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.

Geronimo as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1898. Photo: Frank A. Rinehart, Wikipedia

When he was born he had such a sleepy disposition his parents named him Goyahkla—He Who Yawns. He lived the life of an Apache tribesman in relative quiet for three decades, until he led a trading expedition from the Mogollon Mountains south into Mexico in 1858. He left the Apache camp to do some business in Casa Grandes and returned to find that Mexican soldiers had slaughtered the women and children who had been left behind, including his wife, mother and three small children. “I stood until all had passed, hardly knowing what I would do,” he would recall. “I had no weapon, nor did I hardly wish to fight, neither did I contemplate recovering the bodies of my loved ones, for that was forbidden. I did not pray, nor did I resolve to do anything in particular, for I had no purpose left.”

He returned home and burned his tepee and his family’s possessions. Then he led an assault on a group of Mexicans in Sonora. It would be said that after one of his victims screamed for mercy in the name of Saint Jerome—Jeronimo in Spanish—the Apaches had a new name for Goyahkla. Soon the name provoked fear throughout the West. As immigrants encroached on Native American lands, forcing indigenous people onto reservations, the warrior Geronimo refused to yield.

Born and raised in an area along the Gila River that is now on the Arizona-New Mexico border, Geronimo would spend the next quarter-century attacking and evading both Mexican and U.S. troops, vowing to kill as many white men as he could. He targeted immigrants and their trains, and tormented white settlers in the American West were known to frighten their misbehaving children with the threat that Geronimo would come for them.

Geronimo (third from right, in front) and his fellow Apache prisoners en route to POW camp at Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, in 1886. Photo: Wikipedia

By 1874, after white immigrants demanded federal military intervention, the Apaches were forced onto a reservation in Arizona. Geronimo and a band of followers escaped, and U.S. troops tracked him relentlessly across the deserts and mountains of the West. Badly outnumbered and exhausted by a pursuit that had gone on for 3,000 miles—and which included help from Apache scouts—he finally surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona in 1886 and turned over his Winchester rifle and Sheffield Bowie knife. He was “anxious to make the best terms possible,” Miles noted. Geronimo and his “renegades” agreed to a two-year exile and subsequent return to the reservation.

In New York, President Grover Cleveland fretted over the terms. In a telegram to his secretary of war, Cleveland wrote, “I hope nothing will be done with Geronimo which will prevent our treating him as a prisoner of war, if we cannot hang him, which I would much prefer.”

Geronimo avoided execution, but dispute over the terms of surrender ensured that he would spend the rest of his life as a prisoner of the Army, subject to betrayal and indignity. The Apache leader and his men were sent by boxcar, under heavy guard, to Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, where they performed hard labor. In that alien climate, the Washington Post reported, the Apache  died “like flies at frost time.” Businessmen there soon had the idea to have Geronimo serve as a tourist attraction, and hundreds of visitors daily were let into the fort to lay eyes on the “bloodthirsty” Indian in his cell.

While the POWs were in Florida, the government relocated hundreds of their children from their Arizona reservation to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. More than a third of the students quickly perished from tuberculosis, “died as though smitten with the plague,” the Post reported. Apaches lived in constant terror that more of their children would be taken from them and sent east.

Indian students sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania died by the hundreds from infectious diseases. Photo: Wikipedia

Geronimo and his fellow POWs were reunited with their families in 1888, when the Chiricahua Apaches were moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. But there, too, the Apaches began to perish—a quarter of them from tuberculosis— until Geronimo and more than 300 others were brought to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Though still captive, they were allowed to live in villages around the post. In 1904, Geronimo was given permission to appear at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which included an “Apache Village” exhibit on the midway.

He was presented as a living museum piece in an exhibit intended as a “monument to the progress of civilization.” Under guard, he made bows and arrows while Pueblo women seated beside him pounded corn and made pottery, and he was a popular draw. He sold autographs and posed for pictures with those willing to part with a few dollars for the privilege.

Geronimo seemed to enjoy the fair. Many of the exhibits fascinated him, such as a magic show during which a woman sat in a basket covered in cloth and a  man proceeded to plunge the swords through the basket. “I would like to know how she was so quickly healed and why the wounds did not kill her,” Geronimo told one writer. He also saw a “white bear” that seemed to be “as intelligent as a man” and could do whatever his keeper instructed. “I am sure that no grizzly bear could be trained to do these things,” he observed. He took his first ride on a Ferris wheel, where the people below “looked no larger than ants.”

In his dictated memoirs, Geronimo said that he was glad he had gone to the fair, and that white people were “a kind and peaceful people.”  He added, “During all the time I was at the fair no one tried to harm me in any way. Had this been among the Mexicans I am sure I should have been compelled to defend myself often.”

After the fair, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show brokered an agreement with the government to have Geronimo join the show, again under Army guard. The Indians in Pawnee Bill’s show were depicted as “lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous” monsters who had killed hundreds of men, women and children and would think nothing of taking a scalp from any member of the audience, given the chance.  Visitors came to see how the “savage” had been “tamed,” and they paid Geronimo to take a button from the coat of the vicious Apache “chief.” Never mind that he had never been a chief and, in fact, bristled when he was referred to as one.

The shows put a good deal of money in his pockets and allowed him to travel, though never without government guards.  If Pawnee Bill wanted him to shoot a buffalo from a moving car, or bill him as “the Worst Indian That Ever Lived,” Geronimo was willing to play along. “The Indian,” one magazine noted at the time, “will always be a fascinating object.”

In March 1905, Geronimo was invited to President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade; he and five real Indian chiefs, who wore full headgear and painted faces, rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue. The intent, one newspaper stated, was to show Americans “that they have buried the hatchet forever.”

Geronimo (second from right, in front) and five Native American chiefs rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s Inauguration Day Parade in 1905. Photo: Library of Congress

After the parade, Geronimo met with Roosevelt in what the New York Tribune reported was a “pathetic appeal” to allow him to return to Arizona. “Take the ropes from our hands,” Geronimo begged, with tears “running down his bullet-scarred cheeks.” Through an interpreter, Roosevelt told Geronimo that the Indian had a “bad heart.”  “You killed many of my people; you burned villages…and were not good Indians.”  The president would have to wait a while “and see how you and your people act” on their reservation.

Geronimo gesticulated “wildly” and the meeting was cut short. “The Great Father is very busy,” a staff member told him, ushering Roosevelt away and urging Geronimo to put his concerns in writing. Roosevelt was told that the Apache warrior would be safer on the reservation in Oklahoma than in Arizona:  “If he went back there he’d be very likely to find a rope awaiting him, for a great many people in the Territory are spoiling for a chance to kill him.”

Geronimo returned to Fort Sill, where newspapers continued to depict him as a “bloodthirsty Apache chief,” living with the “fierce restlessness of a caged beast.” It had cost Uncle Sam more than a million dollars and hundreds of lives to keep him behind lock and key, the Boston Globe reported. But the Hartford Courant had Geronimo “getting square with the palefaces,” as he was so crafty at poker that he kept the soldiers “broke nearly all the time.” His winnings, the paper noted, were used to help pay the cost of educating Apache children.

Journalists who visited him depicted Geronimo as “crazy,” sometimes chasing sightseers on horseback while drinking to excess. His eighth wife, it was reported, had deserted him, and only a small daughter was watching after him.

In 1903, however, Geronimo converted to Christianity and joined the Dutch Reformed Church—Roosevelt’s church—hoping to please the president and obtain a pardon. “My body is sick and my friends have thrown me away,” Geronimo told church members. “I have been a very wicked man, and my heart is not happy. I see that white people have found a way that makes them good and their hearts happy. I want you to show me that way.” Asked to abandon all Indian “superstitions,” as well as gambling and whiskey, Geronimo agreed and was baptized, but the church would later expel him over his inability to stay away from the card tables.

He thanked Roosevelt (“chief of a great people”) profusely in his memoirs for giving him permission to tell his story, but Geronimo never was permitted to return to his homeland. In February 1909, he was thrown from his horse one night and lay on the cold ground before he was discovered after daybreak. He died of pneumonia on February 17.

Geronimo (center, standing) at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Photo: Library of Congress

The Chicago Daily Tribune ran the headline, “Geronimo Now a Good Indian,” alluding to a quote widely and mistakenly attributed to General Philip Sheridan. Roosevelt himself would sum up his feelings this way: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

After a Christian service and a large funeral procession made up of both whites and Native Americans, Geronimo was buried at Fort Sill.  Only then did he cease to be a prisoner of the United States.

Sources 

Articles:  “Geronimo Getting Square With the Palefaces,” The Hartford Courant, June 6, 1900.” “Geronimo Has Cost Uncle Sam $1,000,000,” Boston Daily Globe, April 25, 1900. “Geronimo Has Gone Mad,” New York Times, July 25, 1900. “Geronimo in Prayer,” The Washington Post, November 29. 1903.  “Geronimo Seems Crazy,” New York Tribune, May 19, 1907.  “Geronimo at the World’s Fair,” Scientific American Supplement, August 27, 1904. “Prisoner 18 Years,” Boston Daily Globe, September 18, 1904.  “Chiefs in the Parade,” Washington Post, February 3, 1905.  “Indians at White House,” New York Tribune, March 10, 1905.  “Savage Indian Chiefs,” The Washington Post, March 5, 1905. “Indians on the Inaugural March,” by Jesse Rhodes, Smithsonian, January 14, 2009.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/heritage/Indians-on-the-Inaugural-March.html  “Geronimo Wants His Freedom,” Boston Daily Globe, January 28, 1906. “Geronimo Joins the Church, Hoping to Please Roosevelt,” The Atlanta Constitution, July 10, 1907. “A Bad Indian,” The Washington Post, August 24, 1907.  “Geronimo Now Good Indian,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1909.  “Chief Geronimo Buried,” New York Times, February 19, 1909.  “Chief Geronimo Dead,” New York Tribune, February 19, 1909.  “Native America Prisoners of War: Chircahua Apaches 1886-1914, The Museum of the American Indian, http://www.chiricahua-apache.com/ “’A Very Kind and Peaceful People’: Geronimo and the World’s Fair,” by Mark Sample, May 3, 2011, http://www.samplereality.com/2011/05/03/a-very-kind-and-peaceful-people-geronimo-and-the-worlds-fair/ “Geronimo: Finding Peace,” by Alan MacIver, Vision.org, http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=12778

Books: Geronimo, Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Taken Down and Edited by S. M. Barrett, Superintendent of Education, Lawton, Oklahoma, Duffield & Company, 1915.

