The Unsolved Mysteries of Williamson and Voynich

As annoying as Penn and Teller's "Bullshit!" program can be, one of their comments has really stuck with me. During a program about cryptozoology, Penn said that there are enough real and established unsolved mysteries in the world that we shouldn't become obsessed with ones that are merely tenuous.

The obvious examples involve both the huge and the tiny things that science is actively probing: cosmology, subatomic particles, and genetic material. But I'm equally (if not more) fascinated by the little, somewhat mundane oddities that pop up now and then.

Just in case you are too, here's an example: Williamson's tunnels. In the early 1800s, a rich and somewhat eccentric Liverpudlian named Joseph Williamson started constructing huge, elaborate tunnels under his property.


Instead of being objects of curiosity after his death, they were mostly viewed with annoyance; they'd get in the way of new building projects, and housing developers would simply fill them up with rubble -- usually without telling anybody -- so that their new apartment buildings wouldn't fall into them.

Now a small group of volunteers is slowly and methodically uncovering the tunnels, and they're discovering that they're much deeper -- and they travel much farther -- than credible sources would have indicated. It's incredibly difficult for an underfunded handful of people to clear out uncounted tonnes of compressed rubble, but they're slowly making their way through the tunnel network, finding new things all the time.

The mystery isn't just the EXTENT of the tunnels, it's also "Why were they built in the first place?" Nobody really knows yet, but maybe if they travel far enough they'll eventually get some clue. Until then: unsolved and really cool.

A second mystery is one I just learned about tonight, thanks to a brief article in the January 25, 1930 issue of The New Yorker. In 1912, book-dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich publicized the existence of a book that has become known as the Voynich Manuscript.


People have been trying to decipher the manuscript for almost 100 years, but they still can't crack its bizarre cypher. If the book isn't simply an elaborate hoax -- which it doesn't seem to be -- then it was written in the 15th or 16th century. It appears to be a biological, astrological, and alchemical treatise and is full of bizarre illustrations, including chimerical plants and naked women bathing in funnels and tubes.

Want to read it? Think you can solve the mystery? Check it out here. And I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing FAR more fascinating than bigfoot or The Ghost of Henry VIII.

Random Observations About the Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement

I am now firmly mired in the "Patriotism and War" section of "The Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement." I previously mentioned some general impressions of this 1903 child-indoctrination book. Here are more specific examples.

First, if I never read another "baby talk" poem, it will be too soon. Here's the first stanza from "Lulu's Complaint," by an uncredited author.

I'se a poor 'ittle sorrowful baby,
For B'idget is 'way down 'tairs:
My titten has scratched my fin'er,
And Dolly won't say her p'ayers.

Also included in the "Little Folks' Speaker" section is "The Spanish War Alphabet" by A. C. Needham. Here are some of the letters taught to little folks:

C is for Cuba, a tight little isle;
To get which we may have to fight quite a while.

F is for Freedom, which means a great deal
When your neck has been under a vile Spanish heel.

G is for Germany, whose rude employees
Should learn better manners; be taught to say please.

I's for Insurgents, who holler for aid;
Then eat up the rations and loaf in the shade.

J is for Jones, Davy Jones, if you will,
Whose lockers we've twice had occasion to fill.

William Hearst would have been pleased!

The modern reader will probably enjoy B. Taylor's "Grandpa's Aversion To Slang." Here are some choice lines.

It wasn't so long when I was young--
We used plain language then;
We didn't speak of "them galoots,"
Meanin' boys or men.

When speaking of the nice hand-write
Of Joe, or Tom, or Bill,
We did it plain--we didn't say,
"He slings a nasty quill."

An' when we saw a girl we liked,
Who never failed to please,
We called her pretty, neat and good,
But not "about the cheese."

Well, when we met a good old friend
We hadn't lately seen,
We greeted him, but didn't say,
"Hello, you old sardine!"

The "pathetic selections" are real gems and guaranteed to make your children hate the world. There are the child-death sagas of "Poor Little Jim," "Limpy Tim," "The Dying Boy," "Nobody's Child," and "In the Bottom Drawer," in which abused children get taken away by angels and the narrator feels really bad. Then there are the wife-death epics of "To Mary in Heaven," "The Singer's Climax," and "The Gambler's Wife." If you're really lucky, for extra pathos, these stories are told by people who -- at the last line -- suddenly jump into the air and then die. That's just how it was in 1903! And also God's way of culling bad poets.

The "Humorous and Dialectic" section taught me the following lessons.

1. Black people use long words, but always incorrectly. They are lazy except when they're playing games. They are always, always, ALWAYS stealing "watermillion."
2. German people are hard-working, but they're far too rigid in their behaviour. They complain a lot about petty problems.
3. Irish people are delightful and stupid and they know their place. Then they get in a fight.

When not making fun of ethnic minorities, the "humorous" selections are usually stories about funny things that children do in church. But then there's a little ditty called "An Apostrophe to Aguinaldo." How dare the people of the Philippines resist American occupation of their territory! Especially not when treated with such respect, as in these excerpts.

