Beware: Bibulous Boas on Board

In the annals of failed military expeditions, the voyage of Imperial Russia's Baltic Fleet to the Pacific during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) has few peers. As Gavin Wrightman recounts in The Industrial Revolutionaries (New York, 2007), the fleet got off to a uniquely bad start when several of the ships therein mistook English fishing boats in the North Sea for Japanese torpedo boats (no, I'm not making that up) and opened fire, killing two people and wounding six. Russian diplomats agreed to pay reparations to the British government, but the Baltic Fleet's fortunes did not subsequently improve. Both Britain and France refused to supply the ships with fuel (which they had to obtain from German collier vessels en route), one of the ships severed a French submarine telegraph cable in Tangier, a number of crewmen died of heatstroke while loading coal off the African coast, and storms battered one squadron as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope. To lighten the gloomy mood, some of the Russians took shore leave during stops in Africa and "acquired a menagerie of exotic animals including a boa constrictor which apparently developed a taste for vodka" (p. 349). Russian sailors' interest in exotic pets was one they shared with naval officers in the contemporary British Navy, whose shipboard companions included baboons and at least one elephant.

Finally, after seven months of struggle, the Russian fleet reached the Straits of Tsushima, a few days' sailing from Vladivostok. There in the Straits, on 27 May 1905, the exhausted officers and crew ran into a Japanese fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo, and suffered one of the most decisive defeats in naval history. Togo enjoyed several advantages over his opponents: his men were rested, his ships had a functional wireless telegraph system, and his fleet included several dozen deadly torpedo boats, which he deployed to good effect. In just 24 hours of fighting the Japanese navy virtually annihilated the Baltic Fleet, sinking or disabling 34 of 48 ships and inflicting over 10,000 casualties on the Russians. Alas, Weightman is silent on the fate of the boa constrictor. I fear the worst.

Founderbrau

While Scottish and German brewers fight to see who can produce the most potent beer in the world, a microbrewery in Philadelphia is reviving some of the gentler, but still distinctive, potables of the American past. Yards Brewing Company has launched its series of "Ales of the Revolution" with George Washington's Tavern Porter, a 14-proof brew inspired by one of Washington's own recipes. The Washington Post described the beverage as a mixture of "sharper, coffeelike flavors" and "residual sweetness," the latter flavor resulting from the molasses infused into each barrel.

Beer, of course, has been an important drink since the development of agriculture 11,000 years ago, but in late-colonial British North America it usually took a back seat to harder alcoholic beverages. The Anglophone elite preferred imported heavy wines, like port and Madeira, while farmers and laborers enjoyed hard cider and spiritous liquors, particularly rum distilled from West Indies molasses. David McCullough noted in 1776 that the early Continental Army consumed a prodigious amount of ordinary rum, plus cherry rum and flip (a "mixture of liquor, beer, and sugar" [29-30]), while their commander purchased "cider, brandy, and rum by the gallon" (42). I suspect, though, that if they'd had access to 110-proof beer they would have consumed it by preference, whether or not the bottles were stuffed into the carcasses of squirrels and stoats.

What I Saw of the SHEAR Convention (2010)

This year's meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic attracted 400 people, about 40% of the society's membership – a remarkable achievement, given the economic slump and the meeting's isolated location (Rochester, NY). I did some agreeable socializing at the conference, and attended a baker's dozen of papers, of which some of the highlights follow:

Michael Oberg, in "The Many Worlds of Eleazer Williams" (read by Daniel Richter), briefly recounted the life of Reverend Williams, a grandson of Indian captive Eunice Williams who became an Episcopal missionary to the Oneidas. Of particular interest was Williams' "discovery," in the 1840s, that he was the dauphin – the long-lost son of Louis XVI of France, supposedly spirited away to Canada in infancy to protect him from the Jacobins. Of equal interest was the investigation of Williams' claim by two Philadelphia phrenologists, who concluded that Williams was actually an Indian (despite his white ancestry) and couldn't be the Bourbon heir.

The United States' early relations with East Asia received considerable attention this year. Kim Todt, in "'Merchants Have No Country:' The Early Republic and the Importance of its Dutch Trading Partners," observed that the governor of Dutch Batavia (modern Jakarta) actively promoted American trade with the Dutch East Indies, and that the U.S. Navy was sending frigates there by the 1820s. SHEAR President Rosemarie Zagarri, in her presidential address ("The Significance of the 'Global Turn' for the Early American Republic"), pointed out that the British East India Company welcomed U.S. merchants to India in the 1780s, even before Jay's Treaty allowed them to operate there legally. There were forty American ships in the India trade by 1789, and Jacob Crowinshield of Salem brought the first elephant to the United States shortly thereafter. Dale Norwood noted, in "Fear of a British Planet: American Anxiety about British Hegemony and the First U.S. Mission to China," that Americans took an active interest in the First Opium War, a conflict described in American newspaper editorials, church magazines, even children's magazines. One of the latter featured a fictitious child asking her father if the evil British would kill Americans if they didn't buy British opium.

