Scribal Terror

He ran away to join the cavalry

My great grandfather William Meyers ran away from home several times, starting at the age of fourteen, intending to enlist to fight for the Union in the Civil War but each time his parents dragged him home. Finally they gave up and let him enlist at 15. He survived the war and was discharged in the state of Tennessee in 1865.This is his certificate of discharge from the 10th Ohio Cavalry following the general order to demobilize [click to enlarge]. He was eighteen at the time of the discharge and had served since 1862.

Here is a picture of William wearing a very small hat. He was my maternal grandmother's father and all the women in his family were members of the Grand Army of the Republic Ladies' Auxiliary.

Lafitte, Jewish Pirate of the Caribbean

Yes, there were indeed Jewish pirates. Ed Kritzler has written a history of the seafaring scoundrels:

"The Jewish pirates were Sephardic. Once they were kicked out of Spain (in 1492), the more adventurous Jews went to the New World," said Kritzler. The phenomenon of Jewish piracy begins quite a bit earlier. In the time of the Second Temple (63 BCE), Jewish historian Flavius Josephus records that Hyrcanus accused Aristobulus, his brother and leader of the Hashmonaim, of "acts of piracy at sea."

A more famous Jewish pirate – and one researched by Kritzler - was Jean Lafitte, aka, the Corsair or the Buccaneer. His family fled from Spain for France in 1765 after his maternal grandfather was put to death for Judaism.

Lafitte was "unique" according to Edward Glick of the Jerusalem Post:

He was a Sephardi Jew, as was his first wife, who was born in the Danish Virgin Islands.

In his prime, Lafitte ran not just one pirate sloop but a whole fleet of them simultaneously. He even bought a blacksmith shop in New Orleans, which he used as a front for fencing pirate loot. And he was one of the few buccaneers who didn't die in battle, in prison or on the gallows.

During a plane trip, Glick happened to meet one of Lafitte's direct descendants, Melvyn Lafitte, who filled him in on more of the story:

"Our family, originally named Lefitto, lived in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. When Ferdinand and Isabella reconquered Spain and expelled the Muslims and the Jews in 1492, most of the Jews fled to North Africa. Others went to the Balkans or to Greece and Turkey. But some Sephardi Jews, my ancestors among them, crossed the Pyrenees and settled in France, where Jean was born in about 1780. He moved to French Santo Domingo during the Napoleonic period. However, a slave rebellion forced him to flee to New Orleans. Eventually, he became a pirate, but he always called himself a privateer because that label has a more legal ring to it.

"In 1814, the British sought his aid in their pending attack on New Orleans," he continued. "However, he passed their plans to the Americans and helped General Andrew Jackson beat them in 1815. A grateful Jackson, not yet president, saw to it that Lafitte and his family became American citizens."

Wikipedia: Anonymous portrait said to be of Jean Lafitte in the early 19th century, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas

Unstable males: a history of terrorism

Excerpt from Nicholas Shakespeare's Telegraph review of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh:

Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants". . . .

Throughout history, terrorists have been "sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and indifferent talent, who can only become somebody by blowing others, inevitably persons more talented and intelligent, up." Imagine the kind of person (in this case, Andreas Baader) that even Jean-Paul Sartre would call "an arsehole."

Besides invading Poland, etc.

Hitler may have violated Disney copyright. Now THAT'S transgressive! Ananova reports:

The director of a Norwegian museum claims to have found cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany.

The coloured cartoons included sketches of characters from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio from the 1940 Disney film.

There is no independent confirmation the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, but Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White and to have viewed it in his private cinema.

Mr Hakvaag, who said he had performed tests on the paintings which suggested that they dated from 1940, said: "I am 100 per cent sure that these are drawings by Hitler. If one wanted to make a forgery, one would never hide it in the back of a picture, where it might never be discovered."

Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon de Bhopal

Is a middle class Indian lawyer the next in line to the French throne? According to an article in the LA Times, the Bourbons of Bhopal trace their lineage back to "Jean Philippe, a nephew of King Henri IV who survived assassination attempts and a kidnapping at sea, eventually washed up in India, where he served at the court of the Mogul Emperor Akbar in the 16th century."

Through the 18th and 19th centuries, [Balthazar's] forefathers were among Bhopal's elite, trusted retainers of the ruling Muslim clan. But after many decades of loyal service, the Roman Catholic De Bourbons were ousted from their privileged position by a new, intolerant Muslim ruler in the early part of the 20th century.

Much of the De Bourbons' property was confiscated. Over the years they were forced to sell off jewelry, chandeliers and homes, including an imposing gated mansion, now demolished, that Balthazar remembers seeing as a child. The house he lives in has been in the family's hands for 200 years, he says, and was where his ancestors would stop to refresh themselves after riding on elephant-back to attend Mass in the church that still stands nearby.

