Herman Melville, circa 1860. Photo: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A night patrolman on the quay

Watching the bales till morning hour

Through fair and foul. Never he smiled;

Call him, and he would come; not sour

In spirit, but meek and reconciled:

Patient he was, he none withstood;

Oft on some secret thing would brood.

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Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Frederic Villiers, an experienced war artist and pioneer cinematographer, was the first man to attempt to film in battle—with deeply disappointing results.

Who first thought of building a pyramid, or of using gunpowder as a weapon? Who invented the wheel? Who, for that matter, came up with the idea of taking a movie camera into battle and turning a profit from the horrible realities of war? History offers no firm guidance on the first three questions, and is not entirely certain even on the fourth, although the earliest war films cannot have been shot much earlier than 1900. What we can say, fairly definitely, is that most of this pioneer footage tells us little about war as it was actually waged back then, and quite a lot about the enduring ingenuity of filmmakers. That is because almost all of it was either staged or faked, setting a template that was followed for years afterwards with varying degrees of success.

I tried to show in last week’s essay how newsreel cameramen took on the challenge of filming the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20—a challenge they met, at one point, by signing the celebrated rebel leader Pancho Villa to an exclusive contract. What I did not explain, for lack of space, was that the Mutual Film teams embedded with Villa were not the first cinematographers to tussle with the problems of capturing live action with bulky cameras in dangerous situations. Nor were they the first to conclude that it was easier and safer to fake their footage—and that fraud in any case produced far more saleable results. Indeed, the early history of newsreel cinema is replete with examples of cameramen responding in precisely the same way to the same set of challenges. Pretty much the earliest “war” footage ever shot, in fact, was created in circumstances that broadly mirror those prevailing in Mexico.

The few historians to take an interest in the prehistory of war photography seem agreed that the earliest footage secured in a war zone dates to the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and was shot by a veteran British war correspondent by the name of Frederic Villiers. How well he rose to the occasion is hard to say, because the war is an obscure one, and though Villiers—a notoriously self-aggrandising poseur—wrote about his experiences in sometimes hard-to-believe detail, none of the footage he claimed to have shot survives. What we can say is that the British veteran was an experienced reporter who had covered nearly a dozen conflicts during his two decades as a correspondent, and certainly was in Greece for at least a part of the 30-day conflict. He was a prolific, if limited, war artist as well, so the idea of taking one of the new ciné cameras to war probably came naturally to him.

The Battle of Omdurman, fought between British and Sudanese forces in September 1898, was one of the first to show the disappointing gap between image and reality. Top: an artist’s impression of the charge of the 21st Lancers at the height of the battle. Bottom: a photograph of the real but distant action as captured by an enterprising photographer.

If that’s so, the notion wasn’t too obvious to anyone else in 1897; when Villiers arrived at his base at Volos, in Thessaly, trailing his cinematograph and a bicycle, he discovered he was the only cameraman covering the war. According to his own accounts, he was able to get some real long-distance shots of the fighting, but the results were deeply disappointing, not least because real war bore little resemblance to the romantic visions of conflict held by the audiences of the earliest newsreels. “There was no blare of bugals,” the journalist complained on his return, “or roll of drums; no display of flags or of martial music of any sort… All had changed in this modern warfare; it seemed to me a very cold-blooded, uninspiring way of fighting, and I was mightily depressed for many weeks.”

Villiers yearned to obtain something much more visceral, and he got what he required in typically resourceful fashion, passing through the Turkish lines to secure a private interview with the Ottoman governor, Enver Bay, who granted him a safe passage to the Greek capital, Athens, which was much closer to the fighting. ”Not content with this,” writes Stephen Bottomore, the great authority on the first war films,

Villiers asked the governor for confidential information: “I want to know when and where the next fight will take place. You Turks will take the initiative, for the Greeks can now only be on the defensive.” Not surprisingly, Enver Bey was staggered by his request. Looking at Villiers steadily, he said at last: “You are an Englishman and I can trust you. I will tell you this: Take this steamer… to the port of Domokos, and don’t fail to be at the latter place by Monday noon.”

Georges Méliès, the pioneer filmmaker, shot faked footage of the war of 1897—including the earliest shots of what was claimed to be naval warfare, and some horrific scenes of atrocities in Crete. All were created in his studio or his back yard in Paris.

Armed with this exclusive information (Villiers’s own record of the war continues), he arrived at Domokos “on the exact day and hour to hear the first gun fired by the Greeks at the Moslem infantry advancing across the Pharsala plains.” Some battle scenes were shot. Since the cameraman remained uncharacteristically modest about the results of his labours, though, we may reasonably conclude that whatever footage he was able to obtain showed little if any of the ensuing action. That seems to be implicit in one revealing fragment that does survive: Villiers’s own outraged account of how he found himself out-filmed by an enterprising rival. Notes Bottomore:

The images were accurate, but they lacked cinematic appeal. When he got back to England, he realised that his footage was worth very little in the film market. One day a friend told him that he had seen some wonderful pictures of the Greek war the previous evening. Villiers was surprised since he knew for certain that he had been the only cameraman filming the war. He soon realised from his friend’s account that these were not his pictures:

“Three Albanians [then part of the Ottoman army] came along a very white dusty road toward a cottage on the right of the screen. As they neared it they opened fire; you could see the bullets strike the stucco of he building. then one of the Turks with the butt end of his rifle smashed in the door of the cottage, entered and brought out a lovely Athenian maid in his arms… Presently an old man, evidently the girl’s father, rushed out of the house to her rescue, when the second Albanian whipped out his yataghan from his belt and cut the old gentleman’s head off! Here my friend grew enthusiastic. ‘There was the head,’ said he, ‘rolling in the foreground of the picture. Nothing could be more positive than that.’”

A still from Georges Méliès’s short film “Sea Battle in Greece” (1897), clearly showing the dramatic effects and clever use of a pivoted deck, which the filmmaker pioneered.

Although Villiers probably never knew it, he had been scooped by one of the great geniuses of cinema, Georges Méliès, a Frenchman best remembered today for his special-effects-laden 1902 short “Le voyage dans la lune.” Five years before that triumph, Méliès had, like Villiers, been inspired by the commercial potential of a real war in Europe. Unlike Villiers, he had traveled no closer to the front than his back yard in Paris—but, with his showman’s instinct, the Frenchman triumphed nonetheless over his rival on the spot, even shooting some elaborate footage that purported to show close ups of a dramatic naval battle. The latter scenes, recovered a few years ago by the film historian John Barnes, are especially notable for the innovation of an “articulated set”—a pivoted section of deck designed to make it appear that Méliès’s ship was being tossed about in a rough sea, and which is still in use, barely modified, on film sets today.

Villiers himself good-humoredly admitted how difficult it was for a real newsreel cameraman to compete with an enterprising faker. The problem, he explained to his excited friend, was the unwieldiness of the contemporary camera:

You have to fix it on a tripod… and get everything in focus before you can take a picture. Then you have to turn the handle in a deliberate, coffee-mill sort of way, with no hurry or excitement. It’s not a bit like a snapshot, press-the-button pocket Kodak. Now just think of that scene you have so vividly described to me. Imagine the man who was coffee-milling saying, in a persuasive way, “Now Mr. Albanian, before you take the old gent’s head off come a little nearer; yes, but a little more to the left, please. Thank you. Now, then, look as savage as you can and cut away.” Or, “You, No. 2 Albanian, make that hussy lower her chin a bit and keep her kicking as ladylike as possible.”

D.W. Griffith, a controversial giant of the early cinema, whose undoubted genius is often set against his apparent endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation

Much the same sort of results—”real,” long-distance battle footage trumped in the cinemas by more action-packed and visceral fake footage—were obtained a few years later during the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer War, a conflict fought between British forces and Afrikaaner farmers. The South African conflict set a pattern that later war photography would follow for decades (and which was famously repeated in the first feature-length war documentary, the celebrated 1916 production The Battle of the Somme, which mixed genuine footage of the trenches with fake battle scenes shot in the altogether safe environs of a trench mortar school behind the lines. The movie played to packed and uncritically enthusiastic houses for months.) Some of these deceptions were acknowledged; R.W. Paul, who produced a series of shorts depicting the South African conflict, made no claim to have secured his footage in the war zone, merely stating that they had been “arranged under the supervision of an experienced military officer from the front.” Others were not. William Dickson, of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, did travel to the Veldt and did produce what Barnes describes as

footage that can legitimately be described as actuality—scenes of troops in camp and on the move—though even so many shots were evidently staged for the camera. British soldiers were dressed in Boer uniforms to reconstruct skirmishes, and it was reported that the British commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts, consented to be Biographed with all his Staff, actually having his table taken out into the sun for the convenience of Mr Dickson.

Telling the fake footage of the earliest years of cinema from the real thing is never very difficult. Reconstructions are typically close-ups and are betrayed, Barnes notes in his study Filming the Boer War, because “action occurs towards and away from the camera in common with certain ‘actuality’ films of the period such as street scenes where pedestrians and traffic approach or recede along the axis of the lens and not across the field of vision like actors on a stage.” This, of course, strongly suggests a deliberate attempt at deception on the part of the filmmakers, but it would be too easy to simply condemn them for this. After all, as D.W. Griffith, another of the greatest early pioneers of film, pointed out, a conflict as vast as the First World War was “too colossal to be dramatic. No one can describe it. You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way…. No one saw a thousandth part of it.”

Edward Amet stands in front of the pool and painted backdrop used in the filming of his faked war movie The Battle of Matanzas.

Of course, the difficulties that Griffith described, and which Frederic Villiers and the men who followed him in South Africa and China at the turn of the century actually experienced, were as nothing to the problems confronting the ambitious handful of filmmakers who turned their hands to portraying war as it is fought at sea—a notoriously expensive business, even today. Here, while Georges Méliès’s pioneering work on the Greco-Turkish War may have set the standard, the most interesting—and unintentionally humorous—clips that have survived from the earliest days of cinema are those that purport to show victorious American naval actions during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Once again, the “reconstructed” footage that appeared during this conflict was less a deliberate, malicious fake than it was an imaginative response to the frustration of being unable to secure genuine film of real battles—or, in the case of the crudest but most charming of the two known solutions produced at the time, get closer to the action than a New York tub. This notoriously inadequate short film was produced by a New York film man named Albert Smith, founder of the prolific American Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn—who, according to his own account, did make it to Cuba, only to find his clumsy cameras were not up to the task of securing usable footage at long distance. He returned to the U.S. with little more than background shots to mull over the problem. Soon afterward came news of a great American naval victory over the outmatched Spanish fleet far away in the Philippines. It was the first time an American squadron had fought a significant battle since the Civil War, and Smith and his partner, James Stuart Blackton, realized that there would be huge demand for footage showing the Spaniards’ destruction. Their solution, Smith wrote in his memoirs, was low-tech but ingenious:

A poster advertising a Spanish American war film in typically dramatic–and wildly inaccurate–style.