Say, Aguinaldo,
You little measly
Malay moke,
What's the matter with you?
...
What you need, Aggie,
Is civilizing.
And goldarn
Your yaller percoon-skin,
We'll civilize you
Dead or alive.
You'd better
Fall in to the
Procession of Progress
And go marching on to glory,
Before you fall
Into a hole in the ground.
Understand?
That's us--
U. S.

Even considering all the dead child and watermillion poems, this is by far the most disturbing thing in the book. So far.

Books of the Last Few Weeks

One reason that I stop blogging is because there are lots of things I want to write about, but actually doing so seems too big a task. Eventually I need to either spend a few hours writing all those imagined entries, or just forget them all and start anew.

As a compromise, here are some capsule thoughts on the books I've been reading.

"Every Man for Himself" by Beryl Bainbridge

It's the story of one man aboard the Titanic, from the moment of departure to its eventual sinking. Being a Bainbridge novel, the story is more about the man and his relationships than it is about the actual boat, and the man himself is such an unreliable and odd character that you can't trust anything he says.

The book is wonderful and appears, primarily, to be a meditation on the modern aristocracy; those lucky folk on the upper decks who survived so much more reliably than those below. Bainbridge doesn't romanticize either of the classes on the ship, but she certainly draws a distinction between the witty game-playing amongst the rich, the invisible-ness of those in steerage, and the rough pride of the crew.

As much as I liked the book, though, I felt that it pretty much ignored what being on a ship is LIKE. Even during the capsizing of the Titanic -- a monumental situation -- Bainbridge is more concerned with the thoughts of the protagonist than describing the situation itself. So, to learn more about boats and sailing, I read a book I'd picked up at last year's Unitarian Church book sale:

"Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

A highly detailed account of the author's two-year stint as a merchant seaman during the 1830s, it gives a complete blow-by-blow of the nature, traditions, problems, and hardships of such trips. He says at the beginning that he refuses to explain the nautical terms (because people read such books all the time without needing to understand those things), but I found myself swamped by repeated passages such as this:

From the fore top-gallant yard, the men slid down the stay to furl the jib, and from the mizen top-gallant yard, by the stay into the maintop, and thence to the yard; and the men on the topsail yards came down the lifts to the yard-arms of the courses. The sails were furled with great care, the bunts triced up by jiggers, and the jibs stowed in cloth.

A+ for accuracy, Dick, but does anybody really care? A fair proportion of the book is written like this, perhaps to support the central point that going to sea is not a romantic occupation full of breath-taking adventure and spectacular sights...it is primarily an endless series of watches, furling, unfurling, cleaning, staring at the horizon, and then more cleaning. Dana says often in the book that "a boat is like a woman's watch: always in need of repair." I didn't realize that until I read this and it's a point well-taken.

At one point in the book, Dana describes his joy when, in the middle of the voyage, he came across a copy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel "Paul Clifford." I thought it would be interesting to seek out and read this book for myself, to better get the feel of what Dana was reading on that ship. I found copies on abebooks and ordered the cheapest and most local copy I could find...and imagine my surprise that it's an 1835 edition! This beautiful little book is very much like the one that Dana himself read...neat.

"Salt Water Taffy" by Corey Ford

Anyway, more on that later. Another impetus for this "nautical" theme was from a review of Corey Ford's "Salt Water Taffy" in the June 15, 1929 New Yorker magazine. Accompanying the glowing review was this beautiful advertisement...click for a larger version.

Once again I went to abebooks and found myself a copy, and it's absolutely hilarious. A parody of Joan Lowell's "The Cradle of the Deep" -- a tall-tale autobiography which turned out to be absolutely false -- it's the story of how "June Triplett" is born on a boat, captures a pet waterspout, learns about sex from a female shark, tries to become a virgin on the Virgin Islands, and eventually writes her autobiography while swimming back to New York...as ridiculous as the book it's parodying, apparently.

The best thing about the book are the dozens of goofy pictures. Some of them are taken aboard a real boat, while others are crude cut-outs of the actors, pasted onto stock footage. These actors don't get any credit in the book itself but the advertisement above mentions that they are Heywood Broun, Reinald Werrenrath, Neysa McNein, Frank Crowninshield, Harold Ross, Donald Ogden Stewart, Frank Sullivan, "and other literati and the like." In short, a bunch of cynical and artsy New Yorker goofballs.

"The Beothucks or Red Indians"

As children, we Canadians are taught a bizarre and shameful footnote to our history: immediately after settling in Newfoundland, our ancestors began a three-century project of informal extermination. And I'm not talking about the auks, I'm talking about the Beothuks.

Their story is a sad one of brutality, stupidity, missed opportunities, and belated reparations. The Beothuks (called "red Indians" because they covered themselves with red ocher) were the dominant tribe on the island, living mainly in the interior but coming to the coasts during the summer in order to fish.