At the last session of the conference, Rob Harper (in "The Powerful Weakness of the Frontier State: Manipulative Mobilization and the 1786 Clark-Logan Expedition") told a great deal about the Logan expedition of 1786 that I didn't know, mentioning the raid's unpopularity among Kentuckians (who were reluctant to contribute supplies and manpower) and noting that its chief purpose was not revenge but the seizure of Indian hostages who could be traded for white captives. In the same session Robert Owens showed his good sense and taste by mentioning recent scholarship by yours truly in his paper "Vigilante for Peace: James Robertson and the Curious Case of Lame Will."

Finally, I enjoyed the privilege of having breakfast with past SHEAR president Alan Taylor, and learned from him of his forthcoming book, The Civil War of 1812, which ought to prove thought-provoking reading on the eve of that conflict's bicentennial.

Noble Ideas and Petty Grievances

For those of us who think the Declaration of Independence is just a tad too long (that includes nearly anyone who's read more than a few of Jefferson's obscure, nit-picky indictments of George III), Slate Magazine is pleased to offer several translations of the founding American document into Twitter form. The winning entry in their contest was "Bye, George, we've got it" (just 25 characters, you'll note), but I will confess I preferred their third runner-up:

We seek independence based on noble and universal ideas combined with petty and one-sided grievances

and their first runner-up:

Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al.

Reflections on the Fourth of July

For those of you who missed it last year, here is a thought-provoking Independence-Day editorial, "Life, Liberty, and Benign Monarchy" (New York Times, 2 July 2009), by Professor Kathleen DuVal of the University of North Carolina, reflecting on Native American political authority and the attractiveness of Spanish paternalism to American settlers and slaves.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

No Mustard with Them Taters

It is rare, in my research, to encounter primary narratives that evoke a visceral reaction, and such occasions are all the more memorable for it. I still recall the discomfort I felt twelve years ago when I read a letter by Northwest Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair, explaining that he could not attend an Indian council because he had fallen hard on the pommel of his saddle and "ruptured [his] private parts most dreadfully." I had a similarly immediate, though more muted, response to an entry I read a few months ago in British fur trader George Nelson's memoirs. While traveling to an Indian hunting camp on the Kettle River, in northern Minnesota, Nelson and his partners joined an Ojibwa party for a meal. One of the Ojibwas was a woman whose young child was suffering from loose bowels. "The little black devil was running about the lodge squettering out yellow stuff like mustard; she [the mother] scolded and laying the brat on her lap opened the cheeks & with the back of her knife scraped off the stuff." She then released the child, washed her hands in the cooking kettle, wiped off the knife, and resumed cutting meat with it. After that Nelson found he didn't have much of an appetite. (My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804, ed. Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck [Saint Paul, 2002], 65-66.)

Nelson later recorded this anecdote to illustrate, I think, the "savage" Indians' tolerance for filth and disease. In reflecting on it, I have come to the conclusion that the Ojibwa mother in Nelson's story was instead expressing a rather common maternal belief - that her child's exudations couldn't really harm anyone, since they hadn't harmed her - coupled with sufficient exhaustion to wear down any scruples she have about her guests' dining experience. The tired and overworked cooks in George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, one might well note, prepared food in even more squalid conditions than Nelson's hosts, and received greater compensation for it.

Also, "squettering" is an awesome word.

Retrospective Review: Pox Americana (Part Two)

(Continued from earlier post:)

The epidemic in the east, for all its gruesome qualities, was mild in comparison to the outbreak that appeared in Mexico City in August 1779 and spread throughout the hemisphere. Fenn doesn't speculate whether there was a connection between the Mexican smallpox epidemic and the British North American one, though New Orleans, where there were a number of American rebels trading throughout the war and where smallpox broke out in late 1778, may have been a junction between the two. What is certain is that "arrival in Mexico City was key to [the virus's subsequent] success" (142). From thence it could be spread by a large transient population of workers, farmers, and other travelers, down to the coasts and up the caminos reals, throughout Spanish America and into the trading networks of its aboriginal neighbors.

