Herman Melville, circa 1860. Photo: Wikipedia

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman.

Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the 1820 whale attack on the Essex. Photo: Wikipedia

Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.”

Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To Bennet, the tale was like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.”

The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14, 1819, just two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that was supposed to last two and a half years. The 87-foot-long ship was hit by a squall that destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it. Still, Pollard continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. But the 20-man crew found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so they decided to sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific, far from any shores.

To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the Galapagos, where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises. As a prank, one of the crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly spread. Pollard’s men barely escaped, having to run through flames, and a day after they set sail, they could still see smoke from the burning island. Pollard was furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set the fire. Many years later Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland, and the fire was believed to have caused the extinction of both the Floreana Tortoise and the Floreana Mockingbird.

Essex First Mate Owen Chase, later in life. Photo: Wikipedia

By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what the crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old first mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Pollard went whaling. It was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet in length, he estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing the ship. Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for the Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would recall—at about three knots. The whale smashed head-on into the ship with “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces.”

The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the water. “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. Then the whale disappeared. The crew was addressing the hole in the ship and getting the pumps working when one man cried out, “Here he is—he is making for us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head half out of water, bearing down at great speed—this time at six knots, Chase thought. This time it hit the bow directly under the cathead and disappeared for good.

The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only thing the crew could do was lower the boats and try fill them with navigational instruments, bread, water and supplies before the Essex turned over on its side.

Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance, then returned to see the Essex in ruin. Dumbfounded, he asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?”

“We have been stove by a whale,” his first mate answered.

Another boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their captain still pale and speechless. Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of the extent of their deplorable situation.”

The men were unwilling to leave the doomed Essex as it slowly foundered, and Pollard tried to come up with a plan. In all, there were three boats and 20 men. They calculated that the closest land was the Marquesas Islands and the Society Islands, and Pollard wanted to set off for them—but in one of the most ironic decisions in nautical history, Chase and the crew convinced him that those islands were peopled with cannibals and that the crew’s best chance for survival would be to sail south. The distance to land would be far greater, but they might catch the trade winds or be spotted by another whaling ship. Only Pollard seemed to understand the implications of steering clear of the islands. (According to Nathaniel Philbrick, in his book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, although rumors of cannibalism persisted, traders had been visiting the islands without incident.)

Thus they left the Essex aboard their 20-foot boats. They were challenged almost from the start. Saltwater saturated the bread, and the men began to dehydrate as they ate their daily rations. The sun was ravaging. Pollard’s boat was attacked by a killer whale. They spotted land—Henderson Island—two weeks later, but it was barren. After another week the men began to run out of supplies. Still, three of them decided they’d rather take their chances on land than climb back into a boat. No one could blame them. And besides, it would stretch the provisions for the men in the boats.

The whaleship Essex, “stove by a whale” in 1821. Photo: Wikipedia

By mid-December, after weeks at sea, the boats began to take on water, more whales menaced the men at night, and by January, the paltry rations began to take their toll.  On Chase’s boat, one man went mad, stood up and demanded a dinner napkin and water, then fell into “most horrid and frightful convulsions” before perishing the next morning. “Humanity must shudder at the dreadful recital” of what came next, Chase wrote. The crew “separated limbs from his body, and cut all the flesh from the bones; after which, we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again—sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed it to the sea.”  They then roasted the man’s organs on a flat stone and ate them.

Over the coming week, three more sailors died, and their bodies were cooked and eaten. One boat disappeared, and then Chase’s and Pollard’s boats lost sight of each other. The rations of human flesh did not last long, and the more the survivors ate, the hungrier they felt. On both boats the men became too weak to talk. The four men on Pollard’s boat reasoned that without more food, they would die. On February 6, 1821—nine weeks after they’d bidden farewell to the Essex—Charles Ramsdell, a teenager, proposed they draw lots to determine who would be eaten next. It was the custom of the sea, dating back, at least in recorded instance, to the first half of the 17th century. The men in Pollard’s boat accepted Ramsdell’s suggestion, and the lot fell to young Owen Coffin, the captain’s first cousin.

Pollard had promised the boy’s mother he’d look out for him. “My lad, my lad!” the captain now shouted, “if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.” Pollard even offered to step in for the boy, but Coffin would have none of it. “I like it as well as any other,” he said.

Ramsdell drew the lot that required him to shoot his friend. He paused a long time. But then Coffin rested his head on the boat’s gunwale and Ramsdell pulled the trigger.

“He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would say, “and nothing of him left.”

By February 18, after 89 days at sea, the last three men on Chase’s boat spotted a sail in the distance. After a frantic chase, they managed to catch the English ship Indian and were rescued.

Three hundred miles away, Pollard’s boat carried only its captain and Charles Ramsdell. They had only the bones of the last crewmen to perish, which they smashed on the bottom of the boat so that they could eat the marrow. As the days passed the two men obsessed over the bones scattered on the boat’s floor. Almost a week after Chase and his men had been rescued, a crewman aboard the American ship Dauphin spotted Pollard’s boat. Wretched and confused, Pollard and Ramsdell did not rejoice at their rescue, but simply turned to the bottom of their boat and stuffed bones into their pockets. Safely aboard the Dauphin, the two delirious men were seen “sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.”

The five Essex survivors were reunited in Valparaiso, where they recuperated before sailing back for Nantucket. As Philbrick writes,  Pollard had recovered enough to join several captains for dinner, and he told them the entire story of the Essex wreck and his three harrowing months at sea. One of the captains present returned to his room and wrote everything down, calling Pollard’s account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.”

Years later, the third boat was discovered on Ducie Island; three skeletons were aboard. Miraculously, the three men who chose to stay on Henderson Island survived for nearly four months, mostly on shellfish and bird eggs, until an Australian ship rescued them.

Once they arrived in Nantucket, the surviving crewmen of the Essex were welcomed, largely without judgment. Cannibalism in the most dire of circumstances, it was reasoned, was a custom of the sea. (In similar incidents, survivors declined to eat the flesh of the dead but used it as bait for fish. But Philbrick notes that the men of the Essex were in waters largely devoid of marine life at the surface.)

Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily forgiven, because he had eaten his cousin. (One scholar later referred to the act as “gastronomic incest.”) Owen Coffin’s mother could not abide being in the captain’s presence. Once his days at sea were over, Pollard spent the rest of his life in Nantucket. Once a year, on the anniversary of the wreck of the Essex, he was said to have locked himself in his room and fasted in honor of his lost crewmen.

By 1852, Melville and Moby-Dick had begun their own slide into obscurity. Despite the author’s hopes, his book sold but a few thousand copies in his lifetime, and Melville, after a few more failed attempts at novels, settled into a reclusive life and spent 19 years as a customs inspector in New York City. He drank and suffered the death of his two sons. Depressed, he abandoned novels for poetry. But George Pollard’s fate was never far from his mind. In his poem Clarel he writes of

A night patrolman on the quay

Watching the bales till morning hour

Through fair and foul. Never he smiled;

Call him, and he would come; not sour

In spirit, but meek and reconciled:

Patient he was, he none withstood;

Oft on some secret thing would brood.

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Sources

Books: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, 1851, Harper & Brothers Publishers. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 2000, Penguin Books. Thomas Nickerson, The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale, 2000, Penguin Classics. Owen Chase, Narrative of the Whale-Ship Essex of Nantucket, 2006, A RIA Press Edition. Alex MacCormick, The Mammoth Book of Maneaters, 2003, Carroll & Graf Publishers.  Joseph S. Cummins, Cannibals: Shocking True Tales of the Last Taboo on Land and at Sea, 2001, The Lyons Press. Evan L. Balkan, Shipwrecked: Deadly Adventures and Disasters at Sea, 2008, Menasha Ridge Press.

Articles: “The Whale and the Horror,” by Nathaniel Philbrick, Vanity Fair, May, 2000. “Herman Melville: Nantucket’s First Tourist?” by Susan Beegel, The Nantucket Historical Association, http://www.nha.org/history/hn/HN-fall1991-beegel.html. ”Herman Melville and Nantucket,” The Nantucket Historical Association, http://www.nha.org/history/faq/melville.html. Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, “Biography: Herman Melville,” American Experience, PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/whaling-melville/. “No Moby-Dick: A Real Captain, Twice Doomed,” by Jesse McKinley, New York Times, February 11, 2011. “The Essex Disaster,” by Walter Karp, American Heritage, April/May, 1983, Volume 34, Issue 3. “Essex (whaleship),” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship).  ”Account of the Ship Essex Sinking, 1819-1821., Thomas Nickerson, http://www.galapagos.to/TEXTS/NICKERSON.HTM

A photo sometimes said to depict members of Chiloé’s murderous society of warlocks—founded, so they claimed, in 1786 and destroyed by the great trial of 1880-81.

There is a place in South America that was once the end of the earth. It lies close to the 35th parallel, where the Maule River empties into the Pacific Ocean, and in the first years of the 16th century it marked the spot at which the Empire of the Incas ended and a strange and unknown world began.

South of the Maule, the Incas thought, lay a land of mystery and darkness. It was a place where the Pacific’s waters chilled and turned from blue to black, and where indigenous peoples struggled to claw the basest of livings from a hostile environment. It was also where the witches lived and evil came from. The Incas called this land “the Place of Seagulls.”

Today, the Place of Seagulls begins at a spot 700 miles due south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, and stretches for another 1,200 miles all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the “land of fire” so accurately described by Lucas Bridges as “the uttermost part of the earth.” Even now, the region remains sparsely inhabited—and at its lonely heart lies the island of Chiloé: rain-soaked and rainbow-strewn, matted with untamed virgin forest and possessed of a distinct and interesting history. First visited by Europeans in 1567, Chiloé was long known for piracy and privateering. In the 19th century, when Latin America revolted against imperial rule, the island remained loyal to Spain. And in 1880, a little more than half a century after it was finally incorporated into Chile, it was also the scene of a remarkable trial—the last significant witch trial, probably, anywhere in the world.

The great British traveler Bruce Chatwin wrote a memorable description of Chiloé’s sorcerers. But how rooted in reality is it?

Who were they, these sorcerers hauled before a court for casting spells in an industrial age? According to the traveler Bruce Chatwin, who stumbled over traces of their story in the 1970s, they belonged to a “sect of male witches” that existed “for the purpose of hurting people.” According to their own statements, made during the trial of 1880, they ran protection rackets on the island, disposing of their enemies by poisoning or, worse, by sajaduras: magically inflicted “profound slashes.” But since the same men also claimed to belong to a group called La Recta Provincia—a phrase that may be loosely translated as “The Righteous Province”—and styled themselves members of the Mayoria, the “Majority,” an alternative interpretation may also be advanced. Perhaps these witches were actually representatives of a strange sort of alternative government, an indigenous society that offered justice of a perverted kind to indians living under the rule of a white elite. Perhaps they were more shamans than sorcerers.

The most important of the warlocks brought to court in 1880 was a Chilote farmer by the name of Mateo Coñuecar. He was then 70 years old, and by his own admission had been a member of the Righteous Province for more than two decades. According to Coñuecar’s testimony, the society was an important power on the island, with numerous members, an elaborate hierarchy of “kings” and “viceroys”—and a headquarters located in a vast cavern, 40 or more yards long, whose secret entrance had been cleverly concealed in the side of a ravine. This cave (which Chilote tradition asserts was lit by torches burning human fat) was hidden somewhere outside the little coastal village of Quicavi, and was—Coñuecar and other witnesses swore—home to a pair of monsters that guarded the society’s most treasured possessions: an ancient leather book of magic and a bowl that, filled with water, allowed secrets to be seen.

Coñuecar’s testimony, which may be found lodged among the papers of the Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña McKenna, includes this remarkable recollection of his first visit to the cave:

Chiloé, Chile’s second-largest island, is about the size of Puerto Rico and full of legends—many of them concerning La Recta Provincia.

Twenty years ago, when José Mariman was king, he was ordered to go to the cave with meat for some animals that lived inside. He complied with the order, and took them the meat of a kid he had slaughtered. Mariman went with him, and when they reached the cave, he started dancing about like a sorcerer, and quickly opened the entryway. This was covered over with a layer of earth (and grass to keep it hidden), and under this there was a piece of metal [...] the ‘alchemy key.’ He used this to open the entryway, and was then faced with two completely disfigured beings which burst out of the gloom and rushed towards him. One looked like a goat, for it dragged itself along on four legs, and the other was a naked man, with a completely white beard and hair down to his waist.

It is possible, from other records of the Righteous Province, to learn more about the hideous creatures that Coñuecar swore he had encountered in 1860. The goat-like monster was the chivato, a deformed mute covered in piggish bristles. The other—and by far the more dangerous—of the cave’s twin denizens was the invunche or imbunche. Like the chivato, it had once been a human baby, and had been kidnapped in infancy. Chatwin describes what happened to the baby next:

When the Sect needs a new Invunche, the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180 degrees, that is until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.

There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a work-bench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the Invunche is complete.

Quicavi, a small village on Chiloé’s sheltered east coast, was one of the two main bases of the island’s warlocks. A huge cave hidden just outside the settlement was home to their central council.

Naked, fed principally on human flesh, and confined below ground, neither the chivato nor the invunche received any sort of education; indeed it was said that neither ever acquired human speech in all the years they served what Chatwin calls the Committee of the Cave. Nevertheless, he concludes, “over the years, [the invunche] does develop a working knowledge of the Committee’s procedure and can instruct novices with harsh and gutteral cries.”

It would be unwise, of course, to accept at face value the testimony given at any witch trial—not least evidence that concerns the existence of a hidden cave that a week-long search, conducted in the spring of 1880, failed utterly to uncover, and that was extracted under who knows what sort of duress. Yet it is as well to concede that, whatever the Righteous Province actually was, the society does seem to have existed in some form—and that many Chilotes regarded its members as fearsome enemies possessed of genuinely supernatural powers.

Accounts dating to the 19th century tell of the regular collection of protection money on Chiloé–what Ovidio Lagos describes as “an annual tribute” demanded of “practically all villagers, to ensure they would have no accidents during the night.” These make it clear that islanders who resisted these demands for payment could expect to have their crops destroyed and their sheep killed—by sorcery, it was believed, for the men of the Mayoria were believed to possess a pair of magical stones that gave them the power to curse their enemies. The records of the trial of 1880-81 make it clear that the proceedings had their origins in a rash of suspicious poisonings that had claimed numerous victims over the years.

The Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña McKenna (he was of Basque and Irish descent) preserved transcripts of the trial of Chiloé’s warlocks, which long ago vanished from the island’s archives.

Whether one takes literally the many supernatural claims that litter the trial transcripts, though, is a very different matter. The members of the Righteous Province claimed, for example, to possess the ability to fly, using a special word—arrealhue—as they leapt into the air, and wearing a magical waistcoat, known as the macuñ, that gave them the power to defy gravity. Each novice, when he joined the sect, was expected to fashion his own waistcoat; Chatwin reports that it was done by digging up and flaying a recently interred Christian corpse, though other sources say the waistcoat was made from the skin of a virgin girl or a dead sorcerer. Once dried and cured, the skin was sewn into a loose garment, and Chatwin adds the detail that “the human grease remaining in the skin gives off a soft phosphorescence, which lights the member’s nocturnal expeditions.”

