Voyagers to the East, Part XXII

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

If you had lived in France during the sixteenth century, and had been a person of at least moderate wealth (sufficient to allow you to travel throughout the kingdom), there is an excellent chance you would have been able to meet, or at least see, a Native American traveler during your lifetime. There were approximately 100 Indian visitors to France between 1505 and 1613, beginning with a Carijo chief's son, baptized as Binot de Gonneville, whose biracial descendant became an abbot. The mariner Thomas Aubert brought 7 Micmacs -- the first North American sojourners in France - to Rouen in 1508, and Verrazzano may have brought back a southeastern Algonquian boy in 1524. Explorer Jacques Cartier apparently took a Brazilian Indian girl to France in 1527, though her subsequent fate is unknown (Olive Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism, 210). Nine years later, Cartier kidnapped Huron chief Donnaconna, his two sons (who had previously been to France), two other chiefs, and five children, and brought them to St. Malo. Most of this cohort died within a few years, but one of the Huron children, a girl, survived to adulthood in France (Dickason, 210-11).

The number of Indian arrivals increased as the French fishing and fur-trading businesses in North America, and French trade with Brazil, expanded later in the century. In 1547 King Henri II granted an audience to Diogo Alvares, a Portuguese shipwreck survivor who had been adopted by the Tupinamba Indians, and his Tupinamba wife Paraguacu, whom Catherine de Medici gave her own name. Henri invited both to remain in France, but they chose instead to return to Brazil (Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 211-212). Henri encountered a much larger cohort of Brazilian Indians in 1550, during his royal entry into Rouen, when he was greeted by several hundred "Indians" - mostly disguised Frenchmen and women, but including 50 actual Tupi-Guarani - who staged a mock battle for him. (At some point during his reign, possibly during this very procession, Henri II received several Tupinamba captives as gifts, and gave them to various nobles as servants.) Henri's successor, Charles IX, also had presented to him several Native American captives, including a Brazilian "king," during his own entries into Troyes and Bordeaux in March 1564 and April 1565, respectively.

Public viewing of Native Americans in 16th-century France peaked with these processions, but at least a dozen more Indians arrived in the kingdom by the early seventeenth century. According to Jacques Noel, between 1550 and 1587 French fur traders brought several North American Indians to the port of St. Malo, where they were baptized and lived at least part of their lives; they included a Micmac or Beothuk man, Jehan, who was baptized in 1553 (Dickason, 211). Around 1570, sailors brought to France a Micmac chief, Messamoet, who subsequently returned to Canada and became an intermediary between his kinsmen and French traders. Shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, Henri IV received several Montagnais boys brought to France by Francois Grave du Pont and other survivors of Pierre de Chauvin's short-lived colony on the Saguenay River. One of these boys became a companion to the Dauphin (he died in 1603); two others learned French and returned to Canada in 1603 with Grave du Pont and Samuel de Champlain, whom they served as translators during a diplomatic feast, or tabagie, at Tadoussac. (David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream [New York, 2008], 117, 126, 139.) And a decade later, in 1613, six Tupinambas came with missionaries to Paris, where they exchanged their "native" garb (including feathers and maracas, possibly inauthentic) for French clothing and were baptised, with the King and Queen serving as their godparents. (Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 214-17) For the French, the transport of Indians to the metropole was often accompanied by baptism and presentation to the monarch - that is, the submission of exotic strangers to both the Church and the monarchy, in rituals that conjoined the authority of both institutions and were intended to strengthen both.

Of Beowulf and Fred the Sheep

Via the leading weblog on early medieval Spain, "A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe," this intriguing story about about a proposal to date medieval manuscripts through DNA extraction. Since medieval scrolls and books were printed on parchment - animal skin - Timothy Stinson of North Carolina State University hypothesized it would be possible to determine undated manuscripts' date of origin by extracting animal (principally sheep) DNA from them, then comparing their genetic signature to that of books of known provenance. Stinson presented his proposal at the conference of the Bibliographical Society of America on January 23rd, and it's already generated some press.