Baiae and the Bay of Naples, painted by J.M.W. Turner in 1823, well before modernization of the area obliterated most traces of its Roman past. Image: Wikicommons.

There is nothing remotely Elysian about the Phlegræan Fields, which lie on the north shore of the Bay of Naples; nothing sylvan, nothing green. The Fields are part of the caldera of a volcano that is the twin of Mount Vesuvius, a few miles to the east, the destroyer of Pompeii. The volcano is still active–it last erupted in 1538, and once possessed a crater that measured eight miles across–but most of it is underwater now.  The portion that is still accessible on land consists of a barren, rubble-strewn plateau. Fire bursts from the rocks in places, and clouds of sulfurous gas snake out of vents leading up from deep underground.

The Fields, in short, are hellish, and it is no surprise that in Greek and Roman myth they were associated with all manner of strange tales. Most interesting, perhaps, is the legend of the Cumæan sibyl, who took her name from the nearby town of Cumæ, a Greek colony dating to about 500 B.C.– a time when the Etruscans still held sway much of central Italy and Rome was nothing but a city-state ruled over by a line of tyrannical kings.

A Renaissance-era depiction of a young Cumæan sibyl by Andrea del Catagno. The painting can be seen in the Uffizi Gallery. Image: Wikicommons.

The sibyl, so the story goes, was a woman named Amalthaea who lurked in a cave on the Phlegræan Fields. She had once been young and beautiful–beautiful enough to attract the attentions of the sun god, Apollo, who offered her one wish in exchange for her virginity. Pointing to a heap of dust, Amalthaea asked for a year of life for each particle in the pile, but (as is usually the way in such old tales) failed to allow for the vindictiveness of the gods. Ovid, in Metamorphoses, has her lament that “like a fool, I did not ask that all those years should come with ageless youth, as well.” Instead, she aged but could not die. Virgil depicts her scribbling the future on oak leaves that lay scattered about the entrance to her cave, and states that the cave itself concealed an entrance to the underworld.

The best-known–and from our perspective the most interesting–of all the tales associated with the sibyl is supposed to date to the reign of Tarquinius Superbus–Tarquin the Proud. He was the last of the mythic kings of Rome, and some historians, at least, concede that he really did live and rule in the sixth century B.C. According to legend, the sibyl traveled to Tarquin’s palace bearing nine books of prophecy that set out the whole of the future of Rome. She offered the set to the king for a price so enormous that he summarily declined–at which the prophetess went away, burned the first three of the books, and returned, offering the remaining six to Tarquin at the same price. Once again, the king refused, though less arrogantly this time, and the sibyl burned three more of the precious volumes. The third time she approached the king, he thought it wise to accede to her demands. Rome purchased the three remaining books of prophecy at the original steep price.

What makes this story of interest to historians as well as folklorists is that there is good evidence that three Greek scrolls, known collectively as the Sibylline Books, really were kept, closely guarded, for hundreds of years after the time of Tarquin the Proud. Secreted in a stone chest in a vault beneath the Temple of Jupiter, the scrolls were brought out at times of crisis and used, not as a detailed guide to the future of Rome, but as a manual that set out the rituals required to avert looming disasters. They served the Republic well until the temple burned down in 83 B.C., and so vital were they thought to be that huge efforts were made to reassemble the lost prophecies by sending envoys to all the great towns of the known world to look for fragments that might have come from the same source. These reassembled prophecies were pressed back into service and not finally destroyed until 405, when they are thought to have been burned by a noted general by the name of Flavius Stilicho.

Sulfur drifts from a vent on the barren volcanic plateau known as the Phlegraean Fields, a harsh moonscape associated with legends of prophecy. Photo: Wikicommons.

The existence of the Sibylline Books certainly suggests that Rome took the legend of the Cumæan sibyl seriously, and indeed the geographer Strabo, writing at about the time of Christ, clearly states that there actually was “an Oracle of the Dead” somewhere in the Phlegræan Fields. So it is scarcely surprising that archaeologists and scholars of romantic bent have from time to time gone in search of a cave or tunnel that might be identified as the real home of a real sibyl–nor that some have hoped that they would discover an entrance, if not to Hades, then at least to some spectacular subterranean caverns.

Over the years several spots, the best known of which lies close to Lake Avernus, have been identified as the antro della sibilla–the cave of the sibyl. None, though, leads to anywhere that might reasonably be confused with an entrance to the underworld. Because of this, the quest continued, and gradually the remaining searchers focused their attentions on the old Roman resort of Baiæ (Baia), which lies on Bay of Naples at a spot where the Phlegræan Fields vanish beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. Two thousand years ago, Baiæ was a flourishing spa, noted both for its mineral cures and for the scandalous immorality that flourished there. Today, it is little more than a collection of picturesque ruins–but it was there, in the 1950s, that the entrance to a hitherto unknown antrum was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri. It had been concealed for years beneath a vineyard; Maiuri’s workers had to clear a 15-foot-thick accumulation of earth and vines.

The narrow entrance to the tunnel complex at Baiae is easy to miss amid the ruins of a Greek temple and a large Roman bath complex.

The antrum at Baiæ proved difficult to explore. A sliver of tunnel, obviously ancient and manmade, disappeared into a hillside close to the ruins of a temple. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into its cramped entrance discovered a pitch-black passageway that was uncomfortably hot and wreathed in fumes; they penetrated only a few feet into the interior before beating a hasty retreat. There the mystery rested, and it was not revived until the site came to the attention of Robert Paget in the early 1960s.

Paget was not a professional archaeologist. He was a Briton who worked at a nearby NATO airbase, lived in Baiæ, and excavated mostly as a hobby. As such, his theories need to be viewed with caution, and it is worth noting that when the academic Papers of the British School at Rome agreed to publish the results of the decade or more that he and an American colleague named Keith Jones spent digging in the tunnel, a firm distinction was drawn between the School’s endorsement of a straightforward description of the findings and its refusal to pass comment on the theories Paget had come up with to explain his perplexing discoveries. These theories eventually made their appearance in book form but attracted little attention–surprisingly, because the pair claimed to have stumbled across nothing less than a real-life “entrance to the underworld.”

Paget was one of the handful of men who still hoped to locate the “cave of the sibyl” described by Virgil, and it was this obsession that made him willing to risk the inhospitable interior. He and Jones pressed their way though the narrow opening and found themselves inside a high but narrow tunnel, eight feet tall but just 21 inches wide. The temperature inside was uncomfortable but bearable, and although the airless interior was still tinged with volcanic fumes, the two men pressed on into a passage that, they claimed, had probably not been entered for 2,000 years.

A plan of Baiae’s mysterious “Oracle of the Dead,” showing the complex layout of the tunnels and their depth below ground level.

Following the tunnel downward, Paget and Jones calculated that it fell only around 10 feet in the first 400 feet of its length before terminating in a solid wall of rubble that blocked the way. But even the scanty evidence the two men had managed to gather during this early phase of their investigation persuaded them that it was worth pressing on. For one thing, the sheer amount of spoil that had been hauled into the depths suggested a considerable degree of organization–years later, when the excavation of the tunnel was complete, it would be estimated that 700 cubic yards of rubble, and 30,000 man-journeys, had been required to fill it. For another, using a compass, Paget determined that the terrace where the tunnel system began was oriented towards the midsummer sunrise, and hence the solstice, while the mysterious passage itself ran exactly east-west and was, thus, on the equinoctial sunrise line. This suggested that it served some ritual purpose.

It took Paget and Jones, working in difficult conditions with a small group of volunteers, the beter part of a decade to clear and explore what turned out to be a highly ambitious tunnel system. Its ceremonial function seemed to be confirmed by the existence of huge numbers of niches for oil lamps–they occurred every yard in the tunnels’ lower levels, far more frequently than would have been required merely to provide illumination. The builders had also given great thought to the layout of the complex, which seemed to have been designed to conceal its mysteries.

The “River Styx”–an underground stream, heated almost to boiling point in places, which runs through at the deepest portions of the tunnel complex. It was the discovery of this stream that led Paget to formulate his daring hypothesis that the Great Antrum was intended as a representation of the mythic underground passageways to Hades.

Within the portion of the tunnels choked by rubble, Paget and Jones found, hidden behind an S-bend, a second blockage. This, the explorers discovered, marked the place where two tunnels diverged. Basing his thinking on the remains of some ancient pivots, Paget suggested that the spot had at one time harbored a concealed door. Swung closed, this would have masked the entrance to a second tunnel that acted as a short-cut to the lower levels. Opened partially, it could have been used (the explorer suggested) as a remarkably effective ventilation system; hot, vitiated air would be sucked out of the tunnel complex at ceiling level, while currents of cooler air from the surface were constantly drawn in along the floor.

But only when the men went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream. A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters, which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point.

Conditions at this low point in the tunnel complex certainly were stygian. The temperature had risen to 120 degrees Fahrenheit; the air stank of sulfur. It was a relief to force a way across the stream and up a steep ascending passage on the other side, which eventually opened into an antechamber, oriented this time to the helical sunset, that Paget dubbed the “hidden sanctuary.” From there, more hidden staircases ascended to the surface to emerge behind the ruins of water tanks that had fed the spas at the ancient temple complex.

The Phlegræan Fields (left) and Mount Vesuvius, after Scipione Breislak’s map of 1801. Baiae lies at the northeastern tip of the peninsula of Bacoli, at the extreme westerly end of the Fields.

What was this “Great Antrum,” as Paget dubbed it? Who had built it–and for what purpose? And who had stopped it up? After a decade of exploration, he and Jones had formulated answers to those questions.

The tunnel system, the two men proposed, had been constructed by priests to mimic a visit to the Greeks’ mythical underworld. In this interpretation, the stream represented the fabled River Styx, which the dead had to cross to enter Hades; a small boat, the explorers speculated, would have been waiting at the landing stage to ferry visitors across. On the far side these initiates would have climbed the stairs to the hidden sanctuary, and it was there they would have met… who? One possibility, Paget thought, was a priestess posing as the Cumæan sibyl, and for this reason he took to calling the complex the “Antrum of Initiation.”

The tunnels, then, in Paget’s view, might have been constructed to allow priests to persuade their patrons–or perhaps simply wealthy travelers–that they had traveled through the underworld. The scorching temperatures below ground and the thick drifts of volcanic vapor would certainly have given that impression. And if visitors were tired, befuddled or perhaps simply drugged, it would have been possible to create a powerfully otherworldly experience capable of persuading even the skeptical.

A general plan of the tunnel complex, drawn by Robert Paget. Click twice to view in higher resolution.