At this time, vendors were selling large sturdy photographs of ships of the American and Spanish fleets. We bought a sheet of each and cut out the battleships. On a table, topside down, we placed one of Blackton’s large canvas-covered frames and filled it with water an inch deep. In order to stand the cutouts of the ships in the water, we nailed them to lengths of wood about an inch square. In this way a little ‘shelf’ was provided behind each ship, and on this ship we placed pinches of gunpowder–three pinches for each ship–not too many, we felt, for a major sea engagement of this sort….

For a background, Blackton daubed a few white clouds on a blue-tinted cardboard. To each of the ships, now sitting placidly in our shallow ‘bay,’ we attached a fine thread to enable us to pull the ships past the camera at the proper moment and in the correct order.

We needed someone to blow smoke into the scene, but we couldn’t go too far outside our circle if the secret was to be kept. Mrs. Blackton was called in and she volunteered, in this day of non-smoking womanhood, to smoke a cigarette. A friendly office boy said he would try a cigar. This was fine, as we needed the volume.

A piece of cotton was dipped in alcohol and attached to a wire slender enough to escape the eye of the camera. Blackton, concealed behind the side of the table farthermost from the camera, touched off the mounds of gunpowder with his wire taper—and the battle was on. Mrs. Blackton, smoking and coughing, delivered a fine haze. Jim had worked out a timing arrangement with her so that she blew the smoke into the scene at approximately the moment of the explosion…

The film lenses of that day were imperfect enough to conceal the crudities of our miniature, and as the picture ran only two minutes there was no time for anyone to study it critically…. Pastor’s and both Proctor houses played to capacity audiences for several weeks. Jim and I felt less remorse of conscience when we saw how much excitement and enthusiasm was aroused by The Battle of Santiago Bay.

Still from Edward H. Amet’s film of the Battle of Matanzas–an unopposed bombardment of a Cuban port in April 1898.

Perhaps surprisingly, Smith’s film (which has apparently been lost) does seem to have fooled the not-terribly-experienced early cinemagoers who viewed it—or perhaps they were simply too polite to mention its obvious shortcomings. Some rather more convincing scenes of a second battle, however, were faked by a rival filmmaker, Edward Hill Amet of Waukegan, Illinois, who—denied permission to  travel to Cuba—built a set of detailed, 1:70 scale metal models of the combatants and floated them on a 24-foot-long outdoor tank in his yard in Lake County. Unlike Smith’s hurried effort, Amet’s shoot was meticulously planned, and his models were vastly more realistic; they were carefully based on photographs and plans of the real ships, and each was equipped with working smokestacks and guns containing remotely ignited blasting caps, all controlled from an electrical switchboard. The resulting film, which looks unquestionably amateurish to modern eyes, was nonetheless realistic by the standards of the day, and “according to film-history books,” Margarita De Orellana observes, “the Spanish government bought a copy of Amet’s film for the military archives in Madrid, apparently convinced of its authenticity.”

The Sikander Bagh (Secundra Bagh) in Cawnpore, scene of the massacre of Indian rebels, photographed by Felice Beato

The lesson here, surely, is not that the camera can, and often does, lie, but that it has lied ever since it was invented. “Reconstruction” of battle scenes was born with battlefield photography. Matthew Brady did it during the Civil War. And, even earlier, in 1858, during the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, or  rebellion, or war of independence, the pioneer photographer Felice Beato created dramatized reconstructions, and notoriously scattered the skeletal remains of Indians in the foreground of his photograph of the Sikander Bagh in order to enhance the image.

Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the question is how readily those who viewed such pictures accepted them. For the most part, historians have been very ready to assume that the audiences for “faked” photographs and reconstructed movies were notably naive and accepting. A classic instance, still debated, is the reception of the Lumiere Brothers’ pioneering film short Arrival of the Train at the Station, which showed a railway engine pulling into a French terminus, shot by a camera placed on the platform directly in front of it. In the popular retelling of this story, early cinema audiences were so panicked by the fast-approaching train that—unable to distinguish between image and reality—they imagined it would at any second burst through the screen and crash into the cinema. Recent research has, however, more or less comprehensively debunked this story (it has even been suggested that the reception accorded to the original 1896 short has been conflated with panic caused by viewing, in the 1930s, of early 3D movie images)—though, given the lack of sources, it remains highly doubtful precisely what the real reception of the Brothers’ movie was.

Certainly, what impresses the viewer of the first war films today is how ludicrously unreal, and how contrived, they are. According to Bottomore, even the audiences of 1897 gave Georges Méliès’s 1897 fakes a mixed reception:

 A few people might have believed that some of the films were genuine, especially if, as sometimes happened, the showmen proclaimed that they were so. Other viewers had doubts on the matter…. Perhaps the best comment on the ambiguous nature of Méliès’ films came from a contemporary journalist who, while describing the films as “wonderfully realistic,” also stated that they were artistically made subjects.

Yet while the brutal truth is surely that Méliès’s shorts were just about as realistic than Amet’s 1:70 ship models, in a sense that hardly matters. These early film-makers were developing techniques that their better-equipped successors would go on to use to shoot real footage of real wars—and stoking demand for shocking combat footage that has fueled many a journalistic triumph. Modern news reporting owes a debt to the pioneers of a century ago—and for as long as it does, the shade of Pancho Villa will ride again.

Sources

John Barnes. Filming the Boer War. Tonbridge: Bishopsgate Press, 1992; Stephen Bottomore. “Frederic Villiers: war correspondent.” In Wheeler W. Dixon (ed), Re-viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992: Essays and Interviews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994; Stephen Bottomore. Filming, Faking and Propaganda: The Origins of the War Film, 1897-1902. Unpublished University of Utrecht PhD thesis, 2007; James Chapman. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008; Margarita De Orellana. Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution. London: Verso, 2009; Tom Gunning. “An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator.” In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Kirk Kekatos. “Edward H. Amet and the Spanish-American War film.” Film History 14 (2002); Martin Loiperdinger. “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: cinema’s founding myth.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists v4n1 (Spring 2004); Albert Smith. Two Reels and a Crank. New York: Doubleday, 1952.

Pancho Villa, seen here in a still taken from Mutual’s exclusive 1914 film footage. But did the Mexican rebel really sign a contract agreeing to fight his battles according to the ideas of a Hollywood director?

The first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that  more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico since 1876, what was left of the central government in Mexico City found itself fighting several contending rebel forces—most notably the Liberation Army of the South, commanded by Emiliano Zapata, and the Chihuahua-based División del Norte, led by the even more celebrated bandit-rebel Pancho Villa–and the three-cornered civil war that followed was notable for its unrelenting savagery, its unending confusion and (north of the Rio Grande, at least) its unusual film deals. Specifically, it is remembered for the contract Villa was supposed to have signed with a leading American newsreel company in January 1914. Under the terms of this agreement, it is said, the rebels undertook to fight their revolution for the benefit of the movie cameras in exchange for a large advance, payable in gold.

Even at this early date, there was nothing especially surprising about Pancho Villa (or anyone else) inking a deal that allowed cameras access to the areas that they controlled. Newsreels were a coming force. Cinema was growing rapidly in popularity; attendance at nickelodeons had doubled since 1908, and an estimated 49 million tickets were sold each week in the U.S. by 1914. Those customers expected to see some news alongside the melodramas and comedy shorts that were the staples of early cinema. And there were obvious advantages in controlling the way in which the newsreel men chose to portray the Revolution, particularly for Villa, whose main bases were close to the U.S. border.

What made Villa’s contract so odd, though, was its terms, or at least the terms it was said to have contained. Here’s how the agreement he reached with the Mutual Film Company is usually described:

In 1914, a Hollywood motion picture company signed a contract with Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in which he agreed to fight his revolution according to the studio’s scenario in return for $25,000. The Hollywood crew went down to Mexico and joined Villa’s guerrilla force. The director told Pancho Villa where and how to fight his battles. The cameraman, since he could only shoot in daylight, made Pancho Villa start fighting every day at 9:00 a.m. and stop at 4:00 p.m.—sometimes forcing Villa to cease his real warring until the cameras could be moved to a new angle.

It sounds outlandish—not to say impractical. But the story quickly became common currency, and indeed, the tale of Pancho Villa’s brief Hollywood career has been turned into a movie of its own. Accounts sometimes include elaborations; it is said that Villa agreed that no other film company would be permitted to send representatives to the battlefield, and that, if the cameraman did not secure the shots he needed, the División del Norte would re-enact its battles later. And while the idea that there was a strict ban on fighting outside daylight hours is always mentioned in these secondary accounts, that prohibition is sometimes extended; in another, semi-fictional, re-imagining, recounted by Leslie Bethel, Villa tells Raoul Walsh, the early Hollywood director: “Don’t worry, Don Raúl. If you say the light at four in the morning is not right for your little machine, well, no problem. The executions will take place at six. But no later. Afterward we march and fight. Understand?”

Whatever the variations in accounts of Pancho’s film deal, though, it ends the same way. There’s always this sting in the tale:

When the completed film was brought back to Hollywood, it was found too unbelievable to be released—and most of it had to be reshot on the studio lot.

There was plenty of bias: A contemporary cartoon from the New York Times. Click to view in higher resolution.

Today’s post is an attempt to uncover the truth about this little-known incident–and, as it turns out, it’s a story that is well worth telling, not least because, researching it, I found that tale of Villa and his movie contract informs the broader question how just how accurate other early newsreels were. So this is also a post about the borderlands where truth meets fiction, and the problematic lure of the entertaining story. Finally, it deals in passing with the odd way that fictions can become real, if they are rooted in the truth and enough people believe them.

We should begin by noting that the Mexican Revolution was an early example of a 20th-century “media war”: a conflict in which opposing generals duked it out not only on the battlefield, but also in the newspapers and in cinema “scenarios.” At stake were the hearts and minds of the government and people of the United States—who could, if they wished, intervene decisively on one side or another. Because of this, the Revolution saw propaganda evolve from the crude publication of rival “official” claims into more subtle attempts to control the views of the journalists and cameramen who flooded into Mexico. Most of them were inexperienced, monoglot Americans, and almost all were as interested in making a name for themselves as they were in untangling the half-baked policies and shifting allegiances that distinguished the Federales from the Villistas from the Zapatistas. The result was a rich stew of truth, falsity and reconstruction.