Expanding northward from Mexico City, smallpox reached the Spanish borderland colonies of New Mexico and Texas by early 1781. The disease claimed 46,000 lives within the boundaries of modern Mexico, and killed at least 5,000 mission Indians in New Mexico and Texas. Sometime in 1780 or '81, smallpox broke out among the horse-mounted expansionists of the vast Comanche nation, who probably contracted it from the mission-dwelling Lipan Apaches of western Texas. The Comanches then spread the disease throughout the Great Plains, where it had a particularly fatal impact on the agricultural nations of the Upper Missouri River.

The most geographically significant victims of the smallpox were the Shoshones, who carried the variola virus into Canada – and thus into the trading network of the Hudson Bay Company, thereby killing thousands of Cree and Chipewyans – and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Northwest. While exact numbers are impossible to come by, Fenn thinks smallpox killed about 60,000 Native Americans north of Mexico.

Altogether, 130,000 North Americans died of smallpox between 1775 and 1782. Only 10% of them, however, were Anglo-Americans, which helps explain why this episode remains obscure in U.S. historiography, preoccupied as U.S. historians are with the American Revolution. Beyond the limits of the Thirteen Colonies, however, the epidemic was vastly important: it led to a marked decline in marriage ages in New Spain (as Mexicans tried to replace their population losses), compelled the now-diminished Comanche "empire" to make peace with Spain, and allowed the Sioux to supplant the Mandans and the Blackfeet the Shoshones as the premier hunters and traders of their respective homelands. Throughout Indian country, Fenn concludes, smallpox was a "virus of empire" (275).

One point that Fenn does not make as pointedly as she might, and which is particularly useful to students of colonial America, is that the pattern of variola's spread reveals a great deal about transportation and trade in early America. In British North America, smallpox moved by water from seaport to seaport, then spread slowly inland – except in the case of Canada, where the disease moved fairly quickly up the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes. In Spanish America, smallpox spread rapidly north and south from Mexico City, and was carried almost to the Arctic Circle by horse-borne Indian nomads and their trading partners. Fenn's book thus helps confirm and extend April Hatfield's observation (in Atlantic Virginia [2004]) that the British American colonies were more like an archipelago of outposts than a continuous area of settlement, and that the most extensive networks of human contact within the continent were Native American ones. It also reminds us that epidemic disease was - and remains today - one of the most unfortunate side-effects of improvements in trade and communications; the parts of North America that had the best roads or the most mobile populations were also the regions most susceptible to smallpox, while the more isolated settlements of British North America were most effectively able to control the disease.

Retrospective Review: Pox Americana (Part One)

The American smallpox epidemic of 1775-82, one of the most widespread outbreaks of that disease in recorded history, remained an obscure episode for more than two centuries after its subsidence. In 2001, Elizabeth Fenn, then of George Washington University (now at Duke), finally brought this event to a large readership with her deeply-researched, engagingly-written book Pox Americana. Dr. Fenn's book received much publicity when it was published, owing to its appearance in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and the October 2001 anthrax scare. I recently reread Pox Americana, to see how well it holds up now that the initial publicity has faded - and in light of nearly ten years of subsequent scholarship. The short answer is that it's even better than I remembered the first time. Over the next entry or two, I'll be reviewing Pox Americana, analyzing its findings, and suggesting why the plague at the center of Fenn's book, which spread from Hudson Bay to Peru and killed over 100,000 people, remained obscure for so many years.

Smallpox was a relentless and terrifying killer in the early modern period, and one which apparently grew in virulence between 1500 and 1800. It was particularly dangerous to isolated rural populations - like most of the white settlers in North America - and to populations with homogeneous immune systems, like American Indians. In the disease's early stages, those infected with smallpox suffered from aches, fever, and anxiety; as the disease progressed, its victims broke out in hundreds of oozing sores concentrated on the hands, feet, and face. The sores could lead to dehydration (if they appeared in the throat) or blindness; if they flowed together, they doubled the victim's chances of dying; and they almost invariably left disfiguring scars, whose only benefit was that they branded the survivor as permanently immune. There was no way to cure smallpox in the eighteenth century, and only two ways to fight its spread: quarantine and inoculation. Since inoculation actually gave inoculees a mild version of the disease and rendered them temporarily infectious, it was a controversial procedure and usually only available to the wealthy.

When the epidemic of Fenn's subtitle first broke out in the Atlantic seaboard cities of Boston, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Charleston (1775-79), Americans' first impulse was to quarantine the infected areas through controls on public movement, particularly the movement of soldiers. This proved impossible, given the cycling of volunteers in and out of the Continental Army and the movement of refugees to or from areas under rebel control. As a result the disease spread from its coastal enclaves into the hinterland, though it raged with greatest virulence on the coast, on British prison ships and in encampments of black Loyalist refugees - runaway slaves who sought freedom with British but often (in about 5,500 cases, Fenn estimates) found death instead.