In favor of this argument, Paget went on, was the careful planning of the tunnels. The “dividing of the ways,” with its hidden door, would have allowed a party of priests–and the “Cumæan sibyl” too, perhaps–quick access to the hidden sanctuary, and the encounter with the “River Styx” would have been enhanced by the way the tunnels’ S-bend construction concealed its presence from new initiates. The system, furthermore, closely matched ancient myths relating visits to the underworld. In Virgil’s Aeniad, for instance, the hero, Aeneas, crosses the Styx only once on his journey underground, emerging from Hades by an alternate route. The tunnel complex at Baiæ seemed to have been constructed to allow just such a journey–and Virgil, in Paget’s argument, had lived nearby and might himself have been an initiate in Baiæ’s mysteries.

Dating the construction of the complex was a greater challenge. The explorers found little evidence inside the tunnels that might point to the identity of the builders–just a mason’s plumb bob in one of the niches and some ancient graffiti. But, working on the assumption that the passages had formed part of the surrounding temple complex, they concluded that they could best be dated to the late archaic period around 550 B.C.–at pretty much the time, that is, that the Cumæan sibyl was said to have lived. If so, the complex was was almost certainly the work of the Greek colonists of Cumæ itself. As for when the tunnels had been blocked up, that–Paget thought–must have taken place after Virgil’s time, during the early Imperial period of Roman history. But who exactly ordered the work, or why, he could not say.

In time, Paget and Jones solved at least some of the Great Antrum’s mysteries. In 1965 they persuaded a friend, Colonel David Lewis of the U.S. Army, and his son to investigate the Styx for them using scuba apparatus. The two divers followed the stream into a tunnel that dramatically deepened and discovered the source of its mysterious heat: two springs of boiling water, superheated by the volcanic chambers of the Phlegræan Fields.

One of the two boiling springs that feed the “Styx,” photographed in 1965, 250 feet beneath the surface, by Colonel David Lewis, U.S. Army.

Whether Paget and Jones’s elaborate theories are correct remains a matter of debate. That the tunnel complex served some ritual purpose can hardly be doubted if the explorers’ compass bearings are correct, and the specifics of its remarkable construction seem to support much of what Paget says. Of alternative explanations, only one–that the tunnels were once part of a system designed to supply hot mineral-rich waters to bathhouses above–feels plausible, though it certainly does not explain features such as S-bends designed to hide the wonders ahead from approaching visitors. The central question may well be whether it is possible to see Paget’s channel of boiling water deep underground as anything other than a deliberate representation of one of the fabled rivers that girdled Hades–if not the Styx itself, then perhaps the Phlegethon, the mythic “river of fire” that, in Dante’s Inferno, boils the souls of the departed. Historians of the ancient world do not dispute that powerful priests were fully capable of mounting elaborate deceptions–and a recent geological report on the far better known Greek oracle site at Delphi demonstrated that fissures in the rocks nearby brought intoxicating and anaesthetic gases to the surface at that spot, suggesting that it may have been selected and used for a purpose much like the one Paget proposed at Baiæ.

Yet much remains mysterious about the Great Antrum–not least the vexed question of how ancient builders, working with primitive tools at the end of the Bronze Age, could possibly have known of the existence of the “River Styx,” much less excavated a tunnel that so neatly intercepted it. There is no trace of the boiling river at the surface–and it was not until the 1970s, after Paget’s death, that his collaborators finally discovered, by injecting colored dyes into its waters, that it flows into the sea miles away, on the northern side of Cape Miseno.

Paget found one foot-high fragment of roughly painted graffiti close to the entrance of the tunnels. He interpreted the first line to read “Illius” (“of that”), and the second as a shorthand symbol representing a prayer to the Greek goddess Hera.

Little seems to have changed at Baiæ since Paget’s day. His discoveries have made remarkably little impact on tourism at the ancient resort, and even today the network of passages he worked so long to clear remain locked and barely visited. A local guide can be hired, but the complex remains difficult, hot and uncomfortable to visit. Little attempt is made to exploit the idea that it was once thought to be an entrance to the underworld, and, pending reinvestigation by trained archaeologists, not much more can be said about the tunnels’ origin and purpose. But even among the many mysteries of the ancient world, the Great Antrum on the Bay of Naples surely remains among the most intriguing.

Sources
C.F. Hardie. “The Great Antrum at Baiae.” Papers of the British School at Rome 37 (1969); Peter James and Nick Thorpe. Ancient Inventions. London: Michael O’Mara, 1995; A.G. McKay. Cumae and the Phlegraean Fields. Hamilton, Ont: Cromlech Press, 1972; Daniel Ogden. Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; R.F. Paget. “The ‘Great Antrum’ at Baiae: a Preliminary Report. Papers of the British School at Rome 35 (1967); R.F. Paget. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Story of the Finding and Identifications of the Lost Entrance to Hades, the Oracle of the Dead, the River Styx and the Infernal Regions of the Greeks. London: Robert Hale, 1967; H.W. Parke. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1988; P.B. Wale. “A conversation for ‘The Antrum of Initiation, Baia. Italy’.” BBC h2g2, accessed 12 August 2012; Fikrut Yegul. “The Thermo-Mineral Complex at Baiae and De Balneis Puteolanis.” The Art Bulletin 78:1, March 1996.

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.

Ida M. Tarbell, c. 1904. Photo: Wikipedia

At the age of 14, Ida Tarbell witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, in which dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a daunting choice that seemed to come out of nowhere: sell their businesses to the shrewd, confident 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his newly incorporated Standard Oil Company, or attempt to compete and face ruin.  She didn’t understand it at the time, not all of it, anyway, but she would never forget the wretched effects of “the oil war” of 1872, which enabled Rockefeller to leave Cleveland owning 85 percent of the city’s oil refineries.

Tarbell was, in effect, a young woman betrayed, not by a straying lover but by Standard Oil’s secret deals with the major railroads—a collusive scheme that allowed the company to crush not only her father’s business, but all of its competitors. Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with a 19-part series in McClure’s magazine, a masterpiece of journalism and an unrelenting indictment that brought down one of history’s greatest tycoons and effectively broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly. By dint of what she termed “steady, painstaking work,” Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and—with the help of Mark Twain—candid conversations with Standard Oil’s most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which sealed the company’s fate.

She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era. “They had never played fair,” Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil, “and that ruined their greatness for me.”

John D. Rockefeller Sr., c. 1875. Photo: Wikipedia

Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in 1857, in a log cabin in Hatch Hollow, in Western Pennsylvania’s oil region. Her father, Frank Tarbell, spent years building oil storage tanks but began to prosper once he switched to oil production and refining. “There was ease such as we had never known; luxuries we had never heard of,” she later wrote.  Her town of Titusville and surrounding areas in the Oil Creek Valley “had been developed into an organized industry which was now believed to have a splendid future. Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between the eyes.”

That blow came in the form of the South Improvement Company, a corporation established in 1871 and widely viewed as an effort by Rockefeller and Standard Oil in Ohio to control the oil and gas industries in the region. In a secret alliance with Rockefeller, the three major railroads that ran through Cleveland—the Pennsylvania, the Erie and the New York Central—agreed to raise their shipping fees while paying “rebates” and “drawbacks” to him.

Word of the South Improvement Company’s scheme leaked to newspapers, and independent oilmen in the region were outraged. “A wonderful row followed,” Tarbell wrote. “There were nightly anti-monopoly meetings, violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground, their buyers turned out of the oil exchanges.”

Tarbell recalled her father coming home grim-faced, his good humor gone and his contempt directed no longer at the South Improvement Company but at a “new name, that of the Standard Oil company.” Franklin Tarbell and the other small oil refiners pleaded with state and federal officials to crack down on the business practices that were destined to ruin them, and by April of 1872 the Pennsylvania legislature repealed the South Improvement Company’s charter before a single transaction was made. But the damage had already been done. In just six weeks, the threat of an impending alliance allowed Rockefeller to buy 22 of his 26 competitors in Cleveland. “Take Standard Oil Stock,” Rockefeller told them, “and your family will never know want.” Most who accepted the buyouts did indeed become rich. Franklin Tarbell resisted and continued to produce independently, but struggled to earn a decent living. His daughter wrote that she was devastated by the “hate, suspicion and fear that engulfed the community” after the Standard Oil ruckus. Franklin Tarbell’s partner, “ruined by the complex situation,” killed himself, and Tarbell was forced to mortgage the family home to meet his company’s debts.

Rockefeller denied any conspiracy at the time, but years later, he admitted in an interview that “rebates and drawbacks were a common practice for years preceding and following this history. So much of the clamor against rebates and drawbacks came from people who knew nothing about business. Who can buy beef the cheaper—the housewife for her family, the steward for a club or hotel, or the quartermaster or commissary for an army? Who is entitled to better rebates from a railroad, those who give it for transportation 5,000 barrels a day, or those who give 500 barrels—or 50 barrels?”

Presumably, with Rockefeller’s plan uncovered in Cleveland, his efforts to corner the market would be stopped. But in fact, Rockefeller had already accomplished what he had set out to do. As his biographer Ron Chernow wrote, “Once he had a monopoly over the Cleveland refineries, he then marched on and did the same thing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and the other refining centers. So that was really the major turning point in his career, and it was really one of the most shameful episodes in his career.”

Still a teenager, Ida Tarbell was deeply impressed by Rockefeller’s machinations. “There was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege of any sort,” she later wrote. “It was all pretty hazy, to be sure, but it still was well, at 15, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one.”

At age 19, she went to Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. But after studying biology, Tarbell came to realize that she preferred writing. She took an editing job for a teaching publication and eventually worked her way up to managing editor before moving to Paris in 1890 to write. It was there that she met Samuel McClure, who offered her a position at McClure’s magazine. There, Tarbell wrote a long and well-received series on Napoleon Bonaparte, which led to an immensely popular 20-part series on Abraham Lincoln. It doubled the magazine’s circulation, made her a leading authority on the early life of the former president, and landed her a book deal.

Standard Oil Company Refinery No. 1, Cleveland, Ohio, 1889. Photo: Wikipedia

In 1900, nearly three decades after the Cleveland Massacre, Tarbell set her sights on what would become “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” a 19-part series (and book) that, as one writer described, “fed the antitrust frenzy by verifying what many had suspected for years: the pattern of deceit, secrecy and unregulated concentration of power that characterized Gilded Age business practice with its ‘commercial Machiavellianism.’ ”

Ironically, Tarbell began her research by interviewing one of her father’s former fellow independents back in Pennsylvania—Henry H. Rogers. After the Cleveland Massacre, Rogers spent 25 years working alongside Rockefeller, building Standard Oil into one of the first and largest multinational corporations in the world. Rogers, it seems, may have been under the impression, after the McClure’s series on Lincoln, that Tarbell was writing a flattering piece on him; he reached out to her through his good friend Mark Twain. Meeting her in his home, Rogers was remarkably candid in some regards, even going to far as to provide her with internal documents and explaining the use of drawbacks in Standard Oil’s history.