The idea apparently isn't new, however; Michael Drout of Wheaton College and his colleague Greg Rose developed it in 2001, and tried to obtain funding for DNA manuscript dating in 2007. Drout noted a significant problem with the proposal in his weblog: nine or ten centuries' worth of handling results in the deposition of quite a bit of human DNA deposition on the edges of books, which in turn leads to cross contamination with sheep DNA. Still, Drout thinks the problems with creating a DNA manuscript database can be surmounted, given enough time and money.

(The illustration above is from the Arni Magnusson Institute, Iceland)

Of Augury and Haruspication

Apropos of last week's peaceful transfer of power in Washington, I recommend this weblog entry, which explains the origin of the term "inauguration," and gives a thorough description of the various kinds of divination practiced by the Roman republic.

According to the author, augury (the root-word in question) was not actually divination - it was instead a way to determine, by observing the flight of birds in specified sectors of the sky (or ostentaria), whether the gods approved of a proposed course of action. When a new public official was elected or appointed, the Romans used augures, haruspices - the readers of entrails - and fulgatores (lightning-interpreters) to determine whether his selection was spiritually legitimate.

The article is a bit long, but worth reading - it explains, among other things, how to conduct an augury, what the various terms associated with the practice were, what birds' flight or calls were important, and how the Romans resolved contradictory omens. The link is courtesy of the daybook of conservative writer Jerry Pournelle, who is trying to be a good sport about Barack Obama's inauguration.

On Your Knees Cave Man

Happy New Year to all. My first entry of the year, which is based on an article from the December 28, 2008 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, takes us back 10,000 years before present, when a Native American man died in (or, perhaps, died near and was subsequently moved to) a cave in southeastern Alaska. His remains, which paleontologist Tim Heaton found in 1996, included "a male pelvis, three ribs, a few vertebrae…a toothy, broken jaw," and some tools. From this seemingly limited evidence, researchers determined that the man was in his twenties when he died, lived principally on seafood, had traveled some distance to the site of his death, and may have been a mariner.

More recently, geneticist Brian Kemp of Washington State University managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from the ancient traveler's teeth, and determined that he belonged to human genetic haplogroup D4H3. In 2008, genetic mouth-swab testing of 200 Alaska Natives proved that none of them was closely related to this early Alaskan – not surprising, since most of the region's Native Americans descend from later migratory waves. (Anthropologists have identified at least four waves of prehistoric human migration into the Americas: Paleo-Indian, Athabascan, Inuit, and Aleut. Most modern Native Alaskans belong to the latter three groups.) In fact, the only Native Americans who share haplogroup D4H3 are near-coastal peoples who live much further south: the Chumash (California), Cayapa (Ecuador), and Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego).

The discovery thus provides further support for the hypothesis that the first Paleo-Indian migrants to the Americas were seafarers, who used small boats to follow the coasts of the (now-submerged) Bering land bridge and of western Canada to the rest of the Americas. It also suggests that there was more than one wave of Paleo-Indian migrants, since Heaton's prehistoric sojourner was also unrelated to other Paleo-Indian descendents, such as Alaska's Tlingits.

The 10,000-year-old bones, incidentally, were found in On Your Knees Cave – I suspect that's how one enters the cavern – at the north end of Prince William Island. The ancient sojourner has thus received the name "On Your Knees Cave Man," which I suspect neither he nor the Geico cavemen would appreciate.

How Careless!

The global financial meltdown has been hitting private universities hard; several small colleges have announced their forthcoming closure, while others, like Beloit College, have fired faculty and staff in response to declining enrollment and shrinking endowments. Even Ivy League schools aren't immune: Yale has announced a $6 billion decline in its endowment, while the losses at my Alma Mater, if they are "marked to market," may exceed $18 billion - a sum roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Panama or Iceland. This is the sort of news that makes me glad I work for a public school, where we're more dependent on state appropriations and federal aid than foundation pay-outs and tuition. I can't even visualize eighteen billion dollars - though this web page may help my curious readers to do so.