Nor were the chivato and the invunche the only supernatural beings thought to be under the control of the Righteous Province. The prisoners who testified in 1880 admitted that, on joining the society, each warlock was given a small, live lizard, which he wore strapped to his head with a bandana so that it was next to the skin. It was a magical creature from which the novice might imbibe all sorts of forbidden knowledge—not least how to transform himself into an animal and how to open locked doors. Among the islanders, initiates were also believed to use seahorses to convey them to a magical vessel owned by the society and known as the Caleuche—a word that means “shapeshifter” in the local language. The Caleuche was a brightly lit ghost ship that could travel under water and surfaced in remote bays to unload contraband cargoes carried for the island’s merchants, a trade that was one of the chief sources of the warlocks’ wealth. This tradition has outlived the warlocks of the Righteous Province, and even today, many Chilotes firmly believe that the Caleuche still haunts their coast, harvesting the souls of drowned sailors.

Francisco Goya’s paintings of witches did much to shape perceptions of sorcery in Spanish-speaking societies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When the witches needed spies and messengers, they drew on still other resources. The society was widely believed to use adolescent girls, who were stripped naked and forcibly fed a drink made of wolf-oil and the juice of the natri, a fruit found only on Chiloé. This potion was, supposedly, so noxious that it made them vomit up their own intestines. Thus lightened, the girls turned into large, long-legged birds, resembling rooks, whose caws, Lagos says, “are the most unpleasant sounds ever to fall on a human ear.” When their mission was completed, the birds returned at daybreak to the spot where the potion had been drunk to re-ingest their entrails, and once again they became human.

The power to perform such spells was never conferred lightly, and the testimonies collected in 1880-81 suggest that the society developed elaborate initiation ceremonies to test would-be witches. Initiates were first required to wash away all traces of their baptism by bathing in freezing waters of the Traiguén River on 15 consecutive nights. They might then be ordered to murder a close relative or friend to prove that they had cleansed themselves of human sentiment (these murders, for some unstated reason, were to take place on Tuesdays) before running three times round the island naked, calling to the Devil. Chatwin, eccentric as ever, adds two further details that do not appear in the surviving trial transcripts: that the novice was required to catch, without fumbling, a skull thrown to him from the crown of a tricorn hat, and that while standing naked in the freezing river, prospective members were “allowed a little toast.”

It was only when these tests had been completed that the initiate would be admitted to the cave at Quicavi, shown the secret book of magic, and allowed to meet the elders who ran the Righteous Province. (Lagos suggests that the word mayoria refers to these elders—mayores—rather than to the proportion of Chiloé’s Indian population.) There he received instruction in the strict code that governed members, including prohibitions on theft, rape and eating salt. It was claimed that these ceremonies concluded with a great feast in which the chief dish was the roasted flesh of human babies.

The Traiguén River in 1915. It was here that initiates of Chiloé’s sect of witches were said to wash off the effects of the Christian baptism, bathing in the freezing waters for 15 successive nights. During this ordeal, the writer Bruce Chatwin notes, “they were allowed a little toast.”

Thus far, perhaps, the details uncovered in 1880 are of value chiefly to folklorists. The organization of the Righteous Province, though, is of interest to historians and anthropologists, for it consisted of an elaborate hierarchy whose titles seem to have been deliberately chosen to ape the established government. Chiloé was, for example, divided into two kingdoms, each with its own native ruler—the King of Payos, who held the higher rank, and the King of Quicavi. Below them came a number of queens, viceroys and finally reparadores (“repairmen”), who were healers and concocters of herbal medicines. Each ruler had his own territory, which the society gave a name associated with the old Spanish empire—Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago. Perhaps, Lagos suggests, it did this in the belief that “this change would not only encourage secrecy, but also magically recreate a geography.”

The fine detail of the trial transcripts suggests that an intriguing marriage had taken place between local traditions and Christian belief. Chiloé was, and is, inhabited largely by the Mapuche, an indigenous people, noted for their machis (shamans), who had long resisted the rule of Spain. Flores, with his background in anthropology, suggests that the Righteous Province “succeeded in establishing deep ties to rural communities, providing solutions to needs the Chilean State could not satisfy.” This same model, of course, has driven the emergence of secret societies such as the Mafia in many different jurisdictions. It helps to explain why the Mayoria had an official known as the “Judge Fixer,” and why—laced though they were with magical trappings—the most important of its activities revolved around its attempts to compel obedience from poor local farmers.

Several of the warlocks who testified in 1880 expressed regret at the way their society had changed in recent years, becoming ever more prey to personal vendettas. Both Mateo Coñuecar and José Aro, a Mapuche carpenter who was his co-defendant, shed interesting light on these attempts to exercise power. According to Aro, he was ordered to kill a couple, Francesco and Maria Cardenas, who had fallen out with Coñuecar. He invited the pair for a drink and slipped a preparation of arsenic into their cups when he served them; when the couple failed to notice anything, he attributed his success to the fact that his potion had been prepared according to a magical recipe. According to Coñuecar, when an islander named Juana Carimonei came to him to complain that her husband had been seduced by another woman, he arranged the murder of her rival in exchange for a payment of four yards of calico.

The waters surrounding Chiloé are cold and often hazardous to navigate—and the extreme tidal range recorded there might explain the outcome of a legendary battle between a Spanish wizard and a local witch, held in 1786, which supposedly gave birth to the society known as the Righteous Province.

The idea that the Mapuche still aspired to govern themselves years after the Spanish conquest is not especially far-fetched; Spanish rule was only lightly felt in Chiloé, and representatives of the central government were rarely encountered outside the island’s two main towns, Castro and Ancud. This vacuum in authority no doubt helps to explain why much of the evidence collected in 1880 related to struggles for power within the Righteous Province itself. These had apparently been going on for decades; writing in June 1880, a columnist for a newspaper published in Ancud recalled the details of a murder inquiry that had taken place in 1849 when one Domingo Nahuelquin—who as King of Payos was in theory the supreme leader of the sect—had disappeared without a trace. Nahuelquin’s wife alleged that he had been killed on the orders of the King of Quicavi, the same José Mariman who a few years later took Mateo Coñuecar to meet the invunche, and that Mariman had thereby seized control of their society. The mystery of Nahuelquin’s disappearance was never formally resolved, since Mariman, it seems, had his rival and several of his supporters dropped into the sea with large rocks chained around their necks.

Mapuche machis—healers and shamans—photographed in 1903. Image: Wikicommons.

It may be asked why—if the existence of the Righteous Province had been known to the Chilean authorities for more than 30 years—the government chose 1880 to clamp down on the Mapuche and their murderous sect of witches. The answer, so far as can now be ascertained, has to do with shifting circumstances, for in 1880 Chile was in crisis, fighting Peru and Bolivia in a brutal four-year conflict known as the War of the Pacific. As a result, the great bulk of the country’s armed forces were committed far to the north—a situation that Chile’s old rival, Argentina, was quick to take advantage of. The Argentines chose 1880 to revive a number of claims they had to land along their border, and this threat was keenly felt on the western side of the Andes until it was defused by the 1881 Tratado de Límites—a treaty that continues to determine the boundary between the countries. Chiloé’s witch trial is probably best understood as a product of these tensions; certainly the first published references to the Righteous Province appear in decrees ordering the roundup of army deserters that were issued by the island’s governor, Louis Rodriguez Martiniano.

Luis Rodriguez Martiniano, who in 1880 put in motion the investigation that led to the great witch trial.

If this interpretation is correct, the persecution of the Righteous Province grew out of official concerns that the native Chilotes who were sheltering indigenous deserters from the Chilean army might also be sheltering Mapuche sorcerers. The pursuit of the deserters seems to have turned up evidence against the Mayoria. Flores points out that Rodriguez proclaimed only one month later that “sorcerers and healers have for many years formed a partnership that has produced misery and death for whole families.”

The governor did not believe in magical powers, and found it easy to convince himself that the men of the Righteous Province were nothing more than “thieves and murderers.” One hundred or so members of the society were rounded up, and if their interrogation revealed that at least a third of them were harmless native “healers,” it also produced evidence of a number of murders and—perhaps still more damagingly—proof that other members of the group believed themselves to represent a legitimate native government.

It is not, perhaps, surprising in the circumstances that the Chilean authorities went to considerable lengths to destroy the power of Chiloé’s sorcerers. Two members of the Righteous Province were sentenced to serve 15-year terms for manslaughter, and 10 more were convicted of membership in an “unlawful society.” The old warlock Mateo Coñuecar was sent to prison for three years, and his brother, Domingo, for a year and a half. Not, it should be noted, on charges of witchcraft—Chile, in 1880, had long ceased to believe in such a thing—but as racketeers and murderers who had subjected their island to reign of terror for the best part of a century.

Houses in Chiloé. On a coast where tides rise and fall by up to 20 feet, the use of stilts is a common characteristic of seafront buildings.

The governor’s triumph was short-lived; the dubious testimony of the prisoners aside, it proved all but impossible to uncover credible evidence that the Righteous Province had wielded real influence in Chiloé, much less that its members killed by magic or could fly. The majority of the sentences imposed in 1881 were overturned on appeal. But on Chiloé the imprisonment of many of its leaders was widely believed to have finished the Righteous Province off for good, and no conclusive trace of any such organization has been found on the island since.

Still, several mysteries remained when the verdicts were handed down. Had every member of the Mayoria really been accounted for? Had the society actually been headquartered in a hidden cave? If so, what happened to its ancient leather book of spells? And what became of the invunche?

Sources

Francisco Cavada. Chiloé y los Chilotes. Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria, 1914; Bruce Chatwin. In Patagonia. London: Pan, 1979; Constantino Contreras. “Mitos de brujería en Chiloé.” In Estudios Filológicos 2 (1966); Gonzalo Rojas Flores. Reyes Sobre la Tierra: Brujeria y Chamanismo en Una Cultura Insular. Chiloe Entre Los Siglos XVIII y XX. Santiago: Editorial Bibliteca Americana, 2002; Pedro Lautaro-Ferrer. Historia General de la Medicina en Chile. Talca: Garrido, 1904; Ovidio Lagos. Chiloé: A Different World. Self-published e-book, 2006; Marco Antonio León. La Cultura de la Muerte en Chiloé. Santiago: RIL Editores, 2007; David Petreman. “The Chilean ghost ship: The Caleuche.” In Jorge Febles, (ed), Into the Mainstream: Essays on Spanish American and Latino Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008; “Proceso a los brujos de Chiloé.” In Anales Chilenos de Historia de la Medicinia II: I (1960); Janette González Pulgar.”Proceso a los ‘Brujos de Chiloé’ – Primer acercamiento.” In Revista El Chuaco, December 2010-January 2011; Nicholas Shakespeare. Bruce Chatwin. London: Vintage, 2000; Antonio Cárdenas Tabies. Abordaje al Caleuche. Santiago: Nascimento, 1980.

Prince Klaas, leader of the supposed slave rebellion on Antigua, on the wheel.

Breaking on the wheel was the most horrific punishment ever visited on a convicted criminal. It was a form of crucifixion, but with several cruel refinements; in its evolved form, a prisoner was strapped, spreadeagled, to a large cartwheel that was placed axle-first in the earth so that it formed a rotating platform a few feet above the ground. The wheel was then slowly rotated while an executioner methodically crushed the bones in the condemned man’s body, starting with his fingers and toes and working inexorably inward. An experienced headsman would take pride in ensuring that his victim remained conscious throughout the procedure, and when his work was done, the wheel would be hoisted upright and fixed in the soil, leaving the condemned to hang there until he died from shock and internal bleeding a few hours or a few days later.

“Breaking” was reserved for the most dangerous of criminals: traitors, mass killers and rebellious slaves whose plots threatened the lives of their masters and their masters’ families. Yet in the case of one man who endured the punishment, a slave known as Prince Klaas, doubts remain about the extent of the elaborate conspiracy he was convicted of organizing on the West Indian island of Antigua in 1736. The planters who uncovered the plot, and who executed Klaas and 87 of his fellow slaves for conceiving of it, believed it had as its object the massacre of all 3,800 whites on the island. Most historians have agreed with their verdict, but others think the panicky British rulers of the island exaggerated the dangers of a lesser plot—and a few doubt any conspiracy existed outside the minds of Antigua’s magistrates.

A yard on an Antiguan sugar plantation in 1823. A windmill powers the rollers used to crush the cane before it was boiled to release its sugar.

In order to understand why there were slaves on Antigua in the 18th century, and why they might have wanted to revolt, it is first necessary to understand the Caribbean sugar trade. Before Columbus stumbled on the Americas in 1492, few Europeans had ever tasted sugar. The limited supply came all the way from India, and its cost was so high that even a wealthy London merchant might consume, on average, one spoonful of the stuff a year.

Spain’s discovery of the islands of the Caribbean changed all that. Conditions there proved perfect for the cultivation of sugar cane, and by the early 17th century the Spaniards and the British, Danes and Dutch were all busily cultivating cane plantations from Trinidad to Puerto Rico. Sugar ceased to be a luxury commodity–but demand soared as prices fell, leaving the new white planter class that ruled the islands among the wealthiest merchants of their day.

Antigua itself might almost have been designed for the large-scale production of sugar. Although the island is only about 12 miles across, it has a stable climate, is blessed with several excellent harbors, and lies astride reliable trade winds–which drove the windmills that processed the cane.

This illustration, taken from the abolitionist pamphlet “Description of a slave ship,” famously shows the inhuman conditions in which slaves made the voyage across the Atlantic. Confined below for fear they would rebel and seize the ship, 10 to 20 percent of a ship’s cargo of men, women and children would die in the course of a typical 50- to 60-day passage. Click twice to view in higher resolution.

The greatest difficulty that Antigua’s planters faced was finding men to farm their crops. Sugar cane is tough and fibrous, and requires considerable effort to cut; sugar was then extracted in the inhuman conditions of “boiling houses,” where vast fires were kept roaring day and night to heat the cane and refine its juices. At first the planters depended on indentured servants brought from home on long-term contracts, but the work proved too hard for all but the most desperate, and the islands acquired a reputation as hotbeds of disease. Most poor whites found it easier to seek work in the fast-growing colonies of North America. When they left, the planters turned to their only other source of manpower: slaves.

Sugar workers on a Jamaican plantation. This photograph was taken in the mid-19th century, after emancipation, but conditions in the fields had barely changed since the days of the Antiguan slave rebellion. About half the work force in the fields was typically female.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the slave trade produced the greatest forced migration known to history. An estimated 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, and even allowing for the two million who died en voyage, a vast number of slaves survived to reach destinations that ranged from Brazil to the colonies of North America. Four million of these men, women and children finished their journeys in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, where—thanks to the pestilential conditions—huge numbers were required to replace those who had died. It has been calculated that more than 150,000 slaves had to be landed in Barbados to produce a stable population of just 20,000: a phenomenon known to the planters as “seasoning.”

Seasoned slaves endured a monotonous diet—the staple diet of Antigua’s Africans was “loblolly,” a sort of porridge made from pounded maize—and worked six days a week. Given the heat, ceaseless labor and harsh discipline, it might be thought remarkable that the workers on the plantations did not rise more often than they did. Slaves soon made up the majority of Antiguan population—85 percent by 1736, when there were 24,400 of them on the island. But while sheer weight of numbers made rebellion possible, it also made the planters cautious. They formed militias, drilled regularly, and did what they could to prevent their slaves from congregating at dances and markets where talk might turn to revolt. Fear of rebellion also led to near-hysterical brutality. The least whisper of rebellion could prompt large-scale roundups, trials and executions, for it was clear that any large-scale revolt could only be fatal for the slaves’ masters.