European settlers began to arrive in the 15th century, and though there are some stories of goodwill between the cultures, the Beothuks and the settlers REALLY got off on the wrong foot. The Beothuks, probably angry about incursions into their fishing grounds, stole the possessions of the settlers, and the settlers -- meanwhile -- were shooting Beothuks out of some combination of fear, hatred, and sport.

In addition, the French were giving guns to the Mi'kmaq in Labrador, resulting in a serious military imbalance with the Beothuks. Attacked on two fronts, the Beothuks became increasingly evasive, retreating almost entirely to the interior by the 19th century.

It was around this time that philanthropic groups were organized to try to make belated peace with the Beothuks, but the European powers-that-be had a bit of a credibility gap, especially since settlers were still quietly killing Indians. Ultimately the plan of the philanthropists was to find out where the Beothuk were hiding, give them presents, convince one of them to return to town with them, and show the Indian all the joys of civilization. It was thought that when the Indian returned to his tribe, he'd gush about how wonderful the settlers were, and everybody would smoke a peace pipe and get down to some serious fur-trading.

Twenty years later and all the Beothuck had quietly disappeared. Forever.

Right now I'm reading "The Beothucks or Red Indians" by James P. Howley, originally published in 1915. It was Howley's attempt to gather all the information about the Beothuck as possible, and it's basically a reprint of the letters, journals, and proclamations he found.

This format isn't entirely successful. Decades go by without a single update, and then a hundred pages are devoted to material from just a year or two. If an expedition to the Newfoundland interior involved more than one person, he prints ALL their journals about the trip...and then he prints the recollections of people who HEARD about the trip...and then he prints newspaper articles written about the trip a few years later.

It's annoying to read the same thing over and over again, but it does illustrate the unreliability of memory and biography. Everybody describes the situations differently, and as time goes by the stories get more and more inflated. Howley sidesteps this aspect of his book -- simply pointing out in a footnote when somebody is "unclear about" or "misunderstood" the history -- but it's one of the many ironies that a modern reader is able to pick up on.

Another odd thing about the book is how absolutely bungled the whole philanthropic enterprise was. The do-gooders would march into the woods, scare the heck out of some Beothuck by sneaking up on them, accidentally kill one or two, and then kidnap one or more women. They'd spend a year showering the women with gifts. Then, just before returning them to their tribes, the women would die of consumption.

Hey fellas, A+ for effort, but WHAT THE HECK DO YOU IMAGINE THE BEOTHUCK THOUGHT ABOUT THIS? And while acknowledging that the tribe was in danger of complete extinction, did it not occur to anybody that STEALING WOMEN OF CHILDBEARING AGE was the worst thing they could do?

To be fair it seems they really WANTED to kidnap a man, but the women were just easier to catch.

I'd feel more charitably about these heartfelt schemes if the people involved -- even at their most idealistic -- didn't qualify their "reconciliation" plan with the need to "bring the poor brutes to civilization." In the first meeting of the surprisingly liberal 1827 Beothuck Institution, the participants speak highly of the Indian's right to life and land...but they always slip in the verb "to civilize," as though the Beothuck were unable to decide for themselves.

But none of that mattered anyway because the tribe was already dying (if not dead).

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the vivid accounts of Shanawdithit and Demasduit, two of the captured females who responded to European life in a somewhat delightful way (before dropping dead).

MOST fascinating, however, is the apparently complete narrative of William E. Cormack's east-west journey across Newfoundland. Over several hellish months he pushed through parts of the island that even the Indians wouldn't stray into, and his descriptions are engrossing: every detail about the geography, botany, wildlife, weather, and inhabitants during a trip that nobody had ever taken before, and no sane person would ever do again.

I don't have romantic ideas about Indians OR Europeans, and in this case especially their relationship seemed doomed from the start. Reading this book, though, I'm getting a strangely haunting impression of the situation as seen by both peoples. To the European settlers, living precarious lives in an enormous unmapped wilderness, the Beothuck must have seemed almost devilish, the way they disappeared into the interior, leaving behind deserted wigwams and tumble-down storehouses, coming back only to steal things silently in the night.

And imagine what the Beothuck thought, hiding in the interior that they knew so well, always aware that more and more settlers were living on the fringe. Occasionally the settlers would intrude down the rivers, and the Beothuck would quietly slip away, leaving their villages deserted and starting up elsewhere, further and further from the resources they required.

Eventually, undetected, the last Beothuck died in the middle of all that uncharted forest, and nobody else ever knew.

PS: As I said, this is a romantic impression based on a book written in 1915. Reality suggests that some of the Beothuck DID survive, mainly by mingling with settlers and other tribles.

"The Canadian Settler's Guide"

Society is hanging by a thread. As the movies keep reminding us, all we need is a nuclear war, a viral outbreak, a terrorist strike, or a polar bear attack to bring all of our modern machinery to a shuddering halt. We are literally inches away from the stone age, and I don't mean the kind of stone age where we wear fur bikinis and fight dinosaurs. I mean the kind where we all die because we're too stupid to know how to make our own bread.