As the smallpox death toll slowly grew, some white Americans came to believe that the British Army was using the disease as a weapon of war, dispatching sick Loyalist refugees to infect rebel-controlled areas. Fenn thinks this accusation was true; she presents evidence that at least one British commander, late in the war, sent infected slaves into rebel lines to spread the disease to his enemies. That smallpox posed so great a threat to American military effectiveness that the British tried to use it as a weapon helps explain George Washington's crucial decision of 1777 to inoculate all soldiers in the Continental Army against the disease (92-98). Fenn argued that this was "among [Washington's] most important decisions of the war" (134) and helped secure the rebels' eventual victory.

(To be continued...)

Living in the Valley of Death

The lurid title of this post refers not to my own status, but rather to the conference presentation I've spent a good part of the past few weeks researching, writing, and delivering. For the benefit of those of my readers who could not attend the Filson Historical Society's public history conference on Native American history earlier this month, and to hear my lecture on "Native American Subsistence and Commerce in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley," I've posted my lecture notes on Google Documents. Comments, criticism, or unadulterated praise are all welcome.

Founders Round-Up

It seems that Thomas Jefferson has catalogued his personal library on LibraryThing, complete with 'reviews' extracted from his correspondence.

There's a hip-hop video on YouTube (actually from WhiteHouse.gov, but YouTube is trendier) on the early life of Alexander Hamilton - about a year old now, but still worth watching.

John Quincy Adams has a Twitter feed, derived from his diary entries for 1810.

And there's a new strategy game in the works, Founding Fathers, about the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Once known primarily as political wonks, the Founders are fast becoming Web 2.0 and boardgame geeks.

You Mean They Ate Each Other Up?

Probably not, Danny! An archaeological team investigating the winter camp of the Donner Party subjected the bones that the settlers discarded to intense microscopic scrutiny and determined that none of them were from human beings. Instead, the survivors ate cattle which died of starvation, horses brought by one of the relief parties, deer (which they were able to hunt despite 30 feet of snow), and one family's pet dog. They also tried to preserve "civilized" decorum during the winter; their midden includes pieces of slate, used for children's school lessons, and of chinaware, used for their meager meals of boot-and-bone soup. The survivors themselves denied that they had resorted to cannibalism, and no-one was ever able to prove the charge. The conventional story of the Donner Party, however appealing it may be (even to the extent of inspiring an excellent Western/horror movie), appears, like so much of the West's history, to have been a myth.

Historical Humor: A Small Example

For a change of pace I decided to wear my Declaration of Independence tie - a red silk tie bearing the facsimile signatures of the members of the Continental Congress - to school today. In my upper-level Colonial History class, one of my students, after asking me what was on my tie, said - completely deadpan - "It must have taken you a while to collect all those signatures." I'm not used to my students making good jokes, but it's a pleasant surprise when they do.

The Return of Fred the Sheep

A follow-up, courtesy of my friend Carl Anderson, to a story I mentioned last year: working from a proposal by Professor Michael Drout, engineers at Northwestern University have developed a prototype machine capable of extracting sheep DNA from medieval parchment. If researchers then succeed in developing a chemical process that allows them to analyze and classify the extracted genetic material, it will be possible to identify the date and perhaps also the geographical provenance of undated medieval manuscripts.

Northwestern engineering students are also working on a super-hard "dragonslayer" sword, which should make it easier for the school to deal with Chicago's persistent dragon problem.

Statecraft as Mortal Combat

On December 30, 1800, Emperor Paul of Russia made the following announcement in his court's official newspaper: "His Majesty . . . perceiving that the European powers cannot come to an accommodation, and wishing to put an end to the war which has raged fourteen years*, has conceived the idea of appointing a place to which he will invite the other potentates to engage together with himself in single combat on lists which shall be marked at; for which purpose they shall bring with them, to act as their esquires, umpires, and heralds, their most enlightened ministers and able generals, as Thugut, Pitt, and Bernstorff."

Quoted in Edward Emerson's History of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1902), p. 79. Emerson views this invitation as evidence that Paul's mind had come unhinged, a conclusion also reached by the emperor's inner circle, whose members assassinated him early the following year. From our perspective in the early twenty-first century, though, the idea of resolving international disputes through "single combat" between state leaders, rather than through bloody wars with millions of casualties, seems rather more sane. I suspect it would have been amusing, at least, to view a joust or duel between Tallyrand and Pitt the Younger.