There was plenty of bias, most of it in the form of prejudice against Mexican “greasers.” There were conflicts of interest as well. Several American media owners had extensive commercial interests in Mexico; William Randolph Hearst, who controlled vast tracts in northern Mexico, wasted no time in pressing for U.S. intervention when Villa plundered his estates, appropriating 60,000 head of cattle. And there was eagerness to file ticket-selling, circulation-boosting sensation, too; Villa himself was frequently portrayed as “a monster of brutality and cruelty,” particularly later in the war, when he crossed the border and raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico.

Much was exaggerated. The Literary Digest noted, with a jaundiced eye:

“Battles” innumerable have been fought, scores of armies have been annihilated, wiped out, blown up, massacred and wholly destroyed according to the glowing reports of commanders on either side, but the supply of cannon fodder does not appear to have diminished appreciably…. Never was there a war in which more gunpowder went off with less harm to the opposing forces.

Pancho Villa (seated, in the presidential chair) and Emiliano Zapata (seated, right, behind sombrero) in the national palace in Mexico City, November 1914.

What is certain is that fierce competition for “news” produced a situation ripe for exploitation. All three of the principal leaders of the period—Villa, Zapata and the Federal generalissimo Victoriano Huerta—sold access and eventually themselves to U.S. newsmen, trading inconvenience for the chance to position themselves as worthy recipients of foreign aid.

Huerta got things off and running, compelling the cameramen who filmed his campaigns to screen their footage for him so he could censor it. But Villa was the one who maximized his opportunities. The upshot, four years into the war, was the rebel general’s acceptance of the Mutual Film contract.

The New York Times broke the news on January 7, 1914:

Pancho Villa, General in Command of the Constitutionalist Army in Northern Mexico, will in future carry on his warfare against President Huerta as a full partner in a moving-picture venture with [Mutual's] Harry E. Aitken…. The business of Gen. Villa will be to provide moving picture thrillers in any way that is consistent with his plans to depose and drive Huerta out of Mexico, and the business of Mr. Aitken, the other partner, will be to distribute the resulting films throughout the peaceable sections of Mexico and to the United States and Canada.

Pancho Villa wearing the special general’s uniform provided for him by Mutual Films.

Nothing in this first report suggests that the contract was anything more than a broad agreement guaranteeing privileged access for Mutual’s cameramen. A few weeks later, though, came word of the Battle of Ojinaga, a northern town defended by a force of 5,000 Federales, and for the first time there were hints that the contract included special clauses. Several newspapers reported that Villa had captured Ojinaga only after a short delay while Mutual’s cameramen moved into position.

The rebel was certainly willing to accommodate Mutual in unusual ways. The New York Times reported that, at the film company’s request, he had replaced  his casual battle dress with a custom-made comic opera general’s uniform to make him look more imposing. (The uniform remained the property of Mutual, and Villa was forbidden to wear it in front of any other cameramen.) There is also decent evidence that elements of the División del Norte were pressed into service to stage re-enactments for the cameras. Raoul Walsh recalled Villa gamely doing take after take of a scene “of him coming towards the camera. We’d set up at the head of the street, and he’d hit that horse with a whip and his spurs and go by at ninety miles an hour. I don’t know how many times we said ‘Despacio, despacio,‘—Slow, señor, please!’

But the contract between the rebel leader and Mutual Films proves to have been a good deal less proscriptive than popularly supposed. The only surviving copy, unearthed in a Mexico City archive by Villa’s biographer Friedrich Katz, lacks all the eye-opening clauses that have made it famous: “There was absolutely no mention of reenactment of battle scenes or of Villa providing good lighting,” Katz explained. “What the contract did specify was that the Mutual Film Company was granted exclusive rights to film Villa’s troops in battle, and that Villa would receive 20% of all revenues that the films produced.”

A contemporary newspaper speculates on the likely consequences of the appearance of newsreel cameras at the front. New York Times, January 11, 1914. Click to view in higher resolution.

The notion of a contract that called for war to be fought Hollywood-style, in short, is myth–though the did not stop the New York Times from hazarding, on January 8, 1914, that “if Villa wants to be a good business partner… he will have to make a great effort so that the cameramen can carry out their work successfully. He will have to make sure that the interesting attacks take place when the light is good and the killings are in good focus. This might interfere with military operations that, in theory, have other objectives.”

No such compromises seem to have occurred in practice, and the Mutual contract seems to have outlived its usefulness for both parties within weeks. But what followed suggests other ways in which the facts on the ground were subsumed by the demands of the cinema: As early as the end of February, Mutual switched its attentions from shooting documentary footage to creating a fictional movie about Villa that would incorporate stock shots obtained by the newsreel men. The production of this movie, The Life of General Villa, probably explains how those rumors that Mutual’s newsreel footage “had to be reshot in the studio lot” got started. It premiered in New York in May 1914 and turned out to be a typical melodrama of the period. Villa was given an “acceptable” background for a hero—in real life he and his family had been sharecroppers, but in the Life they were middle-class farmers—and the drama revolved around his quest for revenge on a pair of Federales who had raped his sister, which bore at least some semblance to real events in Villa’s life. The point was that it also came closer to conforming to what its target audience demanded from a movie: close ups, action and a story.

Contemporary sources make it easy to understand why Mutual had this sudden change of heart. Villa had kept his side of the bargain; the company’s cameramen had secured the promised exclusive footage of the Battle of Ojinaga. But when the results of these initial efforts reached New York on January 22, they proved disappointing. The footage was no more dramatic than that filmed earlier in the war without the benefit of any contract. As Moving Picture World reported on January 24:

The pictures do not portray a battle; they show among other things the conditions in and around Ojinaga after the battle which was fought in and about the town…. There was a good view of the police station of Ojinaga and the little Plaza of the stricken town…. Other things shown on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande were the train of captured guns and ammunition wagons, the review of the ‘army’ before General Villa, the captured Federal prisoners, the wretched refugees on their way to the American side.

American filmmaker L.M. Burrud poses for a publicity shot allegedly showing him “filming in action.”

The Mutual contract, in short, had merely served to highlight the limitations of the early filmmakers. Previously, newsreel cameramen had fallen explained their inability to secure sensational action footage by citing specific local difficulties, not least the problem of gaining access to the battlefield. At Ojinaga, granted the best possible conditions to shoot and the active support of one of the commanders, they had failed again, and the reason is obvious. For all Mutual’s boasts, contemporary movie cameras were heavy, clumsy things that could be operated only by setting them up on a tripod and hand cranking the film. Using them anywhere near a real battle would be suicidal. A publicity still purporting to show rival filmmaker L.M. Burrud “filming in action,” protected by two Indian bodyguards armed with rifles and stripped to their loincloths, was as fraudulent as much of the moving footage brought out of Mexico. The only “action” that could safely be obtained consisted of long shots of artillery bombardments and the mass maneuvering of men on distant horizons.

Newsreel men and their bosses in the United States responded to this problem in various ways. Pressure to deliver “hot” footage remained as high as ever, which meant there were really only two possible solutions. Tracy Matthewson, representing Hearst-Vitagraph with an American “punitive expedition” sent to punish Villa’s border raids two years later, returned home to find that publicists had concocted a thrilling tale describing how he had found himself in the middle of a battle, and bravely

turned the handle and began the greatest picture ever filmed.

One of my tripod bearers smiled at my shouting, and as he smiled, he clutched his hands to his abdomen and fell forward, kicking…. “Action,” I cried. “This is what I’ve wanted. Give ‘em hell boys. Wipe out the blinkety blank dashed greasers!

…Then somewhere out of that tangle of guns a bullet cuts its way. “Za-zing!” I heard it whistle. The splinters cut my face as it hit the camera. It ripped the side open and smashed the little wooden magazine. I sprang crazily to stop it with my hands. But out of the box coiled the precious film. Stretching and glistening in the sun, it fell and died.

This “dog ate my homework” excuse could be used only once, however, so for the most part newsmen supplied an altogether neater solution of their own; for most a trip to Mexico meant contenting themselves with creating their own dramatic footage to meet the insatiable demand of audiences at home. Which is to say they carefully “reconstructed” action scenes that they or someone else had witnessed—if they were moderately scrupulous—or simply made scenarios up from scratch, if they were not.

While the practice of faking footage was widespread throughout the Mexican war, and many of the pioneer filmmakers were remarkably open about it in their memoirs, little mention was made of it at the time. Indeed, those who flocked to the cinema to see newsreels of the Mexican war (which the evidence suggests were among the most popular films of the period) were encouraged to believe they were seeing the real thing—the film companies competed vigorously to advertise their latest reels as unprecedentedly realistic. To take only one example, Frank Jones’s early War with Huerta was billed in Moving Picture World as “positively the greatest MEXICAN WAR PICTURE ever made…. Do you realize that it is not a Posed Picture, but taken on the FIELD OF ACTION?”

The reality of the situation was exposed a few months later by Jones’s rival Fritz Arno Wagner, who traveled to Mexico for Pathé and later enjoyed a distinguished film career in Europe:

I have seen four big battles. On each occasion I was threatened with arrest from the Federal general if I took any pictures. He also threatened on one occasion when he saw me turning the crank to smash the camera. He would have done so, too, but for the fact that the rebels came pretty close just then and he had to take it on the run to save his hide.

A tiny handful of cameramen were luckier, and, given precisely the right circumstances, could obtain useful action footage. Another newsreel man who filmed the early stages of the revolution told the film historian Robert Wagner that

street fighting is the easiest to film, for if you can get to a good location on a side street, you have the protection of all the intervening buildings from artillery and rifle fire, while you occasionally get the chance to shoot a few feet of swell film. I got some great stuff in Mexico City, a few days before [Diaz's immediate successor as President, Francisco] Madero was killed. One fellow, not twenty feet from my camera, had his head shot off.

Even then, however, the resultant footage—although suitably dramatic—never made it to the screen. “The darn censors would never let us show the picture in the United States,” the newsreel man said. “What do you suppose they sent us to war for?”

The best solution, as more than one film unit discovered, was to wait for the fighting to die down and then enlist any nearby soldiers to produce a lively but sanitized “reconstruction.” There were sometimes hidden dangers in this, too—one cameraman, who persuaded a group of soldiers to “fight” some invading Americans, only narrowly escaped with his life when the Mexicans realized they were being portrayed as cowards being soundly thrashed by the upstanding Yankees. Feeling “that the honor of their nation was being besmirched,” the historian Margarita De Orellana says, “[they] decided to change the story and defend themselves, firing off a volley of bullets. A real fight then ensued.”