I picked up Catherine Parr Traill's "The Canadian Settler's Guide" because, after the zombies bring down our entire fragile infrastructure, I want to lend a helping hand when the time comes to reconstruct the world. I want to offer more practical knowledge than just how to boil Kraft Dinner and accentuate a lip-line.

The fact that you can't grow insulin in a garden sort of makes my whole plan moot anyway, but I want to AT LEAST build a whipsaw and plant some cabbage before I die.

So Traill's book -- written for the new 1855 Canadian immigrant -- has proved helpful. I now understand the importance building a veranda around even the meanest hovel, and I know one should keep the chickens in a coop while one is planting the crops. I have learned the best way to prepare fried corn (boil it first) and how to make a tasty beer out of beets. I could, if pressed, make a rag rug or a candle or a delightful pigeon pie, and I could tell you how many bricks a yard of clay will make (460), and I could even recite a verse of "The Scottish Immigrant Song":

The little gowans tipped wi dew
That 'mang the grass shone brightly;
The harebell waving in the breeze
That bowed its head sae lightly.

When Mrs. Traill devoted a section of the book to "the ague," however, I had to chuckle. "Oh those simple Victorian people, mistaking food poisoning or a tight corset for some mysterious vapor-disease." Little did I know that -- holy cow! -- malaria was a serious problem in Ontario throughout the 1800's. No wonder a spoonful of Epsom salts didn't help.

So when the world comes crashing down, feel free to stay with me for a little while. We'll have a quilting bee, clear some land, and dig a pit to put the potatoes in. But now that I know where rennet comes from, YOU can make the cheese.

Huck Finn

I need to get this off my chest: I just finished reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and I don't have a clue what I should say about it. It's like coming back from Niagara Falls and trying to find meaningful adjectives to describe the falls that haven't already been used. "Huck Finn" has been analyzed to death; what more can I possibly add?

Only that I thought it was amazing, funny, touching, witty, and fascinating. I hear that it is Mark Twain's best book by a longshot so I probably won't pick up his other books, but nobody could write such a masterpiece without being consistently brilliant in SOME other way.

Critics love to slam the book's final chapters, and I have to agree...they are total crap: forced, repetitive, pointless, and a complete letdown from the subtlety and fine-honed logic of the rest of the story. Don't let that spoil it for you though...if you're looking for a fun and sometimes painful adventure through a sharply-observed long-lost time and place, definitely give "Huck Finn" some of your time.

It was almost better than "Dwarf Fortress." Almost.

Sherlock Holmes in "The Lost Pencil Case"

Chapter 1 - A Most Unusual Discovery

During my journies I happened across the widow McClure, a sweet Irish lass, long beyond her years and now terminally ill. Suffering from demetia, each time we met it was most similar to the first, and I found myself once again amazing her with my feats of deduction.

"On Thursday nights," I said to her, "you watch 'The Price is Right,' and you always cheer for the fat ones."

She was amazed. "Mr. Holmes, how do you know such things?"

"These mental stretching-exercises are like morning calisthenics to the student of crime. I am aware, of course, that your grandchildren always visit on Thursdays, and you have said in the past that they are uncommonly fond of television."

"I said that?"

"Indeed you did, but let's return to my monologue. In my curious daily business I am required to read all the latest periodicals, in order to keep abreast of current events which may impact my work. One such magazine which I devour from cover to cover is...'The T.V. Guide.'"

"I love that book," said the esteemed widow, the rosy blush of long-lost youth returning briefly to her aged cheeks.

I made fast my explanation, before her oncoming fit should stop it in its inevitable tracks. "It was short work to decipher the guide's Thursday night schedule, from which -- bracketed by your regular mealtime of five o'clock and your bedtime at six -- I deduced you would be watching 'The Price Is Right' on your video-telegraph machine on regular Thursday evenings." I paused for effect. "Now let me tell you about the Cottingley Fairies..."

Mrs. McClure, as always, was uncommonly amazed, and she shook my hand as best her palsy would allow. Whilst in the perpendicular position that was required to grasp her hand I noticed a most intriguing object lying atop the snow.

I did nothing to betray my knowledge at the time -- wishing not to entangle the widow in the nefarious schemes of the criminal underworld -- but after seeing her off to her daily sponge bath I returned to the sidewalk. Stooping to retrieve the singular object which I had spied, I saw immediately that it was a pencil case.

Chapter 2 - A Crime of Passion

From its position I deduced that it had been carelessly dropped, and not so recently as it was finely dusted with snow. The footprints around it had been hopelessly muddled by pedestrian traffic and by Mrs. McClure's tripedal walker, obscuring any clues as to the owner of the pencil case, or -- if they were not the same -- to the individual who had dropped it.