A Gorey Christmas

As a follow-up to my last post, and for the entertainment of those of my readers who are Edward Gorey fans (probably most of you), I present the following links. (None of these have much to do with early American history, though they do refer to media which are at least ten years old.)

* First, here is a pastiche of the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," written and illustrated in Gorey's style by Shaenon Garrity. Gorey himself was a fan of the original series, but apparently missed the Tribble episode. (This story appeared on Boing Boing last year, but I suspect a fair number of people missed it.)

* Gorey also illustrated at least one classic science fiction novel: a 1960 reprint of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. This selection of illustrations reminds us that the dividing line between s.f. and horror is often quite thin.

* And, finally, a link to a Nine Inch Nails video inspired by Gorey's illustrations. Trent Reznor and Danny Lohner wrote the underlying music and lyrics for the soundtrack to one of David Lynch's films, so it lies at a nexus of late-twentieth-century creepiness.

Happy holidays, everyone.


(Links updated 27 July 2018.)

Memento Mori

While visiting the Philadelphia College of Physicians three years ago, I saw an exhibit on medicine during the early nineteenth century - a tie-in with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition - which included a section on common causes of death, borrowed from the records of two Philadelphia churches. Such a morbid display might seem more suitable for Halloween than for a December weblog posting, but many of the listed causes of death are sufficiently vague and strange (not surprising, given the primitive state of early-nineteenth-century medicine) as to provide a bit of macabre humor. Particularly if you happen to be a fan of Edward Gorey.


And since a little Gorey-esque humor is always fashionable, I present, herewith, the "Diseases and Casualties in Christ Church and at St. Peters, This Year (25 Dec. 1802 – 25 Dec. 1803):"


Apoplexy (1)
Asthma (1)
Bilious Fever (4)
Bilious Cholic (1)
Child Bed (1)
Consumption (2)
Cancer (0)*
Dropsy (7)
Decay (25)
Drowned (1)
Fits (17)
Flux (4)
Fever (3)
Gravel (0)*
Gout (1)
Hives (6)
Hooping Cough (1)
Killed (3)
Lunacy (3)
Mortification (2)
Measles (4)
Nervous Fever (4)
Old Age (8)
Pleurisy (5)
Palsy (2)
Purging and Vomit (5)
Suddenly (1)
Scarlet Fever (4)
Sore Throat (4)
Smallpox (1)
Teeth and Worms (7)
Yellow Fever (11)


* Apparently, this list was a form or template, as it gave two causes of death that didn't apply to 1803.


The total is 139, though the two parishes counted 143 burials that year - one hopes that either the recorders made a counting error or that the four "extra" burials were of people who died the previous year. There were also 213 baptisms, so births outnumbered deaths by a 3:2 ratio. Nonetheless, Philadelphia, like most early modern cities, was a fairly unhealthy place to live, with a five-year average death rate (for 1793-98) of 40 per 1,000 - roughly equal to present-day Nigeria. (Billy Gordon Smith, Lower Sort: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 [Cornell UP, 1994], p. 206)

Obligatory Self-Promotion

My first book, Red Gentlemen & White Savages, is now in press, and should be available for sale by December 21st. Alan Taylor describes it as "an original and substantial contribution to work on the Federalists and Indians, and the best book on this subject to date," while Gregory Nobles says it is "a fresh and engaging book," written "with an appreciation of complexity, but also with great clarity." The Times Literary Supplement has not yet weighed in, but I am hoping they will say my book shows "exceptional promise." One way or another, I'm sure they'll soon be talking about it in all the cafes in Paris.