Tarbell recalled that Rogers also arranged for her to interview another of Rockefeller’s partners, Henry Flagler, who refused to give specifics about the origins of the South Improvement Company. Instead, she sat “listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered him,” she wrote. “I was never happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr. Flagler was to have me go.”

Franklin Tarbell warned Ida that Rockefeller and Standard Oil were capable of crushing her, just as they’d crushed her home town of Titusville.  But his daughter was relentless.  As the articles began to appear in McClure’s in 1902, Rogers continued to speak with Tarbell, much to her surprise.  And after he went on record defending the efficiency of current Standard Oil business practices, “his face went white with rage” to find that Tarbell had uncovered documents that showed the company was still colluding with the railroads to snuff out its competition.

“Where did you get that stuff?” Rogers said angrily, pointing to the magazine. Tarbell informed him that his claims of “legitimate competition” were false. “You know this bookkeeping record is true,” she told him.

Tarbell never considered herself a writer of talent. “I was not a writer, and I knew it,” she said. But she believed her diligent research and commitment (she spent years examining hundreds of thousands of documents across the country, revealing strong-arm tactics, espionage and collusion) “ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write.”

In The History of the Standard Oil Company, she managed to combine a thorough understanding of the inner workings of Rockefeller’s trust and his interest in the oil business, with simple, dramatic and elegant prose. While avoiding a condemnation of capitalism itself and acknowledging Rockefeller’s brilliance, she did not hesitate to criticize the man for stooping to unethical business practices in pursuit of his many conquests:

It takes time to crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller’s most impressive characteristics is patience. There never was a more patient man, or one who could dare more while he waited. The folly of hurrying, the folly of discouragement, for one who would succeed, went hand in hand. Everything must be ready before he acted, but while you wait you must prepare, must think, work. “You must put in, if you would take out.” His instinct for the money opportunity in things was amazing, his perception of the value of seizing this or that particular invention, plant, market, was unerring. He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded. And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipe line. Nothing, for little things grow.

Ida Tarbell concluded her series with a two-part character study of Rockefeller, where she described him as a “living mummy,” adding, “our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises.” Public fury over the exposé is credited with the eventual breakup of Standard Oil, which came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that the company was violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Tarbell ultimately forced Americans to consider that the nation’s best-known tycoon was using nefarious tactics to crush legitimate competitors, driving honest men from business. Ultimately, Standard Oil was broken into “baby Standards,” which include ExxonMobil and Chevron today. Rockefeller, a great philanthropist, was deeply stung by Tarbell’s investigation. He referred to her as “that poisonous woman,” but told advisers not to comment on the series or any of the allegations. “Not a word,” Rockefeller told them. “Not a word about that misguided woman.”

Almost 40 years after the Cleveland Massacre cast a pall over Titusville, Ida Tarbell, in her own way, was able to hold the conglomerate accountable. She died in Connecticut in 1944, at the age of 86. New York University placed her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, at No. 5 on a list of the top 100 works of 20th^-century American journalism.

Sources

Books: Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, Macmillan, 1939.  Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, The Macmillan Company, 1904. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Random House, 1998.  Steve Weinbert, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Clarice Stasz, The Rockefeller Women: Dynasty of Piety, Privacy, and Service, iUniverse, 2000.

Articles: “The Rockefellers,” American Experience, PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/sfeature/sf_7.html  “The Lessons of Ida Tarbell, by Steve Weinberg, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, 1997, http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/lessons-ida-tarbell  “Ida Tarbell and the Standard Oil Company: Her Attack on the Standard Oil Company and the Influence it had Throughout Society,” by Lee Hee Yoon, http://hylee223.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/research-paper-ida-tarbell-and-the-standard-oil-company/

Ruins of the Mulka store, in the outback of South Australia. Even at its peak it received only two or three visitors a week and was the only shop in more than 70,000 desolate square miles.

Harrods, in the bustling heart of London, is in a good location for a shop. So is the Macy’s in Herald Square, which boasts of serving 350,000 New Yorkers every day at Christmas time. Whereas down at the Mulka Store, in the furthermost reaches of South Australia, George and Mabel Aiston used to think themselves lucky if they pulled in a customer a week.

Mulka’s proper name is Mulkaundracooracooratarraninna, a long name for a place that is a long way from anywhere. It stands on an apology for a road known as the Birdsville Track—until quite recently no more than a set of tire prints stretching, as the locals put it, “from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond.” The track begins in Marree, a very small outback town, and winds its way up to Birdsville, a considerably smaller one (“seven iron houses burning in the sun between two deserts”) many hundreds of miles to the north. Along the way it inches over the impenetrable Ooroowillanie sandhills and traverses Cooper Creek, a dried-up river bed that occasionally floods to place a five-mile-wide obstacle in the path of unwary travelers, before skirting the tire-puncturing fringes of the Sturt Stony Desert.

Make your way past all those obstacles, and, “after jogging all day over the treeless plain,” you’d eventually stumble across the Mulka Store, nestled beneath a single clump of pepper trees. To one side of the shop, like some ever-present intimation of mortality, lay the lonely fenced-off grave of Edith Scobie, “died December 31 1892 aged 15 years 4 months”—quite possibly of the sort of ailment that is fatal only when you live a week’s journey from the nearest doctor. To the rear was nothing but the “everlasting sandhills, now transformed to a delicate salmon hue in the setting sun.” And in front, beside a windswept garden gate, “a board sign which announced in fading paint but one word: STORE. Just in case the traveler might be in some doubt.”

Main road near Mulka in about 1950

Mulka itself stands roughly at the midway point along the Birdsville Track. It is 150 miles from the nearest hamlet, in the middle of a still plain of awesome grandeur and unforgiving hostility where the landscape (as the poet Douglas Stewart put it) “shimmers in the corrugated air.” Straying from the track, which is more than possible in bad weather, can easily be fatal; in 1963, just a few miles up the road from Mulka, the five members of the Page family, two of them under 10 years old, veered off the road, got lost, and died very slowly of thirst a few days later.

That tragedy took place in the height of summer, when daytime temperatures routinely top 125 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end and vast dust storms hundreds of miles across scour the country raw, but Mulka, for all its lonely beauty, is a harsh environment even at the best of times. There is no natural supply of water, and in fact the place owes its existence to an old Australian government scheme to exploit the underground Great Artesian Basin: around 1900, a series of boreholes up to 5,000 feet deep were sunk far below the parched desert to bring up water from this endless underground reservoir. The idea was to develop the Birdsville Track as a droving route for cattle on their way from the big stations of central Queensland to the railheads north of Adelaide, and at its peak, before corrosion of the pipes reduced the flow to a trickle, the Mulka bore was good for 800,000 gallons a day—soft water with an unpleasantly metallic taste that came up under pressure and steaming in the heat, but enough to satisfy all 40,000 head of cattle that passed along the track each year.

"Poddy" Aiston, c.1902

You will not be surprised to learn that George Aiston (1879-1943), the indomitable proprietor of the Mulka Store, was the sort of larger-than-life character who has always flourished in the Australian outback. Returning from service in the Boer War around 1902, Aiston—”Poddy” to his friends—signed up as a constable with the South Australia mounted police and found himself posted to Mungerannie, a spot 25 miles north of Mulka, where he combined the duties of policing the Birdsville Track on camel-back with the role of Sub-Protector of Aborigines. Although he had practically no formal education, Aiston was a man of quick intelligence and surprisingly wide interests; he lectured occasionally on ethnography at the University of Melbourne and corresponded with academics and authorities from all over the world. For some years the Mulka Store was home to a large assortment of medieval armor and what was reckoned to have the best collection of dueling pistols outside Europe, and Poddy was also sympathetic to, and fascinated by, the indigenous peoples of Australia. Over the years, he befriended many of them, learning their languages, and he gradually became a world-renowned expert in their culture, building up a significant collection of Aboriginal artifacts, from spears and throwing sticks and boomerangs to pointing bones (used to work magic and curse enemies) and works of art. It’s very lucky that he did, for Aiston’s years as Sub-Protector of Aborigines coincided with the final collapse of the local culture, and it is largely thanks to the work he did, and the photographs he took, that we know as much as we do about central Austalian folklore and corroborees and rain-making ceremonies, and all the other aspects of traditional nomadic life. Poddy set these details down in 1924 in a book co-written with George Horne that’s still in print and still worth reading: Savage Life in Central Australia.

Scholar though he was at heart, Aiston was by necessity also an intensely practical man. Informed in 1923 that he was to be transferred out of the district he had grown to love, he resigned from the police and, with his wife, took a lease on the land around the Mulka bore. There he built his store by hand, adding to it over the years until it became quite a substantial dwelling. “This house,” he informed a friend in May 1925,

is a queer patchwork of rooms, none of them of the same height and gables running in all directions. I am enlarging the kitchen and dining room and raising them to the level of my store and our bedroom… It is my intention to build two bedrooms on the other side to correspond, and will then pull down the three rooms… for an extension of the dining room and to make a sitting room; it will be rather a nice place when it is finished.

Being the only shop of any kind in a district of well over 70,000 square miles, Aiston and his wife tended to maintain the broadest range of stock imaginable, though inevitably they catered chiefly for the needs of passing drovers and the owners of the cattle stations up and down the track. “My shop often amuses me,” Poddy wrote soon after its opening. “I have just about everything from ribbons to horseshoes. Just above my head there are three pairs of Mexican spurs…. I have enough medicines to stock a chemist’s shop.” For some years he doubled up as a blacksmith and tacksman, shoeing the horses of passing drovers, and it was only in 1927 that he finally found it worthwhile to open up a petrol depot as motor vehicles at last replaced horses and camels as the chief means of transportation on the track. As late as 1948, shortly after Poddy’s death, when the writer George Farwell called on Mrs. Aiston at the Mulka Store, the stock remained a source of quiet astonishment, and though the customer base remained minuscule, the few who did call would spend anywhere from £25 to £60 a time—that when £25 was still a large sum of money.

Here was a real bush store, with all manner of interesting goods; alongside bags of flour and sugar were bridles, bush blankets, shining new quartpots, Bedourie camp-ovens, round cheeses, waterbags, and some boxes of old-style phonograph cylinders, manufactured when Sousa’s Band first stirred the world.