A still from Victor Milner’s wildly successful reconstruction of the U.S. Marines’ assault on the post office at Vera Cruz, April 1914.

Thankfully, there were safer ways of completing an assignment. Victor Milner, a cameraman attached to the U.S. Marine force sent to occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz early in the war for reasons too complicated to recount in detail here, made it ashore to discover that the troops had already secured their objectives. Soon afterward, however, he had the luck to run into a friend who, in civilian life, had been “in the public relations business and was anxious to get some good publicity for the Navy and Marines.”

He got together with the local commanders and they staged the greatest replay of the storming of the Post Office that you can imagine. I am sure it was far better than the real thing… The pictures were a newsreel sensation and were shown as a scoop in all the theaters before any of us got back to the States. To this day, I don’t think anyone in the States was aware that they were a replay, and the shots were staged.

Sources

Leslie Bethell (ed.). The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Kevin Brownlow. The Parade’s Gone By… Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; Kevin Brownlow. The War, the West and the Wilderness. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979; James Chapman. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008; Aurelio De Los Reyes. With Villa in Mexico on Location. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1986; Margarita De Orellana. Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution. London: Verso, 2009; Friedrich Katz. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; Zuzana Pick. Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010; Gregorio Rocha. “And starring Pancho Villa as himself.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6:1 (Spring 2006).

The Fox sisters, from left to right: Leah, Kate and Maggie.
From “Radical Spirits.”

One of the greatest religious movements of the 19th century began in the bedroom of two young girls living in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. On a late March day in 1848, Margaretta “Maggie” Fox, 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, waylaid a neighbor, eager to share an odd and frightening phenomenon. Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture—raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared with their parents. While Maggie and Kate huddled together on their bed, their mother, Margaret, began the demonstration.

“Now count five,” she ordered, and the room shook with the sound of five heavy thuds.

“Count fifteen,” she commanded, and the mysterious presence obeyed. Next, she asked it to tell the neighbor’s age; thirty-three distinct raps followed.

“If you are an injured spirit,” she continued, “manifest it by three raps.”

And it did.

Margaret Fox did not seem to consider the date, March 31—April Fool’s Eve—and the possibility that her daughters were frightened not by an unseen presence but by the expected success of their prank.

The Fox family deserted the house and sent Maggie and Kate to live with their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, in Rochester. The story might have died there were it not for the fact that Rochester was a hotbed for reform and religious activity; the same vicinity, the Finger Lakes region of New York State, gave birth to both Mormonism and Millerism, the precursor to Seventh Day Adventism. Community leaders Isaac and Amy Post were intrigued by the Fox sisters’ story, and by the subsequent rumor that the spirit likely belonged to a peddler who had been murdered in the farmhouse five years beforehand. A group of Rochester residents examined the cellar of the Fox’s home, uncovering strands of hair and what appeared to be bone fragments.

The Posts invited the girls to a gathering at their home, anxious to see if they could communicate with spirits in another locale. “I suppose I went with as much unbelief as Thomas felt when he was introduced to Jesus after he had ascended,” Isaac Post wrote, but he was swayed by “very distinct thumps under the floor… and several apparent answers.” He was further convinced when Leah Fox also proved to be a medium, communicating with the Posts’ recently deceased daughter. The Posts rented the largest hall in Rochester, and four hundred people came to hear the mysterious noises. Afterward Amy Post accompanied the sisters to a private chamber, where they disrobed and were examined by a committee of skeptics, who found no evidence of a hoax.

The Fox sisters’ home, Hydesville, New York. From “Hudson Valley Halloween Magazine.”

The idea that one could communicate with spirits was hardly new—the Bible contains hundreds of references to angels administering to man—but the movement known as Modern Spiritualism sprang from several distinct revolutionary philosophies and characters. The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and by the 1840s held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a “magnetic fluid” that could become imbalanced, causing illness. By waving his hands over a patient’s body, he induced a “mesmerized” hypnotic state that allowed him to manipulate the magnetic force and restore health. Amateur mesmerists became a popular attraction at parties and in parlors, a few proving skillful enough to attract paying customers. Some who awakened from a mesmeric trance claimed to have experienced visions of spirits from another dimension.

At the same time the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish philosopher and mystic, also surged in popularity. Swedenborg described an afterlife consisting of three heavens, three hells and an interim destination—the world of the spirits—where everyone went immediately upon dying, and which was more or less similar to what they were accustomed to on earth. Self love drove one toward the varying degrees of hell; love for others elevated one to the heavens. “The Lord casts no one into hell,” he wrote, “but those who are there have deliberately cast themselves into it, and keep themselves there.” He claimed to have seen and talked with spirits on all of the planes.

Seventy-five years later, the 19th-century American seer Andrew Jackson Davis, who would become known as the “John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism,” combined these two ideologies, claiming that Swedenborg’s spirit spoke to him during a series of mesmeric trances. Davis recorded the content of these messages and in 1847 published them in a voluminous tome titled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. “It is a truth,” he asserted, predicting the rise of Spiritualism, “that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres…all the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communication will be established.” Davis believed his prediction materialized a year later, on the very day the Fox sisters first channeled spirits in their bedroom. “About daylight this morning,” he confided to his diary, “a warm breathing passed over my face and I heard a voice, tender and strong, saying ‘Brother, the good work has begun—behold, a living demonstration is born.’”

Andrew Jackson Davis. From www.andrewjacksondavis.com.

Upon hearing of the Rochester incident, Davis invited the Fox sisters to his home in New York City to witness their medium capabilities for himself. Joining his cause with the sisters’ ghostly manifestations elevated his stature from obscure prophet to recognized leader of a mass movement, one that appealed to increasing numbers of Americans inclined to reject the gloomy Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and embrace the reform-minded optimism of the mid-19^th century. Unlike their Christian contemporaries, Americans who adopted Spiritualism believed they had a hand in their own salvation, and direct communication with those who had passed offered insight into the ultimate fate of their own souls.

Maggie, Kate, and Leah Fox embarked on a professional tour to spread word of the spirits, booking a suite, fittingly, at Barnum’s Hotel on the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane, an establishment owned by a cousin of the famed showman. An editorial in the Scientific American scoffed at their arrival, calling the girls the “Spiritual Knockers from Rochester.” They conducted their sessions in the hotel’s parlor, inviting as many as thirty attendees to gather around a large table at the hours of 10 a.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., taking an occasional private meeting in between. Admission was one dollar, and visitors included preeminent members of New York Society: Horace Greeley, the iconoclastic and influential editor of the New York Tribune; James Fenimore Cooper; editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who witnessed a session in which the spirits rapped in time to a popular song and spelled out a message: “Spiritualism will work miracles in the cause of reform.”

Leah stayed in New York, entertaining callers in a séance room, while Kate and Maggie took the show to other cities, among them Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, where one visitor, explorer Elisha Kent Kane, succumbed to Maggie’s charms even as he deemed her a fraud—although he couldn’t prove how the sounds were made. “After a whole month’s trial I could make nothing of them,” he confessed. “Therefore they are a great mystery.” He courted Maggie, thirteen years his junior, and encouraged her to give up her “life of dreary sameness and suspected deceit.” She acquiesced, retiring to attend school at Kane’s behest and expense, and married him shortly before his untimely death in 1857. To honor his memory she converted to Catholicism, as Kane—a Presbyterian—had always encouraged. (He seemed to think the faith’s ornate iconography and sense of mystery would appeal to her.) In mourning, she began drinking heavily and vowed to keep her promise to Kane to “wholly and forever abandon Spiritualism.”

Kate, meanwhile, married a devout Spiritualist and continued to develop her medium powers, translating spirit messages in astonishing and unprecedented ways: communicating two messages simultaneously, writing one while speaking the other; transcribing messages in reverse script; utilizing blank cards upon which words seemed to spontaneously appear. During sessions with a wealthy banker, Charles Livermore, she summoned both the man’s deceased wife and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, who announced his identity by writing his name on a card. Her business boomed during and after the Civil War, as increasing numbers of the bereaved found solace in Spiritualism. Prominent Spiritualist Emma Hardinge wrote that the war added two million new believers to the movement, and by the 1880s there were an estimated eight million Spiritualists in the United States and Europe. These new practitioners, seduced by the flamboyance of the Gilded Age, expected miracles—like Kate’s summoning of full-fledged apparitions—at every séance. It was wearying, both to the movement and to Kate herself, and she, too, began to drink.

On October 21, 1888, the New York World published an interview with Maggie Fox in anticipation of her appearance that evening at the New York Academy of Music, where she would publicly denounce Spiritualism. She was paid $1,500 for the exclusive. Her main motivation, however, was rage at her sister Leah and other leading Spiritualists, who had publicly chastised Kate for her drinking and accused her of being unable to care for her two young children. Kate planned to be in the audience when Maggie gave her speech, lending her tacit support.

“My sister Katie and myself were very young children when this horrible deception began,” Maggie said. “At night when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple on a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound.” The sisters graduated from apple dropping to manipulating their knuckles, joints and toes to make rapping sounds. “A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them,” she explained. “It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: ‘I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder.’ Of course that was pure imagination.”

She offered a demonstration, removing her shoe and placing her right foot upon a wooden stool. The room fell silent and still, and was rewarded with a number of short little raps. “There stood a black-robed, sharp-faced widow,” the New York Herald reported, “working her big toe and solemnly declaring that it was in this way she created the excitement that has driven so many persons to suicide or insanity. One moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.” Maggie insisted that her sister Leah knew that the rappings were fake all along and greedily exploited her younger sisters. Before exiting the stage she thanked God that she was able to expose Spiritualism.

The mainstream press called the incident “a death blow” to the movement, and Spiritualists quickly took sides. Shortly after Maggie’s confession the spirit of Samuel B. Brittan, former publisher of the Spiritual Telegraph, appeared during a séance to offer a sympathetic opinion. Although Maggie was an authentic medium, he acknowledged, “the band of spirits attending [her] during the early part of her career” had been usurped by “other unseen intelligences, who are not scrupulous in their dealings with humanity.” Other (living) Spiritualists charged that Maggie’s change of heart was wholly mercenary; since she had failed to make a living as a medium, she sought to profit by becoming one of Spiritualism’s fiercest critics.

Whatever her motive, Maggie recanted her confession one year later, insisting that her spirit guides had beseeched her to do so. Her reversal prompted more disgust from devoted Spiritualists, many of whom failed to recognize her at a subsequent debate at the Manhattan Liberal Club. There, under the pseudonym Mrs. Spencer, Maggie revealed several tricks of the profession, including the way mediums wrote messages on blank slates by using their teeth or feet. She never reconciled with sister Leah, who died in 1890. Kate died two years later while on a drinking spree. Maggie passed away eight months later, in March 1893. That year Spiritualists formed the National Spiritualist Association, which today is known as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches.

