Footnote of the Month

 

 "Yes, one has to wonder: where did they get a monkey? I can provide no answer." So wrote John Belshaw in an endnote to his book Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (UBC Press, 2009, p. 248n1). I don't know the context of the author's question, and I think this is a case where it's better to give one's imagination free rein. Would that I could use the same citation in one of my own books.

 

19th-century netsuke, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Attack Monkeys of Ningbo

I'm brushing up my knowledge of what Gary Brecher calls “the Teflon Empire” by reading Julia Lovell's clear-eyed, balanced history of the First Opium War, the event that Chinese nationalists consider the founding episode (founding atrocity, if you prefer) of modern Chinese history. Like most military conflicts, this one had few redeeming features. It doesn't even bear a very accurate name. Qing officials did destroy a lot of English opium in 1839, but the British government did not go to war as payback; rather, it wanted to humiliate the decadent government of an allegedly inferior nation. Humiliate China it did: the war proved hopelessly, tragically one sided, with thousands of demoralized Chinese troops crushed in their indefensible forts and drowned in their obsolete junks. British casualties numbered in the low hundreds. Like the Falklands War, the Opium War was (to quote Ricky Gervais) “basically a range war...the equivalent of holding a midget at arm's length...[while] you're just kicking him in the bollocks.”

There's not much levity in Lovell's book, but she does have an eye for colorful details. I particularly enjoyed her account of one of General Prince Yijing's attempts at unconventional warfare: "Before the [Chinese] assault on [British-held] Ningbo, Yijang had made room in the budget to buy nineteen monkeys: the idea was to tie firecrackers to their backs then fling them onto English ships moored nearby.”* None of the general's subordinates, however, would volunteer for monkey-tossing duty, so Yijing's simian attack force went unused. I regret to say the monkeys' attendant eventually abandoned them to starve. The ministrations of Mars are often cruel.

* My petite amie suggests that General Yijing had read of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, who ignited enemy buildings with his tail.

Above image: Japanese (not Chinese, but certainly East Asian) macaques frolicking in the snow. Taken by the author, Dec. 2014.

This Continent is DRUGGED

In her new book The Atlantic in World History (Oxford, 2012), Karen Kupperman records an inadvertent and amusing use of a native North American hallucinogen, jimsonweed*, by Virginia troops during Bacon's Rebellion (1676). Gathering the plant for a "boil'd salad," the men

"'turned natural fools upon it for several days: One would blow up a feather in the air, another would dart straws at it with much fury, and another, stark naked was sitting up in a corner, like a monkey, grinning and making mows [moues] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces, with a countenance more antic than any Dutch droll.'" (89-90)

It took eleven days for the afflicted men to come to their senses, during which time their companions had to restrain them from "wallow[ing]" in their own filth.

Kupperman also discusses other drugs and stimulants that Europeans discovered in America, including coca, of which one Italian researcher wrote in 1859 "I sneered at all the poor mortals condemned to live in the valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the space of 77,438 worlds, each more splendid than the one before" (89). I guess he counted all of them.


* Named, apparently, for Jamestown.

If I Were the Emperor Napoleon

"In his place, I would take ship, and I would go to seek fortune in America and I would live there very peacefully in the forests and the deserts. The fruit of the coconut tree would nourish me, and water clearer than crystal would refresh my burning blood and my burnt-out brain. I would hunt monkeys in the woods, I would reflect on my past greatness and would try to console myself for my present misfortune as best I could. That is what I would do if I were the Emperor Napoleon." Marie Metternich, in a letter to her father, 27 January 1814, quoted in Adam Zamoyski, The Rites of Peace (HarperCollins, 2007), p. 151.

Jacko's Navy

I've always assumed that the British Navy of the nineteenth century - the century in which Britain built, and maintained through sea power, the largest empire in history - was one of the greatest military machines of all time. Apparently, I was misinformed. In a chapter on the 19th-century British Navy in his book Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York, 1991, pp. 373-400), Robert Massie effectively dispelled my impression of the Royal Navy as a sleek, well-disciplined, technologically advanced fighting force. Instead, Massie describes the pre-1900 British Navy as complacent, besotted with Nelsonian dogma, and comically obsessed with cleanliness and polish; its ship captains as an assortment of dandies, megalomaniacs, and eccentrics; and its ships' crews as a pack of half-starved boys and drunks. Massie does this to great comic effect, which I can best capture in glossary form, as follows:

Boiler: What one ship's engineer thought he had turned into, thanks to delirium tremens. The man spent all day on his back, "puffing vigorously" to avoid bursting. (p. 377)

Candle wax: Used by midshipmen to afix pieces of yarn to the backs of cockroaches. The boys would then light the yarn and set the insects to racing each other.

Cleanliness: The highest virtue in the Royal Navy. See Gunnery Practice; HMS Forte; Nightcaps; Watertight Doors

Elephant: Ship's pet on HMS Galatea (1870); brought aboard by Lieutenant Lord Charles Beresford; learned to help raise the mainsail with his trunk; apparently very happy aboard ship once he got over his seasickness.

Fanny Adams: 1) English girl who supposedly disappeared near a British cannery. 2) What British sailors called canned meat.

Gunnery practice: Avoided by most officers and crew, as firing the guns tended to dirty the ships' decks. Also discouraged by the Admiralty, which believed that fighting should occur at close range and that aimed fire was therefore unnecessary.

HMS Forte: One of the cleanest ships in Her Majesty's Navy (ca. 1870), it featured gilt and satin wood facings, "French-polished" gun carriages, and cannonballs "painted blue with a gold band around them and a yellow top." The captain wore numerous finger rings, spent hours grooming himself, and frequently took his midshipmen ashore to play cricket. (pp. 398-99)

Jacko: Name of pet baboon belonging to Captain Marryat of HMS Larne. Frequently pulled buttons off crewmembers' uniforms.

Maggot derbies: Another amusement of midshipmen. Pretty much what the name implies.

Nightcaps: Small flannel nightcaps were placed on ships' ring bolts to prevent them from becoming dirty or tarnished.

Shot-to-hit ratio: During the bombardment of Alexandria, Egypt (1881), British warships achieved a ratio of 1 hit for every 300 shots. See also Gunnery practice.

Watertight doors: Thanks to RN officers' obsession with cleanliness and "brightwork," these were usually filed and polished so intensely that they ceased to be watertight.

This is a far cry from the "Wooden Ships and Iron Men" of Nelson's age; it is, instead, the sort of navy that Gilbert and Sullivan or Monty Python would have imagined (and did imagine). It was also not the kind of navy that could survive serious competition from another industrial power. After Germany and Britain began their naval arms race in the early 20th century, the R.N., under the command of Admiral John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher, began a series of modernizing reforms. These included a greater emphasis on modern weapons (especially torpedoes and long-range guns), more gunnery training for crewmen, and the systematic cashiering of inefficient or incompetent officers. Jacky's navy was certainly more disciplined than Jacko's navy, but also much less colorful.