It's the Rocks That'll Kill You

I've always assumed that the horrific casualties sustained by both armies in the American Civil War resulted from the collision between new military technology - mass-produced rifles and minie balls - and outdated, offensive-oriented tactics. However, geologists Judy Ehlen and Robert Whisonant report that geology and topography may have also played roles in generating the conflict's high body count. Battles that took place above limestone, for instance, tended to be very bloody because limestone erodes quickly, creating "flat, open terrain" and ample fields-of-fire for riflemen. Such was the case in Miller's Cornfield at the Battle of Antietam (17 Sept. 1862), where 8,000 men were killed or wounded in just a few hours, and during Pickett's Charge on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg (3 July 1863). Conversely, battles fought on dolomite or shale, like the firefight at Burnside's Bridge across Antietam Creek, tended to have lower casualties because those substrata produced more rugged surface terrain, screening attacking soldiers from defensive rifle fire. Whisonant and Ehlen determined that 25% of the war's deadliest battles took place on terrain with a limestone base - certainly an important factor in determining casualties, if not a predominant one. (Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 Nov. 2008; see also here and here.)

That's Just What I Was Thinking

"The George Bush era is reminiscent of the reign of the Roman Emperor Andronicus III (c. 1296-1341) in its negative jingoistic engagement with Islam and the Middle East (Iran-Iraq) and other expansionist achievements across the globe. Obama then is most likely to fall into the role of John V (c 1332-1391) - the successor of Andronicus III. He will have to deal with increasingly resurgent Islamic forces, Russia, China and other cultures and nations seeking an assertion of self-respect and dignity."

From a comment on the Open Source Radio website, in reference to a recent interview with historian Gordon Wood. Thousands of articles have been written, and millions of weblog entries and online comments posted, about the 2008 presidential election, but this may be the only one that has compared one of the candidates to a late-Byzantine emperor. We live in a wondrous age.

P.S.: If George W. Bush is Andronicus III, then doesn't that make Dick Cheney, the eminence grise of the Bush administration, John Kantakouzenos (and thus Obama's regent and successor)? A chilling thought.

Voyagers to the East, Part XXI

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

In an earlier essay in this series, I described the employment of Brazilian Indians in a 1547 joyeuse entree - a ceremony of royal entry and submission - staged by the French city of Rouen for King Henri II. Rouen may have been the first, but it was not the only French city to incorporate Indians into its joyeuses entrees: in March 1564 the city fathers of Troyes organized for Charles IX a procession which featured a Native American chief mounted on a horse that was costumed "like a unicorn." A year later (April 1565), when Charles formally entered Bordeaux, its pageant included a procession of captives, among them an unspecified number of Brazilian and North American captives, who joined the citizens in submitting to the king. (Olive Dickason, The Myth of the Savage: and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas [Edmonton, Alberta, 1984], 213.)

Indians, in fact, appear to have been a "prestige good" in 16th-century France; association with them lent a certain exoticism to one's portfolio (so to speak). During his reign, King Henri II received several Brazilian Indian boys captured by the Tupinamba, whom he subsequently gave to prominent French nobles as gifts - or, more precisely, for their retinues. Several decades later, in 1602, Francois Grave du Pont gave several North American Indian boys to King Henri IV, first monarch of the Bourbon dynasty. Henri, in turn, gave at least one to the Dauphin as a companion, though the Indian boy died at Chateau St. Germain a year later. (Dickason, 212.) To the French, the prestige value of an Indian captive clearly outweighed his or her labor value. And I wonder: did the association of Indian servants with prominent French nobles play any role in shaping the French idea of the "noble savage"?

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Methane Plumes of Doom

Another reason I'm trying not to worry about the global financial crisis: there's a much more serious global meltdown underway at the moment that appears to be accelerating, and whose long-term consequences will be much more destructive than the collapse of the international credit markets. I refer, of course, to global warming, and to a new scientific survey that suggests it may be about to speed up dramatically. From The Independent (UK) of 23 September 2008:

"Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast* have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

"In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through 'methane chimneys' rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a 'lid' to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age...

"Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback [loop]...The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth."

The complete story can be found here. We've known for several years of the release of methane deposits situated below melting permafrost and Arctic lakes (see this story about Siberian lake-thaw ebullition**, for example), but I believe this is the first time I've read of similar discharges from the floor of the Arctic Ocean, which is apparently one of the largest methane sinks in the world. Elevated local levels of methane, according to the Independent story, are most likely responsible for the accelerated rate of warming in the Arctic (as compared to the rest of the world), but it's unlikely that all of that gas will remain confined to the Arctic for very long.