The séance table. From “Radical Spirits.”

In 1904, schoolchildren playing in the sisters’ childhood home in Hydesville—known locally as “the spook house”—discovered the majority of a skeleton between the earth and crumbling cedar walls. A doctor was consulted, who estimated that the bones were about fifty years old, giving credence to the sisters’ tale of spiritual messages from a murdered peddler. But not everyone was convinced. The New York Times reported that the bones had created “a stir amusingly disproportioned to any necessary significance of the discovery,” and suggested that the sisters had merely been clever enough to exploit a local mystery. Even if the bones were that of the murdered peddler, the Times concluded, “there will still remain that dreadful confession about the clicking joints, which reduces the whole case to a farce.”

Five years later, another doctor examined the skeleton and determined that it was made up of “only a few ribs with odds and ends of bones and among them a superabundance of some and a deficiency of others. Among them also were some chicken bones.” He also reported a rumor that a man living near the spook house had planted the bones as a practical joke, but was much too ashamed to come clean.

Sources:

Books: Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rose of Spiritualism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: Beacon University Press, 1989; Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox. Orlando, Fl: Harcourt, 2005; Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism. New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1888; Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. New York: S.S. Lyon and William Fishbough, 1847.

Articles: “The Origin of Spiritualism.” Springfield Republican, June 20, 1899; “Gotham Gossip. Margaretta Fox Kane’s Threatened Exposure of Spiritualism.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 7, 1888; “Fox Sisters to Expose Spiritualism.” New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1888; “The Rochester Rappings.” Macon Telegraph, May 22, 1886; “Spiritualism Exposed.” Wheeling (WVa) Register, October 22, 1888; “Spiritualism in America.” New Orleans Times- Picayune, April 21, 1892; “Spiritualism’s Downfall.” New York Herald, October 22, 1888; “Find Skeleton in Home of the Fox Sisters.” Salt Lake Telegram, November 28, 1904; Joe Nickell, “A Skeleton’s Tale: The Origins of Modern Spiritualism”: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/skeletons_tale_the_origins_of_modern_spiritualism/.

A pile of American bison skulls in the mid-1870s. Photo: Wikipedia

The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century:

The last rail is laid; the last spike driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City.

The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. T. P. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming.

Back in Utah, railroad officials and politicians posed for pictures aboard locomotives, shaking hands and breaking bottles of champagne on the engines as Chinese laborers from the West and Irish, German and Italian laborers from the East were budged from view.

Celebration of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, May 10, 1869. Photo: Wikipedia

Not long after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, railroad financier George Francis Train proclaimed, “The great Pacific Railway is commenced.… Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years.… This is the grandest enterprise under God!”  Yet while Train may have envisioned all the glory and the possibilities of linking the East and the West coasts by “a strong band of iron,” he could not imagine the full and tragic impact of the Transcontinental Railroad, nor the speed at which it changed the shape of the American West. For in its wake, the lives of countless Native Americans were destroyed, and tens of millions of buffalo, which had roamed freely upon the Great Plains since the last ice age 10,000 years ago, were nearly driven to extinction in a massive slaughter made possible by the railroad.

Following the Civil War, after deadly European diseases and hundreds of wars with the white man had already wiped out untold numbers of Native Americans, the U.S. government had ratified nearly 400 treaties with the Plains Indians. But as the Gold Rush, the pressures of Manifest Destiny, and land grants for railroad construction led to greater expansion in the West, the majority of these treaties were broken. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s first postwar command (Military Division of the Mississippi) covered the territory west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains, and his top priority was to protect the construction of the railroads. In 1867, he wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroads. Outraged by the Battle of the Hundred Slain, where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors ambushed a troop of the U.S. Cavalry in Wyoming, scalping and mutilating the bodies of all 81 soldiers and officers, Sherman told Grant the year before, “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” When Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, he appointed Sherman Commanding General of the Army, and Sherman was responsible for U.S. engagement in the Indian Wars.  On the ground in the West, Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan, assuming Sherman’s command, took to his task much as he had done in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, when he ordered the “scorched earth” tactics that presaged Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Early on, Sheridan bemoaned a lack of troops: “No other nation in the world would have attempted reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country with less than 60,000 to 70,000 men, while the whole force employed and scattered over the enormous region…never numbered more than 14,000 men.  The consequence was that every engagement was a forlorn hope.”

The Army’s troops were well equipped for fighting against conventional enemies, but the guerrilla tactics of the Plains tribes  confounded them at every turn.  As the railways expanded, they allowed the rapid transport of troops and supplies to areas where battles were being waged.  Sheridan was soon able to mount the kind of offensive he desired. In the Winter Campaign of 1868-69 against Cheyenne encampments, Sheridan set about destroying the Indians’ food, shelter and livestock with overwhelming force, leaving women and children at the mercy of the Army and Indian warriors little choice but to surrender or risk starvation.  In one such surprise raid at dawn during a November snowstorm in Indian Territory, Sheridan ordered the nearly 700 men of the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, to “destroy [Indian] villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and to bring back all women and children.” Custer’s men charged into a Cheyenne village on the Washita River, cutting down the Indians as they fled from lodges. Women and children were taken as hostages as part of Custer’s strategy to use them as human shields, but Cavalry scouts reported seeing women and children pursued and killed “without mercy” in what became known as the Washita Massacre. Custer later reported more than 100 Indian deaths, including that of Chief Black Kettle and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, shot in the back as they attempted to ride away on a pony. Cheyenne estimates of Indian deaths in the raid were about half of Custer’s total, and the Cheyenne did manage to kill 21 Cavalry troops while defending the attack. “If a village is attacked and women and children killed,” Sheridan once remarked, “the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.”

Gen. Philip Sheridan photographed by Matthew Brady. Photo: Library of Congress

The Transcontinental Railroad made Sheridan’s strategy of “total war” much more effective. In the mid-19th century, it was estimated that 30 milion to 60 million buffalo roamed the plains. In massive and majestic herds, they rumbled by the hundreds of thousands, creating the sound that earned them the nickname “Thunder of the Plains.”  The bison’s lifespan of 25 years, rapid reproduction and resiliency in their environment enabled the species to flourish, as Native Americans were careful not to overhunt, and even men like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who was hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad to hunt the bison to feed thousands of rail laborers for years, could not make much of a dent in the buffalo population. In mid-century, trappers who had depleted the beaver populations of the Midwest began trading in buffalo robes and tongues; an estimated 200,000 buffalo were killed annually. Then the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad accelerated the decimation of the species.

Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. Unlike the Native Americans or Buffalo Bill, who killed for food, clothing and shelter, the hunters from the East killed mostly for sport.  Native Americans looked on with horror as landscapes and prairies were littered with rotting buffalo carcasses.  The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks.  Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows, leaving countless 1,500-pound animals where they died.
Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands in the winter months. One hunter, Orlando Brown brought down nearly 6,000 buffalo by himself and lost hearing in one ear from the constant firing of his .50 caliber rifle. The Texas legislature, sensing the buffalo were in danger of being wiped out, proposed a bill to protect the species. General Sheridan opposed it, stating, ”These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.”

Chief Black Kettle, leader of the Southern Cheyenne. Photo: Wikipedia

The devastation of the buffalo population signaled the end of the Indian Wars, and Native Americans were pushed into reservations.  In 1869, the Comanche chief Tosawi was reported to have told Sheridan, “Me Tosawi. Me good Indian,” and Sheridan allegedly replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”  The phrase was later misquoted, with Sheridan supposedly stating, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Sheridan denied he had ever said such a thing.

By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild. Congress finally took action, outlawing the killing of any birds or animals in Yellowstone National Park, where the only surviving buffalo herd could be protected. Conservationists established more wildlife preserves, and the species slowly rebounded. Today, there are more than 200,000 bison in North America.

Sheridan acknowledged the role of the railroad in changing the face of the American West, and in his Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army in 1878, he acknowledged that the Native Americans were scuttled to reservations with no compensation beyond the promise of religious instruction and basic supplies of food and clothing—promises, he wrote, which were never fulfilled.

“We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less? Then, why wonder at Indian difficulties?”

Sources

Books: Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army to the Secretary of War, The Year 1878, Washington Government Printing Office, 1878. Robert G. Angevine, The Railroad and the State: War, Politics and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America, Stanford University Press 2004. John D. McDermott, A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West, University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Ballard C. Campbell, Disasters, Accidents, and Crises in American History: A Reference Guide to the Nation’s Most Catastrophic Events, Facts on File, Inc., 2008.  Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, University of Texas Press, 2002. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan & His Army, University of Nebraska Press 1985. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States Since 1865, Vol. 2, Wadsworth, 2010.

Articles: “Transcontinental Railroad,” American Experience, PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/tcrr-intro/ ”Buffalo Hunting: Shooting Buffalo From the Trains of the Kansas Pacific Railroad,” Harper’s Weekly, December 14, 1867. : “Black Kettle,” New Perspectives on the West, PBS: The West, http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/blackkettle.htm  ”Old West Legends: Buffalo Hunters,” Legends of America, http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-buffalohunters.html “Completion of the Pacific Railroad,” Hartford Courant, May 11, 1869.

A Bolivian donkey of the 1850s. From Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1854).

To be one of Queen Victoria’s ambassadors in the middle of the 19th century, when British power was at its height, was to be something close to a king—in parts of the world, close to a god. Backed by the full might of the Royal Navy, which ruled unchallenged over the Seven Seas, solitary Englishmen thousands of miles from home could lay down their version of the law to entire nations, and do so with the cool self-confidence that came from knowing that, with a word, they could set in motion perhaps the mightiest war machine that the world had ever seen. (“Tell these ugly bastards,” Captain William Packenham once instructed his quaking interpreter, having stalked, unarmed and unescorted but for a 16-year-old midshipman, into the midst of a village seething with Turkish brigands, “that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits.”)

Men of this caliber did not expect to be be treated lightly, much less ordered to pay their respects to a pair of naked buttocks belonging to the president of Bolivia’s new mistress. Yet that—according to a tradition that has persisted since at least the early 1870s, and is widely known in South America as the “Black Legend”—was the uncomfortable experience of a British plenipotentiary who encountered the Bolivian caudillo Mariano Melgarejo in 1867. Accounts of the event go on to relate that when the diplomat indignantly refused, he was seized, stripped naked, trussed with ropes and thrust onto a donkey, facing backward. Thus afforded a clear view of the animal’s posterior, Britain’s outraged ambassador was paraded three times around the main square of the capital before being expelled from the country.