The round cheeses are not such a strange addition to the stock as they at first appear; they were the fast food of their day, ideal tucker for drovers trekking up and down the track on horseback. There are clues, nonetheless, that the Aistons’ eccentricities were eventually exacerbated by the isolation and the heat. Tom Kruse, the renowned mailman of the Birdsville Track, who made the journey from Marree to the Queensland border once a fortnight in a lorry laden with letters and supplies, remembered that “for years old Poddy used to have a standing order for condensed milk and nectarines. Might be a few, might be half a ton.” Despite this, Kruse—himself an eternally resourceful character—retained an immense respect for Aiston. “He was a most remarkable man and he would have been a legend no matter where he lived,” he said. “It just seemed that the Birdsville Track was the most unlikely place in the world to find such an extraordinary personality.”

George and Mabel Aiston outside the Mulka Store

Even Poddy Aiston, though, could not control the weather, and though his store got off to a profitable start—the penny-an-animal he charged drovers to water their cattle at his borehole mounted up—he and his wife were nearly ruined by the record drought that quickly destroyed the lives of almost every outback dweller between 1927 and 1934. Before the long rainless period set in, there were cattle stations all along the Birdsville Track, the nearest of them only nine miles from Mulka, but gradually, one by one, the drought destroyed the profitability of these stations and the owners were forced to sell up or simply to abandon their properties. As early as 1929, the Aistons had lost practically their entire customer base, as Poddy confessed in another letter, this one written in the southern summer of 1929:

This drought is the worst on record…. There is no-one left on the road between here and Marree, all the rest have just chucked it up and left. Crombie’s place is deserted and there is only one other house above that to Birsdville that is occupied.

Aiston and his wife stayed put, struggling to make a living, but their hopes of an early and comfortable retirement were shattered by the seven-year drought, and the couple had no option but to stay in business until Poddy’s death in 1943. After that, Mabel Aiston continued to run the store for eight more years, finally retiring, in her middle 70s, in 1951. For a long time, it seems, she had resisted even that, telling George Farwell that she felt too attached to the land to leave it.

For Farwell, she was the perfect shopkeeper:

The years seemed to have overlooked Mrs. Aiston, for at the age of 73 she looked as fresh and light-hearted as when I had first met her, despite her lonely widowed life and the trying heat of summer. She greeted me as casually as if I had only been absent a few days; we took up a year-old conversation where we had left off…. With her grey hair, spectacles, apron, neatly-folded hands and quiet friendliness across the counter of her store, she reminded one of the typical shopkeeper of the small suburbs, where kiddies go for a bag of lollies or a penny ice-cream. That is, until you heard her begin to talk about this country, which she loved.

She wasn’t isolated, she insisted, for now that the drought had finally broken the track had grown busier—indeed, after years of nothingness, it now seemed to be almost bustling again:

There’s plenty of people passing here. Tom Kruse comes up each fortnight, and usually he has somebody new with him. Besides, Ooriwilannie’s only nine miles up the track. You know the Wilsons have moved in there now? They’re always driving down to see how I am. They’ve got to come two or three times a week to get water from the bore.

Sometimes, she added, “I feel I ought to go South. I’d have to go Inside somewhere. But what is there down there for an old woman like me? I’d be lost. I often think I may as well leave my bones here as anywhere.”

She wouldn’t be lonely, after all. She’d still have Edith Scobie, with the Pages yet to come.

Grave of Edith Scobie (1877-1892), Mulka Store. The inscription on her sand-scoured tombstone, huddled beneath a solitary gumtree, reads: "Here lies embalmed in careful parents' tears/A virgin branch cropped in its tender years."

Page family grave, near Deadman's Hill, Mulka. The five members of the family were buried without any sort of ceremony in a trench gouged out by a Super Scooper. The inscription on the aluminium cross reads simply: "The Pages Perished Dec 1963"

Sources

State Library of New South Wales. ML A 2535 – A 2537/CY 605: George Aiston letters to W.H. Gill, 1920-1940; Harry Ding. Thirty Years With Men: Recollections of the Pioneering Years of Transportation in the Deserts of ‘Outback’ Australia. Walcha, NSW: Rotary Club of Walcha, 1989; George Farwell. Land of Mirage: the Story of Men, Cattle and Camels on the Birdsville Track. London: Cassell, 1950; Lois Litchfield. Marree and the Tracks Beyond. Adelaide: the author, 1983; Kristin Weidenbach. Mailman of the Birdsville Track: the Story of Tom Kruse. Sydney: Hachette, 2004.

Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates with ponies. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

For Lawrence Oates, the race to the South Pole had a portentous start. Just two days after the Terra Nova Expedition left New Zealand in November 1910, a violent storm killed two of the 19 ponies in Oates’s care and nearly sank the ship. His journey ended almost two years later, when he stepped out of a tent and into the teeth of an Antarctic blizzard after uttering ten words that would bring tears of pride to mourning Britons. During the long months in between, Oates’s concern for the ponies paralleled his growing disillusionment with the expedition’s leader, Robert Falcon Scott.

Oates had paid one thousand pounds for the privilege of joining Scott on an expedition that was supposed to combine exploration with scientific research. It quickly became a race to the South Pole after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, already at sea with a crew aboard the Fram, abruptly changed his announced plan to go to the North Pole. “BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC—AMUNDSEN,” read the telegram he sent to Scott. It was clear that Amundsen would leave the collecting of rock specimens and penguin eggs to the Brits; he wanted simply to arrive first at the pole and return home to claim glory on the lecture circuit.

Oates, circa 1911. Photo: Wikipedia

Born in 1880 to a wealthy English family, Lawrence Oates attended Eton before serving as a junior officer in the Second Boer War.  A gunshot wound in a skirmish that earned Oates the nickname “Never Surrender” shattered his thigh, leaving his left leg an inch shorter than his right.

Still, Robert Scott wanted Oates along for the expedition, but once Oates made it to New Zealand, he was startled to see that a crew member (who knew dogs but not horses) had already purchased ponies in Manchuria for five pounds apiece. They were “the greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen,” Oates said. From past expeditions, Scott had deduced that white or gray ponies were stronger than darker horses, though there was no scientific evidence for that. When Oates told him that the Manchurian ponies were unfit for the expedition, Scott bristled and disagreed. Oates seethed and stormed away.

Inspecting the supplies, Oates quickly surmised that there was not enough fodder, so he bought two extra tons with his own money and smuggled the feed aboard the Terra Nova. When, to great fanfare, Scott and his crew set off from New Zealand for Antarctica on November 29, 1910, Oates was already questioning the expedition in letters home to his mother: “If he [Amundsen] gets to the Pole first we shall come home with our tails between our legs and make no mistake. I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves all that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc. etc. is rot and if we fail it will only make us look more foolish.” Oates went on to praise Amundsen for planning to use dogs and skis rather than walking beside horses. “If Scott does anything silly such as underfeeding his ponies he will be beaten as sure as death.”

After a harrowingly slow journey through pack ice, the Terra Nova arrived at Ross Island in Antarctica on January 4, 1911. The men unloaded and set up base at Camp Evans, as some crew members set off in February on an excursion in the Bay of Whales, off the Ross Ice Shelf—where they caught sight of Amundsen’s Fram at anchor. The next morning they saw Amundsen himself, crossing the ice at a blistering pace on his dog sled as he readied his animals for an assault on the South Pole, some 900 miles away. Scott’s men had had nothing but trouble with their own dogs, and their ponies could only plod along on the depot-laying journeys they were making to store supplies for the pole run.

Given their weight and thin legs, the ponies would plunge through the top layer of snow; homemade snowshoes worked only on some of them. On one journey, a pony fell and the dogs pounced, ripping at its flesh. Oates knew enough to keep the ponies away from the shore, having learned that several ponies on Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907-1909) had fallen dead after eating salty sand there. But he also knew some of his animals simply would not hold up on any lengthy journey. He suggested to Scott that they kill the weaker ones and store the meat for the dogs at depots on the way to the pole. Scott would have none of it, even though he knew that Amundsen was planning to kill many of his 97 Greenland dogs for the same purpose.

“I have had more than enough of this cruelty to animals,” Scott replied, “and I’m not going to defy my feelings for the sake of a few days’ march.”

“I’m afraid you’ll regret it, Sir,” Oates answered.

The Terra Nova crews continued with their depot-laying runs, with the dogs becoming “thin as rakes” from long days of heavy work and light rations. Two ponies died of exhaustion during a blizzard. Oates continued to question Scott’s planning. In March of 1911, with expedition members camped on the ice in McMurdo Sound, a crew woke in the middle of the night to a loud cracking noise; they left their tents to discover they were stranded on a moving ice floe. Floating beside them on another floe were the ponies.

The men hopped over to the animals and began moving them from floe to flow, trying to get them back to the Ross Ice Shelf to safety. It was slow work, as they often had to wait for another floe to drift close enough to make any progress at all.

Then a pod of killer whales began circling the floe, poking their heads out of the water to see over the floe’s edge, their eyes trained on the ponies. As Henry Bowers described in his diary, “the huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes only a few yards from us at times, and always around us, are among the most disconcerting recollections I have of that day. The immense fins were bad enough, but when they started a perpendicular dodge they were positively beastly.”

Oates, Scott and others came to help, with Scott worried about losing his men, let alone his ponies. Soon, more than a dozen orcas were circling, spooking the ponies until they toppled into the water. Oates and Bowers tried to pull them to safety, but they proved too heavy. One pony survived by swimming to thicker ice. Bowers finished off the rest with a pick axe so the orcas at least wouldn’t eat them alive.

“These incidents were too terrible,” Scott wrote.

Worse was to come. In November 1911, Oates left Cape Evans with 14 other men, including Scott, for the South Pole. The depots had been stocked with food and supplies along the route. “Scott’s ignorance about marching with animals is colossal,” Oates would write. “Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition.… He is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere.”

Scott's party at the South Pole, from left to righ:, Wilson, Bowers, Evans, Scott and Oates. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Unlike Scott, Amundsen paid attention to every detail, from the proper feeding of both dogs and men to the packing and unpacking of the loads they would carry, to the most efficient ski equipment for various mixtures of snow and ice. His team traveled twice as fast as Scott’s, which had resorted to manhauling their sledges.

By the time Scott and his final group of Oates, Bowers, Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans had reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, they saw a black flag whipping in the wind. “The worst has happened,” Scott wrote. Amundsen had beaten them by more than a month.