The cane boiling house at Betty’s Hope, Antigua’s first sugar plantation, pictured in about 1910.

Slave resistance did occur on Antigua. In the 17th century, before the island was properly settled, runaways formed what were known as maroon societies—villages made up of escaped slaves who concealed themselves in the wild interior around the summit of Antigua’s extinct volcano, Boggy Peak. English justice was harsh; when the maroons were recaptured in a round-up ordered in 1687, one slave found guilty of “mutinous behaviour” was sentenced to be “burned to ashes,” and another, who had carried messages, had a leg sawed off. This treatment was not sufficient to dissuade others, though, and in 1701 fifteen recently arrived slaves rose against their owner, Major Samuel Martin, and hacked him to death for refusing to give them Christmas off. There was even a worryingly ritual aspect to the slaves’ revenge—they removed Martin’s head, doused it in rum, and, one contemporary reported, “Triumphed Over it.”

Next, in 1729, a plot came to light involving slaves belonging to the Antigua legislator Nathaniel Crump. Contemporary records say this conspiracy was betrayed by one of the slaves, and its intention (it was alleged in court) was to kill not only Crump and his family, but also the entire white population of the island. The judge hearing the case handed down what exemplary sentences—three of Crump’s slaves were burned alive, and a fourth was hanged, drawn and quartered. Reviewing the evidence, the court added a clear warning of more trouble ahead: “The design is laid much deeper than is yet imagined.”

Scenes of slave rebellion. Planters in Antigua knew that, in the event of a general rising, the slaves’ only hope would be to exterminate the white population and attempt to turn the entire island into a fortress, holding it against the inevitable counterattack.

What followed over the next few years only increased the likelihood of further unrest. Antigua experienced a severe depression. There was also drought and, in 1735, an earthquake. Many planters responded by cutting costs, not least those involved in feeding and housing their slaves. The resultant unrest coincided with a successful slave rebellion in the Danish Virgin Islands, 200 miles to the northwest, which resulted in the massacre of the Danish garrison of St. John, the murder of many local planters (a number fled) and the establishment of slave rule in the territory for the better part of a year.

It was against this backdrop that the Antiguan slaves found a leader. The planters called him Court, a slave name that he apparently abhorred. His African name seems to have been Kwaku Takyi. Present-day Antiguans, however, know him as Prince Klaas and consider him a national hero. Having come to the island from West Africa in 1704, at age 10, Klaas became the property of a prominent plantation owner by the name of Thomas Kerby. He evidently possessed considerable presence; Kerby raised him to the rank of “head slave” and brought him to live in the Antiguan capital, St. John’s.

A slave dance. This 18th century painting, by Dirk Valkenburg, shows plantation slaves participating in a traditional African dance. It was at a ceremony of this sort that Prince Klaas was acclaimed as “king” of the Antiguan slaves–and at which, according to some historians, he declared war on the island’s planters in a formal Ashanti ritual. Image: Wikicommons.

According to David Barry Gaspar, who has written in more detail on the subject than anybody else, Klaas was one of the masterminds behind an elaborate plot, hatched late in 1735, to overthrow white rule on Antigua. The conspiracy allegedly involved slaves on a number of large plantations, and was built around an audacious effort to destroy the island’s planters in a single spectacular explosion. Taking advantage of a large ball due to be held in St. John’s in October 1736, the slaves planned to smuggle a 10-gallon barrel of gunpowder into the building and blow it up. The detonation was to be the signal for slaves on the surrounding plantations to rise, murder their masters and march on the capital from four directions. A general massacre would follow, and Prince Klaas himself would be enthroned as leader of a new black kingdom on the island.

The planters on Antigua had no difficulty believing the details of this conspiracy–which, as they themselves would have been well aware, bore a striking resemblance to the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Court records dating to the time state that the conspiracy was discovered only by chance, after the ball was postponed by nearly three weeks and several slaves who knew of the plan could not resist hinting that things were about to change. Their “insolence” increased “to a very Dangerous Pitch,” Justice of the Peace Roberth Arbuthnot observed; a British constable reported that when he had tried to break up a crowd of slaves, one had shouted to him: “Damn you, boy, it’s your turn now, but it will be mine by and by, and soon too!”

Arbuthnot was sufficiently alarmed to make inquiries, which soon turned into a full-blown criminal investigation. One slave gave sufficient details for him to begin making arrests, and under interrogation (and occasionally torture), a total of 32 slaves confessed to having some stake in the scheme. In all, 132 were convicted of participating in it. Of this number, five, including Klaas, were broken on the wheel. six were gibbeted (hung in irons until they died of hunger and thirst) and 77 others were burned at the stake.

The planter’s nightmare, an armed slave, was a potent figure of menace; the governments of several Caribbean islands have been accused of seeing slave rebellions where there were none.

In the eyes of the Antiguan government, Prince Klaas’s planned rebellion was well evidenced. A stream of witnesses testified that the plot existed; Klaas himself, together with his chief lieutenant—a creole (that is, a slave born on the island) known as Tomboy, whose job it would have been to plant the powder—eventually confessed to it. Events on the Danish island of St. John showed that slaves were capable of executing conspiracies, and there were other parallels as well. In Barbados, in 1675 and in 1692, the authorities uncovered plots to massacre the white community that had apparently been kept secret for as long as three years. In each of these cases, the leaders of the planned rebellions were said to have been “Coromantees“—slaves from what is now Ghana, the same part of West Africa from which Prince Klaas had come.

Klaas is a figure of compelling interest to historians. Gaspar and others argue that his influence over his fellow slaves went further than the Antiguan planters of the day realized, since, according to the official report on the planned uprising, “it was fully proved that he had for many Years covertly assumed among his Countrymen, the Title of King, and had been by them address’d, and treated as such.”  They further identify him as an Ashanti, a member of a tribal confederation renowned for discipline and courage, not to mention abundant use of human sacrifice.

The most intriguing evidence relating to Prince Klaas concerns a public ceremony held a week before the planned rebellion. In the course of this ritual, Gaspar says, Klaas was enthroned by an “obey man”—an obeah-man, that is; a priest, shaman or sorcerer who practiced the West African folk religion known as voodoo or santería. In other Caribbean risings, it was the obeah-man who administered oaths of loyalty to would-be rebels with a mixture made of gunpowder, grave dirt and cock’s blood; strong belief in his supernatural powers helped cement loyalty. Michael Craton is not alone in arguing that the ceremony Antigua’s obeah-man presided over was actually a war dance,

“set up by Tackey [Klaas] and Tomboy ‘in Mrs Dunbar Parkes’ Pasture, near the Town,’ [and] viewed by many unsuspecting whites and creole slaves… as simply a picturesque entertainment. But for many slaves it held a binding significance, for it was an authentic Ikem [shield] dance performed by an Ashanti king in front of his captains once he had decided on war.

An American slave displays the marks of severe lashing, one of the punishments most commonly used in the sugar plantations of Antigua.

Other evidence that Prince Klaas was really planning an uprising comes from Arbuthnot’s inquiry, which concluded that there had been warning signs of rebellion. Slaves had been seen congregating after midnight and heard blowing conch shells to announce their meetings. Yet —confessions aside—little physical evidence of a conspiracy was ever produced. The “10-gallon barrel of powder” that Tomboy was to have used to blow up the ball was not recovered; nor, despite extensive searches, were any weapons caches found.

All this has led researchers such as Jason Sharples and Kwasi Konadu to direct renewed attention to the slaves’ own testimonies. And here, it must be acknowledged, there is good reason to doubt that the confessions obtained by Arbuthnot were wholly reliable. Konadu persuasively argues that Klaas’s “dance” was probably a familiar Ashanti ceremony acclaiming a newly chosen leader, and not a declaration of war. Sharples demonstrates that Arbuthnot’s prisoners would have found it easy to exchange information and discuss what the captors wished to hear, and adds that they must have known that a confession—and the betrayal of as many of their fellow Africans as possible—was their one hope of saving themselves. He also supplies an especially revealing detail: that one slave, known as “Langford’s Billy,” who “escaped with his life by furnishing evidence against at least fourteen suspects” and was merely banished in consequence, turned up in New York four years later, heavily implicated in another suspected slave plot that many researchers now concede was merely a product of hysteria. Thrown into prison, Billy confided to a fellow inmate that he “understood these affairs very well” as a result of his experiences on Antigua, and that “unless he…did confess and bring in two or three, he would either be hanged or burnt.” He even offered, Sharples says, likely names “as proper ones to be accused.”

Thomas Johnson–born into slavery in the United States in 1836, emancipated in the wake of the Civil War, and author of Twenty-Eight Years a Slave (1909)–displays some of the whips, shackles and restraints used to control and discipline slaves both in the U.S. and the Caribbean.

The verdict thus remains in balance. Large-scale slave rebellions did take place in the Caribbean, and plantation slaves were capable of forming elaborate plans and keeping them secret. Yet, as Jerome Handler argues in the case of the supposed Barbados plots, there is also evidence that frightened British overstated the threats they faced; perhaps Prince Klaas planned something serious, but short of the extermination of all the planters of Antigua.

Finally, it is also worth remembering a point well-made by Michael Johnson, who a decade ago published an influential article arguing that another renowned African “conspiracy”—the uprising supposedly planned by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822–was probably the product of white panic, duress and leading questions. Johnson showed that the very hideousness of slavery predisposes historians to search for evidence of slave conspiracies; after all, who would not have tried to rebel against such injustice and cruelty? To find no evidence of black resistance might lead some to conclude  that the slaves lacked courage, rather than—as is the fairer verdict—that they had little hope, and were viciously repressed.

Whatever the truth of the Antiguan rebellion, change was slow to come to the island. Measures were put in place to prevent the free association of slaves, but there was also a slow Christianization of the black population, with most of the work was done by the Moravians, who numbered nearly 6,000 converts by 1785. By 1798, local laws allowed “unrestrained” worship on Sundays.

August 1, 1834–Emancipation Day–is celebrated in Antigua.

Uniquely among the isles of the West Indies, Antigua emancipated all its slaves at the first opportunity; the entire plantation workforce of 32,000 souls was freed at midnight on August 1, 1834 the earliest date mandated by Britain’s act of emancipation. “Some timorous planter families,” noted James Thome and Horace Kimball, two abolitionists who made a six month “emancipation tour” of the West Indies at the behest of the American Anti-Slavery Society, “did not go to bed on emancipation night, fearing lest the same bell which sounded freedom of the slaves might bring the death knell of their masters.” But others greeted their former slave the next morning, “shook hands with them, and exchanged the most hearty wishes.”

The slaves faced an uncertain future–competing now with whites and with one another for work, and no longer guaranteed any sort of care in their old age. But no trouble of any sort occurred. “There was no frolicking,” Thome and Kimball reported; rather “nearly all the people went to church to ‘tank God to make a we free! There was more “religious” on dat day dan you can tink of!’ ” And the Antiguan writer Desmond Nicholson puts it this way: “When the clock began to strike midnight, the people of Antigua were slaves…when it ceased, they were all freemen! There had never been in the history of the world so great and instantaneous a change in the condition of so large a body of people. Freedom was like passing suddenly out of a dungeon into the light of the sun.”

Sources

Michael Craton. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca [NY]: Cornell University Press, 2009; David Eltis and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010; David Barry Gaspar. “The Antigua slave conspiracy of 1736: a case study in the origins of resistance.” The William and Mary Quarterly 35:2 (1978); David Barry Gaspar. “‘A mockery of freedom’: the status of freedmen in Antigua society before 1760.” In Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 56 (1982); David Barry Gaspar. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 1993; Jerome Handler. “Slave revolts and conspiracies in seventeenth century Barbados.” In Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 56 (1982); Michael Johnson. “Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators.” In The William and Mary Quarterly, 58:4 (2001); Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; Kwasi Konadu. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; Russell Menard. “Plantation empire: how sugar and tobacco planters built their industries and raised an empire.” In Agricultural History 81:3 (2007); Desmond Nicholson. Africans to Antiguans: The Slavery Experience. A Historical Index. St John’s, Antigua: Museum of Antigua and Barbuda; Jason Sharples. “Hearing whispers, casting shadows: Jailhouse conversation and the production of knowledge during the Antigua slave conspiracy investigation of 1736.” In Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (ads). Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

The remains of a windmill, once used to pump brine into the salt pans of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Photo credit: www.amphibioustravel.com.

Salt is so commonplace today, so cheap and readily available, that it is hard to remember how hard to come by it once was. The Roman forces who arrived in Britain in the first century C.E reported that the only way the local tribes could obtain it was to pour brine onto red-hot charcoal, then scrape off the crystals that formed on the wood as the water hissed and evaporated. These were the same forces that, according to a tradition dating to the time of Pliny the Elder, gave us the word “salary” because they once received their wages in the stuff.

Salt was crucially important until very recently not merely as a condiment (though of course it is a vital foodstuff; hearts cannot beat and nerve impulses cannot fire without it), but also as a preservative. Before the invention of refrigeration, only the seemingly magical properties of salt could prevent slaughtered animals and fish hauled from the sea from rotting into stinking inedibility. It was especially important to the shipping industry, which fed its sailors on salt pork, salt beef and salt fish. The best salt meat was packed in barrels of the granules–though it could also be boiled in seawater, resulting in a far inferior product that, thanks to the scarcity of fresh water aboard wooden sailing ships, was then often cooked in brine as well, reaching the sailors as a broth so hideously salty that crystals formed on the sides of their bowls. The demand for salt to preserve fish was so vast that the Newfoundland cod fishery alone needed 25,000 tons of the stuff a year.

Raking salt on the Turks and Caicos Islands in about 1900.

All this demand created places that specialized in producing what was known colloquially as “white gold.” The illustration above shows one remnant of the trade in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a sleepy Caribbean backwater that, from 1678 to 1964, subsisted almost entirely on the profits of the salt trade, and was very nearly destroyed by its collapse. The islands’ history is one of ingenuity in harsh circumstances and of the dangers of over-dependence on a single trade. It also provides an object lesson in economic reality, for the natural products of the earth and sky rarely make those who actually tap them rich.

The islands, long a neglected part of the British empire, lie in the northern reaches of the Caribbean, far from the major trade routes; their chief call on the world’s notice, before salt extraction began, was a disputed claim to be the spot where Christopher Columbus made landfall on his first voyage across the Atlantic. Whether Columbus’s first glimpse of the New World really was the island of Grand Turk (as the local islanders, but few others, insist), there is no doubt about the impact the Spaniards had once they began to exploit their new tropical empire. The indigenous population of the Turks and Caicos—estimated to have numbered several tens of thousands of peaceable Lucayan Amerindians—made a readily exploitable source of slave labor for the sugar plantations and gold mines the conquistadores established on Haiti. Within two decades of its discovery, the slave trade and the importation of diseases to which the Lucayans possessed practically no resistance (a large part of the European portion of what is termed the Columbian Exchange), had reduced that once-flourishing community to a single elderly man.

By the 1670s, not quite two centuries after Columbus’s first voyage, the Turks and Caicos were uninhabited. This was very much to the advantage of the next wave of settlers, Bermudans who arrived in the archipelago in the hope of harvesting its salt. Though by global standards the Atlantic island is a paradise of lush vegetation and balmy airs—so much so that it was hymned by Shakespeare—Bermuda was too cool and too damp to produce white gold. But it had a population of hardy seafarers (most of them originally Westcountrymen, from the further reaches of the British Isles) and plenty of good cedar to make ships.