John Augustus Lloyd: close associate of Simón Bolívar, British agent provocateur and plenipotentiary to Bolivia at the time of the Black Legend's inception. From an 1851 engraving.

Arriving home a few months later, the Black Legend continues, the same man was summoned to an audience with Queen Victoria, whose anger at this insult to her majesty at least matched his own. Her immediate response was to order that a gunboat be sent to bombard the Bolivian capital in retaliation. Informed that the seat of Melgarejo’s government lay hundreds of miles inland and 9,000 feet above sea level—well beyond the reach of any purely naval expedition—the queen called instead for a quill. She then inked a thick black cross onto her map of South America and declared with an imperious flourish that “Bolivia does not exist.” Diplomatic relations between the two countries were immediately severed, not to be resumed until early in the 20th century.

The Black Legend of Bolivia still circulates widely, much to the irritation of locals angered by its portrayal of their president as a hair-trigger oaf; it was the subject of an entire book by the Bolivian historian Humberto Vázquez Machicado and was cited as fact by the New York Times as recently as two months ago. Determining whether there is any truth to the story, though, requires careful research. For one thing, there are several versions of the legend, in which the nature of the initial insult varies as widely as the writing implement used by Queen Victoria to erase the offending nation from the map. For another, even when examined with the help of spadework in Bolivia and access to the original diplomatic documents from Britain’s inexhaustible National Archives, aspects of the story remain inscrutable. That there really was a serious dispute between the British and Bolivia in the middle of the 19th century is incontrovertible; that it involved a row between Queen Victoria’s man in the altiplano and a Bolivian president is a matter of public record, and that strong words of some sort were traded is clearly stated in contemporary documents. Yet the incident did not occur in 1867, it cannot have involved Mariano Melgarejo, and even several weeks of effort have failed to uncover the exact wording of the grievous insult offered up to the ambassador.

Let us start by examining the bones of the Black Legend—and with a grateful acknowledgement that my guide to much of what follows is Olivia Saunders of the University of Glamorgan, perhaps the leading British authority on the recent history of Bolivia. My own research draws heavily on her mastery of the relevant archives.

To begin with, there is no doubt that the legend has enjoyed remarkable ubiquity. The story of the British ambassador’s discomfiting encounter with South American notions of etiquette appears in a wide variety of sources, from guides and travelogues to serious histories, on both sides of the language barrier. James L. Busey, for example, records it without reference to any buttocks, but with special emphasis on Bolivian backwardness:

One day when the British ambassador called on President Melgarejo to present his credentials, the dictator was sitting at his desk, beside which stood his burro. Melgarejo, being quite drunk, told the ambassador to present his credentials to the burro, which the diplomat hesitated to do. So, the story goes, Melgarejo had both the ambassador and the burro led outside to the plaza in front of the presidential palace, where the surprised diplomat was compelled to ride around the plaza several times….

The changing shape of Bolivia, showing the loss of the coastal province of Antofagusta in 1904. (Although the transfer of territory was ratified in 1904, Antofagusta had been seized by Chile as early as 1880.) Bolivia still seeks the recovery of her coastline, and maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca. Map: Wikicommons.

Other writers recount the same story with different details. For Tristan Jones, a Welsh sailor noted for the telling of tall tales, the cause of the dispute was the theft of 600 tonnes of high-grade guano by the British merchantman Habsburg in 1842, and the consequence of the ambassador’s humiliation was the loss of Bolivia’s vital Pacific coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific.  For the mining engineer Anselm Guise and for Andrew Graham-Yool, a British writer based for years in South America, the spark was indeed provided by the homage that Melgarejo insisted be paid to his mistress, and Graham-Yool makes explicit reference to the woman’s naked backside. There is even a version of the story in which the president retaliates by crossing Britain off his own atlas of the world.

The Bolivian historian Machicado, meanwhile, traces the earliest known version of the legend to Ramón Sotomayor Valdés’ Estudio Histórico de Bolivia, published in Chile in 1874—but adds that this first account mentions only that less than harmonious relations between the president and Queen Victoria’s man resulted in the “English cabinet” solemnly declaring that Bolivia should be erased from the map of “pueblos civilizados“—that is, civilized peoples. Further accounts and other details are legion, and according to Saunders they include versions that have the British representative refusing a glass of chicha, a cloudy local beverage made from fermented corn (and being punished for his temerity, in some more detailed tellings, by being forced to consume a gigantic bowl of cocoa); or importing a large quantity of English goods, duty-free under diplomatic privilege, to sell on the open market; or conspiring to overthrow the president. As for Victoria, she is variously stated to have used a pen, blue, green and red pencils, and even a piece of chalk to expunge Bolivia from her map.

President Manuel Belzú, whose fractious relationship with Colonel Lloyd is the true basis for Bolivia's Black Legend.

It is clear, in short, that the Black Legend is not quite history. Determining what really happened all those years ago, however, demands a more detailed knowledge of Bolivia and its progress after securing independence from Spain in 1825. It was a period of often considerable confusion, punctuated by frequent revolutions and dominated for long periods by the two presidents around whom the legend revolves–Melgarejo and his predecessor, Manuel Isidoro Belzú.

The two men were quite similar in several key respects. Both came from humble backgrounds, rose through the ranks of the army, and displayed great qualities of leadership. Melgarejo, the more successful of the two, was also by a distance the less polished—”the most brutal, corrupt and prehensile figure in Bolivia’s long history of tyrants,” Paul Lewis writes. He is the subject of several tall tales, one of which relates that, delighted by the gift of a fine gray horse from the Brazilian government, he called for a map of his country, placed one hoof on the border, drew around it and then ceded the resulting horsehoe-shaped chunk of Bolivian territory to Brazil. According to a second dubious anecdote, the president ordered his army to go to the aid of the French during the Franco-Prussian War; told this would mean an ocean voyage, he snapped: “Don’t be stupid. We’ll take a short cut through the brush.”

Melgarejo’s predecessor and great rival, Belzú, was Bolivia’s president for seven years from early 1848. He first made his mark as a hero of the war of independence and was one of the first mestizos, or men of mixed heritage, to dominate the country. Belzú’s father, in fact, was an Arab soldier, and his mother an Amerindian; turning his native blood to political advantage, he seized power by building a base of support among the indigenous peasantry and using it to help him overthrow his mentor and one-time friend, President José Ballivián. Belzú himself held on to power with some difficulty, surviving an assassination attempt in 1850 that left him with two pistol balls in his head. Some historians rate Belzú as little better than Melgarejo: he was “an ignorant and violent soldier,” William Warren Sweet writes, whose presidency was “a period of anarchy” in which “foreign treaties were disregarded, while guerrilla bands were permitted to raid the country unhindered, and ‘rapine, robbery and riot’ became almost the normal condition.”

The Bolivian capital La Paz in the latter half of the 19th century.

It is Belzú’s cavalier attitude to the undertakings Bolivia had made with foreign nations that gives us the clue that he, rather than Melgarejo, was responsible for the birth of the Black Legend. Encouraging a sort of cult of personality—he liked to be acclaimed as Tata, father, of his country and took considerable pains to portray himself as protector of the peasantry—Belzú railed with increasing frequency against the exploitation of the mestizos by Bolivia’s wealthy Spanish oligarchy. In harangue after harangue, he accused the old elite of bleeding the country dry of its resources—and of leaguing with foreign merchants to export its wealth:

Comrades, an insensitive throng of aristocrats has become the arbiter of your wealth and your destiny; they exploit you ceaselessly and you do not observe it; they cheat you constantly and you don’t sense it; they accumulate huge fortunes with your labor and your blood and you are unaware of it. They divide the land, honors, jobs and privileges among themselves, leaving you only misery, disgrace and work, and you keep quiet. How long will you sleep? Wake, once and for all!

This inflammatory rhetoric soon took effect. By the spring of 1853, Bolivian peasants had begun to seize land from the oligarchs, a move that the president publicly backed. When the landowners took action to recover their property, Belzú retaliated by lashing out at their allies, the American and European merchants. He ordered the closure of their warehouses and banned exports of tin, a move that cost one British house, J. Hegan & Company, an estimated 15,000 pesos. When Hegan’s Bolivian representative, an American named James Cunningham, called at Belzú’s palace and attempted to claim that money—and a further 30,000 pesos owed as the result of the abrupt cancellation of a government contract—he was beaten up and thrown out of the country.

All this was in direct contravention of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce that Britain and Bolivia had signed shortly before Belzú came to power, and instructions were sent to the local chargé d’affaires to seek redress. This order, in turn, brought Belzú into contact with Colonel John Augustus Lloyd.

Mariano Melgarejo, who personally shot dead his predecessor and displayed his body from the presidential balcony.

Lloyd certainly should have been the man for the job. He was an old South American hand who had served for several years on the staff of Símon Bolívar, the Liberator himself. In the 1820s he had surveyed Panama to plot the route of a possible canal, and after arriving in Bolivia as consul general he had toured extensively through the country, ascending to 14,000 feet to inspect remote coalfields and document the miserable lives of the miners there.

Lloyd’s dispatches set out in some detail the problems that Belzú’s policies were causing Hegan and the other merchant houses. “Decrees,” a British Foreign Office official wrote, summarizing his reports,

have been issued without notice, suddenly prohibiting particular branches of trade in which British subjects were engaged… the Bolivian government has adopted a system in dealing with the interests of trade, which destroys the feeling of security, without which commercial enterprise cannot be carried on.

Lloyd protested, only to find that the president consistently “disregarded” him. Kenneth Lehman writes that at this point, “Belzú issued him his passport and ordered him to leave the country,” leading Britain to break off diplomatic relations. Other nations followed suit; by July 1853, the American chargé d’affaires was the only diplomat left in the capital.

This bald account, of course, gives no hint of what precisely passed between Lloyd and Belzú. That something serious did occur might be guessed from the length of time that the British allowed to lapse before patching things up and restoring diplomatic relations (a move that occurred only after 1900–making it impossible, of course, that the Black Legend dates to Melgarejo’s time; there was no British ambassador around to insult then). Equally telling are the speed, noted by Machicado, with which the Black Legend began to spread, and its remarkable ubiquity. Versions of the story even appear in official papers; Saunders has uncovered a 1906 letter written by Henry Dundas, British consul in La Paz, in which the diplomat pleaded for a raise in his annual salary of £600 on the ground that it was necessary for him to reassert “the dignity of England” in the face of “an iniquitous story current in Bolivia, which is believed by many, and has lost nothing in the telling of how a certain British representative was once ridden on a donkey out of the town of La Paz with his face turned towards the animal’s tail.”