I turned my attention to the case itself. It contained numerous geometric tools and writing utensils, most telling of which was a gum eraser which proclaimed that somebody with the initials "P.M." had once loved somebody else "4ever," but the initials of the paramour had been cruelly defaced by what I soon determined to be a young girl's fingernail.

This discovery shone new light on the development. At first glance I had assume the pencil case to have been accidentally dropped, but the obscure gum eraser with its gouged-out initials suggested a more sinister motive: an affair of the heart, a lover spurned.

"This puts me in mind of a similar case which you may remember," I said to the stuffed and mounted figure of Dr. Watson which I carry for such purposes. "The unrequited love which John Hinkley, Jr. felt for Jodie Foster, which inspired him to steal her pencil case one night out of sheer pique, only to lose it on the day that he attempted to take the life of Ronald Reagan in a most inelegant way. I fear that the unknown figure involved in this case is similar to that of the case long past; merciless, passionate, and far beyond the bounds of common rationality. Mark my words, Watson...here we face the most vicious criminal we have ever known."

Watson, choosing not to interrupt my investigation at such a crucial stage, maintained his silence and leaned increasingly a-tilt in the growing wind.

Further analysis of the pencil case presented more evidence of the seriousness of the crime, not least in the form of a passionate scribbling on the inner lid: "Jessica you are a jalous bitch :)" I also deduced, from various obscure and sundry notes contained therein that the owner of the case was a Miss P___ M___, enrolled in form eight of M_____ Public School, located as I knew on C_____ Street.

I rushed immediately to the telegraph office but was dismayed to find it inoperative. My next step -- the telephone book -- revealed many more individuals with the surname M____ than I had anticipated. Having decided to attend to the school of M_______ in person, I briefly considered the hiring of a hansom or dogcart to fetch me there, but the hired lackeys in this town refuse to admit Dr. Watson in his current condition and the only other carriage drivers -- those singularly curious members of the Mennonite religious order -- have been reticent since the disastrous resolution of "The Case of the Poisoned Strudel."

Chapter 3 - The Visit

The following morning I hied myself to M_____ Public School with the wayward pencil case in my possession. Inspector Lestrade being long since lost in his ill-fated battle with the Fiery Moria Balrog, I brought instead a collection of Street Arabs in various disguise, these "Baker Street Irregulars" serving to lighten my spirits and affirm my superiority. Having delayed for so long any explanation of my methods or purpose, however, they soon dispersed to the nearest Tim Horton's, tongues a-poke and fingers raised.

Finally, after many minutes of solitary walking, I was on my own at the school, ready to spring the net that I had been carefully weaving since the discovery of the pencil case but a day previous.

Aware that a man in possession of cocaine should not linger at the gates of a public school, I entered the singular halls of the once-great institution. I was greeted by an uncommonly beautiful matron, so pale as to be nearly luminous in the dim fluorescent lighting, a figure at once so winsome and concupiscent that I felt Watson growing singularly stiff at my side.

I bowed respectfully under her gaze. "M'lady, I bring to you a pencil case which may or may not belong to one P____ M____, a student of your singular institution. The circumstances are unparalleled in their circumstance, but I deduce that the case was lost as she found her way home across C____ street. The soft cushion of the new-fallen snow no-doubt muffled the rattle of the falling protractors and pencils, with the result that--"

"I'll make sure she gets it," said the matron, removing the object from my hands and retreating instantly down the corridor. My interview, it would seem, was over.

Chapter 4 - The Scarlet Mormon of East Pushtan

You may wonder at the resolution of this astonishing tale, so unlike any that I or my imitators have told before. I too am uncertain as to the fate of the pencil case, and the fate of the mysterious P____ M_____, whose form and circumstance remain vague in my understanding.

Surely, if Watson were still an active and mobile young man of 35, he would have stumbled upon a postscript worthy of all that preceded, a final few chapters to explain the terrible curse of the M_____ family and their ancestry in another country, another time.

But Watson is no longer the man he was, and I confess the same regarding myself. 'Tis just me and my cat at Baker Street, waiting here, wondering what next will fall from the grasp of this world's singular criminals.

Sir John Franklin, Unforgettable, Dead

William T. Vollmann's novel "The Rifles" is about John Franklin's northwest passage expedition. Except that John Franklin is really the time-traveling twin of Captain Subzero, who is also sort of William T. Vollmann himself, and all of them are in love with a crazy Inuk woman named Reepah, who was part of the greater tragedy of the much-maligned 1950s relocation of Inuit families to Resolute, and everybody has been impacted by the properties of lead, you see.

The book is best when it is describing Vollmann's impressions of the far north; the shambolic yet warm settlements, the sparse beauty of endless tundra, and the sheer superpower of wind, ice, and cold.

It's also good when Vollmann writes about Reepah, a hearing-impaired, gasoline-sniffing, poverty stricken, utterly damaged woman who cheerfully ping-pongs between Subzero and Franklin, past and present, chopping blubber in the kitchen and screaming drunkenly in New York City. Her affairs with her Caucasian lovers are typically Vollmann: lopsided, crazy, impossible, doomed.

