Ancient Mayans elongated the heads of young children of the wealthy and powerful by squeezing them between two boards and wrapping the heads tightly. Children’s skulls grew to resemble the shape of an ear of corn. Later the Huns would do the same.
Mind the Gap
Francisco Vasquez de Coronada “discovered” the Grand Canyon and the Rio Grande in 1540. He was too busy searching (in vain) for gold to pay much attention.
A Hand in Everything
Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries 1812
In the course of writing my insects book, I did a lot of research on Napoleon, as so many of his French troops died from insect-vectored diseases. What a horrid little man he was.
After crowning himself Emperor in 1804, he endeavored to become Evil Mastermind of the Universe by grabbing control of India away from the British. As he knew France’s naval skills could never match up to those of Britain, he sent his extremely expendable troops overland toward India. It’s a long walk from France to India. Along the way, he figured he’d knock off Eastern Europe and Russia.
What he didn’t anticipate was that half a million of his men would die of famine, typhus, dysentery, and exposure. France’s catastrophic retreat from Russia is just one of his many charming accomplishments.
But what so many people want to know is, why did he always have his portrait painted with his hand in his shirt?
Many theories have been proposed to explain his hidden hand. He might have had a stomach ulcer, or an itchy skin condition. Perhaps he was winding his watch, or he kept a nice-smelling sachet in his vest. Or he might just have been cheap: in those days, portrait painters charged extra to paint hands. But the probable reason is simply that it was a classic way to stand when having your portrait painted, having been established long before Napoleon’s birth. Napoleon just made it his trademark.
Still, according to Georgia Bragg in her entertaining book, How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous, Napoleon ultimately died of a cancerous stomach ulcer—just beneath the spot where he always had his hand in so many of his paintings. Coïncidence?
Jacques-Louis_David Portrait of Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries 1812
Can It
Canned food, in heavy iron cans, was invented for the British Navy in 1813. But can openers were not invented until the 1860s. Before then, people opened cans with a hammer and chisel.
source: The Boy Who Invented the Popsicle, by Don L. Wulffson
Burnside’s Sideburns
Ambrose Burnside, a Civil War General for the Union Army, sported impressive sidebar whiskers, which grew down in front of his ears. We have him to thank for the word “sideburns.”
One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Slime
Van Gogh, Potato Eaters 1885
Ever since I first learned about it, I’ve been fascinated and horrified by the Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Hunger. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned the probable source of the blight: bird poop.
The blight first appeared in Ireland in 1845. It had spread to many other European countries as well, but the Irish were especially hard-hit because 4 out of 10 people in that country subsisted exclusively on potatoes, and a big percentage of the rest of them ate mostly potatoes. As many as a million people died of starvation, and two million more fled the country.
The potato plants were attacked by a kind of mold that acts as a fungus. Phytophthora infestans means “vexing plant destroyer.” The spores get blown on the wind, land on plants, germinate, and kill it quickly. The spores love wet weather (such as can be found in Ireland). Rain washes them into the soil, where they attack potatoes six or more inches below the surface. In that first awful year, 1845, the mold could turn a field of healthy potato plants into black, stinking mush in just a few days.
For centuries, farmers have used poop as fertilizer; plants need nitrogen, and poop contains nitrogen. In my POOP book, I wrote about how most major urban centers carted their human and horse poop outside the city and sold it to nearby farmers. But as cities grew larger and larger, farms became father and farther away, and rather suddenly, it was no longer cost effective to cart poop to the farms. As a result, cities became much smellier, and waterways more and more polluted, as there was nowhere to put the poop except to dump it into the nearest river. (See my Poop book for the disastrous consequences to cities.) So what did farmers use to fertilize their fields instead? Guano–bird poop–from Peru.
All this I knew, but it wasn’t until I recently read Charles C. Mann’s new book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, that I learned much more about the mining of guano. It’s a grim tale.
Fertilizer ships from Europe sailed to the Chincha islands, thirteen miles off the coast of Peru, where huge piles of sea bird poop were stacked as high as a twelve-story building. According to Mann, the islands gave off a stench that could be smelled long before a ship reached them. And nothing grew on the islands; the only living things were “bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies.” There was no drinkable water, and not a single plant on the barren, smelly, dry landscape. Mining the guano was wretched work. Miners had to hack away at the guano, enveloping themselves in corrosive dust clouds. The poop was dumped through a long tube, where it dropped directly into the ships’ holds below, exploding into toxic dust that enveloped the ship. No one wanted to work in those miserable conditions. They tried convicts and African slaves, but the convicts killed themselves (and one another) and the slaves were too valuable to “waste” in the mines, as life tended to be brutish and short for those forced to perform this wretched work. The solution? Enslaved Chinese workers. As many as a quarter million Chinese indentured workers were shipped there, to live in virtual slavery, in a horrific alternate Middle passage you don’t hear much about.
Van Gogh, Woman lifting potatoes, 1885
Although we may never know for certain, many scientists believe that it was the guano ships that carried P. infestans over to Europe. The plant disease that emerged from the guano fertilizer then decimated Europe’s potato fields in the 1840s.
Ivan’s Terrible Temper
Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1530 – 1584) did a lot of terrible things. For instance, he carried a long staff with a pointy end, and when he lost his temper, used it to stab whoever happened to be standing nearest to him.
What the Well-Dressed Inuit Wears to Stay Dry
Photo by Robert E. Peary
In honor of the bizarre snowstorm that struck many of us in the Northeast over the weekend, today’s blog is about the Inuit fashions of the early 20th century.
When Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and two Inuit guides became the first explorers to reach the North Pole, in 1909, they were dressed for the occasion. By all accounts–except perhaps Peary’s–the team would never have reached the Pole without Henson’s contribution. His physical strength, vigorous stamina, and vast experience with ships and travel made him an ideal partner for Peary. And he also had great people skills–while on the survey trip to Greenland, Henson befriended the native Inuits, who taught him their language and the skills needed to become an expert dogsled driver. Charmed by his kindness and delighted with the color of his skin, so similar to their own, the Inuits taught him the most valuable secret of all: how to dress for the Arctic climate.
Here’s something Henson and Peary learned: What does the well-dressed Inuit wear to stay cozy and dry in wet weather? A raincoat made of walrus intestines.
To make this garment, the Inuit removed the intestines, turned them inside out, scraped them clean with a mussel shell, washed them in water and urine, blew them up with air, hung them to dry, and finally split them open and laid them out in the sun to bleach them. The long white strips were then sewn together. The whole process took about a month. The result was a lightweight, waterproof outer garment.
Inuits knew how to dress for the cold. In their animal skin garments they could stay outside for hours in -50 degree Fahrenheit weather, in garments weighing only 7 – 10 pounds.
Inuits wore snow goggles of wood or ivory to reduce the glare of the sun. Snow blindness—painful inflammation of the retina—was a real hazard.
Sealskin fur mittens often had two thumbs. Why? They could be swivelled around when the palms got wet.
Photo by George R. King, 1917
Little Miss Muffet
Dr. Thomas Muffett (1533 – 1604) was an English doctor and also an entomologist. He believed spiders had great medicinal properties. His daughter, Patience, is commemorated in the Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme. Dr. Muffet believed milk was unhealthful, but evidently curds and whey were OK.
Like Buttah
Margarine was invented in France in the mid-1800s, as the result of an acute butter shortage. U.S. dairy farmers at the time were not pleased when margarine began to be imported to America, and strict laws were passed regulating where it could be sold. Its sale was prohibited in Wisconsin until 1967.