Queen Victoria, photographed in 1854 with her consort, Prince Albert. The Black Legend considerably exaggerates her role in British political life–giving a clue to its probable origins.

Hints, though, seem to be all that we have. The Foreign Office documents of the period give few clues, referring only to Belzú’s refusal to reverse the closure of the warehouses. South American newspapers of the day say much the same, though they make it clear that it was Lloyd who demanded his passports, rather than Belzú who expelled him. And while the story did appear, very briefly, in several British newspapers around the middle of 1853, these reports are disappointingly vague. The Leicestershire Mercury wrote that the Bolivian president had “insulted the British Chargé so grossly as to compel him to leave,” while the London Daily News restricted itself to an oblique mention of an “insult received from the Bolivian authorities [when] Colonel Lloyd… claimed satisfaction, &c., on behalf of a British subject unjustly and roughly treated in the town of Corrocorro.” That small mining town was the base of Hegan & Co., and hence the News‘s correspondent was probably referring to the American, Cunningham; what is significant, in this account, is that the News makes a distinction between the commercial “insult” Belzú offered to Hegan and a separate one he administered to Lloyd.

That anything so dramatic as a naked ride athwart a Bolivian donkey ever occurred to Colonel Lloyd may be ruled out; if the newspaper stories are accurate, though, it is not unreasonable to suppose that an exchange of strong words did take place. As for how and where the Black Legend originated, both Machicado’s findings and the story’s details strongly suggest that it has its origins somewhere in South America. The legend’s portrayal of Victoria’s central role in British diplomacy—receiving ambassadors and ordering reprisals—is an outsider’s fantasy that bears little relation to reality; the Queen was a constitutional monarch who, while not so far above politics that she never dabbled in it (her preference for the lively Conservative leader Disraeli over the the Liberals’ earnest Gladstone is well documented), certainly played no active part in relations with South America. Yet the legend’s portrayal of Bolivia and its president is so unflattering it also seems implausible that it originated in that country. Machicado’s inability to trace the story further back than the Estudio Histórico de Bolivia may thus be telling; the book was published in Santiago, capital of Bolivia’s ancient enemy Chile, and its portrayal of an uncivilized mountain people chimes well with contemporary Chilean prejudices.

It may be too late, now, to discover for certain how the Black Legend originated, though Saunders has hopes for a forthcoming research trip to Santiago. What can be said is that the story has enjoyed a remarkably long life and certainly has impacted on Anglo-Bolivian relations.

Florence Nightingale nurses cholera victims during the Crimean War. Contemporary engraving.

As for the two protagonists in the affair, both Colonel Lloyd and General Belzú met their ends not long after the memorable encounter that set in train Bolivia’s Black Legend. Lloyd continued his adventurous career after his return to Britain, and at the outset of the Crimean War he was commissioned to “secretly raise the Circassians in the British interest,” apparently in the hope that trouble in the Caucasus would distract attention from the British, French and Sardinian armies invading Russia via its Black Sea coast. Lloyd traveled out to the Crimea, but fell ill there with cholera, one of well over 25,000 victims of the epidemic that would help to make the name of Florence Nightingale. Forced to return to Istanbul, he died there in October 1854.

Belzú lasted longer. Having survived not only the assassination attempt but 30 revolutions and at least a dozen other plots to overthrow him, he turned the presidency of Bolivia over to his son-in-law, General Jorge Córdova, in 1855, and journeyed to Europe as his country’s roving ambassador. He was back in Bolivia by 1864, where he and Melgarejo became rivals plotting the overthrow of the highly unpopular President José María Achá.

Again there are several versions of what happened next; according to Lewis, Belzú seized La Paz while his rival was engaged in fighting in the countryside. Recognizing that he had little chance of forcing his way into the city, Melgarejo instead tried subterfuge, having two of his men escort him to the presidential palace as a “prisoner.” Belzú, who had been delivering one of his fiery speeches to a large crowd, was alerted to this astounding piece of good fortune and hurried over to gloat, whereupon Melgarejo drew a pistol, shot his rival dead and hauled his body up to the balcony where Belzú had been addressing his supporters. Displaying the bloody corpse to the crowd, Melgarejo demanded “¿Belzú o Melgarejo?” And, after a few seconds of stunned silence, the crowd roared back: “¡Viva Melgarejo!”

Sources

British National Archives. Foreign Office. Political and Other Departments: General Correspondence before 1906, Bolivia. FO 11/14-15; Henry Dundas to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, December 20, 1907, FO 369/161; Anon. “Colonel Lloyd.” In Quarterly Journal of the Royal Geographical Society vol.13 (1857); Robert Barton. A Short History of the Republic of Bolivia. La Paz: Editorial Los Amigos del Libro, 1968; Birmingham Gazette, 23 October 1854; W. Bollaert. “Observations on the Past and Present Populations of the New World.” In Transactions of the Anthropological Society of London, 1863; Daily News [London], 4 May 1853;  James Busey. Prospects for Social Transformation of Latin America. Swindon: Economic & Social Science Research Association, 1985; James Dunkerley. Americana: The Americans in the World, Around 1850. New York: Verso, 2000; Charles Ennick. The Andes and the Amazon: Life and Travel in Peru. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908; Andrew Graham-Yool. Small Wars You May have Missed. London: Junction Books, 1983; Great Britain: Foreign and Commonwealth Office. British and Foreign State Papers vol.56. London: William Ridgway, 1870;  Anselm Guise. Six Years in Bolivia: The Adventures of a Mining Engineer. West Lafayette [IN]: Purdue University Press, 1997; William Lewis Herndon and Lardner Gibbon. Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon. Washington: AOP Nicholson, 1854;  Frank Jacobs. “How Bolivia Lost Its Hat.” New York Times, 3 April 2012; Tristan Jones. The Incredible Voyage. Dobbs Ferry [NY]: Sheridan House, 2002; Kenneth Lehman. Bolivia and the United States: A Limited Partnership. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999; Leicestershire Mercury, 9 July 1853; Paul Lewis. Authoritarian Leaders in Latin America: Dictators, Despots and Tyrants. Lanham [MD]: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006; Geoffrey Lowis. Fabulous Admirals: Being a Brief Account of Some of the Froth on those Characters who Enlivened the Royal Navy a Generation of Two Ago. Compiled from Many Sources. London: Putnam, 1957; Waltraud Morales. Bolivia: Land of Struggle. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992; New York Semi-Weekly Courier & Enquirer, April 27, 1853; Robert Scheina. Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791-1899. Dulles [VA]: Potomac Books, 2003;  William Warren Sweet. A History of Latin America. Cincinnati: Abingdon Press, 1919; Humberto Vázquez Machicado. La Leyenda Negra Boliviana: La Calumnia de la Borradura del Mapa. La Paz: UMSA, 1955; HA Weddell. Voyage dans le Nord de la Bolivie, et Dans Les Parties Voisines de Perou. Paris: Bertrand, 1853, Utica Sunday Journal, December 29, 1901.

My grateful thanks to Olivia Saunders of the University of Glamorgan for sharing her extensive original research into the origins of the legend of General Melgarejo.

A crowd of 250,000 jammed Times Square to see the start of the race. From www.sportscardigest.com.

Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.

The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was suppoed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.

In Times Square that morning 17 men, including drivers, mechanics and journalists, crammed into six cars from four countries: three from France, and one each from Germany, Italy and the United States. A quarter of a million people lined Broadway up to northernmost Harlem; those who couldn’t glimpse the cars had to settle for the whiff of gasoline and the strains of a brass band. The American entry, a 60-horsepower touring car called the Thomas Flyer, carried three extra gasoline tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons and primitive canvas convertible top. The race was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., when Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Union Civil War general, planned to fire the starting pistol, but he was characteristically late. At a quarter-past, railroad financier Colgate Hoyt snatched the golden gun from the table and shot it into the air.

The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or “our bodies will be found inside the car.” Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.

Emilio Sirtori, the driver for the Italian Zust, took with him 21-year-old journalist and poet Antonio Scarfoglio, who had threatened to pilot a motorboat across the Atlantic if his father didn’t let him enter the race. (His father, a prominent newspaper editor in Naples, relented.) The German entrant, driving the Protos, was an aristocratic army officer named Hans Koeppen who regarded the race as an opportunity to raise his rank from lieutenant to captain. Montague “Monty” Roberts, manning the Thomas Flyer, was a gregarious crowd favorite and one of few American drivers who actually trained for races. His teammate was George Schuster, a 35-year-old mechanic for the E. R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, New York. One of 21 children born to Casper Schuster, a German immigrant who worked as a blacksmith, George was an expert radiator solderer, chassis inspector, motor tuner and test driver. To Roberts, he was an ideal choice—high enough in the factory hierarchy to be considered indispensable, but too low to steal attention from Roberts himself. After the starting shot, the cars moved forward, Scarfoglio wrote, “between two thick hedges of extended hands amidst a roar as of a falling torrent.” The poet blew a kiss to the crowd, and they were off.

The American team was headed by Monty Roberts and George Schuster, in the Thomas Flyer. From www.sportscardigest.com.

August Pons, driver of the French Sizaire-Naudin, drpopped out after only 96 miles with a broken differential. The De Dion, the Zust and the Thomas Flyer quickly emerged as the leaders, with the Protos and the Moto-Bloc bringing up the rear. In Hudson, New York, the cars plowed through foot-deep snow in a single file. Schuster circled the Thomas Flyer—which had no heater or windshield—with a stick to check snow depth and put down planks for traction. The trail out of Auburn, which the New York Times described as the worst road in the United States, lived up to its reputation, with the three leading cars getting mired at Dismal Hollow in the Montezuma Swamp. The men prepared to camp for the night, but an American guide hired by the Italians came with six horses to pull the cars through.

They settled into a routine, rising at 5 a.m. and driving until 8 p.m., with the mechanics tinkering with the cars until midnight to repair cracks in the chassis and drain the radiators to keep them from freezing. (At the time, antifreeze was primarily used to produce explosives.) They stopped at hardware stores to fill up on gasoline, one bucketful at a time. The teams forged a tense agreement that they would alternate leadership every five hours, but this spirit of cooperation quickly dissolved. They convinced themselves that an hour or two would make a difference in a six-month race, and feared that their opponents would sneak off in the middle of the night. St. Chaffray took to giving imperious orders: “When you wish to go into a city ahead, you ask me,” he told Roberts. The American replied, “From now on you will know this is a race.”