Venturesome Bermudans lighted on the Turks and Caicos as an ideal spot to begin producing salt. In addition to being uninhabited—which made the islands “commons,” in the parlance of the time, open to tax-free exploitation by anyone—the islands had extensive coastal flatlands, which flooded naturally at high tide and baked under the tropical sun. These conditions combined to produce natural salt pans, in which—the archaeologist Shaun Sullivan established by experiment in 1977—16 men, armed with local conch shells to use as scoopers, could gather 140 bushels of salt (about 7,840 pounds) in a mere six hours.

Salt Cay, home to the Turks and Caicos Islands’ sole export industry. The island consists of a two-mile-long expanse of natural salt pans.

The best place in the Turks and Caicos to make salt was a low triangular island to the south of Grand Turk known today as Salt Cay. Measuring no more than two miles by two and a half, and tapering to a point at its southern end, this island was so low-lying that much of it was underwater twice a day. The Bermudans worked these natural salt pans and added some refinements of their own, building stone cofferdams to keep out the advancing tides and rickety windmills to power pumps. Thus equipped, they could flood their pans at will, then wait for the brine to evaporate. At that point, the job become one of adding muscle power. Salt was raked into the vast mounds that for decades dominated the island scenery, then loaded onto ships headed north. By 1772, in the last years before the American War of Independence, Britain’s North American colonies were importing 660,000 bushels annually from the West Indies: nearly 40 million pounds of white gold.

At this stage, the Turks and Caicos were practically undefended and prone to attack by passing vessels; the French seized the territory four times, in 1706, 1753, 1778 and 1783. In those unfortunate circumstances, white workers captured on common land would eventually be released, while enslaved blacks would be seized and taken off as property. As a result, the early laborers in the Turks and Caicos salt pans were mostly sailors. Bermuda’s governor John Hope observed what was for the times a highly unusual division of labor:

Sunrise over the Turks and Caicos salt pans. Photo credit: www.amphibioustravel.com

All vessels clear out with a number of mariners sufficient to navigate the vessel anywhere, but they generally take three or four slaves besides [when they go] gathering of salt at Turks Island, etc. When they arrive, the white men are turn’d ashore to rake salt… for ten or twelves months at a stretch [while] the master with his vessel navigated by Negroes during that time goes a Marooning–fishing for turtles, diving upon wrecks, and sometimes trading with pyrates. If the vessels happen to be lucky upon any of these accounts, Curacao, St Eustatia, or the French islands are the ports where they are always well received without questions asked… If not, they return and take in their white sailors from the Turks Islands, and… proceed to some of the Northern Plantations [to sell their salt].

From a purely economic perspective, the system paid dividends for the ship’s owners; the white sailors were—relatively—happy to have a steady living, rather than depending on the uncertainties of the Caribbean’s inter-island trade, while the captains saved money by paying their black sailors low wages. The system changed only in the 1770s, when a cold war erupted between Bermuda and a second British crown colony, the Bahamas, with the result that the islands ceased to be a commons and became a hotly contested British dependency.

Turks and Caicos islanders engaged in the salt trade. Late 19th-century postcard.

The 1770s saw two important changes in the Turks salt trade. First, the victory of the American colonists in their War of Independence led to the flight of loyalist settlers, who took their slaves with them and—in a few cases, at least—settled on the Turks and Caicos. The introduction of slavery into the archipelago provided a new source of cheap labor to the now better-defended salt trade. The second change was ignited by a decision made in the legislature of the Bahamas to seek jurisdiction over the Turks and Caicos, which thus ceased to be common land and became a crown colony. The Bahamian acts imposed two crucial new conditions on the Turks salt rakers: They had to reside on the islands permanently, rather than for the 10 months at a time that had been the Bermudan custom; and any slaves who missed more than 48 hours of work during the 10-month season would forfeit their owner’s share in the profits. The aim, quite plainly, was to disrupt Bermudan salt raking and take control of what was an increasingly lucrative trade.

The Bermudans, as might be expected, did not take all this very kindly. Their Assembly pointed out that 750 of the new colony’s 800 rakers were Bermudan and argued that the Turks and Caicos lay outside the Bahamas’ jurisdiction. Meanwhile, on the islands, a group of salt rakers took matters into their own hands and beat up a Bahamian tax man who had been sent there to collect a poll tax and new salt duties imposed by the Nassau government. In 1774, Bermuda sent a heavily armed sloop-of-war to the Turks and Caicos to defend its waters not against enemy Frenchmen or Spaniards, but their supposed allies, the Bahamians. Only the distraction of the American war prevented the outbreak of full-blown hostilities between the two colonies over the Turks salt trade.

The salt grinding house on Grand Turk processed the islands’ annual crop of white gold. Nineteenth-century century postcard.

Hatred of the Bahamas ran high in the Turks and Caicos then, and it continued to play an important role in what passed for island politics for a further century. A British government resolution of 1803, aimed at ending the possibility of bloodshed, formally transferred the islands to the Bahamas, and in the first half of the 19th century salt taxes made up fully a quarter of the Nassau government’s revenues—a fact bitterly resented on Grand Turk, whose representative in the Bahamian House of Representatives, the writer Donald McCartney says, “did not attend meetings regularly because he was not made to feel part of the Bahamian legislature.” It was commonly observed in the Turks and Caicos that little of the tax was used to improve the islands.

The badge of the Turks and Caicos, which adorned its flag until it became a stand-alone crown colony in the 1970s, was inspired by the local salt trade. Between the 1880s and 1966, thanks to a foul-up in London, the right hand of the two piles of salt was given a smudgy black “door”—the result of a civil servant’s ignorant assumption that the islands lay somewhere in the Arctic, and the objects were igloos.

London seemed barely to care about things that mattered greatly on Grand Turk.  When in the 1870s the British government decided that the Turks and Caicos needed its own flag, an artist was commissioned to paint some characteristic local scenes; his view lighted on two vast piles of white gold sitting on a quayside, awaiting loading into a freighter. The resultant sketch was sent to London to be worked into a badge that sat proudly in the center of the islands’ flag, but not without the intervention of a puzzled official in the Admiralty. Arctic exploration was then much in vogue, and—apparently having no idea where the Turks and Caicos were, and presuming that the conical structures in the sketch were poor representations of ice—the unknown official helpfully inked in a door on the right side of the salt piles, the better to indicate that they were actually igloos. It says much for British ignorance (and the islanders’ politeness) that this error was not corrected until the 1960s, when the smudge was removed in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s state visit to Grand Turk.

The friction between the islands and their Bahamian neighbors explains one further peculiarity in Turks and Caicos history: the geographically absurd link between the islands and distant Jamaica, which began in 1848, when the British government at last agreed to the islanders’ repeated pleas to be freed from Bahamian exploitation. From that year until Jamaica’s independence in 1962, the Turks and Caicos was ruled from Kingston, and a brief reunion with the Bahamas between 1962 and 1974 showed that not much had changed; renewed dissatisfaction in the Turks and Caicos meant that the islands became a separate crown colony from the latter date.

The last days of the Turks salt industry, in the early 1960s. Contemporary postcard.

Those who have read this far will not be surprised to hear that the cause of the fighting was still salt. Cut off from the revenues of the Turks salt trade after 1848, the Bahamians went on to build a salt trade of their own, building new salt pans in Great Inagua, the most southerly island in the Bahamas group. By the 1930s, this facility was producing 50,000 tons of salt a year and providing stiff competition to the Turks salt trade; by the 1950s, the introduction of mechanization in Great Inagua had rendered the salt pans of Salt Cay economically redundant.

The tragedy of the Turks and Caicos islands was that they had no way to replace their devastated salt trade; mass tourism was, in the 1960s, still more than two decades off, and for the next 20 years the islanders subsisted on little more than fishing and, for a criminal few, the drug trade. The islands sit 600 miles north of Columbia and 575 miles southeast of Miami, and made for a useful refueling spot for light aircraft carrying cocaine to the American market—one with the added benefit, as Harry Ritchie puts it, of “a law-abiding populace who wouldn’t dream of carrying out a heist on any Class A cargo, but some of whom could be persuaded, for a tidy sum, to light the odd fire on deserted airstrips at certain times of the night.”

Sources

Michael Craton and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People. Athens [GA], 2 volumes: University of Georgia Press, 1999; Michael J. Jarvis. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680-1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010; Mark Kurlansky. Salt: A World History. London: Cape, 2002; Pierre Laszlo. Salt: Grain of Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; Donald McCartney. Bahamian Culture and Factors Which Impact Upon It. Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing, 2004; Jerry Mashaw and Anne MacClintock. Seasoned by Salt: A Journey in Search of the Caribbean. Dobbs Ferry [NY]: Sheridan House, 2003;  Sandra Riley and Thelma Peters. Homeward Bound: A History of the Bahama Islands to 1850. Miami: Riley Hall, 2000; Harry Ritchie. The Last Pink Bits: Travels Through the Remnants of the British Empire. London: Sceptre, 1997; Nicholas Saunders. The Peoples of the Caribbean: An Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Traditional Culture. Santa Barbara [CA]: ABC Clio, 2005; Sue Shepherd. Pickled, Potted and Canned: The Story of Food Preserving. Darby [PA]: Diane Publishing, 2003; Shaun Sullivan. Prehistoric Patterns of Exploitation and Colonization in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, 1981.

Henry Clay, c. 1850-52. Photo: Library of Congress

To this day, he is considered one of the most influential politicians in U.S. history. His role in putting together the Compromise of 1850, a series of resolutions limiting the expansion of slavery, delayed secession for a decade and earned him the nickname “the Great Pacificator.” Indeed, Mississippi Senator Henry S. Foote later said, “Had there been one such man in the Congress of the United States as Henry Clay in 1860-’61 there would, I feel sure, have been no civil war.”

Clay owned 60 slaves. Yet he called slavery “this great evil…the darkest spot in the map of our country” and did not modify his stance through five campaigns for the presidency, all of which failed. “I’d rather be right than be president,” he said, famously, during an 1838 Senate debate, which his critics (he had many) attributed to sour grapes, a sentiment spoken only after he’d been defeated. Throughout his life, Clay maintained a “moderate” stance on slavery: He saw the institution as immoral, a bane on American society, but insisted that it was so entrenched in Southern culture that calls for abolition were extreme, impractical and a threat to the integrity of the Union. He supported gradual emancipation and helped found the American Colonization Society, made up of mostly Quakers and abolitionists, to promote the return of free black people to Africa, where, it was believed, they would have better lives. The organization was supported by many slaveowners, who believed that free blacks in America could only lead to slave rebellion.

Clay’s ability to promote compromise in the most complex issues of the day made him a highly effective politician.  Abraham Lincoln said Clay was “the man for a crisis,” adding later that he was “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.”

Yet there was one crisis in Henry Clay’s life in which the Great Pacificator showed no desire to compromise. The incident occurred in Washington, D.C., when he was serving as secretary of state to President John Quincy Adams. In 1829, Charlotte Dupuy, Clay’s longtime slave, filed a petition with the U.S. Circuit Court against him, claiming she was free. The suit “shocked and angered” Clay, and whatever sympathies he held with regard to human rights did not extinguish his passion for the rule of law. When confronted with what he considered a “groundless writ” that might result in the loss of his rightful property, Henry Clay showed little mercy in fighting the suit.

The Decatur House, on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., where Henry Clay’s slave Charlotte Dupuy lived and worked. Photo: Wikipedia

Born into slavery around 1787 in Cambridge, Maryland, Charlotte Stanley was purchased in 1805 by a tailor named James Condon, who took the 18 year-old girl back to his home in Kentucky. The following year, she met and married Aaron Dupuy, a young slave on the 600-acre Ashland plantation in Lexington, owned by Henry Clay—who then purchased her for $450. The young couple would have two children, Charles and Mary Ann Dupuy.

In 1809, Clay was to elected to fill retiring Senator John Adair’s unexpired term at the age of 29—below the constitutionally required age of 30, but no one seemed to notice or care. The Dupuys accompanied him to Washington, where they lived and worked as house slaves for the congressman at the Decatur House, a mansion on Lafayette Square, near the White House. In 1810, Clay was elected to the House of Representatives, where he spent most of the next 20 years, serving several terms as speaker.

For those two decades the Dupuys, though legally enslaved, lived in relative freedom in Washington. Clay even allowed Charlotte to visit her family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on several occasions—visits Clay later surmised were “the root of all the subsequent trouble.”

But in 1828 Adams lost in his re-election campaign to another of Clay’s rivals, Andrew Jackson, and Clay’s term as secretary of state came to an end. It was as he was preparing to return to Kentucky that Charlotte Dupuy filed her suit, based on a promise, she claimed, made by her former owner, James Condon, to free her after her years of service to him.  Her case long predated the Dred Scott suit, which would result in the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the territories, that the Constitution did not apply to people of African descent and that they were not U.S. citizens.

Dupuy’s attorney, Robert Beale, argued that the Dupuys should not have to return to Kentucky, where they would “be held as slaves for life.”  The court agreed to hear the case. For 18 months, she stayed in Washington, working for wages at the Decatur House for Clay’s successor as secretary of state, Martin Van Buren. Meanwhile, Clay stewed in Kentucky. The court ultimately rejected Dupuy’s claim to freedom, ruling that Condon sold her to Clay “without any conditions,” and that enslaved persons had no legal rights under the constitution. Clay then wrote to his agent in Washington, Philip Fendall, encouraging him to order the marshal to “imprison Lotty.” He added that her husband and children had returned with him to Kentucky, and that Charlotte’s conduct had created “insubordination among her relatives here.” He added, “Her refusal therefore to return home, when requested by me to do so through you, was unnatural towards them as it was disobedient to me…. I think it high time to put a stop to it…How shall I now get her, is the question?”

Clay arranged for Charlotte to be put in prison in Alexandria, Virginia. “In the mean time,” he wrote Fendall, “be pleased to let her remain in jail and inform me what is necessary for me to do to meet the charges.” She was eventually sent to New Orleans, where she was enslaved at the home of Clay’s daughter and son-in-law for another decade. Aaron Dupuy continued to work at the Ashland plantation, and it was believed that neither Clay nor the Dupuys harbored any ill will after the freedom suit was resolved—an indication, some historians have suggested, that Clay’s belief that his political adversaries were behind Charlotte Dupuy’s lawsuit was well-founded.

In 1840, Henry Clay freed Charlotte and her daughter, Mary Ann. Clay continued to travel the country with her son, Charles, as his manservant. It was said that Clay used Charles as an example of his kindness toward slaves, and he eventually freed Charles in 1844.  Aaron Dupuy remained enslaved to Clay until 1852, when he was freed either before Clay’s death that year, or by his will.

Lincoln eulogized Henry Clay with the following words:

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.

Sources

Books: David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American, Random House, 2010. Jesse J. Holland, Black Men Built the Capital: Discovering African American History in and Around Washington, D.C., Globe Pequot, 2007.