“The POLE,” Scott wrote. “Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day—add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22 degrees, and companions laboring on with cold feet and hands.… Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”

The return to Camp Evans was sure to be “dreadfully long and monotonous,” Scott wrote. It wasn’t monotonous. Edgar Evans took a fall on February 4th and became “dull and incapable,” according to Scott; he died two weeks later after another fall near the Beardmore Glacier. The four survivors were suffering from frostbite and malnutrition, but seemingly constant blizzards, temperatures of 40 degrees below zero and snowblindness limited their progress back to camp.

Oates, in particular, was suffering. His old war wound now practically crippled him, and his feet were “probably gangrene,” according to Ross D.E. MacPhee’s Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole. Oates asked Scott, Bowers and Wilson to go on without him, but the men refused. Trapped in their tent during a blizzard on March 16th or 17th (Scott’s journal no longer recorded dates), with food and supplies nearly gone, Oates stood up. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said—his last ten words.

The others knew he was going to sacrifice himself to increase their odds of returning safely, and they tried to dissuade him. But Oates didn’t even bother to put his boots on before disappearing into the storm. He was 31. “It was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman,” Scott wrote.

John Charles Dollman's A Very Gallant Gentleman, 1913. Photo: Wikipedia

Two weeks later, Scott himself was the last to go. “Had we lived,” Scott wrote in one of his last diary entries, “I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.  These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

Roald Amundsen was already telling his tale, one of triumph and a relatively easy journey to and from the South Pole. Having sailed the Fram into Tasmania earlier in March, he knew nothing of Scott’s ordeal—only that there had been no sign of the Brits at the pole when the Norwegians arrived. Not until October 1912 did the weather improve enough for a relief expedition from Terra Nova to head out in search of Scott and his men. The next month they came upon Scott’s last camp and cleared the snow from the tent. Inside, they discovered the three dead men in their sleeping bags. Oates’s body was never found.

Sources

Books: Ross D.E. MacPhee, Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole, American Museum of Natural History and Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2010.  Robert Falcon Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996.  David Crane, Scott of the Antarctic: A Biography, Vintage Books, 2005.  Roland Huntford, Scott & Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole, Putnam, 1980.

The last photo of Mawson's Far Eastern Party, taken when they left the Australasian Antarctic Party's base camp on November 10, 1912. By January 10, 1913, two of the three men would be dead, and expedition leader Douglas Mawson would find himself exhausted, ill and still more than 160 miles from the nearest human being. Photo: State Library of New South Wales via Wikicommons.

Even today, with advanced foods, and radios, and insulated clothing, a journey on foot across Antarctica is one of the harshest tests a human being can be asked to endure. A hundred years ago, it was worse. Then, wool clothing absorbed snow and damp. High-energy food came in an unappetizing mix of rendered fats called pemmican. Worst of all, extremes of cold pervaded everything; Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who sailed with Captain Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition of 1910-13, recalled that his teeth, “the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces” and fell victim to temperatures that plunged as low as -77 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cherry-Garrard survived to write an account of his adventures, a book he titled The Worst Journey in the World. But even his Antarctic trek—made in total darkness in the depths of the Southern winter—was not quite so appalling as the desperate march faced one year later by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson. Mawson’s journey has gone down in the annals of polar exploration as probably the most terrible ever undertaken in Antarctica.

Douglas Mawson, leader and sole survivor of the Far Eastern Sledge Party, in 1913. Photo: Wikicommons.

In 1912, when he set sail across the Southern Ocean, Mawson was 30 years old and already acclaimed as one of the best geologists of his generation. Born in Yorkshire, England, but happily settled in Australia, he had declined the chance to join Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition in order to lead the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, whose chief purpose was to explore and map some of the most remote fastnesses of the white continent. Tall, lean, balding, earnest and determined, Mawson was an Antarctic veteran, a supreme organizer and physically tough.

The Australasian party anchored in Commonwealth Bay, an especially remote part of the Antarctic coast, in January 1912. Over the next few months, wind speeds on the coast averaged 50 m.p.h. and sometimes topped 200, and blizzards were almost constant. Mawson’s plan was to split his expedition into four groups, one to man base camp and the other three to head into the interior to do scientific work. He nominated himself to lead what was known as the Far Eastern Shore Party—a three-man team assigned to survey several glaciers hundreds of miles from base. It was an especially risky assignment. Mawson and his men have the furthest to travel, and hence the heaviest loads to carry, and they would have to cross an area pitted with deep crevasses, each concealed by snow.

Mawson selected two companions to join him. Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis, a British army officer, was the expedition’s dog handler. Ninnis’s close friend Xavier Mertz, was a 28-year-old Swiss lawyer whose chief qualifications for the trek were his idiosyncratic English—a source of great amusement to the other two—his constant high spirits, and his standing as a champion cross-country skier.

A member of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition leans into a 100 m.p.h. wind at base camp to hack out ice for cooking. Photo: Wikicommons.

The explorers took three sledges, pulled by a total of 16 huskies and loaded with a combined 1,720 pounds of food, survival gear and scientific instruments. Mawson limited each man to a minimum of personal possessions. Nennis chose a volume of Thackeray, Mertz a collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Mawson took his diary and a photograph of his fiancée, an upper-class Australian woman named Francisca Delprait, but known to all as Paquita.

At first Mawson’s party made good time. Departing from Commonwealth Bay on November 10, 1912, they traveled 300 miles by December 13. Almost everything was going according to plan; the three men reduced their load as they ate their way through their supplies, and only a couple of sick dogs had hindered their progress.

Xavier Mertz

Even so, Mawson felt troubled by a series of peculiar incidents which—he would write later—might have suggested to a superstitious man that something was badly amiss. First he had a strange dream one night, a vision of his father. Mawson had left his parents in good health, but the dream occurred, he would later realize, shortly after his father had unexpectedly sickened and died. Then the explorers found one husky, which had been pregnant, devouring her own puppies. This was normal for dogs in such extreme conditions, but it unsettled the men—doubly so when, far inland and out of nowhere, a petrel smashed into the side of Ninnis’s sledge. “Where could it have come from?” Mertz scribbled in his notebook.

Now a series of near-disasters made the men begin to feel that their luck must be running out. Three times Ninnis almost plunged into concealed cracks in the ice. Mawson was suffering from a split lip that sent shafts of pain shooting across the left side of his face. Ninnis had a bout of snow-blindness and developed an abcess at the tip of one finger. When the pain became too much for him to bear, Mawson lanced it with a pocket knife—without benefit of anesthetic.

On the evening of December 13, 1912, the three explorers pitched camp in the middle of yet another glacier. Mawson abandoned one of their three sledges and redistributed the load on the two others. Then the men slept fitfully, disturbed by distant booms and cracking deep below them. Mawson and Ninnis did not know what to make of the noises, but they frightened Mertz, whose long experience of snowfields taught him that warmer air had made the ground ahead of them unstable. “The snow masses must have been collapsing their arches,” he wrote. “The sound was like the distant thunder of cannon.”

Bellgrave Ninnis

Next day dawned sunny and warm by Antarctic standards, just 11 degrees below freezing. The party continued to make good time, and at noon Mawson halted briefly to shoot the sun in order to determine their position. He was standing on the runners of his moving sledge, completing his calculations, when he became aware that Mertz, who was skiing ahead of the sledges, had stopped singing his Swiss student songs and had raised one ski pole in the air to signal that he had encountered a crevasse. Mawson called back to warn to Ninnis before returning to his calculations. It was only several minutes later that he noticed that Mertz had halted again and was looking back in alarm. Twisting around, Mawson realized that Ninnis and his sledge and dogs had vanished.

Mawson and Mertz hurried back a quarter-mile to where they had crossed the crevasse, praying that their companion had been lost to view behind a rise in the ground. Instead they discovered a yawning chasm in the snow 11 feet across. Crawling forward on his stomach and peering into the void, Mawson dimly made out a narrow ledge far below him. He saw two dogs lying on it: one dead, the other moaning and writhing. Below the ledge, the walls of the crevasse plunged down into darkness.

Frantically, Mawson called Ninnis’s name, again and again. Nothing came back but the echo. Using a knotted fishing line, he sounded the depth to the ice ledge and found it to be 150 feet—too far to climb down to. He and Mertz took turns calling for their companion for more than five hours, hoping that he had merely been stunned. Eventually, giving up, they pondered the mystery of why Ninnis had plunged into a crevasse that the others had crossed safely. Mawson concluded that his companion’s fatal error had been to run beside his sledge rather than stand astride its runners, as he had done. With his weight concentrated on just a few square inches of snow, Ninnis had exceeded the load that the crevasse lid would bear. The fault, though, was Mawson’s; as leader, he could have insisted on skis, or at least snowshoes, for his men.

Mawson and Mertz read the burial service at the lip of the void and paused to take stock. Their situation was clearly desperate. When the party had split their supplies between the two remaining sledges, Mawson had assumed that the lead sled was far more likely to encounter difficulties, so Ninnis’s sledge had been loaded with most of their food supplies and their tent. “Practically all the food had gone—[and] spade, pick, tent,” Mawson wrote. All that remained was sleeping bags and food to last a week and a half. “We considered it a possibility to get through to Winter Quarters by eating dogs,” he added, “so 9 hours after the accident started back, but terribly handicapped. May God help us.”

Lieutenant Ninnis running alongside his sledge, a habit that would cost him his life—and risk those of the two companions he left behind.

The first stage of the return journey was a “mad dash,” Mawson noted, to the spot where they had camped the previous night. There he and Mertz recovered the sledge they had abandoned, and Mawson used his pocket knife to hack its runners into poles for some spare canvas. Now they had shelter, but there was still the matter of deciding how to attempt the return journey. They had left no food depots on their way out; their choices were to head for the sea—a route that was longer but offered the chance of seals to eat and the slim possibility that they might sight the expedition’s supply ship—or to go back the way they’d come. Mawson selected the latter course. He and Mertz killed the weakest of their remaining dogs, ate what they could of its stringy flesh and liver, and fed what was left to the other huskies.

For the first few days they made good time, but soon Mawson went snow-blind. The pain was agonizing, and though Mertz bathed his leader’s eyes with a solution of zinc sulphate and cocaine, the pair had to slow down. Then they marched into a whiteout, seeing “nothing but greyness,” Mertz scribbled in his notebook, and two huskies collapsed. The men had to harness themselves to the sled to continue.