As a wise satirist recently said, "it's just a natural part of the End of Days."


* Which, incidentally, would have been impossible ten years ago.
** My fifty-cent word of the week.

Good to Be a Banksta

I've not planned to discuss the current world credit crisis in this weblog, because I don't really understand its causes or have any idea of how we can resolve it without starting another Great Depression. However, Tatsuya Ishida does a good job interpreting the recent financial bailout vote in Congress, and guessing how long it will be before the surviving major banks and investment houses ask for another $700,000,000,000.

Demographic Collapse in the Southeast: An Illustrative Example

In my forthcoming book on early U.S. Indian relations, I observe that in 1793, southern Indian warriors seeking to drive American settlers out of the Tennessee Valley were able, with the use of multitribal meetings and the promise of Spanish supplies, to assemble a large force of gunmen for an assault on Knoxville. This Native American army comprised nearly 2,000 men from the Creek, Cherokee, and Shawnee nations, and was one of the largest Native military forces to operate in a single campaign in the eighteenth-century southeast.

Apparently, though, this was only a large force for its day, and would not have been considered so two centuries earlier. In his detailed and archaeologically-informed history of the De Soto expedition of 1539-43, Charles Hudson gives this description of the Spanish adventurers' first encounter with Indian travelers on the Mississippi River:

"Some Indians in dugout canoes approached and pulled up to the landing. Four principal men got out and approached De Soto...They informed De Soto that they were vassals of a great chief, Aquijo, who was dominant over many towns on the opposite side of the river. They said Chief Aquijo would come the next day to talk with De Soto. The next day the chief arrived with a fleet of two hundred very large dugout canoes, full of Indians armed with bows and arrows. The Spaniards counted as many as seven thousand Indians, painted with red ocher and wearing feathers of many colors. Some of them held shields of cane so tightly and strongly woven that a crossbow bolt could hardly penetrate them." (Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun [University of Georgia Press, 1997], 284-5.)

That was just the warrior population of one chiefdom in Arkansas.

I know of no more vivid way to illustrate the decline of Indian population in the southeast between 1540 and 1790. Moreover, white settlers and the U.S. government had considerable difficulty defeating and expelling the remnant Indian nations they encountered in the southeast in the eighteenth century. If they had instead encountered Indian chiefdoms the size of Aquijo's, I suspect it would have taken Americans the better part of a century to conquer them. (And if those chiefdoms' warriors had been armed with muskets and cannons, I suspect we would never have heard of "Manifest Destiny.")

The Camera Hound of the Future

Courtesy of my friend and Alert Reader Elena O'Malley, a link to an Atlantic Monthly essay by Vannevar Bush, predicting - and suggesting plausible technical paths to - the computer, the digital camera, the Personal Data Assistant*, Internet-based research, and direct brain-computer interfaces. Published in 1945.

* Well, sort of. Bush did predict that it would be the size of a desk. Moore's Law was still 20+ years away.

Bad Professor! No Dry Sherry!

Any teacher or professor worrying about how students might react to his or her behavior in the classroom should remember that they would have to work pretty hard to top the eccentricities and unprofessionalism of some of our predecessors. For example, according to a column by "Ms. Mentor" (Emily Toth) in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 5, 2008), Thorsten Veblen, when he was teaching at Stanford University, "graded arbitrarily, switching A's and C's at random...posted whimsical office hours ('Monday 10 a.m. to 10:05 a.m.'), and...urged 'girl students' to spend weekends with him in a converted chicken coop in the woods." According to the longer article cited by Toth, Veblen eventually became so unpopular with students that he was lucky to get three people to sign up for one of his classes. Stanford, which had hired Veblen in 1906, finally threw him out in 1909, whereupon he wrote a new book, The Higher Learning in America, trashing the people he'd previously vexed. It's not an exemplary story, though I'm tempted to use Veblen's line about his grading policy - "My grades are like lightning; they strike anywhere!" - the next time I'm returning exams.