Articles: “The Half Had Not Been Told Me: African Americans on Lafayette Square, 1795-1965, Presented by the White House Historical Association and the National Trust for Historic Preservation,” http://www.whitehousehistory.org/decatur-house/african-american-tour/content/Decatur-House  ”Henry Clay and Ashland,” by Peter W. Schramm, The Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, http://ashbrook.org/publications/onprin-v7n3-schramm/  ”Henry Clay: Young and in Charge,” by Claire McCormack, Time, October 14, 2010. “Henry Clay: (1777-1852),” by Thomas Rush, American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/biographies/henry-clay/ “American History: The Rise of the Movement Against Slavery,” The Making of a Nation, http://www.manythings.org/voa/history/67.html “Eulogy on Henry Clay, July 6, 1952, Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln Online, Speeches and Writing, http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/clay.htm

The aeronaut Sophie Blanchard in 1811. Illustration: Wikipedia

When Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner leaped from a capsule some 24 miles above earth on October 14, 2012, millions watched on television and the internet as he broke the sound barrier in a free fall that lasted ten minutes. But in the anticipation of Baumgartner’s jump (and his safe parachute landing), there was little room to marvel at the massive balloon that took him to the stratosphere.

More than 200 years ago in France, the vision of a human ascending the sky beneath a giant balloon produced what one magazine at the time described as “a spectacle the like of which was never shewn since the world began.” Early manned flights in the late 18th century led to “balloonomania” throughout Europe, as more than 100,000 spectators would gather in fields and city rooftops to witness the pioneers of human flight. And much of the talk turned to the French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard.

Known for being nervous on the ground but fearless in the air, Blanchard is believed to be the first female professional balloonist. She became a favorite of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII, who bestowed upon her official aeronaut appointments. Her solo flights at festivals and celebrations were spectacular but also perilous, and in the summer of 1819, she become the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident.

She was born Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant in Trois-Canons in 1778, not long before the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne began experimenting with balloons made from sackcloth and taffeta and lifted by heated air from fires in a box below. As the Montgolfiers’ balloons became larger and larger, the brothers began to consider manned flight. Louis XVI took an interest and proposed sending two criminals into the sky to test the contraption, but the brothers chose instead to place a sheep, a duck and a rooster on board for the first balloon flight to hold living creatures. In a 1783 demonstration before the King and Marie Antoinette and a crowd at the royal palace in Versailles, the Montgolfier brothers saw their craft ascend 1,500 into the air. Less than ten minutes later, the three animals landed safely.

Just months later, when Etienne Montgolfier became the first human rise into the skies, on a tethered balloon, and not long after, Pilatre de Rozier and French marquis Francois Laurent le Vieux d’Arlandes made the first human free flight before Louis XVI, U.S. envoy Benjamin Franklin and more than 100,000 other spectators.

Balloonomania had begun, and the development of gas balloons, made possible by the discovery of hydrogen by British scientist Henry Cavendish in 1766, quickly supplanted hot-air balloons, since they could fly higher and further. More and more pioneers were drawn to new feats in ballooning, but not everyone was thrilled: Terrified peasants in the English countryside tore a descending balloon to pieces.

French inventor and balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Illustration: Wikipedia

A child of this pioneering era, Sophie Armant married Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a middle-aged inventor who had made his first balloon flight in Paris when she was just five years old. (The date of their marriage is unclear.) In January 1785, Blanchard and John Jeffries, an American doctor, became the first men to fly over the English Channel in a hydrogen balloon, flying from England to France. (Pilatre de Rozier, trying to cross the channel from France to England later that year, became the first known aviation fatality after his balloon deflated at 1,500 feet.)

Jean-Pierre Blanchard began to tour Europe. At demonstrations where he charged for admission, he showed off his silk balloons, dropped parachute-equipped dogs and launched fireworks from above. “All the World gives their shilling to see it,” one newspaper reported, citing crowds affected with “balloon madness” and “aeriel phrenzy.” Spectators were drawn to launches with unique balloons shaped like Pegasus and Nymp, and they thrilled to see men risk their lives in flights where fires often sent balloons plummeting back to earth.

“It may have been precisely [their] lack of efficiency that made the balloon such an appropriate symbol of human longings and hopes,” historian Stephan Oettermann noted. “Hot-air balloons and the gas balloons that succeeded them soon after belong not so much to the history of aviation as to the still-to-be-written account of middle class dreams.”

Furniture and ceramics at the time were decorated with images of balloons. European women’s clothing featured puffy sleeves and rounded skirts. Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s coiffed hair became all the rage among the fashionable. On a trip to the United States in 1793 he conducted the first balloon flight in North America, ascending over Philadelphia before the likes of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

But not everything Blanchard did succeeded. He escaped a mid-air malfunction by cutting his car from his balloon and using the latter as a parachute. He falsely marketed himself as the inventor of the balloon and the parachute. He established the “Balloon and Parachute Aerostatic Academy” in 1785, but it quickly failed. John Jeffries, Blanchard’s English Channel crossing partner and chief financier, later claimed that Blanchard tried to keep him from boarding the balloon by wearing weighted girdles and claiming the balloon could carry only him.

Facing ruin, Blanchard (who had abandoned his first wife and their four children to pursue his ballooning dreams) persuaded his new wife to ride with him, believing that a flying female might be a novel enough idea to bring back the paying crowds.

Tiny, nervous, and described by one writer as having “sharp bird-like features,” Sophie Blanchard was believed to be terrified of riding in horse-drawn carriages. Yet once in a balloon, she found flight to be a “sensation incomparable,” and not long after she and her husband began ascents together, she made her first solo ascent in 1805, becoming the first woman to pilot her own balloon.

The Blanchards made a go of it until 1809—when Jean-Pierre, standing beside Sophie in a basket tethered to a balloon flying over the Hague, had a heart attack and fell to his death. Crippled by her husband’s debts, she continued to fly, slowly paying off creditors and accentuating her shows with fireworks that she launched from the sky. She became a favorite of Napoleon’s, who chose her the “aeronaut of the official festivals.” She made an ascent to celebrate his 1810 wedding to Marie Louise.

Napoleon also appointed her chief air minster of ballooning, and she worked on plans for an aerial invasion of England by French troops in balloons—something she later deemed impossible.  When the French monarchy was restored four years later, King Louis XVIII named her “official aeronaut of the restoration.”

The death of Mme. Blanchard. Illustration: Wikipedia

She had made long-distance trips in Italy, crossed the Alps and generally did everything her husband had hoped to do himself. She paid off his debts and made a reputation for herself. She seemed to accept, even amplify, the risks of her career. She preferred to fly at night and stay out until dawn, sometimes sleeping in her balloon. She once passed out and nearly froze at altitude above Turin after ascending to avoid a hailstorm. She nearly drowned after dropping into a swamp in Naples. Despite warnings of extreme danger, she set off pyrotechnics beneath her hydrogen balloon.

Finally, at the age of 41, Sophie Blanchard made her last flight.

On the evening of July 6, 1819, a crowd gathered for a fete at the Tivoli Gardens in Paris. Sophie Blanchard, now 41 but described as the “still young, sprightly, and amiable” aeronaut, rose from the lawn to a flourish of music and flare of fireworks. Despite the misgivings of others, she had planned to do her “Bengal Fire” demonstration, a slow-burning pyrotechnics display. As she mounted her balloon she said, “Allons, ce sera pour la derniere fois” (“Let’s go, this will be for the last time”).

In an elaborate white dress and matching hat accessorized with an ostrich plume, Blanchard, carrying a torch, began her ascent. Winds immediately carried her away from the gardens. From above, she lit fireworks and dropped them by parachute; Bengal lights hung from beneath her balloon. Suddenly there was a flash and popping from the skies; flames shot up from the top of the balloon.

“Beautiful! Beautiful! Vive Madame Blanchard,” shouted someone in the crowd.  The balloon began to descend; it was on fire. “It lighted up Paris like some immense moving beacon,” read one account.

Blanchard prepared for landing as the balloon made a slow descent, back over the gardens along the Rue de Provence.  She cut loose ballast to further slow the fall, and it looked as though she might make it safely to the ground. Then the basket hit the roof of a house and Blanchard tipped out, tumbling along the roof and onto the street, where, according to a newspaper account, “she was picked up dead.”

While all Europe mourned the death of Sophie Blanchard, some cautioned, predictably, that a balloon was no place for a woman.  She was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, beneath a tombstone representing her balloon in flames, with the epitaph Victime de son Art et de son Intrepidite (Victim of her art and intrepidity).

Sources

Articles: “The ‘Balloonomania’: Science and Spectacle in 1780s England,” by Paul Keen, Eighteenth Century Studies, Summer 2006, 39, 4. “Consumerism and the Rise of Balloons in Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” by Michael R. Lynn, Science in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2008. “Madame Blanchard, the Aeronaut,” Scientific American Supplement #195, September 27, 1879.  “Sophie Blanchard—First Woman Balloon Pilot,” Historic Wings, July 6, 2012, http://fly.historicwings.com/2012/07/sophie-blanchard-first-woman-balloon-pilot/ “How Man Has Learned to Fly,” The Washington Post, October 10, 1909.

Books: Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

The mummified head of Charles XII, photographed at the time of his exhumation in 1917, and showing the exit wound–or was it?–left by the projectile that killed him during the siege of Fredrikshald in 1718.

Sweden has had her share of memorable monarchs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it seemed that every other ruler crowned in Stockholm was astonishing in one way or another. Gustav Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina, Charles XI–between them, to the surprise of generations of students who have presumed that the conjunction of the words “Swedish” and “imperialism” in their textbooks is some sort of typographical error, they turned the country into the greatest power in northern Europe. “I had no inkling,” the writer Gary Dean Peterson admits in his study of this period, “that the boots of Swedish soldiers once trod the streets of Moscow, that Swedish generals had conquered Prague and stood at the gates of Vienna. Only vaguely did I understand that a Swedish king had defeated the Holy Roman Emperor and held court on the Rhine, that a Swede had mounted the throne of Poland, then held at bay the Russian and Turk.” But they did and he had.

The Swedish monarchs of this period were fortunate. They ruled at a time when England, France and Germany were torn apart by wars between Catholics and Protestants, as the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began its steep decline and before Muscovy had transformed itself into Russia and begun its drive to the west. Yet their empire endured into the 1720s, and even then it took two decades of constant war to destroy it—not to mention an overwhelming alliance of all of their enemies, led by the formidable Peter the Great.

The Swedish empire before 1721, showing the dates at which various territories were added and lost. Click twice to view in higher resolution.

Much of the credit for Sweden’s protracted resistance rests with the fifth, last and most controversial of this line of notable rulers: Charles XII (1682-1718). An endlessly fascinating figure—austere and fanatical, intelligent yet foolhardy—Charles has some claim to be the greatest of Swedish kings. Voltaire, an admirer, dubbed him “the Lion of the North,” and though he was at heart a soldier, whose genius and speed of movement earned him the nickname “the Swedish Meteor,” he was also a considerable mathematician with a keen interest in science. In other circumstances, Charles might have turned himself into an early example of that 18th-century archetype, the enlightened despot. Yet plenty of Swedes, then and now, despised their king for impoverishing the country and sacrificing thousands of his subjects by fighting almost from the moment he ascended the throne in 1697 until he died two decades later. For the playwright August Strindberg, he was “Sweden’s ruin, the great offender, a ruffian, the rowdies’ idol.” Even today, the king’s biographer Ragnhild Hatton observed, “Swedes can be heard to say that no one shall rob them of their birthright to quarrel about Charles XII.”

Charles came to the throne at a critical moment. The Swedes had spent a century making enemies, all of whom now combined against them, hoping to take advantage of the new king’s youth and inexperience. Charles fought them doggedly, confronting overwhelming odds, and swiftly proved himself to be among the greatest generals of the age. But he also made grievous mistakes, and missed more than one opportunity to bring hostilities to an end when he could have obtained decent terms. By fighting on, he condemned Sweden’s empire to dismemberment.

Charles XII and his ally, the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, take stock after the Battle of Poltava (1709). The king’s wounded foot prevented him from commanding in battle.

None of this was obvious at first. The early  years of the Great Northern War of 1700-21 were a period of Swedish triumph; confronting a formidable alliance of Russia, Poland, Saxony and Denmark, the teenaged Charles drove the Danes out of the war in a few weeks before turning on Peter the Great and his Russians. At the Battle of Narva (November 1700), fought in a blizzard in Estonia, the king, then still 18, led an army that was outnumbered four to one to the most complete victory in Swedish history. The Saxons and the Poles were defeated next, and the Polish king replaced by a Swedish puppet. This would, no doubt, have been the moment to make peace, but Charles refused to consider ending what he considered to be an “unjust war” without securing outright victory. He chose to invade Russia.

So many of the Meteor’s decisions had been right thus far, but this one was rash and catastrophic. There were a few early successes—at Holovzin, in 1708, Charles routed the Russians (who outnumbered him on this occasion three to one) by completing a forced march through a marsh in pitch dark and driving rain. Swedish casualties were unsustainable, however, and a few months later, at Poltava, what remained of Charles’s army confronted a large, well-trained and modernized Russian force, the product of Tsar Peter’s energetic military reforms.

Charles’s great rival, Peter the Great of Russia, gained most from the Great Northern War.

The king was not available to lead his men. A week earlier, Charles had been struck in the foot by a musket ball—his first injury in a decade’s fighting—and by the time battle commenced he was weakened by blood poisoning and wracked with fever. At the same time, it might be argued that the position was already hopeless. Sweden was a nation of 2.5 million confronting one that was four times her size; worse, Charles had led his men into the heart of Russia, stretching his supply lines to the breaking point. When his Swedes were routed, and 7,000 of them killed, the king had no choice but to flee to sanctuary in the Ottoman Empire, where he would remain in semi-captivity for four years.

Looking back across the centuries, Poltava assumes additional significance. It was always clear it was a decisive battle–one that ensured Russia would win the war. What was less obvious was that the peace that eventually followed would change the face of Europe. Under the terms of the Treaty of Nystad (1721), Peter the Great occupied Sweden’s Baltic provinces and wasted little time in building a new capital, St. Petersburg, on the site of the old Swedish fortress of Nyenskans. With that, Russia’s entire focus shifted; a nation that had spent centuries looking east and confronting the Tatar threat now had a window on the West, through which new ideas would flow and new rivalries come into focus.

Very little went right for Charles XII after Poltava. Sweden lost Bremen and Pomerania, its imperial possessions in Germany, and a hostile ruler seized the throne of Poland. Even the Meteor’s return home in the autumn of 1714—accomplished, in typical fashion, by a pell-mell ride across half of Europe that he completed in just 15 days—did little to redress the shifting balance of power. The only enemy that Charles could then confront on equal terms was Denmark, and it was in Danish-held Norway that the king fell in battle in December 1718. He was just 36 years old.

A contemporary plan of the Swedish siege of Fredrikshald. The fortress is in light pink just to the right of the river; its elevated position is made clear. The Swedish trench line where Charles was killed lies directly to the north. Double click to enlarge.

Even in death, Charles remained extraordinary, for the circumstances in which he died were very strange. The king was shot through the head while conducting a siege at Fredrikshald, a hilltop fortress just across the Danish border—but there have been many who have tried to prove that the bullet or shell fragment that killed him had not been fired from within the fortress. The Meteor, it has been repeatedly argued, was murdered by one of his own men.

Saying with any certainty what happened to Charles XII is difficult; for one thing, while plenty of people were around him when he died, not one witnessed the instant of his death. The king had gone forward one evening after dark to supervise the construction of a front-line trench well within range of Danish musket fire. It was a deadly spot—nearly 60 Swedish trench diggers had already been killed there—and though he waited until well after dark to visit, there were flares burning on the fortress walls, and “light bombs,” a 17th-century version of star shells, illuminated the scene. Charles had just stood to survey the construction, exposing his head and shoulders above the breastworks, when he slumped forward. A large-caliber projectile had entered his head just below one temple, traveled horizontally through his brain, and exited through the far side of his skull, killing him instantly.