Each night’s rations were less palatable than the last. Learning by experiment, Mawson found that “it was worth the while spending some time in boiling the dogs’ meat thoroughly. Thus a tasty soup was prepared as well as a supply of edible meat in which the muscular tissue and the gristle were reduced to the consistency of a jelly. The paws took longest of all to cook, but, treated to lengthy stewing, they became quite digestible.” Even so, the two men’s physical condition rapidly deteriorated. Mertz, Mawson wrote in his diary on January 5, 1913, “is generally in a very bad condition… skin coming off legs, etc.” Despite his leader’s desperation to keep moving, Mertz insisted that a day’s rest might revive him, and the pair spent 24 hours huddled in their sleeping bags.

The route taken by the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, showing glaciers Mawson named for Mertz and Ninnis. Click to view in higher resolution.

“Things are in a most serious state for both of us—if he cannot go 8 or 10 m[iles] a day, in a day or two we are doomed,” Mawson wrote on January 6. “I could pull through myself with the provisions at hand but I cannot leave him. His heart seems to have gone. It is very hard for me—to be within 100 m[iles] of the Hut and in such a position is awful.”

The next morning Mawson awoke to find his companion delirious; worse, he had developed diarrhea and fouled himself inside his sleeping bag. It took Mawson hours to clean him up and put him back inside his bag to warm up, and then, he added, just a few minutes later, “I [found] him in a kind of fit.” They began moving again, and Mertz took some cocoa and beef tea, but the fits got worse and he fell into a delirium. They stopped to make camp, Mawson wrote, but “at 8pm he raves & breaks a tent pole…. Continues to rave for hours. I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful & I put him quietly in the bag. He dies peacefully at about 2am in the morning of 8th. Death due to exposure finally bringing on a fever.”

A haunted Douglas Mawson pictured early in 1913, recuperating at base camp after his solo ordeal in the Antarctic.

Mawson was now alone, at least 100 miles from the nearest human being, and in poor physical condition.  “The nose and lips break open,” he wrote, and his groin was “getting in a painfully raw condition due to reduced condition, dampness and friction in walking.” The explorer would admit later that he felt “utterly overwhelmed by an urge to give in.” Only determination to survive for Paquita, and to give an account of his two dead friends, drove him on.

At 9 a.m. on January 11 the wind finally died away. Mawson had passed the days since Mertz’s death productively. Using his now blunt knife, he had cut the one remaining sledge in two; he resewed his sail; and, remarkably, he found the strength to drag Mertz’s body out of the tent and entomb it beneath a cairn of ice blocks he hacked out of the ground. Then he began to trudge toward the endless horizon, hauling his half-sledge.

Within a few miles, Mawson’s feet became so painful that each step was an agony; when he sat on his sledge and removed his boots and socks to investigate, he found that the skin on his soles had come away, leaving nothing but a mass of weeping blisters. Desperate, he smeared his feet with lanolin and bandaged the loose skin back to them before staggering on. That night, curled up in his makeshift tent, he wrote:

My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment—frost-bitten fingertips, festerings, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off the whole body.

The next day, Mawson’s feet were too raw to walk. On January 13 he marched again, dragging himself toward the glacier he had named for  Mertz, and by the end of that day he could see in the far distance the high uplands of the vast plateau that terminated at base camp. By now he could cover little more than five miles a day.

The steamship Aurora, which rescued Mawson and his companions from the bleak confines of their base camp.

Mawson’s greatest fear was that he, too, would stumble into a crevasse, and on January 17, he did. By a piece of incredible good fortune, however, the fissure that opened was a little narrower than his half-sledge. With a jerk that all but snapped his fragile body clean in two, Mawson found himself dangling 14 feet down above an apparently bottomless pit, spinning slowly on his fraying rope. He could sense

the sledge creeping to the mouth [of the crevasse]. I had time to say to myself, ‘So this is the end,’ expecting every moment the sledge to crash on my head and both of us to go to the bottom unseen below. Then I thought of the food left uneaten on the sledge, and…of Providence again giving me a chance. The chance looked very small as the rope had sawed into the overhanging lid, my finger ends all damaged, myself weak.

Making a “great struggle,” Mawson inched up the rope, hand over hand. Several times he lost his grip and slipped back. But the rope held. Sensing that he had the strength for one final attempt, the explorer clawed his way to the lip of the crevasse, every muscle spasming, his raw fingers slippery with blood. “At last I just did it,” he recalled, and dragged himself clear. Spent, he lay by the edge of the chasm for an hour before he recovered sufficiently to drag open his packs, erect the tent and crawl into his bag to sleep.

That night, lying in his tent, Mawson fashioned a rope ladder, which he anchored to his sledge and attached to his harness. Now, if he were to fall again, getting out of a crevasse ought to be easier. The theory was put to the test the following day, when the ladder saved him from another dark plummet into ice.

Toward the end of January, Mawson was reduced to four miles of marching a day; his energy was sapped by the need to dress and redress his many injuries. His hair began to fall out, and he found himself pinned down by another blizzard. Desperate, he marched eight miles into the gale before struggling to erect his tent.

The next morning, the forced march seemed worth it: Mawson emerged from the tent into bright sunshine—and to the sight of the coastline of Commonwealth Bay. He was only 40 miles from base, and little more than 30 from a supply dump called Aladdin’s Cave, which contained a cache of supplies.

Not the least staggering of Mawson’s achievements on his return was the precision of his navigation. On January 29, in another gale, he spotted a low cairn just 300 yards off the path of his march. It proved to mark a note and a store of food left by his worried companions at base camp. Emboldened, he pressed on, and on February 1 reached the entrance to Aladdin’s Cave, where he wept to discover three oranges and a pineapple—overcome, he later said, by the sight of something that was not white.

As Mawson rested that night, the weather closed in again, and for five days he was confined to his ice hole as one of the most vicious blizzards he had ever known raged over him. Only when the storm dropped on February 8 did he find his way to base at last–just in time to see the expedition’s ship, Aurora, leaving for Australia. A shore party had been left to wait for him, but it was too late for the ship to turn, and Mawson found himself forced to spend a second winter in Antarctica. In time, he would come to view this as a blessing; he needed the gentle pace of life, and the solicitude of his companions, to recover from his trek.

There remains the mystery of what caused the illness that claimed Mertz’s life and so nearly took Mawson’s. Some polar experts are convinced that the problem was merely poor diet and exhaustion, but doctors have suggested it was caused by husky meat—specifically, the dogs’ vitamin-enriched livers, which contain such high concentrations of Vitamin A that they can bring on a condition known as “hypervitaminosis A”–a condition that causes drying and fissuring of the skin, hair loss, nausea and, in high doses, madness, precisely the symptoms displayed by the fortunate Douglas Mawson, and the luckless Xavier Mertz.

Sources

Philip Ayres. Mawson: A Life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003; Michael Howell and Peter Ford. The Ghost Disease and Twelve Other Stories of Detective Work in the Medical Field. London: Penguin, 1986; Fred & Eleanor Jack. Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988; Douglas Mawson. The Home of the Blizzard: A True Story of Antarctic Survival. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000.

Port Louis, Mauritius, in the first half of the 19th century.

Port Louis, Mauritius, August 1782. The French Indian Ocean colony—highly vulnerable to British attack at the height of the American Revolutionary War—is in a state of alert. The governor, Viscomte François de Souillac, has been warned that a flotilla of 11 ships is approaching his island. Fearing that this is the long-awaited invasion fleet, De Souillac orders a sloop-of-war out to reconnoiter. But before the vessel can report, the panic ends. De Souillac is informed that the fleet has altered course and is now steering away from Mauritius. A few days later, when the sloop returns, the governor gets confirmation: the ships were actually East Indiamen, British merchant vessels making for Fort William in India.

All this is remarkable chiefly for the source of De Souillac’s intelligence. The governor had his information not from signals made by ships sailing far offshore, nor from land-based lookouts armed with high-powered telescopes, but from a minor member of the local engineering corps, one Étienne Bottineau. And Bottineau was chiefly renowned in Mauritius (or “Île de France,” to give it its contemporary French name) as a man who won a lot of bets in waterfront taverns thanks to his uncanny ability to foresee the arrival of ships that were anywhere from 350 to 700 miles from the island when he announced their approach.

Sir David Brewster, author of Letters on Natural Magic.

These predictions, he insisted, were the products of neither sorcery nor good luck. They were, rather, the product of rigorous observation and of years of trial and error. For Bottineau claimed to be the inventor of a whole new “science”—famous then, forgotten now—that he called nauscopie: “the art of discovering ships and land at a great distance.”

Today, memory of Bottineau survives only because the Frenchman became a bit-part player in the scientific literature of the early 19th century. He appears there as an enigmatic figure whose life and work were sometimes referenced but rarely critically examined. The Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, for example, mentions him in his influential Letters on Natural Magic (1832) as “the wizard beacon-keeper of the Isle of France,” and for all his avowed skepticism, Brewster conceded that Bottineau “must have derived his power from a diligent observation of the phenomena of nature.” And the Frenchman’s new “science” remained of interest to at least one naval officer as late as the 1920s, just before the invention of radar rendered the whole idea of nauscopie redundant. Writing in 1928, the British hydrographer Rupert Gould suggested that

there can be little doubt that Bottineau was no charlatan–that he had made a discovery which would be of some interest even in these days of W/T [wireless telegraphy], and must, in his own day, have been of much greater importance.

Viscomte François de Souillac, governor of Mauritius in the 1780s and believer in Bottineau's talents.

What concerns us here is whether Bottineau’s claims stand up as well as Gould thought they did. There is no doubt that the Frenchman was, at the very least, able to confound many of the most senior officers stationed on Mauritius with the accuracy of his predictions. Colonel Trebond, the officer in charge of the island’s infantry detachment, signed an affidavit confirming that “M. Bottineau has, at different periods, announced to him the arrival of more than a hundred vessels, two, three, or even four days before the coast signals”—adding that “moreover… he stated when there was only one, or when there were several vessels.” And Trebond was backed up by M. Melis, the naval Commissary-General in Port Louis, who swore that Bottineau had predicted the arrival of 109 vessels and been wrong only twice.

De Souillac, meanwhile, was happy to sign a testimonial dated April 18, 1784, summarizing the results of months spent carefully monitoring the engineer’s predictions and confirming his belief that he

sees in nature signs that indicate the presence of vessels, as we assert that fire exists in places where we see the smoke… this is the clearest explanation that he has afforded, in order to show that he did not make the discovery by knowledge of any art, or of any science, or by the application of any previous science…. The signs, he says, indicate clearly enough the presence of vessels, but they only who can read the signs are able to judge of the distances, and this art, he asserts, is an extremely laborious study.