Northwest Passages

Alert reader Chantal Hachem noted that my account of the eccentricities of the nineteenth-century Royal Navy reminded her of a British Arctic explorer whose crewmen went mad eating rations from lead-lined food cans. That explorer, Sir John Franklin, was lost sometime between 1845 and 1848 during his search for the Northwest Passage, the all-water route from Europe to Asia by way of northern Canada which eluded so many European explorers. Franklin's story, recounted in Fergus Fleming's Barrow's Boys (Grove Press, 2001), is a harrowing and tragic one - tragic because the Northwest Passage turned out to be wishful thinking, as the permanent Arctic ice pack blocked the waterways through the northern Canadian islands. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, first European to traverse the Passage (1903-5), took more than two years to do so, as his ship became locked in the ice for two consecutive winters. Until recently the only large vessels capable of "sailing" all the way through the Northwest Passage in one season were nuclear submarines, which could travel under the ice.

But times change. One of the most important consequences of global warming is the shrinking of the permanent Arctic ice pack, which, among other effects, has opened the Northwest Passage to surface ships for at least part of the year. Last fall, a civilian passenger ship arrived in Barrow - the northernmost town in the United States, and previously a synonym for "remote Arctic wasteland" - and discharged 400 German tourists who, I am sure, completely flummoxed the Inupiat inhabitants of the community. In consequence, the US Coast Guard began patrols into the Beaufort Sea, and this summer it opened temporary bases in two Arctic Ocean villages, including Barrow. Meanwhile, the governments of the United States, Canada, and Russia have begun discussions - heated arguments, actually - about ownership of the Northwest Passage (and its Russian equivalent, the Northeast Passage) and of the large oil and gas deposits believed to lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. I don't know whether Franklin would be pleased or astonished.

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.

Some Weblogs Are More Equal Than Others

It's apparently never too late to start a weblog. George Orwell, for instance, has just begun his own blog, even though he died nearly sixty years ago. Chances are, though, that he won't be linking back to mine.

(The Orwell Diaries weblog, sponsored by the Orwell Prize, will consist of entries from Orwell's daily diaries of 1938-42, encompassing his sojourn in Morocco and the early years of World War Two. Each entry will be posted exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote it.)

Your Monthly Apocalypse: Peak Oil

The Peak Oil hypothesis, first formulated in the 1950s by M. King Hubbert, has acquired a steady following on the Internet during the past five years. The theory derives from a well-established feature of oil fields: all of them reach a "peak" of productivity at some point in their operational lifespans, and then begin to decline in output. There are ways to increase an older field's productivity (by pumping in pressurized water, for instance), but all of them increase the expense of extracting the petroleum. Eventually, the cost of pumping oil from the field exceeds its profitability, and the operators shut down the wells. This happens to all oilfields: Texas fields peaked in 1970, the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska in 1988, the North Sea fields in 1999. The principal oilfields in Saudi Arabia may have peaked in 2006, but since the Saudi oil ministry doesn't share its survey data with outsiders, it's hard to tell.

Peak Oil is the theory that worldwide oil production has or soon will pass its peak, and that as a consequence the price of oil is going to be rising rapidly from now on - especially as growing demand from China and India intersects with an increasingly scarce supply. Some oil-industry analysts say that $200-300/barrel oil is only a few months or years away. The consequences of such a dramatic price increase are obvious to everyone: more expensive oil means more expensive food (because of rising fertilizer and diesel-fuel costs), consumer goods, gasoline, and heating oil for virtually everyone on the planet. Peak Oil enthusiasts think that these price increases will bring us more than mere hardship: many believe that $200-300 oil will cause a collapse of industrial civilization, ushering in a post-crash era that will either resemble The Road Warrior or Little House on the Prairie, depending on one's level of optimism. Some of the pessimists have begun stockpiling food and ammunition, to protect themselves both against the impending collapse of American agriculture and against the rampaging hordes of less-prudent survivors who hunger for the survivalists' canned peas. Others simply explore their fears by sampling the small but growing body of fiction devoted to post-Peak-Oil collapse scenarios.