Frederick I of Sweden, the supposed originator of a plot against King Charles’s life, portrayed c.1730. Image: Wikicommons.

The first instinct of the men standing below Charles in the trench was not to investigate what had happened, but to get the king’s body out of the trenches without demoralizing the rest of the army. Later on, though, several government commissions took evidence from the men who had been in the trench that night. Most thought that the shot had come from the left–the direction of the fortress. But none had seen it strike the king.

Expert testimony makes it clear that there was nothing inherently suspicious about Charles’s death. He had been within easy reach of Danish guns, and might easily have been hit by grapeshot from a big gun or a sniper’s bullet. Yet there is at least a prima facie case for considering other possibilities. It has been claimed, for instance, that the guns of Fredrikshald were not firing at the time the king was hit (untrue) and that there were plenty of people on the Swedish side who might have wished Charles dead (a lot more likely). From the latter perspective, the suspects included everybody from an ordinary Swedish soldier tired of the Meteor’s never-ending war to the principal beneficiary of Charles’s death: his brother-in-law, who took the throne as King Frederick I, immediately abandoned the attack on Norway and soon ended the Northern War. It is possible to argue, too, that every wealthy Swede profited from the Meteor’s demise, since one of Frederick’s first acts was to abandon a widely hated 17 percent tax on capital that Charles’s efficient but despised chief minister, Baron Goertz, was on the point of introducing. Goertz was so loathed by 1718 that it has been suggested that the real motive for killing Charles might have been to get to him. It is true that the baron was arraigned, tried and executed within three months of his master’s death.

Detail of Charles XII’s skull with the mummified scalp peeled back to reveal the full extent of the damage caused by the projectile that killed him. 1917 autopsy photograph.

The written evidence does suggest that some of those in the king’s circle behaved oddly both before and after he was shot. According to an aide-de-camp, albeit writing 35 years later, Prince Frederick seemed extremely nervous on the last day of Charles’s life and regained his composure only after being told the king was dead. And Frederick’s secretary, André Sicre, actually confessed to Charles’s murder. The value of Sicre’s “statement” remains disputed; he had fallen ill with fever, made his admission in the throes of a delirium and hastily recanted it when he recovered. But there is also an odd account that Melchior Neumann, the king’s surgeon, scribbled inside the cover of a book. The Finnish writer Carl Nordling recounts that, on April 14, 1720, Neumann

dreamed he saw the dead king on the embalming table. Then the king regained life, took Neumann’s left hand and said, “You shall be the witness to how I was shot.” Agonized, Neumann asked: “Your Majesty, graciously tell me, was Your Majesty shot from the fortress?” And the king answered: “No, Neumann, es kam einer gekrochen”—”One came creeping.”

The right side of Charles XII’s skull, showing what appears to be a significantly smaller entrance wound.

The forensic evidence–which, perhaps surprisingly for a death that took place nearly 300 years ago, survives in abundance—offers rather surer ground. Charles’s thick felt hat, for instance, remains on display in a Swedish museum, bearing a hole 19 millimeters in diameter, or about three quarters of an inch—a clear indicator of the size, and hence perhaps the type, of the projectile that killed him. The king’s embalmed and mummified body lies in a Stockholm church, from which it has been exhumed three times–in 1746, 1859 and 1917– and on the last of these occasions X-rays were taken of the corpse and a full autopsy performed in the hope of resolving the vexed question of whether he was murdered. As we will see, even the projectile that is supposed to have killed Charles has survived.

The real question, of course, is, from which direction was he hit? Those who have studied the case generally agree that, given the orientation of the trench in which the king was standing, an object striking him on the left side of the head must have come from the fortress, whereas a shot fired from the right would most likely have originated from the Swedes’ own trench system. Examination of Charles’s body suggests that he was, in fact, shot from the right–what appears to be the entry wound on that side of his skull is significantly smaller than the apparent exit wound on the left.

Detail of a 1917 X-ray of Charles’s skull. The photograph shows no traces of any fragments of the projectile that killed him.

Yet this and virtually every other forensic detail has been contested. Examination of Charles’s hat, on display in a Stockholm museum, reveals a single prominent hole on the left side. Does this mean that he was actually shot from Fredrikshald–or merely that he wore his headgear at a rakish tilt? Similarly, trials have shown that, in some circumstances, entrance wounds can be larger than exit holes, and while the exhumation of 1859 found that Charles XII had been killed by the enemy, those of 1746 and 1917 argued that he had been murdered. Historians have established that Danish shells dating to the correct period contained iron shot of the correct dimensions, but they have also demonstrated that the guns capable of firing them remained silent that night while only the largest howitzers fired. Nordling, meanwhile, argues that the absence of lead splinters in the dead king’s skull suggests that he was assassinated with an exotic piece of ammunition: a silver bullet or a jacketed round of some description. Either option seems extravagant, not least because jacketed ammunition dates only to the 19th century–but even this sort of speculation pales in comparison with the suggestion that Charles was felled not by a bullet but a button.

Every historian considering the “bullet-button” (kulknappen) hypothesis is indebted to the folklorist Barbro Klein, who set out a mass of data in a paper published in 1971. Klein showed that an eighteenth century assassin might well have feared that the king could not be felled by ordinary ammunition; a considerable body of contemporary legend attests to the fact that Charles was considered “hard” during his lifetime (that is, invulnerable to bullets). And a fragment collected by the folklorists Kvideland and Sehmsdorf suggests that some people, at least, believed the king was literally bulletproof, and that rounds aimed at him would strike a sort of spiritual force-field and fall straight to the ground:

No bullet could hit Charles XII. He would free his soldiers for twenty-four hours at a time, and no bullet could hit them during that time period either….

He would take his boots off whenever they were full of bullets, saying that it was hard to walk with all these “blueberries” in his boots.

The “kulknappen,” or “bullet-button” discovered in 1924 and believed by some to have been the projectile used to kill Charles XII. A recent investigation discovered it bore fragmentary traces of the same group of DNA as the blood that still stains King Charles’s gloves.

The strangest piece of evidence in this strange tale is a “curious object” brought into the museum at Varberg in May 1932 by Carl Andersson, a master smith. Andersson handed over “two half-spheres of brass filled with lead and soldered together into a ball, with a protruding loop that testified to its former use as a button.” One side was flattened, “the result of a forceful collision with a hard surface.” He had found the button, he said, in 1924 in a load of gravel he had hauled from a pit near his home.

According to Klein, the kulknappen fits neatly with another Swedish tradition–one suggesting that Charles’s magical protection had been breached by a killer who used the king’s own coat button to kill him. More than that: versions of this same bit of folklore tie the object to the gravel pit where it was found. These stories say a Swedish soldier “found the bullet… and brought it with him home.” They end with the man bragging about his find, only to be warned by the local priest that the killers might come after him. He solves the conundrum by hurling the evidence into the very quarry from which Andersson’s bullet-button was eventually  recovered.

On close examination, there is reason to doubt the accuracy of this tradition; few of the tales that Klein collected date to before 1924, and Professor Nils Ahnlund has published a scathing commentary on the dangers of using such folklore as historical evidence. But there are at least three details that give one pause for thought. One is another legend that names the soldier who found the bullet as “Nordstierna”–which, as Klein notes, really was the name of a veteran of the Northern War who farmed at Deragård, the spot where the bullet-button was recovered. The second is the diameter of Andersson’s find: 19.6 millimeters (0.77 inches), a very close match to the hole in Charles’s hat.

The legend of Charles XII has unusual potency and the king continues to attract interest in the oddest places. This Japanese print, dating to 1905, shows him fighting with Peter the Great, and is testimony to the enduring power of his legend.

What, though, of the third detail? For this, we need to turn to a much more recent piece of evidence: an analysis by Marie Allen, of Uppsala University,who in 2001 recovered two traces of DNA from the kulknappen. One of those fragments, lodged deep within the crevice where the two halves of the button were soldered together, came from someone with a DNA sequence possessed by only 1 percent of the Swedish population. And a sample taken from the bloodstained gloves that Charles XII wore on his last night revealed an identical sequence; the king, it seems, belonged to that same tiny group of Swedes.

As things stand, then, little has been resolved. The historian naturally revolts against the outlandish notion that Charles XII was killed by an assassin who believed he was invulnerable to bullets, who was somehow able to obtain a button from the king’s own coat—and possessed such skill as a marksman that he could hit his target in the head from 20 or 30 yards, using an irregularly shaped projectile, in the middle of a battle and in almost total darkness.

Yet if advances in DNA analysis prove anything, it is that there is always hope in cold cases. Allen’s evidence may be inconclusive, but it is at least intriguing. And there is always the chance that further developments in technology may prove a closer match.

Sweden lost a king when the Meteor fell to earth. But she certainly gained a mystery.

Sources

Anon. “A royal autopsy delayed 200 years.” In New York Times, September 16, 1917; Jan von Flocken. “Mord oder heldentod? Karl XII von Schweden.” Die Welt, August 2, 2008; Robert Frost. The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558-1721. London: Longman, 2001; R.M. Hatton. Charles XII of Sweden. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968; Ragnhild Hatton. Charles XII. London: Historical Association, 1974; Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett. “Performing knowledge.” In Pertti Anttonen et al (eds.), Folklore, Heritage, Politics, and Ethnic Diversity: Festschrift for Barbro Klein. Botkyrka: Mankulturellt Centrum, 2000; Barbro Klein. “The testimony of the button.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 8 (1971); Reimund Kvideland and Henning Sehmsdorf (eds). Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; Gary Dean Peterson. Warrior Kings of Sweden: The Rise of an Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Jefferson., NC: McFarland, 2007; Carl O. Nordling. “The death of King Charles XII–the forensic verdict.” Forensic Science International  96:2, September 1998; Stewart Oakley. War and Peace in the Baltic 1560-1719. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 1974; Michael Roberts. The Swedish Imperial Experience 1560-1718. Cambridge: CUP, 1984.

A photograph supposed to show a pair of Australian convicts photographed in Victoria c.1860; this identification of the two men is inaccurate–see comments below. Between 1788 and 1868, Britain shipped a total of 165,000 such men to the penal colonies it established on the continents’ east and the west coasts. During the colonies’ first quarter-century, several hundred of these men escaped, believing that a walk of as little as 150 miles would take them to freedom in China.

What is it that makes us human? The question is as old as man, and has had many answers. For quite a while, we were told that our uniqueness lay in using tools; today, some seek to define humanity in terms of an innate spirituality, or a creativity that cannot (yet) be aped by a computer. For the historian, however, another possible response suggests itself. That’s because our history can be defined, surprisingly helpfully, as the study of a struggle against fear and want—and where these conditions exist, it seems to me, there is always that most human of responses to them: hope.

The ancient Greeks knew it; that’s what the legend of Pandora’s box is all about. And Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians speaks of the enduring power of faith, hope and charity, a trio whose appearance in the skies over Malta during the darkest days of World War II is worthy of telling of some other day. But it is also possible to trace a history of hope. It emerges time and again as a response to the intolerable burdens of existence, beginning when (in Thomas Hobbes’s famous words) life in the “state of nature” before government was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and running like a thread on through the ancient and medieval periods until the present day.

I want to look at one unusually enduring manifestation of this hope: the idea that somewhere far beyond the toil and pain of mere survival there lies an earthly paradise, which, if reached, will grant the traveler an easy life. This utopia is not to be confused with the political or economic Shangri-las that have also been believed to exist somewhere “out there” in a world that was not yet fully explored (the kingdom of Prester John, for instance–a Christian realm waiting to intervene in the war between crusaders and Muslims in the Middle East–or the golden city of El Dorado, concealing its treasure deep amidst South American jungle). It is a place that’s altogether earthier—the paradise of peasants, for whom heaven was simply not having to do physical labor all day, every day.

The Land of Cockaigne, in an engraving after a 1567 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Cockaigne was a peasant’s vision of paradise that tells us much about life in the medieval and early modern periods. A sure supply of rich food and plenty of rest were the chief aspirations of those who sang the praises of this idyllic land.

One of the earliest manifestations of this yearning, and in important respects one that defined the others that came after it, was the Land of Cockaigne, a realm hymned throughout Europe from at least the 12th century until well into the 16th. According to Herman Pleij, the author of an exhaustive study of its legend, Cockaigne was “a country, tucked away in some remote corner of the globe, where ideal living conditions prevailed.” It promised a mirror image of life as it was actually lived during this period: “Work was forbidden, for one thing, and food and drink appeared spontaneously in the form of grilled fish, roast geese and rivers of wine.” Like some Roald Dahl fantasy, this arcadia existed solely to gratify the baser instincts of its inhabitants.”One only had to open one’s mouth,” Pleij writes, “and all that delicious food practically jumped inside. One could even reside in meat, fish, game, fowl and pastry, for another feature of Cockaigne was its edible architecture. The weather was stable and mild—it was always spring—and there was the added bonus of a whole range of amenities: communal possessions, lots of holidays, free sex with ever-willing partners, a fountain of youth…and the possibility of earning money while one slept.”

It is far from clear, from the fragmentary surviving sources, just how real the Land of Cockaigne was to the people who told tales of it. Pleij suggests that “by the Middle Ages no one any longer believed in such a place,” hypothesizing that it was nonetheless “vitally important to be able to fantasize about a place where everyday worries did not exist.” Certainly, tales of Cockaigne became increasingly surreal. It was, in some tellings, filled with living roasted pigs that walked around with knives in their backs to make it all the easier to devour them, and ready-cooked fish that leaped out of the water to land at one’s feet. But Pleij admits it is not possible to trace the legend back to its conception, and his account leaves open the possibility that belief in a physically real paradise did flourish in some earlier period, before the age of exploration.

Finnish peasants from the Arctic Circle, illustrated here after a photograph of 1871, told tales of the Chuds; in some legends they were dwellers underground, in others invaders who hunted down and killed native Finns even when they concealed themselves in pits. It is far from clear how these 17th-century troglodytic legends morphed into tales of the paradisiacal underground “Land of Chud” reported by Orlando Figes.

As much is suggested by another batch of accounts, dating to a rather later period, which come from Russia. There peasants told of as many as a dozen different lands of plenty; perhaps the best-known was Belovode, the Kingdom of the White Waters. Although accounts of this utopia first appeared in print in 1807, at least some versions of the legend seem to have been much older. Belovode was said to be located a three year round trip from European Russia, on the far side of Siberia and “across the water”; perhaps it was Japan. There are some intriguing differences between Belovode and Cockaigne which may say something about the things that mattered to Russia’s peasants. Their utopia was, for instance, not a land of plenty, merely a place where “spiritual life reigned supreme, all went barefoot and shared the fruits of the land, [and] which was devoid of oppressive rules, crimes and war.”

Belief in the existence of Belovode endured in some rural districts throughout the 19th century; “large migrations were mounted to find it,” the historian Richard Stites records, and as late as 1898 “three cossacks of the Urals set sail from Odessa to Asia and Siberia and back again, declaring on their return that it did not exist.” There were other, similar utopias in Russian myth—”the City of Ignat, the Land of the River Darya, Nutland, and Kitezh, the land beneath the lake”—and in his well-regarded cultural history, Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes confirms that

the peasantry believed in a Kingdom of God on this earth. Many of them conceived of heaven as an actual place in some remote corner of the world, where the rivers flowed with milk and the grass was always green. This conviction inspired dozens of popular legends about a real Kingdom of God hidden somewhere in the Russian land. There were legends of the Distant Lands, of the Golden Islands, of the Kingdom of Opona, and the Land of Chud, a sacred kingdom underneath the ground where the ‘White Tsar’ ruled according to the ‘ancient and truly just ideals’ of the peasantry.

