and some religious, including phallic symbols in fertility cults.

“The tooth of the morse,” the archaeologist continued, “was white gold from time out of mind. There was nothing: no precious metals, gems, spices, no valuta more sought after. How odd that such hideous monsters should have been the source of such wealth.”

Wealth derived from walrus was not limited to ivory. The inch-thick leather made from the hides of old bulls would stop musket balls and offered as much resistance to cutting and thrusting weapons as did bronze. For tens of centuries it was the first choice of shield makers and their warrior customers.

The hide had other uses as well. Split into two or even three layers, it made a superb sheathing for ships’ hulls. A narrow strap, cut spirally from a single hide, could yield a continuous thong as much as two hundred feet in length. When rolled into the “round,” such a thong became rope as flexible and durable as that made from the best vegetable fibres, and it was a good deal stronger. In fact, walrus-hide rope remained the preferred cordage and rigging on some north European and Asian vessels until as late as the sixteenth century.

Although walrus are today restricted almost exclusively to Arctic waters, they were formerly found in Europe south to the Bay of Biscay and, in the western Atlantic, as far to the south as Cape Cod. However, as people became more numerous and more rapacious, and as walrus ivory steadily increased in value, the more southerly herds were exterminated, one by one...

Getting the feel of the job, Poole’s crew [in 1603] killed about four hundred walrus and sailed home with eleven tuns of oil and several casks of tusks. When they returned to Bear Island the following year, they were professionals...

Within eight years of Poole’s first visit to Bear Island, thirty to forty thousand walrus had been butchered, and so few remained as to be not worth hunting.

An even worse slaughter took place in New World waters, especially in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where every year more than 100,000 sea cows hauled out on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands alone...

Up to 25,000 walrus were killed each year on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands during the 1700s.

Gleanings from "The Road to Little Dribbling"

George Everest (for whom the mountain is named) didn't pronounce his name EV-erest, but as EVE-rest - just two syllables.

A listing of hikers and walkers killed by cows in Britain.

The first electric light put to use anywhere in the world was in a lighthouse in South Foreland, England.  This was in 1858, well before Edison developed the modern lightbulb.  It was an arc lamp too bright for domestic use, and for a decade that lighthouse was the only place in the world to see an electric light in operation.

London is one of the least crowded cities on earth, at about half the population density of NYC or Paris.

The Air Forces Memorial, at the top of Cooper's Hill in Runnymede, England, has inscribed in stone the names of 20,456 airmen who died in the Second World War but have no grave.

"One of the great pleasures of dotage is the realization that you have pretty much everything you will ever need. Apart from a few perishable essentials like light bulbs, batteries, and food, I require almost nothing. I don’t need any more furniture, decorative bowls, lap rugs, cushions with messages expressing my feelings about animals or housework, hot water bottle covers, paperclips, rubber bands, spare cans of paint, dried out paint brushes, miscellaneous lengths of electrical wire or any kind of metal objects that might one day theoretically come in handy for some as yet unimagined purpose...  I’m especially set for clothes. I have reached the time of life where all I want is to wear out the clothes I have and never get another thing.  I think many men of a certain age will nod in agreement when I say there is a real satisfaction when you wear something out and can finally discard it - a feeling of a job well done..."

The legendary King Arthur was a bastard, sired by Uther Pendragon on his enemy's wife.

In the early 20th century, the largest fishing port in the world was... Grimsby, England.  Not the largest in Britain or northern Europe, but the largest in the world.   In Grimsby, people used to bring their own fish and have the fish-and-chips shop fry it for a penny.

This was an enjoyable book.  It's perhaps the third or fourth of Bill Bryson's books that I've reviewed or excerpted for TYWKIWDBI.  Although styled as notes about a prolonged exploration of Great Britain, the book is not detailed enough to be a true travel guidebook, and Bryson's curmudgeonly complaints sometimes morph into surprisingly caustic criticism, but overall the tone is light and humorous, and it makes for a pleasant, easy read.