But what does all this have to do with "rifles?" I missed it the first time I read the book, but this time I took note of the introduction, in which the author tries to find the source of a river on Cornwallis Island...he keeps following it, trying to find its source, only to realize -- after an exhausting journey -- that

...these lakes were from permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were in a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In his "Seven Dreams" series (of which "The Rifles" is book six) he is following tenuous paths through history, following his inspirations in directions that are symbolic and meaningful. "The Rifles" is about starvation and lead, which killed the Franklin expedition (partially through lead-contaminated food), which is killing Reepah (who sniffs gasoline), and impacted the entire north when rifles and European contact turned the ecosystem from one of sheer survival to one of fur-for-profit.

But Vollmann knows that this is a messy river to follow, and he acknowledges that this is too simplistic. The book sinks into necessarily long descriptions of starvation which make the reader understand both the protracted nature of Arctic death and the sheer emptiness of the landscape. As difficult as it is to read, and as spongy as its "permafrost" can occasionally be, "The Rifles" gives a personal glimpse of the far north as experienced by Vollmann himself.

It makes you want to go there and go very far away, all at the same time.

Immediately after this, I finally roused myself to read one of Vollmann's sources: "Frozen In Time" by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, about Beattie's own trips north to exhume the bodies of Franklin's crew.

The book is dry and clunkily sentimental, and it is so repetitive that you wonder if you aren't reading the same chapters over and over again. It's written, in fact, as though it were the awkward offspring of a research paper and a journal, which is exactly what it is.

Beattie was the man who developed and (it would seem) supported the theory that Franklin's expedition was debilitated early on by lead poisoning, mainly due to hastily-manufactured tinned food. Most of the bodies and relics from the 1840s are long gone -- scattered by the elements, lost under the ice, acquired by the Inuit -- but the bodies of three crewmen have remained buried on isolated, inhospitable Beechey Island.

So Beattie and his team went there with a portable laboratory and dug up the corpses. They were amazed to find that the 140-year-old bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine were almost perfectly preserved...and it's the gruesome pictures of the men that are the real stars of the book. Bulging hands, rubbery lips, gritted teeth, staring eyes, emaciated bodies, all dressed in period clothing and looking barely dead. The bodies are downright eerie...if you want nightmares, here are a few online shots.

That's it for me. No more Arctic stories for a while. I'm plunging into Sherlock Holmes because I much prefer reading about that smug bastard than spending another week perpetually icebound.

More Vaudeville Cats, Plus Special JJ Synchronicity Bonus!

I've just finished Douglas Gilbert's "American Vaudeville." It really is an exceptional book. Sloppy, yes, full of asides and written almost like a journal, but if you pay close attention you get a real sense of the interconnectedness of vaudeville; the stage hands, the performers, the booking agents, the theatre chain owners, the critics.

But of course you want to hear about the vaudeville cats.

The domestic feline--the writer, who adores them, regrets to say--never graduated with high honors in vaudeville although there were a number of successful cat acts. Of course, these cats are not dangerous, but they are unreliable, merely because they are supreme individualists, preferring to do the thing they want at the time they want to do it; which should be understandable...

Yet even [Tetchow] could get from his pets, for indeed they were that, but one trick each. His star performer was a tom who ran from the wings, scrambled up a rope hanging from the proscenium arch, got into a basket attached to a parachute and came floating down to the stage.

Heck, my cat could do that. Or at least she would if there was a toilet up there to drink out of.

It may be unnecessary to say that goats are difficult to work with and more unreliable than cats.

So no goats in baskets.

Special synchronicity bonus for reader jj! He mentioned this act last week, and what did I find on page 247?

Willie [Hammerstein] combed the museums and side shows for his freaks. In Philadelphia he found the wonderful Sober Sue...A number of the best comics of the period tried [to make her laugh]--Sam Bernard, Willie Collier, Eddie Leonard, Louis Mann. All failed. But the customers kept coming, not to see Sober Sue, but the comedians who (without salary) were contributing thousands of dollars in prestige and box-office take... When the engagement terminated it was discovered that her facial muscles were paralyzed and it was physically impossible for her to laugh.

Apparently Sober Sue suffered from the very odd Mobius syndrome, and her real name was Susan Kelly.

More Quirky Vaudeville Anecdotes

I'm having so much fun re-reading Douglas Gilbert's "American Vaudeville." His anecdotes about popular variety acts are priceless and rapid fire. I can't vouch for his accuracy -- heck, he was there and I wasn't -- but vaudeville was so exaggerated to begin with that you can forgive the occasional over-the-top description.

Here are a few more of my favourite moments in the book. First off, he reprints a wonderfully nasty song by Dan Collyer called "Tommy, Don't Wriggle the Baby."