* Paul was doubtless mashing together the Wars of the First and Second Coalitions (1792-1802) with the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-89.

Chickasaw Archery

I'm in the early stages of researching a book on the economic history of the Chickasaws, a small but strategically-important southeastern Indian nation that in the nineteenth century would become one of the Five Civilized Tribes. In the course of re-reading Charles Hudson's description of the sixteenth -century Chicazas (the principal ancestors of the Chickasaws) in his book Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (U. of Georgia Press, 1997), I came across this account of Chickasaw archers' military prowess: when the Chicazas attacked De Soto's men in the winter of 1541, they succeeded in killing nearly 60 horses, twelve of which they shot through the heart. The horse of hidalgo Juan Diaz was supposedly killed by an arrow that entered its shoulder, went through the entire body, and "protrud[ed] on the opposite side the length of four fingers" (p. 269). Another died after two arrows entered its heart from two different directions.

Hudson bases this chapter on contemporary accounts of the Soto expedition, chiefly the narrative of the Gentleman of Elvas. I must say I find this account of Chickasaw archers' virtuosity somewhat difficult to believe - their arrows would have had to have been of the same strength as medieval longbowmen's arrows in order to have that degree of penetrating power. It doesn't surprise me, though, that they would consider the Spaniards' animals important targets, since horses gave Europeans a military advantage nearly as important as that provided by their firearms and steel weapons.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic

I didn't mean to turn February into Adam Zamoyski month here at Stranger Things Have Happened, but I wanted to share one last anecdote from his very entertaining (and thought-provoking) book on the Congress of Vienna, Rites of Peace (NY, 2007):

When Napoleon Bonaparte died on St. Helena, in May 1821, the nation which had fought hardest to defeat and exile him, Great Britain, was preoccupied with the coronation of King George IV and his struggle to exclude his estranged wife Caroline from the ceremony. Supposedly, when a messenger brought George the news that "Your greatest enemy [i.e., Napoleon] is dead," he replied "No! By God! Is she?" (p. 561)

I guess that's funnier if you've watched A Royal Scandal.

A Hard World for Little Republics

It's not easy being a small nation in a world of aggressive Great Powers. Consider the experience of diplomats from the short-lived Italian republic of Lucca, who in the spring of 1814 petitioned Emperor Francis of Austria for "the restoration of their independence." Francis replied - in Italian, graciously enough - "Tutti hanno fame, anch'io voglio mangiare, emmeglio che io vi mangi che se fosse un altro," which translates as "Everyone is hungry, and I need to eat too, and it is better I should eat you than another." (Adam Zamoyski, The Rites of Peace [New York, 2007], 234.)

I'll have to remember that line the next time I play Diplomacy.

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.

Town versus Gown

Thanks to riotous students, expansionist campus developers, and professors mowing their lawns at 11:30 on Tuesday mornings, relations between modern American universities and their host communities are rarely tranquil. Things have been worse in earlier days and other lands, of course. At the Historiann weblog, commenter Indyanna recalls an "early modern town-gown ruckus" in Oxford, England, in 1717, caused by George I's decision to garrison a regiment of soldiers in that town. "When the probably-mainly-Jacobite students refused to illuminate their windows to celebrate the King’s birthday, some tipsy soldiers smashed the windows in question. Next thing, the whole town was in arms and on fire. The House of Lords had to intervene to sort things out, the regiment got sent to Minorca, and its aging Colonel was packed off back to Dublin in retirement." Bad news for the colonel and the town, but perhaps not such bad consequences for the window-smashing soldiers - Minorca doesn't sound like a hardship post.

(ETA, 28 June 2018: The Oxford riot apparently took place in 1716, according to OU sources.)

The Indian College Discovered?

Via the History News Network: archaeologists have discovered the probable location of Harvard's Indian College, the first school for Native Americans in British North America. The specific find was a trench containing brick, tile, and stone, likely the foundation of one of the school's walls. The trench also contained ceramic remains and some pieces of type from Massachusetts Bay's first printing press, also housed at the College - perhaps the same press used to print John Eliot's Wampanoag translation of the Bible.

As Harvard's own webpage on the Indian College makes clear, the institution was (like Dartmouth College a century later) a fundraising device designed to pry money out of the evangelizing New England Company. The principal residents of the brick College building were white students, and only a few of the seven Algonquian Indians who attended Harvard in the seventeenth century resided there. Most of these students, incidentally, came to bad ends: three died before graduating and one, John Sassamon, was murdered in 1675, setting off the chain of events that led to King Philip's War.