And Balthazar may very well be the last Dauphin.

You can read more of the (rather romantic) details here.

First sleep, second sleep

In a New York Times article on the "sleep industry," Jon Mooallem summarizes A. Roger Ekirch, author of At Day's Close, on an interesting and little known detail of sleep in times past:

For many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking  a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin  took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Via Improbable Research.

According to Wikipedia, this phenomenon is called segmented sleep:

Segmented sleep, divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern and interrupted sleep are modern Western terms for a polyphasic sleep pattern found in medieval and early modern Europe and many non-industrialised societies today, where the night's sleep is divided by one or more periods of wakefulness. This is particularly common in the winter.

Interesting parallel

Brussels Journal makes a connection between two eras of anti-Semitism:

During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the “Amerikabomber,” an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments, recalled in his diary: “It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky.” Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, “the center of world Jewry.”

Less than 60 years later, Hitler’s plans were executed by Muslim immigrants living in Germany. At the 2003 trial of the network around Mohammed Atta (the pilot who flew into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels, a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta’s, said that the Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is “the center of world Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it.”

The Basilica Cistern of Constantinople

[The Basilica Cistern] is an underground chamber of 143 by 65 metres, capable of holding 80,000 cubic metres of water. The large space is broken up by a forest of 336 marble  columns each 9 metres high. The columns are arranged in 12 rows each consisting of 28 columns. The capitals of the columns are mainly Ionic and Corinthian styles, with the exception of a few Doric style with no engravings. According to ancient historians, emperor Constantine  had already built a basilica and cistern on the same spot. As the demand for water grew, emperor Justinian enlarged the cisterns and incorporated the basilica. --Wikipedia

This incredible urban undergarment is open to the public, but be sure to book your flight to Istanbul not Constantinople.

Was Napoleon killed by his wallpaper?

In a Slate review of Elements of Murder: A History of Poison by John Emsley, Daniel Kevles writes:

Twenty years after he died in exile on St. Helena, Napoleon's body was exhumed for reburial in Paris. The exceptional preservation of his corpse, which could be chemically tested along with years' worth of hair cuttings, revealed that his body contained high levels of arsenic. The symptoms of Napoleon's final illness were also consistent with arsenic poisoning. Armchair analysts theorized that he had been done in by the British or by a jealous husband. But Emsley argues that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper—or more precisely, drawing on the work of an Italian scientist named Bartolomeo Gosio, by the green, arsenic-rich pigment in the wallpaper's star pattern.

At the end of the 19^th century, Gosio was prompted to investigate why so many Italian children were inexplicably sickening and dying. Physicians suspected arsenic poisoning. Gosio demonstrated that a microorganism that grew on the flour-paste backing of the wallpaper could turn the arsenic in it into a gas that was powerful enough to make people ill and even kill them. If Napoleon chose the colors of his wallpaper to commemorate his imperial colors, Emsley writes, "[H]e did himself no favours … though they reminded him of his glorious past." Napoleon seems to have been a victim, like so many others, of a surreptitious killer. But he may have been poisoned by his own vanity rather than by a self-protective lover, a grasping wife, or a woman like the Lucrezia Borgia of historical repute.

Other uses of arsenic

Arsenic not only persists in the remains of anyone who has ingested or inhaled it, but it also acts as a preservative. It has been employed in embalming solutions and in dry preservatives used by taxidermists such as Becoeur soap , which was "made of arsenic powder, camphor, tartaric acid and lime" or "the arsenic  soap made of white soap flakes, arsenic salts, potash, camphor, alcohol and water, borax powder . . . " etc. (Tissier & Migne). The "miraculous preservation" of corpses can sometimes be attributed to the presence of arsenic in the soil in which they have been buried .

Any way you look at it . . .

There are several versions of the death of Henry II, Duke of Champagne, and king of Jerusalem (1166-1197). All of them, as Dorkafork explains, are pretty ridiculous:

During the Third Crusade, Henry II of Champagne, king of Jerusalem, perished due to defenestration.  The story involves a first floor window and a dwarf.  The version I read was that he tripped over his dwarf servant and fell out the window. Though this story has the most flair, I suspect it's the least likely. Other stories say the dwarf was just trying to pull him back up, and did not have mass on his side.  In any case, by all accounts his dwarf servant fell out of the window as well, I guess there's no need to gild the lily.  Some stories suggest that Henry would not have died if the dwarf had not landed on top of him.

So, chalk up another eminent victim to the scourge of defenestration.