Convicts disembarking in Australia in the late 18th century found themselves living in a minuscule western bubble in a hostile land located on “the edges of the earth.” Some, though, held out hope that their position was not quite so desperate as it appeared.

Elsewhere, Figes adds some detail concerning Opona, a place “somewhere on the edge of the flat earth, where the peasants lived happily, undisturbed by gentry or state.” Groups of travelers, he asserts, “even set out on expeditions in the far north in the hope of finding this arcadia.”

So, desperate peasants were capable, in certain circumstances, of taking great risks in search of a physical paradise—and the more desperate they were, perhaps, the more willing they would be to risk their necks for it. The third and last legend that I want to consider here suggests as much. It dates to the last years of the 18th century and flourished among a group of men and women who had very little to lose: unhappy convicts who found themselves being transported from Britain to penal colonies established along the newly discovered–and inhospitable–east coast of Australia.

Beginning in 1787, just a few years after the American War of Independence closed off access to the previous dumping-ground favored by the government in London, tens of thousands of criminals found themselves disembarking on the edges of a continent that had scarcely been explored. Among them were large contingents of Irish men and women, the lepers of Britain’s criminal courts, and it was among the members of this fractured and dislocated community that an even stranger myth sprang up: the idea that it was possible to walk from Botany Bay to Beijing. China, not Cockaigne or Belovode, became the land of paradise for these believers.

Of course, few Irish petty criminals (and most of them were petty; it was possible to be transported for seven years for stealing sixpence-worth of cloth, or pickpocketing a handkerchief) had any education in those days, so it is not surprising that their sense of geography was off. The sheer scale of their delusion, though, takes a little getting used to; the real distance from Sydney to Peking is rather more than 5,500 miles, with a large expanse of the Pacific Ocean in the way. Nor is it at all clear how the idea that it was possible to walk to China first took root. One clue is that China was the principal destination for ships sailing from Australia, but the spark might have been something as simple as the hopeful boast of a single convict whom others respected. Before long, however, that spark had grown into a blaze.

Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, hoped that the craze for “Chinese traveling” was “an evil that would cure itself.” He was wrong.

The first convicts to make a break northward set out on November 1, 1791, little more than four years after the colony was founded. They had arrived there only two months earlier, on the transport ship Queen, which the writer David Levell identifies as the likely carrier of this particular virus. According to the diarist Watkin Tench, a Royal Marines officer who interviewed several of the survivors, they were convinced that “at a considerable distance northward existed a large river which separated this country from the back part of China, and that when it should be crossed they would find themselves among a copper coloured people who would treat them kindly.”

A total of 17 male convicts absconded on this occasion, taking with them a pregnant woman, wife to one; she became separated from the remainder of the group and was soon recaptured. Her companions pressed on, carrying with them their work tools and provisions for a week. According to their information, China lay no more than 150 miles away, and they were confident of reaching it.

The fate of this initial group of travelers was typical of the hundreds who came after them. Three members of the party vanished into the bush, never to be heard from again; one was recaptured after a few days, alone and “having suffered very considerably by fatigue, hunger and heat.” The remaining 13 were finally tracked down after about a week, “naked and nearly worn out by hunger.”

The Blue Mountains formed an impassable barrier to early settlers in New South Wales. Legends soon grew up of a white colony located somewhere in the range, or past it, ruled by a “King of the Mountains.” Not even the first successful passage of the chain, in 1813, killed off this myth.

The failure of the expedition does not seem to have deterred many other desperate souls from attempting the same journey; the “paradise myth,” Robert Hughes suggests in his classic account of transportation, The Fatal Shore, was a psychologically vital counter to the convicts’ “antipodean Purgatory”–and, after all, the first 18 “bolters” had been recaptured before they had the opportunity to reach their goal. Worse than that, the surviving members of the party helped to spread word of the route to China. David Collins, the judge advocate of the young colony, noted that the members of the original group “imparted the same idea to all their countrymen who came after them, engaging them in the same act of folly and madness.”

For the overstretched colonial authorities, it was all but impossible to dissuade other Irish prisoners from following in the footsteps of the earliest bolters. Their threats and warnings lacked conviction; Australia was so little explored that they could never state definitively what hazards absconders would face in the outback; and, given that all the convicts knew there was no fence or wall enclosing them, official attempts to deny the existence of a land route to China seemed all too possibly self-serving. Before long, a stream of “Chinese travelers” began to emulate the trailblazers in groups up to 60 strong–so many that when muster was taken in January 1792, 54 men and 9 women, more than a third of the total population of Irish prisoners, were found to have fled into the bush.

The fragmentary accounts given by the few survivors of these expeditions hint at the evolution of a complex mythology. Several groups were found to be in possession of talismanic “compasses”—which were merely ink drawings on paper—and others had picked up navigational instructions by word of mouth. These latter consisted, Levell says, of “keeping the sun on particular parts of the body according to the time of day.”

Over time, the regular discovery of the skeletons of those who had tried and failed to make it overland to China through the bush did eventually dissuade escaping convicts from heading north. But one implausible belief was succeeded by another. If there was no overland route to China, it was said, there might yet be one to Timor; later, tales began to circulate in the same circles of a “white colony” located somewhere deep in the Australian interior. This legend told of a land of freedom and plenty, ruled over by a benevolent “King of the Mountains,” that would have seemed familiar to medieval peasants, but it was widely believed. As late as 1828, “Bold Jack” Donohue, an Irish bushranger better known as “the Wild Colonial Boy,” was raiding farms in outlying districts in the hope of securing sufficient capital to launch an expedition in search of this arcadia. The colonial authorities, in the person of Phillip’s successor, Governor King, scoffed at the story, but King hardly helped himself in the manner in which he evaded the military regulations that forbade him to order army officers to explore the interior. In 1802 he found a way of deputing Ensign Francis Barrallier to investigate the impenetrable ranges west of Sydney by formally appointing him to a diplomatic post, naming him ambassador to the King of Mountains. Barrallier penetrated more than 100 miles into the Blue Mountains without discovering a way through them, once again leaving open the possibility that the convicts’ tales were true.

The bushranger Bold Jack Donahoe in death, soon after he began raiding farms in the hope of obtaining sufficient supplies to set out in search of the “white colony” believed to exist somewhere in Australia’s interior.

It is impossible to say how many Australian prisoners died in the course of fruitless quests. There must have been hundreds; when the outlaw John Wilson surrendered to the authorities in 1797, one of the pieces of information he bartered for his freedom was the location of the remains of 50 Chinese travelers whose bones—still clad in the tatters of their convict uniforms—he had stumbled across while hiding in the outback. Nor was there any shortage of fresh recruits to the ranks of believers in the tales; King wrote in 1802 that “these wild schemes are generally renewed as often as a ship from Ireland arrives.”

What remained consistent was an almost willful misinterpretation of what the convicts meant by fleeing. Successive governors viewed their absconding as “folly, rashness and absurdity,” and no more than was to be expected of men of such “natural vicious propensities.” Levell, though, like Robert Hughes, sees things differently—and surely more humanely. The myth of an overland route to China was, he writes, “never fully recognised for what it was, a psychological crutch for Irish hope in an utterly hopeless situation.”

Sources

Daniel Field. “A far-off abode of work and pure pleasures.” In Russian Review 39 (1980); Orlando Figes. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. London: Penguin, 2003; Robert Hughes. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. London: Folio Society, 1998; David Levell. Tour to Hell: Convict Australia’s Great Escape Myths. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2008; Felix Oinas. “Legends of the Chuds and the Pans.” In The Slavonic and Eastern European Journal 12:2 (1968); Herman Pleij. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; R.E.F. Smith (ed). The Russian Peasantry 1920 and 1984. London: Frank Cass, 1977; Richard Stites. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

The Potala Palace, Lhasa: home to nine successive Dalai Lamas, a number of them suspiciously short-lived. Photo: Wikicommons.

Few buildings inspire awe in quite the way that the Potala Palace does. Set high on the great Tibetan plateau, against the looming backdrop of the Himalayas, the vast structure rises 400 feet from a mountain in the middle of Lhasa, taking the uppermost apartments on its thirteenth floor to 12,500 feet above sea level. The palace is at once architecturally striking and historically significant. Until the Chinese occupation of 1951, it was also the winter home of the 14th Dalai Lama, believed to be the reincarnation of a long line of religious leaders dating back to the late fourteenth century.

For Buddhists, the Potala is a holy spot, but even for visitors to the Tibetan capital it is hardly the sort of place one would expect to find steeped in intrigue and corruption. Yet during the first half of the 19th century, the palace was the scene of a grim battle for political supremacy fought among monks, Tibetan nobles and Chinese governors. Most historians of the country, and many Tibetans, believe that the most prominent victims of this struggle were four successive Dalai Lamas, the ninth through the twelfth, all of whom died in unusual circumstances, and not one of whom lived past the age of 21.

Lungtok Gyatso (1805-1815), the ninth Dalai Lama, died suddenly at age 9.

The early 1800s are a poorly documented period in Tibet’s history. What can be said is that these dark days began with the death of the eighth Dalai Lama in 1804. Jamphel Gyatso had been enthroned in 1762 and, like three out of four of his immediate predecessors, lived a long life by the standards of the time, bringing a measure of stability to his country. But, by the time of his death, the augeries for Tibet’s future were not propitious. Qianlong, the last great ruler of China’s Qing dynasty, had abdicated in 1796, leaving his empire to successors who took less interest in a region that China had dominated for half a century. The decline of the Qing had two consequences: the governors—ambans—sent from Beijing in pairs to rule in Lhasa discovered that they had a free hand to meddle as they wished; and the Tibetan nobility, which had alternately collaborated with the Qing and resented them, sensed an opportunity to recover the influence and power they had lost since 1750. For the Chinese, the power vacuum that existed during a Dalai Lama’s minority made governing their distant dependency easier; conversely, any Buddhist leader with a mind of his own was a threat. For Tibet’s nobility, a Dalai Lama who listened to the ambans was most likely an imposter who fully deserved  a violent end.

Add to that toxic stew a series of infant Dalai Lamas placed in the care of ambitious regents drawn from a group of fractious rival monasteries, and it’s easy to see that plenty of people might prefer it if no self-willed, adult and widely revered lama emerged from the Potala to take a firm grip on the country. Indeed, the chief difficulty in interpreting the murderous politics of the period is that the story reads too much like an Agatha Christie novel. Every contemporary account is self-serving, and everybody gathered in the Potala’s precincts had his own motive for wanting the Dalai Lama dead.

The Potala in 1904, at the end of Tibet's medieval period, and much as it would have been in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The palace itself made an evocative setting for a murder mystery. To begin with, it was ancient; construction on the site had begun as early as 647, in the days of Tibet’s greatest early ruler, Songtsän Gampo, and just as the medieval Tibetan Empire began to emerge as a genuine rival to Tang dynasty China. The structure that we know today mostly dates to a thousand years later, but the Potala belongs to no one period, and the complex was still being expanded in the 1930s. It’s really two palaces: the White, which was the seat of government until 1950, and the Red, which houses the stupas—tombs—of eight Dalai Lamas. Between them, the two buildings contain a thousand rooms, 200,000 statues and endless labyrinthine corridors, enough to conceal whole armies of assassins.

Only a few of the Potala’s many chambers, the first Westerners to gain access to the complex learned, were decorated, properly lit or ever cleaned. Perceval Landon, a correspondent of the London Times who came to Lhasa in 1904 with the British invasion force led by Francis Younghusband, and saw the Potala as it must have been a century earlier, was bitterly disappointed by its interiors—which, he wrote, were illuminated solely by smoldering yak butter and were

indistinguishable from the interiors of a score of other large Tibetan lamaseries…. Here and there in a chapel burns a grimy butter lamp before a tarnished and dirty image. Here and there the passage widens as a flight of stairs breaks the monotony of grimy walls. The sleeping cells of the monks are cold, bare and dirty…. It must be confessed, though the words are written with considerable reluctance, that cheap and tawdry are the only possible adjectives that can be applied to the interior decoration of this great palace temple.

The tenth Dalai Lama, Tsultrim Gyatso (1816-1837), died when a ceiling at the palace collapsed on him while he slept.

The Dutch writer Ardy Verhaegen sketches in more of the background. The eighth Dalai Lama, he points out, although long-lived (1758-1804), never displayed much interest in temporal affairs, and long before the end of his reign political power in Tibet was being wielded by regents drawn from the ranks of other high lamas in monasteries around the capital. By the 1770s, Verhaegen writes, these men “had acquired a taste for office and were to misuse their powers to further their own interests.” The situation was made worse by the death in 1780 of Lobsang Palden Yeshe, the influential Panchen Lama who had stood second in the hierarchy of Yellow Hat Buddhism, and by virtue of his office played a key role in identifying new incarnations of the Dalai Lama. His successors—only two during the whole of the next century—were much less forceful characters who did little to challenge the authority of the ambans.

According to Verhaegen, several suspicious circumstances link the deaths of the eighth Dalai Lama’s four successors. One was that the deaths began shortly after Qianglong announced a series of reforms. His Twenty-Nine Article Imperial Ordinance introduced an unwelcome innovation into the selection of a new Dalai Lama. Traditionally, that process had involved a combination of watching for signs and wonders, and a test in which an infant candidate was watched to see which of various personal items, some of which had belonged to earlier incarnations, were preferred; the novelty Qianlong introduced was the so-called Golden Urn, from which lots were to be drawn to select a candidate. The Urn’s real purpose was to allow China to control the selection process, but in the case of the ninth and tenth Dalai Lamas, the wily Tibetans found ways of circumventing the lottery, to the considerable displeasure of Beijing. One possibility is that the Chinese arranged the deaths of these two incarnations in order to have the opportunity to impose a Dalai Lama they approved of.

The eleventh Dalai Lama died a few weeks after he dismissed his advisers and assumed full political power at age 17.

The second circumstance that Verhaegen calls attention to is that all four of the Lamas who died young had made the sacred journey to Lhamoi Latso lake shortly before their passing. This visit, made “to secure a vision of his future and to propitiate the goddess Mogosomora,” took the Lama away from Lhasa and exposed him to strangers who might have taken the opportunity to poison him. Not that the Potala was safe; alternately, Verhaegen suggests,

it is also possible they were poisoned by cooks… or by the regents when given a specially prepared pill, meant to increase [their] vitality.

Whatever the truth, the first in what would become a series of suspiciously premature deaths took place in 1815 when the ninth Dalai Lama, nine-year-old Lungtok Gyatso, fell dangerously ill with what was said to be pneumonia contracted while attending a festival deep in the Tibetan winter. According to Thomas Manning, the first British visitor to Tibet, who met him twice in Lhasa, Lungtok had been a remarkable boy: “beautiful, elegant, refined, intelligent, and entirely self-possessed, even at the age of six.” His death came during the regency of Dde-mo Blo-bzan-t’ub-btsan-’jigs-med-rgya-mts’o, abbot of bsTan-rgyas-glin. Derek Maher notes that Demo (as he is, thankfully, known outside the austere halls of Tibetan scholarship) “suffered from episodes of mental illness.” Beyond that, however, the only certainties are that Lungtok died at the Potala, that his illness followed a visit to Lhamoi Latso Lake—and that a number of death threats were made against him just before he died. Rumors circulating in Lhasa, the historian Günther Schulemann says, suggested that “certain people [were] trying to get rid of” the boy.