Reading between the lines of the governor’s report it seems that there is still room for some doubt. De Souillac went on to state that Bottineau often lost bets early in his career “because the vessels did not arrive at the appointed time” and “had for a long time been the dupe of his science.” But he seems to have been persuaded that further study had produced solutions for these early problems and that Bottineau’s results had improved considerably:

Since the war has broken out, his announcements have been very numerous, and sufficiently correct to create a sensation in the island. We have conversed with him upon the upon the reality of his science; and to have dismissed him as a quack would have been an injustice…. What we can certify is, that M. Bottineau was almost always right.

Bottineau’s own story, told in biographical fragment and a memoir that he composed in about 1785, is as relatively straightforward as his description of nauscopie itself is stunningly opaque. Born in Anjou, probably some time in the early 1740s, he grew up in Nantes, where “being delighted with the appearance of the port and shipping, he came to the resolution of entering into the sea service.” Employment with the French East India Company and the French Navy followed, and  “as early as the year 1762,” he wrote,

it appeared to me that a vessel approaching land must produce a certain effect upon the atmosphere, and cause the approach to be discovered by a practised eye even before the vessel itself was visible. After making many observations, I thought I could discover a particular appearance before the vessel came in sight: sometimes I was right, but more frequently wrong; so that at the time I gave up all hope of success.

In 1764, I was appointed to a situation in the Île de France: while there, having much leisure time, I again betook myself of my favorite observations….

The clear sky and pure atmosphere, at certain periods of the day, were favorable to my studies, and as fewer vessels came to the island, I was less liable to error than was the case off the coast of France, where vessels are continually passing…. I had not been six months upon the island when I became confident that my discovery was certain.”

Charles Eugène La Croix de Castries, Minister of Marine.

Even so, it took quite some time for Bottineau to make a reputation for himself as an oracle. He wrote that his discovery “caused him to undergo every kind of persecution, and through the malice of his enemies he was treated as a slave and sent to Madagascar during the war of 1778.” He was able to return to Mauritius, though, and by the early 1780s, he seems to have been widely regarded as pretty much infallible. By Bottineau’s reckoning, he “announced the arrival of 575 vessels” between 1778 and 1782, “many of them four days before they became visible.”

By this time Bottineau felt sufficiently confident to attempt to turn a profit from nauscopie. In 1780 he set a letter home addressed to the Maréchal de Castries, then the Minister of Marine, announcing his “discovery” and offering it to the government in return for a substantial fee. Castries, in reply, ordered the French authorities on Mauritius to make a study of Bottineau’s predictions, carefully recording them in a large ledger and comparing them to the actual arrival of ships in the colony for at least eight months. At the end of that time, Bottineau wrote, “I had announced one hundred and fifty vessels in sixty-two informations; none of which had been found to be false.” Certainly he had been successful enough for De Souillac to offer him a testimonial and approve his return to France to lay his case before the Ministry of Marine.

The engineer landed in France in June 1784 and proceeded to Paris. There, however, things began to go badly wrong for Bottineau. De Castries would not see him; the influential Abbé Fontenay, editor of the semi-official Mercure de France ridiculed nauscopie in his paper, suggesting that what was being seen was not “ships at sea, but castles in the air”—and before long the French Revolution put an end to all hope of any reward. As Gould remarked in characteristic style, Bottineau’s “one convert, or semi convert, of note” during this period was of dubious value to him; he was “the famous or infamous Jean Paul Marat… some time a troglodytic inhabitant of the Paris sewers; but latterly, until very properly stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, … one of the three most powerful men of the Terror.” Marat’s name was scarcely one to conjure with after he abandoned his career as a scientist and journalist in favor of becoming the chief supplier of victims to the guillotine; as many as 200,000 people died in the Reign of Terror. It is not very surprising to learn from The Scots Magazine of 1802 that “a Mr. Bottineau, the inventor of a method by which the approach of ships at sea may be discovered … died lately in great misery at Pondicherry.”

Whether one views Étienne Bottineau as a genius, a trickster or a fool depends largely on what one makes of the documents in the case. Setting aside Bottineau’s own deposition, the evidence for nauscopie is drawn almost entirely from just two sources: a packet of papers that belonged to Marat and a short biographical memoir written by Étienne Jouy. Jouy, a one-time army officer and later a playwright, librettist and member of the Académie Française, encountered the “wizard of Mauritius” during a four-year sojourn in Sri Lanka in the late 1780s and had firsthand knowledge of his predictions. Marat’s papers, meanwhile, include affidavits and Bottineau’s own opaque description of his methods, but their provenance is unusual, to say the least. The surviving packet can be found not in a French archive but in a British magazine; the originals are lost; and the identity of the man who copied them remains unknown.

Jean Paul Marat: Bottineau's friend was also a fervent revolutionary who spent the last years of his life largely confined to his bath, seeking relief from a persistent skin condition.

It appears that Marat’s papers must have been seized by the Cabinet Noir—France’s secret postal police—after his murder. With the rise of Napoleon, most of the Cabinet’s holdings from the revolutionary period were deemed surplus to requirements, and when in 1806 a well-connected lady by the name of Madame Guilleminot (sister-in-law to the general of the same name) took up the hobby of collecting autographs and applied to the Emperor’s sister for some samples, “an immense package of letters” from the Cabinet’s files was boxed up and sent to her in Brussels. This collection, which evidently included extracts from the Marat papers, was later sorted by an unnamed British gentleman detained in the city on parole during the Napoleonic Wars; he copied out some of the more interesting items, and on his eventual return to England, these began to appear as a series in The New Monthly Magazine. Given this exotic and uncheckable provenance, it seems worth noting that the New Monthly‘s extracts closely match several excerpts published during Bottineau’s lifetime by The Scots Magazine, which include the most detailed account of the wizard’s day-to-day observations.

The first thing to be noted, in attempting to assess Bottineau’s claims, is that most of the material regarding the details of his predictions comes from his own hand—a lengthy statement regarding the eight-month trial, published by The Scots Magazine in 1786, and an account of his early life and his development of his new “art” that is incorporated in the Marat papers. Since both were written to promote nauscopie to the French Ministry of Marine, they can scarcely be taken at face value. And it is notable that of the four certificates Bottineau presented on his arrival in Paris, only De Souillac’s was dated after the conclusion of the eight-month trial; of the other three, one makes no mention of Bottineau’s results, and the other two, by Trebond and the Commissary-General, relate to his activities in the years leading up to 1782, when a much less careful note was being made of his predictions. De Souillac’s testimonial, moreover, suggests that Bottineau’s results were not quite so consistent as he liked to say; the result of his predictions, the governor wrote, “was, that several vessels that had been announced several days beforehand, arrived at the precise time; several others were delayed, and several did not arrive.”

Étienne Jouy, who heard Bottineau make several successful predictions of the imminent arrival of ships in Sri Lanka during the 1770s.

Perhaps some clue as to Bottineau’s success can be found in De Soiullac’s rationalization of these negative results. “It has since been proved, that the delay in the arrival of some of the vessels was occasioned by contrary winds,” he wrote, and “those which did not arrive, M. Bottineau is fully persuaded, were foreign vessels which passed by … whether this be the effect of chance, or otherwise, it would perhaps be imprudent in us to determine.” In other words, Botinneau talked fast enough to worm his way out of looming trouble, and De Souillac was happy to pass the problem up to his superiors. The equivocal content of the governor’s testimonial perhaps explains De Castries’s unwillingness to see the wizard in Paris.

In fairness to Bottineau, however, it must be said that many of the less plausible features of his predictions turn out to be later accretions to his legend. Some accounts of nauscopie suggest that it was so remarkably accurate that its practitioners could see men on the decks of far-distant ships; one suggests that when Bottineau once implausibly announced the approach of a four-masted vessel (three being the maximum fitted in those days), he was proven correct when two two-masted vessels lashed together eventually appeared. No such detailed accounts appear in Bottineau’s writings, which instead describe the atmospheric disturbances he claimed to see and interpret as “a mass of vapours,” a “cloudy mass” or a “meteor” which would eventually “develop [and] the colors assume a certain tone.” Then, as a ship approached, the “mass” would “extend and become consistent.”

Whatever it was that Bottineau saw, or claimed to see, it was certainly not easily visible to anybody else. But while it would be tempting to conclude that nauscopie was either an hallucination or a confidence trick—which the wizard’s eagerness to profit and haste to explain away his failures certainly suggests—it must be noted in closing that he was not the only man who practiced it. As late as 1818, a Royal Navy captain, Francis Maude, met an old Mauritian who told him that he had been instructed in the art by Bottineau himself, and who had—Maude said—”unvarying success.” A Mr. Thomas Trood claimed in 1866 to have rediscovered Bottineau’s secret and codified it while stationed in Samoa. And the highly skeptical James Prior, a British naval officer who visited Mauritius in 1811 and thought that the idea of nauscopie seemed dangerously close to “second sight,” still noted in his journal that “whether true or false, one of the persons thus gifted is said to have received a pension some years ago for his talent. This man communicated to government, that he had distinctly observed, from the island, the shipwreck of a vessel in one of the ports of Madagascar [and] though laughed at, he persisted in his story, mentioned the day, the hour and the precise scene of her distress, all of which being duly registered, turned out afterwards to be correct; the distance is only about 400 miles.”

Well; it is just a story; Prior’s nauscopist was only “said” to be receiving a pension; and the detail of his predictions surpassed by a worrying margin anything that Bottineau ever claimed. Nor was more ever heard of Thomas Trood. But if the wizard was correct in suggesting that nauscopie can only be effectively practiced miles away from the cold and crowded sea lanes of the North Atlantic, in the gentle, balmy waters of the tropics, it is still pleasant to speculate on what might be achieved by someone with good eyesight, a hammock and a few years to spare on a beach in Mauritius. Might it be possible to get a grant for that?

Sources

Anon. ‘Foresight.’ In The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, April 1826; Anon. ‘Nauscopie: the art of discovering the representation of ships, when one hundred leagues and upwards distant.’ Reprinted from The New Monthly Magazine by the Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, August 1833; Anon. Nauscopy. The Scots Magazine, April 1786; Anon. ‘Extraordinary theory as to seeing objects at immense distances.’ Leeds Mercury, May 15, 1866; Anon. ‘The science of Nauscopia.’ In Every Saturday, October 30, 1869; Anon. ‘Nauscopy.’ Pall Mall Gazette, 11 June 1897; Rupert Gould. Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944; Lawrence Green. Eight Bells at Salamander: The Unwritten Story of Ships and Men in South African Waters… Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1961; Richard Phillips (ed). New Voyages and Travels. London: privately printed, 1819.