Now I am the oldest one of a family numbering twenty.
At the tender age of one begun my troubles of which I had plenty.
The children I had to nurse, with an infant's nursery bottle.
And when they were twins, upon my pins!--the infants I'd like to throttle!

CHORUS:
Tommy don't wriggle the baby.
Please don't tickle the baby.
Be pertickeler, perpendickeler
Always carry the child.

I think this would be a good companion song to the Talking Heads' "Stay Up Late."

I'm intrigued by the short chapter regarding Charlie Case, who Gilbert describes as "a natural Negro, a gentle neurotic (strange combination!)". Ahem. The transcription of one of Case's routines is unlike any vaudeville act I've heard before, so deadpan in its weirdness. It has a touch of the Marx Brothers to it but is so toned down...

Father was a peculiar man. Us children didn't understand him. Mother understood him. Mother could always tell when father'd been drinking. We couldn't tell. We used to think he was dead.

In the "synchronicity" department, just a few weeks ago I blogged about the practice of "paying the angles" on 1920s radio. This was just as big a problem in vaudeville, and Gilbert knows who to blame.

Lottie Gilson...almost ruined her art with an innovation that is still a nuisance in night clubs and on the radio--song plugging. She was the first of the pluggers, singing for an extra fee the most awful junk of the one-finger Tin-Pan Alley boys...

For an interesting article about the birth of the "hit song," see this parlor songs page.

Life Was Cheap For the Vaudeville Felines (plus "socks")

In his rather informal book "American Vaudeville," author Douglas Gilbert often goes off on wild tangents, describing the long-lost vaudeville routines that he obviously pines for. He takes real delight in remembering the more bizarre acts for us, and I take a real delight in reading about them:

A performer whose name nobody can recall had an act called "The Cat Piano." It comprised a number of live cats confined in narrow boxes with wire netting on the front ends. Artificial tails extended from the rear. This performer was a marvelous cat imitator and miaowed the "Miserere" by pulling the cats' tails. Spits, snarls, and plaintive mews added to the effect of the back-fence serenade.

He also mentions "Nelson's Boxing Cats" in his huge list of standard acts from 1880 to 1930, sadly with no further details.

Here's another passage that I love:

Most of the museums pasted warnings in dressing rooms that the words "slob," "sucker," "damn," "hell," and "socks" were forbidden. The ban on "socks" may seem unreasonable today [1940] but in the eighties crude jests--"stronger than father's socks," or "I threw my socks at the wall and they stuck"--were common gags.

Next time I'm at a party I'll be sure to try out some of those sock gags. "The wine has a pungent bouquet...stronger than father's socks!"

Common Mounted Police Problems In 1889

Police today think they got it tough? "The New West" -- a collection of reports filed by the North-West Mounted Police in 1889 -- should be required reading.

In 1876, the North West Act was passed, providing governance to what was then the North-Territories (now essentially Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba). I can find very little information about the act itself, but one particular part of it caused a lot of trouble for the Mounties: the Liquor Laws.

These laws forbade the importation and sale of liquor (though apparently not beer) without a permit from the Governor-General, the point being to prevent Indians from drinking it. But the Mounted Police found it impossible to enforce, especially since lawyers were always finding ingenious new loopholes in it. Not even the local government seemed sympathetic to the law; one judge even ruled that people could sell liquor as long as they had SOME permit, even if it was somebody else's. Every single report in this book contains a frustrated screed by the officers: everybody hates the law, we can't enforce it, it must be changed.

Equally annoying to the Mounted Police was the state of their barracks furniture, which they had to make themselves out of rough wood. This lowered morale almost as much as the lack of recreational facilities, and the officers were constantly pleading for iron bed frames, mainly because the iron frames could be folded up to allow the men more room to move around. Superintendent J. Cotton made the typical comment (so typical that it starts to sound like a coordinated campaign): "The ordinary boards and trestles furnish the men with a wretched substitute for a bed, and, at best, present a sorry appearance in the barrack room."

Once you joined the Mounted Police you signed up for a specific term and could only leave by buying out your contract. Even then it often took months for a buyout to be authorized. Since most of the men were skilled farmers and craftsmen -- and the life of a Mountie was cruel, harrowing, and ill-rewarded -- many of them saw better opportunities in the nearby towns and couldn't wait to be authorized to leave. Some of them deserted the force, mainly by crossing the border into Montana. This seems to make the officers more sad than angry.

Apart from difficulties with fire protection (not enough equipment for storing water and too many fires caused by locomotive sparks), a lack of bridges and ferries (making crossing rivers a life-threatening exercise), and dissatisfaction with the armaments (especially the Winchester carbines and the revolvers which were "too powerful"), the reports are mostly positive.

They get most colourful when they start talking about their dealings with the Indians. They generally divided the tribes into good (Bloods, Piegans, Stoneys) and bad (Cree) categories, except for the much-maligned "half-breeds" -- AKA Metis, or French-Indians -- who were generally described as shiftless criminals: "Many are idle and have no settled occupation, and if they get any money waste it in drinking and gambling."