Rising oil prices are certainly causing hardship for many people in the United States, where even the Amish are complaining about fuel costs, and the rising food prices associated with them are bringing even greater hardship to people in the developing world. I am cautiously optimistic, however, that world oil prices will level off and decline well before they cause the collapse of industrial civilization. First of all, while there is a limited supply of cheap, easily-accessible oil in the world, there is rather a lot of expensive oil - probably at least a century's supply - locked up in the form of superheavy crude, or oil sand, or in shale. This oil is currently expensive to extract, but as the price of oil rises, it will become profitable for companies to process and extract it. There is historic precedent for this prediction. In the 1960s, when oil exploration began on the Alaskan North Slope and in the North Sea, oil company executives argued that the price of oil would never rise high enough ("high enough," in this case, being $5/barrel) to make exploitation of any fields there profitable. They had a point: the North Sea has some of the ghastliest weather in the world, and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska is 800 miles from the nearest warm-water port. In the 1970s, however, the industrial world suffered two oil "shocks," and the price of oil rose from about $2/barrel in 1970 to $34/barrel by 1980. The seventeenfold increase in oil prices made oil companies (and governments) comfortable with multi-billion-dollar investments in North Sea drilling platforms and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and both developments ultimately contributed to an increase in overall supply. (Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power [New York, 1991], 569-574, 625-626, 665-670, 685.)

More recently, as oil prices have risen from about $40 (at the turn of the century) to nearly $150, oil companies have begun processing and selling oil that would have been considered nearly worthless 20 years ago, like Venezuelan superheavy (roughly the same consistency as Play-Doh) and Albertan oil-sand extract (which requires considerable heat to separate the oil from the sand). If oil rises into the $200-300 range, the extraction of oil from Rocky Mountain shale will probably become profitable, and Canada, which has ten times as much oil as Saudi Arabia locked into the Athabascan tar-sands basin, will become the next petroleum superpower. Eventually, these new producers will relieve some of the current pressure on world oil supplies.

Moreover, rising oil and oil-derivative prices generally lead to curtailment of demand, as consumers, inventors, and governments find ways to make more effective use of declining supply. This happened in the 1970s, when the U.S. government, for the first time, mandated corporate fuel-efficiency standards for all American automakers. The Big Three auto companies screamed bloody murder, but, under pressure from both Washington and from Japanese and European competitors, they complied with the new law. By the 1980s the average fuel-economy of the American automobile had risen from about 10 mpg into the high 20s. (Yergin, The Prize, 660-662.) These new fuel-efficiency standards, combined with power companies' abandonment of oil-fired power plants in favor of coal and natural gas, actually caused global oil consumption to drop in the 1980s. With the return of $10/barrel oil in the 1990s, American fuel economy standards dropped, but there's no particular reason why they couldn't rise again just as dramatically as they did in the 1970s and '80s. Several foreign car companies are leading the way to improved fuel efficiency: a German company has just developed a non-hybrid car, the Loremo, which (thanks to a diesel engine and radical streamlining) gets 120 mpg. Meanwhile, Japanese and German automakers are developing plug-in hybrids, available in 3-5 years, that should get 150-200 mpg. And, if higher automotive fuel efficiency doesn't bring prices down, one can stretch out the gasoline and diesel supply with biodiesel and ethanol brewed from algae.

I'm never quite comfortable dismissing a good disaster scenario, but I'm not particularly pessimistic about the world's long-term oil and energy outlook. Our current energy crisis will produce short-term hardship and a lot of stupid legislation, but ultimately we can work our way out of it through technological innovation and sheer greed - sorry, profit-seeking.

If I'm wrong, though, it's probably not a bad idea to keep those Laura Ingalls Wilder novels handy.

(The above photo, showing an oil refinery in Hampshire, England, is courtesy of FreeFoto.com.)