The ninth’s successor, Tsultrim Gyatso, lived a little longer; he was nearly 21 years old when he suddenly fell ill in 1837. Tsultrim—who displayed some unusual traits, including a predisposition for the company of commoners and a love of sunbathing with his office clerks—had just announced plans for an overhaul of the Tibetan economy and an increase in taxation when he entirely lost his appetite and grew dangerously short of breath. According to official accounts, medicines were administered and religious intervention sought, but his decline continued and he died.

The twelfth Dalai Lama died in such suspicious circumstances that the Chinese authorities had his attendants imprisoned and ordered an autopsy.

There would have been no solid reason to doubt this version of the tenth Dalai Lama’s death had not one Chinese source stated unequivocally that it was caused not by disease but by the unexplained collapse of one of the Potala’s ceilings on him while he was asleep. Basing his account on a set of documents addressed to the Chinese emperor 40 years later, W.W. Rockhill, the dean of American scholars of Tibet, records that, once the dust and rubble had been cleared, a large wound was discovered on the young man’s neck.

It is far from clear whether this mysterious wound was inflicted by an assailant or a piece of falling masonry, but historians of the period are in full agreement as to who had the best motive for wanting the tenth Dalai Lama dead: the regent Nag-dban-’jam-dpal-ts’ul-k’rims, known as Ngawang to most Western writers. He was himself a reincarnated lama who had held power since 1822; the Italian scholar Luciano Petech damningly describes him as glib, full of guile and “by far the most forceful character in 19th century Tibet.” Ngawang was the subject of an official Chinese inquiry, which, in 1844, stripped him of his estates and ordered his banishment to Manchuria; Verhaegen writes that he planned “to extend his authority during the minority of the next Dalai Lama” and was generally thought in Lhasa to have hastened his ward’s death, while Schulemann notes the rather circumstantial detail that the regent “did not seem overly sad at the news and said very little about it.” Yet, as Petech points out, the evidence is far from sufficient to secure the conviction of Ngawang in a court of law. The Chinese investigation focused on broader allegations of peculation and abuse of power, and all that can be said for certain is that the tenth Dalai Lama died just weeks before he was due to turn 21, assume the full powers of his office and dispense with the need for a regent.

The eleventh Dalai Lama did not live so long. Khedup Gyatso also died at the Potala–this time, it was said, of a breakdown in his health caused by the rigors of his training and the punishing round of rituals over which he was supposed to preside. Once again, there is no proof that this death was anything other than natural; once again, however, the situation was unusual. He died in the midst of a disastrous war between Tibet and the Gurkhas of Nepal, and it is not surprising, in those circumstances, that a struggle for power broke out in Lhasa. As a result, the eleventh Dalai Lama suddenly and unexpectedly became the first in 65 years to assume full political power and rule without a regent. This decision made Khedup a threat to a number of vested interests in the Tibetan capital, and it may have been sufficient to make him a target for assassination.

The Golden Urn, supplied to Tibet by China's Manchu emperor, was to be used to select a Dalai Lama by lot when more than one possible candidate was discovered. Accounts differ as to how it was used; one version is that the ivory lots pictured were placed within it, and the urn was spun until one flew out. Since the introduction of the urn in 1792, Tibetans have gone to great lengths to avoid its use, fearing that the process will be manipulated to produce the candidate desired by China.

The twelfth Dalai Lama, Trinle Gyatso, was discovered two years after the eleventh’s death. His childhood involved the usual round of intensive study and visits to outlying monasteries. Enthroned in 1873 at the age of 18, he held power for just over two years before his death, and remained for most of his life under the influence of his Lord Chamberlain, Palden Dhondrup. Dhondrup committed suicide in 1871 as a result of court intrigue, after which his body was decapitated and his head put on public display as a warning. The distraught Dalai Lama was so shocked, Verhaegen says, that “he eschewed all company and wandered about as though demented.” Some date his decline to that period; what is certain is that, wintering in the Potala four years later, he fell ill and died in just two weeks.

Two aspects of his life are outstandingly peculiar. The first, noted in the official biography of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, was that Trinle once experienced a vision of the Lotus Born Guru, who advised him that “if you do not rely on the siddhiu of karmamudra, you will soon die.” Karmamudra means tantric sex, but why the Dalai Lama should have been advised to practice it is as much of a mystery as why he expired after rejecting the guru’s psychical advice. Equally puzzling was his final illness, which did not confine him to his bed. Instead, he was found dead, seated in meditation and facing south.

Trinle was the fourth Dalai Lama to die in one human lifetime, and murder was immediately suspected. The ambans, the pro-Chinese historian Yan Hanzhang writes, ordered that “the remains be kept in the same position and all the objects in the Dalai’s bed chamber in the same place as when the death occurred.” They then had all the dead lama’s attendants locked in jail.

An autopsy proved inconclusive, but, for Yan, the identity of the murderers was obvious: The twelfth Dalai Lama and his three predecessors were all “victims of the power struggles between the big clerical and lay serf-owners in Tibet.” An alternative hypothesis suggests that Chinese intervention in Lhasa was the cause. Trinle had been the first Dalai Lama to be selected by a contested draw from the Golden Urn—that “potent symbol of Qing control,” Maher calls it, that was said in Tibetan proverb to be the “honey on a razor’s edge.” As such, he was viewed as Beijing’s man, and was less popular than his predecessors among Tibet’s high nobility. Many in Lhasa saw that as explanation enough for his death.

The indications that the twelfth Dalai Lama was killed are hardly conclusive, of course; indeed, of the four youths who ruled over the Potala between 1804 and 1875, there is strong evidence only for the murder of the tenth Dalai Lama. What can be said, however, is that the numbers do suggest foul play; the average lifespan of the first eight holders of the office had been more than 50 years, and  while two early incarnations had died in their 20s, none before the tenth had failed to reach manhood. Tibet in the early nineteenth century was, moreover, far from the holy land of peaceful Buddhist meditation pictured by romantics. Sam von Schaik, the British Museum’s Tibet expert, points out that it was “a dangerous and often violent place where travelers carried swords, and later guns, at all times”—a theocracy in which monks and monasteries fought among themselves and where “violence might be prolonged for generations by blood feuds in vicious cycles of revenge.” Life was all too often cheap in a place like that—even when the victim was a bodhisattva.

Sources
Ya Hanzhang. The Biographies of the Dalai Lamas. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991; Perceval Landon. Lhasa: an Account of the Country and People of Central Tibet and of the Progress of the Mission Sent There by the English Government in the Year 1903-4. London, 2 vols.: Hurst & Blackett, 1905; Derek Maher, ‘The Ninth to the Twelfth Dalai Lamas.’ In Martin Brauen (ed). The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History. Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2005; Luciano Petech. Aristocracy and Government in Tibet, 1728-1959. Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1973;  Luciano Petech. ‘The Dalai-Lamas and Regents of Tibet: A Chronological Study.’ T’oung Pao 2nd series vol.47 (1959); Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche. ‘Life and times of the Eighth to Twelfth Dalai Lamas.’ The Tibet Journal VII (1982); W.W. Rockhill. The Dalai Lamas of Lhasa and their Relations with the Manchu Emperors of China, 1644-1908. Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1998; Sam von Schaik. Tibet: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011; Günther Schulemann. Geschichte  der Dalai Lamas. Leipzig: Harrasowitz, 1958; Tsepon Shakabpa. Tibet: A Political History. New York: Potala Publications, 1988;  Ardy Verhaegen. The Dalai Lamas: the Institution and its History. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2002.

The Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, site of the deadly race run between condemned grand viziers and their executioners.

The executioners of the Ottoman Empire were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death by “compression of the testicles”–as contemporary chronicles put it–at the hands of an assassin known as Pehlivan the Oil Wrestler. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, in fact), the Ottoman dynasty flourished—ruling over modern Turkey, the Balkans and most of North Africa and the Middle East—thanks in part to the staggering violence it meted out to the highest and mightiest members of society.

Seen from this perspective, it might be argued that the Ottomans’ decline set in early in the 17th century, precisely at the point when they abandoned the policy of ritually murdering a significant proportion of the royal family whenever a sultan died, and substituted the Western notion of simply giving the job to the first-born son instead. Before then, Ottoman succession had been governed by the “law of fratricide” drawn up by Mehmed II in the middle of the 15th century. Under the terms of this remarkable piece of legislation, whichever member of the ruling dynasty succeeded in seizing the throne on the death of the old sultan was not merely permitted, but enjoined, to murder all his brothers (together with any inconvenient uncles and cousins) in order to reduce the risk of subsequent rebellion and civil war. Although it was not invariably applied, Mehmed’s law resulted in the deaths of at least 80 members of the House of Osman over a period of 150 years. These victims included all 19 siblings of Sultan Mehmed III—some of whom were still infants at the breast, but all of whom were strangled with silk handkerchiefs immediately after their brother’s accession in 1595.

Osman II: death by crushed testicles. Image: Wikicommons.

For all its deficiencies, the law of fratricide ensured that the most ruthless of the available princes generally ascended to the throne. That was more than could be said of its replacement, the policy of locking up unwanted siblings in the kafes (“cage”), a suite of rooms deep within the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. From around 1600, generations of Ottoman royals were kept imprisoned there until they were needed, sometimes several decades later, consoled in the meantime by barren concubines and permitted only a strictly limited range of recreations, the chief of which was macramé. This, the later history of the empire amply demonstrated, was not ideal preparation for the pressures of ruling one of the greatest states the world has ever known.

For many years, the Topkapi itself paid mute testimony to the grand extent of Ottoman ruthlessness. In order to enter the palace, visitors had first to pass through the Imperial Gate, on either side of which were two niches where the heads of recently executed criminals were always on display. Inside the gate stood the First Court, through which all visitors to the inner portions of the palace had to pass. This court was open to all the sultan’s subjects, and it seethed with an indescribable mass of humanity. Any Turk had the right to petition for redress of his grievances, and several hundred agitated citizens usually surrounded the kiosks at which harassed scribes took down their complaints. Elsewhere within the same court stood numerous armories and magazines, the buildings of the imperial mint and stables for 3,000 horses. The focal point, however, was a pair of “example stones” positioned directly outside the Central Gate, which led to the Second Court. These “stones” were actually marble pillars on which were placed the severed heads of notables who had somehow offended the sultan, stuffed with cotton if they had once been viziers or with straw if they had been lesser men. Reminders of the sporadic mass executions ordered by the sultan were occasionally piled up by the Central Gate as additional warnings: severed noses, ears and tongues.

Selim the Grim. Image: Wikicommons.

Capital punishment was so common in the Ottoman Empire that there was a Fountain of Execution in the First Court, where the chief executioner and his assistant went to wash their hands after decapitating their victims—ritual strangulation being reserved for members of the royal family and their most senior officials. This fountain “was the most feared symbol of the arbitrary power of life and death of the sultans over their subjects, and was hated and feared accordingly,” the historian Barnette Miller wrote. It was used with particular frequency during the reign of Sultan Selim I—Selim the Grim (1512-20)—who, in a reign of eight short years, went through seven grand viziers (the Ottoman title for a chief minister) and ordered 30,000 executions. So perilous was the position of vizier in those dark days that holders of the office were said not to leave their homes in the morning without tucking their wills inside their robes; for centuries afterward, Miller points out, one of the most common curses uttered in the Ottoman Empire was “Mays’t thou be vizier to Sultan Selim!”

Given the escalating demands of the executioner’s job, it seems remarkable that the Turks employed no specialist headsman to tackle the endless round of loppings, but they did not. The job of executioner was held instead by the Sultan’s bostancı basha, or head gardener—the Ottoman corps of gardeners being a sort of 5,000-strong bodyguard that, aside from cultivating the Sultan’s paradise gardens, doubled up as customs inspectors and police officers. It was the royal gardeners who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosphorus—it is said that another Sultan, Ibrahim the Mad (1640-48), once had all 280 of the women in his harem executed this way simply so he could have the pleasure of selecting their successors—and the tread of an approaching group of bostancıs, wearing their traditional uniform of red skull caps, muslin breeches and shirts cut low to expose muscular chests and arms, heralded death by strangulation or decapitation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years.

A bostancı, or member of the Ottoman corps of gardener-executioners. The artist, a European who worked from travelers' accounts, has incorrectly shown him wearing a fez rather than the traditional skull cap.

When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the bostancı basha in person, but—at least toward the end of the sultans’ rule—execution was not the inevitable result of a death sentence. Instead, the condemned man and the bostancı basha took part in what was surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history: a race held between the head gardener and his anticipated victim, the result of which was, quite literally, a matter of life or death for the trembling grand vizier or chief eunuch required to undertake it.

How this custom came about remains unknown. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, accounts of the bizarre race began to emerge from the seraglio, and these seem reasonably consistent in their details. Death sentences passed within the walls of the Topkapi were generally delivered to the head gardener at the Central Gate; and Godfrey Goodwin describes the next part of the ritual thus:

It was the bostancibaşi‘s duty to summon any notable.… When the vezir or other unfortunate miscreant arrived, he well knew why he had been summoned, but he had to bite his lip through the courtesies of hospitality before, at long last, being handed a cup of sherbet. If it were white, he sighed with relief, but if it were red he was in despair, because red was the color of death.

For most of the bostancıs’ victims, the sentence was carried out immediately after the serving of the fatal sherbet by a group of five muscular young janissaries, members of the sultan’s elite infantry. For a grand vizier, however, there was still a chance: as soon as the death sentence was passed, the condemned man would be allowed to run as fast as he was able the 300 yards or so from the palace, through the gardens, and down to the Fish Market Gate on the southern side of the palace complex, overlooking the Bosphorus, which was the appointed place of execution. (On the map below, which you can view in higher resolution by double clicking on it, the Central Gate is number 109 and the Fish Market Gate number 115.)

A plan of the vast Topkapi Palace complex in Istanbul, from Miller's Beyond the Sublime Porte. Click to view in higher resolution.

If the deposed vizier reached the Fish Market Gate before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. But if the condemned man found the bostanci basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.

Ottoman records show that the strange custom of the fatal race lasted into the early years of the nineteenth century. The last man to save his neck by winning the life-or-death sprint was the Grand Vizier Hacı Salih Pasha, in November 1822. Hacı—whose predecessor had lasted a mere nine days in office before his own execution—not only survived his death sentence, but was so widely esteemed for winning his race that he went on to be appointed governor general of the province of Damascus.

After that, though, the custom languished, along with the empire itself. The Ottomans barely saw out the 19th century, and when the Turkish state revived, in the 1920s under Kemal Atatürk, it did so by turning its back on almost everything the old empire had stood for.

Sources

Anthony Alderson. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956; Joseph, Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall. Des Osmanischen Reichs: Staatsverfassung und Staatsverwaltung. Vienna, 2 vols.: Zwenter Theil, 1815; I. Gershoni et al, Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions. Boulder [CO]: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002; Geoffrey Goodwin. Topkapi Palace: an Illustrated Guide to its Life and Personalities. London: Saqi Books, 1999; Albert Lybyer. The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1913; Barnette Miller. Beyond the Sublime Porte: the Grand Seraglio of Stambul. New Haven [CT]: Yale University Press, 1928; Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson. Tableau Général de l’Empire Ottoman. Paris, 3 vols., 1787-1820; Baki Tezcan. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.