Indians occasionally stole horses, slaughtered ranch cattle, and drank too much, but these were always stressed as isolated cases. Sometimes they camped close to ranches: "They have numbers of dogs, and these dogs chase calves and colts, kill poultry, etc.; Certainly a camp of Indians near one's house is not a desirable addition." The general tone was that the Indians were "good-natured" and needed to be prodded in the right direction.

From my 21st century point of view -- aware that the Native Americans have legitimate grievances, then and now -- I'm always on the lookout for racism in these reports. I started getting suspicious when officers kept mentioning Indians leaving their reservations "without a pass." Not having access to the laws of the time, I got more and more concerned: was there REALLY a law saying that the Indians had to get some sort of "pass" before they could walk on non-reservation land?

Then I came across this little gem of subdued horribleness, thanks to Superintendent R. B. Deane:

The Indians that have come this way from the Blood Reserve have, on the whole, behaved themselves well... Others come with all sorts of plausible pretexts to account for being off their reserve without a pass. Some do not appear to think a pass necessary at all. One Indian produced a pass which was exactly a year old, and therewith was quite content. Some of them seem to be aware that in point of law they have as much right to roam about the country as white men, and that confinement to a reserve was not one of the provisions of their treaty.

You've got to be KIDDING me. The Mounted Police were regularly enforcing a fake "pass law" to keep Indians from leaving their reservations? And this is nonchalantly described in a report, with full knowledge that the reports were published every year for public reading? This has changed the tone of everything I'm reading; if such a basic violation of the rights of the Indians was so casually tossed around, I can't imagine what they DIDN'T put in the reports.

Not altogether surprising, but these 19th century Mounties sounded like such even-handed guys until then.

The New West: Mysterious 19th Century Ailments

As part of my personal mission to learn more about the country I live in (and to have fun doing it), I'm reading a fascinating book called "The New West." It's a straight-forward collection of reports from the North-West Mounted Police filed during 1889.

These prototypical mounties had only been around for 16 years by that point. They were still suffering growing pains as they tried to keep up with explosive settlement, the coming of the railroad, forest fires, cattle theft, and some decidedly uneasy relationships with the Native Americans.

I've only just started reading the book, but I'm struck by the reports filed by Senior Surgeon A. Jukes (who, I've just discovered, testified that Louis Riel was not insane) and his group of assistant surgeons. They provide handy tables of all the illnesses they treated during the year. Many of them are easy for a 21st century reader to understand, but there are plenty of cases of Freaky 19th Century Ailments with weird names.

To educate you (and myself), I've done a bit of research. And if you're a really dedicated hypochondriac, try these ones on for size:

• Two officers spent almost a month recovering from Bilious Fever. It's an intestinal flu/fever that keeps on coming back to haunt you. I've always assumed this caused your stomach to bloat.
  
• Eighteen unfortunate fellows dealt with Cephalalgia, which isn't a deadly tropical amoeba...it's just a headache!
• Choria took one man seventy days to recover from. It's the infamous St. Vitus' Dance, a symptom of several different illnesses (such as Huntington's disease and rheumatic fever).
• Lumbago -- AKA lower-back pain -- was pretty popular and easily overcome.
• I'm totally confused by Odontolgia, which is listed as a "disease of the nervous system." There are lots of online references to Odontologia, but they're all in Spanish and probably refer to some medical field. Maybe a toothache?
  
• Good old Catarrh, a chronic inflammation of the mucous membranes.
  
• One poor guy caught Furunculus and was still being treated by the time of the report. It's a boil. Why don't we hear about boils and carbuncles anymore? Either because our hygiene is better or because we just call them big pimples nowadays, is my guess.
• Three (possibly) uncircumsized men complained of Balanitis, a penile inflammation. The Mounted Police didn't have many opportunities to bathe, apparently.
• Yikes, Desquamative Nephritis took three months to kill a police officer. It's a nasty inflammation of the kidneys.
• One man had Orchitis, an inflammation of the testicles. But don't worry...he got over it!
• Two men suffered Eruptions! I have no idea what this means. Testicles again?
  
• I sense a trend here...another two men from Calgary spent ten days being treated for Spermatorrhoea, which Swami Sivandra of Rishikesh says has "eaten away the very core of the heart of many brilliant youth." Amazing that a grown man would go to the doctor because he's having wet dreams...those Victorians!
  
• Incidentally, there was a single tapeworm lurking around Calgary in 1889, poor lonely thing.
• Varix was a horribly swollen vein.
• For guys who were so good with their horses, they sure got kicked by horse a lot.
• When is a police officer felonous? When he's suffering from an infected fingertip! That would be a good joke. Actually, no, it wouldn't.

All that and only ONE gunshot wound.

Extra-special credit goes to Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms. This just goes to show that no matter what weird thing you're curious about, you'll find a website for it eventually.