The animosity increased as they trekked through the snow-battered Midwest, with the Italians accusing the Americans of cheating by using railroad tracks and the aid of a trolley car. A few of the foreign competitors took offense at the locals, whom they perceived as boorish. Scarfoglio sent off a snide dispatch: “I do not like the Americans as a whole, just as I do not like the cheesemonger whom a prize in a lottery or a sudden rise in the price of potatoes has made wealthy. There is still too much of the herdsman about them.” In Indiana, the Moto-Bloc and  Protos teams resented the fact that they had to pay significant sums for the aid of horses and men while the Thomas Flyer was swarmed by Hoosiers anxious to volunteer. They sent a plea to the president of the Chicago Automobile Club, which the Tribune printed under the headline, “FOREIGNERS’ PATHETIC APPEAL”: “We are discouraged,” the note began. “The peasants demand $3 per mile for helping us…they charged $5 each to permit us to sleep on the ground. Peasants along the way have filled up road dug by leading cars, so as to help the Thomas car…would it be possible to influence public opinion to aid us?”

By March 8, the Thomas Flyer was leading in Julesburg, Colorado, and traveling with a new passenger: Hans Hendrick Hansen. The Norwegian had quit St. Chaffray’s team after the De Dion got stuck in a particularly bad snowdrift; when Hansen, the Artic expert, failed to extricate it, he and the Frenchman began to argue. They agreed to settle the matter with a duel, but before they could find their pistols St. Chaffray made an executive (and cool-headed) decision to fire Hansen. “I could go afoot over the Siberian route and beat the De Dion car,” Hansen retorted, and pledged his allegiance to the American flag.

Pulling the Thomas Flyer out of Colorado mud. From www.ameshistoricalsociety.org.

Meanwhile, the Zust was in Omaha, the De Dion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Moto-Bloc in Maple Park, Illinois, and the Protos a bit behind in Geneva, Illinois. As the Thomas Flyer approached frenzied crowds in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Monty Roberts knew that his time in the great race was nearing its end. He wanted to sail to Paris in May and race in the Grand Prix. E. Linn Mathewson, the son of the general agent for Thomas cars in the Midwest, would drive the Flyer through Wyoming to Utah. Professional driver Harold Brinker, famous for surviving a crash the previous year that had killed another driver, would take command in Ogden. George Schuster, the indefatigable mechanic, would drive through Alaska and Siberia, and Roberts would return when the car neared Europe.

Before leaving Cheyenne, Schuster bought a .38-caliber Colt with a six-inch barrel, reasoning it might come in handy. He continued to sacrifice himself for the journey when no one else could or would, walking ten miles in the dead of night to find gasoline and navigating the car out of gullies they couldn’t avoid. His acumen had kept the car running through blizzards, freezing temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he repaired the fresh damage and readied the Flyer for the next leg of the journey. And he was so unheralded that newspaper reports frequently misspelled his name when they bothered to mention him at all.

By the time the Americans left Wyoming, they were leading by two states. The Italians were starting across Nebraska from Omaha. St. Chaffray was in Iowa, awaiting parts for the De Dion, while Lieutenant Koeppen in the Protos and Charles Godard in the Moto-Bloc were just entering Iowa. The Moto-Bloc was having mechanical trouble, although Godard was loath to disclose specifics. Desperate, he decided—in violation of the rules—to ship his car to San Francisco by railroad, but abandoned the idea when a photographer caught him in the act. Godard received a cable from the owners of his car: “Quit race, sell car and come home.” The Moto-Bloc was finished, leaving only four cars.

The German Protos in Ogden, Utah. From www.theoldmotor.com.

Harold Brinker drove the Thomas Flyer from Utah through Nevada and around the border of Death Valley, arriving in San Francisco the third week of March, 900 miles ahead of his closest competitor, the Zust. Factory whistles sounded and automobile drivers blew their horns on Market Street. “The record of the Thomas car from New York to San Francisco was a remarkable feat,” the New York Times concluded. “Many skeptics declared when the New York to Paris racers started out from New York in the dead of winter that none of them would get across Wyoming until summer, some that they would not reach Chicago and a few that they could not cross New York State.” The Americans prepared to ship the Flyer on a freighter to Seattle. After a two-day trip there, it would be transferred to a cargo ship headed for Valdez, Alaska. Brinker begged Schuster to let him to continue with the team, even as an assistant, but the mechanic refused. It was finally his car and his turn.

On Wednesday, April 8, the Flyer touched Alaskan soil. The welcoming committee consisted of the entire population of Valdez, few of whom had ever seen a car. Schuster wasted no time investigating the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail in a single-horse sleigh, and concluded that the only way to cross Alaska in a car would be to dismantle it and ship the parts by dogsled. The Parisian race committee abandoned the idea of Alaska and the Bering Strait and directed the Americans to return to Seattle. Their new plan called for the cars to sail to Vladivostok and drive to Paris from there. While the Americans were still at sea, their competitors, including the ever-troubled Protos, arrived in Seattle and set sail for Russia. Then the Americans lost time getting their Russian visas in order. The Flyer had been the first to arrive on the Pacific coast but was now the last to leave, a few weeks behind the competition.

The Italian and French teams were forging across Japan when the race committee made another decision. In recognition of the time the Flyer lost detouring through Alaska, the American team was given an allowance of 15 days—which meant, essentially, that the Zust and the De Dion could beat the Flyer into Paris by two weeks and still lose. The Protos, meanwhile, would be penalized 15 days for resorting to the train from Ogden to Seattle; the committee didn’t disqualify Lieutenant Koeppen entirely, concluding that there had been some honest confusion (unlike in Godard’s case) about the rules.

The Thomas Flyer in Japan, with George Schuster at the wheel. From www.time.com.

In Russia, the racers were advised to give up and take the Trans-Siberian Railway. Scarfoglio reported that the “great men of the Russian government, all covered with gold lace,” outlined the many reasons the venture would fail: “We shall be met on the road by Chinese brigands, Manchurian tigers, fever, plague, pestilence, famine—to say nothing of the mud after three months of rain, mosquitoes as big as locusts and other similar delights.” The drivers agreed to start again evenly matched. With one day to prepare, George Schuster searched for a supply of gasoline, which was scarce in Siberia. Back at his hotel, he received a note summoning him to St. Chaffray’s room. When he arrived he saw that the Italian team was already there.

“There is no petrol,” the Frenchman announced. “There are no means of getting any. What there was is in my possession, and I offer it to the car which will agree to take me onboard.” The Italians left the room in disgust. St. Chaffray tried to reason with the Americans, stating that he could get a seat on the German car, but the Flyer was sure to beat the Protos into Paris and he wished to be on the first car to arrive. He added that “it would not look well for a Frenchman to ride on a German machine.” Schuster calmly said he’d think about it, but he was seething. Privately he told his team that he’d rather stay in Vladivostok for the rest of his life than accept St. Chaffray’s bribe. Without fanfare, St. Chaffray transferred the rights to his gasoline to the Italian team, but was not allowed to join. His sponsor, the Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, had decided he was finished.

In Perm, Russia, Schuster received a telegram from the Thomas factory in Buffalo: “Do you want us to send Montague Roberts to help you when you get on the good roads of Europe?” Schuster was so mad he could’ve “eaten nails,” as he put it, and sent an immediate reply: “July 9: Arrived today. Expect to reach Paris on July 24. Schuster.” The suggestion that he was good enough to drive the Flyer through the bogs of Siberia but not through the capitals of Europe impelled him, despite deadened nerves and aching limbs. He was now only a day ahead of the Protos and determined to maintain his lead.

There was one problem: Schuster kept getting lost. The Russians couldn’t understand hand signals and the Americans couldn’t understand Russian. One wrong turn cost the Americans 15 hours. Worse, the Flyer sunk into a mudhole and needed a day’s worth of repairs. Schuster heard that Lieutenant Koeppen had left St. Petersburg the same day and was on his way to securing a three-day lead. The Italians remained 3,000 miles behind, in Atchunsk.

At 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, five and a half months and 21,933 miles from the start in Times Square, Lieutenant Koeppen arrived in Paris, slowly guiding the Protos down Boulevard Poissonniere. A delegation of editors from Le Matin greeted him with tepid enthusiasm and served a cold buffet at his reception. At the same time, Schuster was having breakfast at the Imperial Automobile Club of Berlin, where several people congratulated him on his good showing. He didn’t bother to explain that the Protos would ultimately be docked two weeks for using the train in the American west, and that the Flyer was allotted two extra weeks for attempting the trip to Alaska. Schuster had a month in which to get to Paris and still win the race.

Parisians welcoming George Schuster and the Thomas Flyer. From www.time.com.

Schuster and his crew arrived on July 30, the Flyer making its way through the lines of lighted cafes, the crowds shouting wildly: “Vive le car Americain!” They cruised toward the Place de l’Opéra, where, in front of the Café de la Paiz, a gendarme stopped the car.

“You are under arrest,” he declared. “You have no lights on your car.”

A crowd of Americans rushed from the café and tried to explain, but the officer waved them away. The law was the law: a car had to have a headlight to be on the streets of Paris at night, or the driver was to be placed under arrest. A quick-thinking man on a bicycle rode up to the car, jumped off and deposited his bike, which had a headlight, in the Flyer next to Schuster. Problem solved. The gendarme stepped aside.

Schuster graciously insisted that Monty Roberts be present for the Flyer’s triumphant return to Times Square on August 17, 1908. After the accolades and parties died down, he returned to his job at the Thomas factory, where he was promised employment as long as the company was in business. Five years later, the Thomas company collapsed and all its goods were auctioned off. Lot number 1829 was listed simply as the “Famous New York to Paris Racer.”

Sources:

Books: Julie M. Fenster, Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race. New York: Crown, 2005; Dermot Cole: Hard Driving: The 1908 Auto Race from New York to Paris. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Allen Andrews: The Mad Motorists: The Great Peking to Paris Race of ’07. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965.

Articles: “Macedonian Cry for Help from Foreign Autoists.” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1908; “First in Chicago Autos’ Aim.” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1908; “New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago.” New York Times, February 10, 2008; “Race to Paris Starts Today.” New York Times, February 12, 1908; “The Greatest Race—1908 New York to Paris,” by Art Evans. Sports Car Digest, September 28, 2011: http://www.sportscardigest.com/the-greatest-race-1908-new-york-to-paris/; “Tour of Autoists Like Polar Trip.” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1908; “Mathewson At Wheel of Racer.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 1908; “American Car Will Try to Cross Alaska.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1908; “Thomas, Winner, Reaches Paris.” New York Times, July 31, 1908.