Carapichea Ipecacuanha, a flowering plant native to Brazil, was first introduced to Europe in the mid 17th century. Its roots were used as a medicine—known to many as syrup of ipecac–to make a patient vomit in the case of accidental poisoning.
Mutiny on the Mississippi
I’ve been reading about a Frenchman named René-Robert Cavelier de la Salle (1643 – 1687), who became the first European to explore the entire length of the Mississippi River–by canoe, no less. The more I read about him, the more fascinating I find him. It’s impossible to do justice to his story in a short blog post. Someone should write a book about him. Go ahead—you can put me in your acknowledgments.
Like so many fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century European explorers, La Salle was a study in contradictions: exceedingly brave, exceedingly cruel, and possessed of an unbelievable tolerance for enduring hardship. His quest for fame and fortune caused him to make some pretty bone-headed decisions, which ultimately caused his undoing.
La Salle and his crew—comprised of 23 Frenchmen and 18 Indians—paddled the length of the Mississippi and reached the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. He claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France, and founded Louisiana, which he named after his boss, Louis XIV.
Back he went to France. (If I were writing a book, the first question I’d ask is how he got back to France. I mean, here he was with his 41 crew members on the swampy, malarial mouth of the river—how did he get back to France? If you decide to write a book about him, would you please let me know?)
In 1684, he set sail from France (see my question above), newly provisioned with four ships and 300 colonists, intent on reaching the mouth of the Mississippi by sea in order to set up a new French colony. Disaster after disaster struck. One ship was captured by Spanish pirates. Another sank. The remaining two ships travelled too far west, thanks to faulty navigation and bad maps, and one of them ran aground in a bay of Texas.
They set up the colony there, which turned out to be another bad decision, as the settlers began dying rapidly from diseases and hostile Indian attacks. Undaunted, La Salle undertook three separate expeditions, travelling eastward–on foot– in an effort to find the mouth of the Mississippi. Many of these searchers died or deserted. At the fourth attempt, in 1687, a group of his own men mutinied and murdered him, leaving his body for the animals to eat.
source:
http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=109
The Birds
In 1852, the U.S. imported house sparrows from Germany to control canker worms that were infesting trees in Central Park. More pairs of sparrows were introduced in other states and today they are the most abundant songbirds on the continent.
Give or Take
The first use of mathematical symbols + (plus) and – (minus) was in 1489.
Fallen Idols
There’s been a lot of talk among my writer friends about an article that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Fallen Idols.” The author writes about her disappointment in discovering that many of her literary heroes were rather awful people in their personal lives. Rilke, a favorite poet of hers, turned out to be “a selfish, sycophantic, womanizing rat.”
I’m actually not that bothered by the whole issue of artists who create great art but are personally big jerks. Beethoven was a jerk. Wagner was a jerk. Picasso was a jerk. Caravaggio was a murderer. Doesn’t bother me. I can still love their art.
But historical figures are quite another issue, and it’s been bothering me for a long time. For those of us who read and write a lot about social history, it’s difficult to reconcile one’s admiration for a great historical figure with one’s discovery that he (usually he) was a big fat jerk.
Here are my two issues: First, to what extent were these personally repugnant individuals the products of their time? And two, how certain can we be that the historical accounts that have prevailed are accurate? Two very different but important issues.
Even most school kids now know that Christopher Columbus was a big fat jerk, whose primary motivation was personal enrichment, and who was immensely cruel to the natives he encountered and to his own men. And if you research Thomas Edison, you’re bound to read about the bitter rivalry between him and Nikola Tesla, and intimations that Edison may have taken undue credit for some of Tesla’s inventions. Or maybe Edison was simply the better marketer. In any case, Tesla wasn’t all that bothered, because, as one blogger put it, “he was too busy inventing the twentieth century.”
I lose a lot of sleep over the Founding Fathers, the ones who proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” because a lot of them were slave owners and womanizers who actually meant “all white male property owners are created equal.” Churchill helped take down Hitler, but he was himself extremely racist. But at what point do we declare that at least some of these men were products of their time? That the good they did for humankind vastly outweighed their personal jerkiness? I think about this a lot.
Then there are those figures that historians don’t all agree about. Was Gandhi truly such a jerk to his three sons? Whenever they did something wrong (like the time Gandhi caught one of them kissing a girl), he punished himself by fasting for a week. He refused his sons a formal education. He was pretty mean to his wife, too. Was he a bad family man or simply trying to encourage his family to embrace his fervently held ideals?
And what about Galileo? Did he steal the theory of the path of projectiles from Cavalieri? Should he really be credited with inventing the telescope, when telescopes had already been built by others before him? Some accounts say he was persecuted by the Inquisition and forced to recant his heliocentric theories. Others say the church was rather reasonable with him (considering the era), and just asked him to say they were theories rather than facts.
Did Florence Nightingale really refuse Mary Seacole’s request to join her nurses in the Crimea because of Mary’s race? Or was Mary just an opportunistic innkeeper looking to earn a living by setting up a hotel in the war zone?
What’s the takeaway? History is complex. It’s written by the victors. Textbooks are too superficial. Take your pick.
Images: Rilke, Tesla, Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, Gandhi, Mary Seacole all via wikimedia commons
Two to One
Singer Elvis Presley had an identical twin brother, who was delivered stillborn.
Grande Mocha
The port city of Mocha, in Yemen, was a major coffee market from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Mocha’s coffee was not a mocha-coffee blend, the way we know mocha today.
Slaveowner in Chief
Twelve out of the first eighteen U.S. presidents were slave owners.
Flea Bitten
Since ancient times, a favorite subject for artists and writers has been . . . the lowly flea. Not only have fleas always been close associates of humans, they also seem to provide writers with ready metaphors for all sorts of things, ranging from stand-ins for a lover to a canon of poetry to the Holy Trinity.
People didn’t seem as skeeved out by fleas as we are today, perhaps because everyone was bugged by them.
Evidently the Roman poet Ovid wrote some naughty flea sonnets. And writer Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) used the flea metaphor to satirize lesser poets who criticized better ones:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
—Jonathan Swift, from “On Poetry: A Rhapsody”
And then there was John Donne (1572 – 1631), a favorite poet of mine.
In his younger days, he wrote some pretty racy love poetry, but as he grew older and more devout (and obsessed with death), his poems become more devotional (although some would argue his later poems are still pretty racy). In about 1610, he wrote an entire poem called “The Flea,” which is basically a long plea to hook up with an indifferent love interest. But you see glimmers of his emerging piety (he was a well-known preacher who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism) when the narrator of the poem urges the woman not to crush the flea that just bit them both: “three lives in one flea spare.” (I’m pretty sure that’s a reference to the Holy Trinity.) You can read that poem here.
Gerard ter Borch circa 1665 Boy Ridding his Dog of Fleas
Guisseppe Maria Crespi Searcher for Fleas 1720s
Crespi, 1709
Georges de la Tour (1625 ish) Woman With Flea
The Stilt Walkers
As I was doing some photo research for a book project, I stumbled across some pictures that astonished me. These images were taken during the 19th century, in a region in the southwest of France called Landes. At the time it was an impoverished place, inhabited mostly by shepherds. There were few roads and the ground was flat and marshy. So the people of Landes developed a unique way of getting around: they travelled on stilts.
In 1891, a Frenchman from the region named Sylvain Dornon walked on his stilts from Paris to Moscow in a mere 58 days. You can read more about these people here, in a Scientific American article of 1891.
(Most of these images come from the NYPL digital gallery, which you can find here.)