History

The carved outline of foot found on the removable deck planking of the late 9th century Viking Gokstad Ship bears mute witness to how at least one crew member passed the time during a long sea voyage. There are two foot outlines: a right foot carved across two planks and a weaker outline of a left foot on a single plank. The deck was made out of moveable pine planks that could easily be lifted if the crew needed to access the small hold for cargo storage or to bail out water. When the ship was first excavated in 1880, the planks were found scattered so we don’t know if the feet were originally next to each other or if they were carved independently. Even though the ship was excavated 133 years ago and has been in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum since 1932, researchers only noticed the footprints in 2009 when moving the loose floorboards. Museum storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad thinks the carving was the work of a bored youth, much like kids these days might carve their initials into their desks. “My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It’s a kind of an ‘I was here’ message,” says Aannestad. [...] Aannestad has measured one of her own feet against a tracing of the carved outline – because no one can actually step on the fragile floorboard, of course. The foot was smaller than hers, and even though people were generally shorter in the Viking days, this was probably a little person. “It could have been a young man. People were treated as adults much earlier in those days. They took off sooner than we would allow young boys to do today,” says Aannestad. They should add the shoe outline to the exhibit so visitors, especially kids, can compare their feet to that of a real Viking who lived and traveled in that ship 1100 years ago. The foot carving is not the first time a young man established a lasting connection to this ship. It was first discovered on Gokstad farm near the town of Sandefjord on the west side of the Oslo Fjord in 1880 by the two teenage sons of the farm’s owner. The hill was called Kongshaugen (meaning “The King’s Mound”), and one day the boys decided to see if the legends that a king was buried there with all his treasure might be true. Just after New Year’s when the ground was still frozen, the highly motivated youths climbed the hill and started digging. Although the name suggests the hill was a burial mound for royalty, there are many mounds named Kongshaugen that turn out to be just hills. This one turned out to have an elaborate Viking ship burial within. The news reached the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments and its then-president Nicolay Nicolayse managed to stop the amateur dig. He returned in the Spring and began a proper excavation from the side instead of the top down. You can read his 1892 account of the dig here. What he found was an oak clinker-built ship 76 feet long and 17 feet wide with 16 oar holes on each side of the hull. There was room for more than the 34 rowers, however. The ship’s maximum capacity was around 70. A scrap of white wool with red stripes sewn on was found in the front of the ship, possibly a fragment of the square sail. There was a birch bark-covered wooden burial chamber built at the stern of the ship behind the mast. Inside the burial chamber was a raised bed with the incomplete skeleton of an adult male, a man in his 40s around 5’9″ whose leg bones showed the marks of the cutting blows that probably killed him in battle. Blows to the leg were a common fighting technique in Viking times. Fragments of silk and gold thread stuck in the joists of the roof indicate the chamber was once draped with expensive textiles. There were grave goods, although none of the gold, silver, jewelry, precious accessories and armaments that usually accompanied a Viking ship burial. Those had been looted, probab

This is a neat article on Grant and his wife, Julia. The quotes from their courtships letters are a lot of fun! As soon as he was away, Grant began writing love letters to Julia Dent. They portray a tender, sensitive and insecure young man, overly concerned that his fiancée did not share the intensity of his longing for her. She did not write as frequently as he did, causing him great despair, but when she did compose and send letters, Grant would read them over and over. “My Dear Julia,” he wrote. “You can have but little idea of the influence you have over me Julia, even while so far away…and thus it is absent or present I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.” One letter arrived in return with two dried flowers inside, but when Grant opened it the petals scattered in the wind. He searched the barren Mexican sands for even a single petal, but in vain. “Before I seal this I will pick a wild flower off of the Bank of the Rio Grande and send you,” he wrote. Later, from Matamoras, he wrote, “You say in your letter I must not grow tired of hearing you say how much you love me! Indeed dear Julia nothing you can say sounds sweeter…. When I lay down I think of Julia until I fall asleep hoping that before I wake I may see her in my dreams.”

Guys gone wild, 1860s style. "Unidentified soldiers in Union uniforms holding cigars in each other's mouths." Ninth-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress. View full size.

From 1952 comes this conflation of two popular genres in the children's TV show "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet." Photo by Charlotte Brooks for the Look magazine assignment "Cowboys and Meteors." View full size.

Today's research snippet.Items from the Chalcis hoard - 14th/15thCBernard of Clairveaux 1090-1153 was a great letter writer. His epistles were frequently full of good advice as he saw it, pep talks and admonishments. Sometimes there were dark hints about the doings of others in society.Here are extracts from his letter to 'The Virgin Sophia, that she may keep the title of virginity and attain its reward.' His remarks on the state of high born royal women are often taken to be jibes aimed at Eleanor of Aquitaine, although no names are named and there is no outright proof."For if among men, virtue is rare – a rare bird on earth – how much rarer is it in the case of a weak woman of high birth? Who can find a virtuous woman? Much more a virtuous woman of high birth?""Let other women, then, who have not any other hope, contend for the cheap, fleeting and paltry glory of things that vanish and deceive. Do you cling to the hope that confounds not. Do you keep yourself, I say, for that far more exceeding weight of glory, which our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh for you on high. And if the daughters of Belial reproach you, those who walk with stretched forth necks, mincing as they go, decked out and adorned like the Temple, answer them: My Kingdom is not of this world; answer them: My time is not yet come…""Silk and purple and rouge and paint have beauty, but impart it not. Every such thing that you apply to the body exhibits its own loveliness, but leaves it’s not behind. It takes the beauty was it, when the thing itself is taken away. For the beauty that is put on with the garment and put off with the garment, belongs without doubt to the garment, and not to wearer of it. Do not you therefore, emulate those evil disposed persons who, as mendicants, seek an extraneous beauty when they have lost their own. They only betray how destitute they are of an proper and native beauty, when at such great labour and cost of a study to furnish themselves outside with the many and various graces of the fashion of the world which passeth away, just that they may appear graceful in the eyes of fools. Deem it a thing unworthy of you to borrow your attractiveness from the furs of animals and the toils of worms; let your own suffice you. For that is the true and proper beauty of anything, which it has in itself without the aid of any substance besides. Oh! How lovely the flush with which the jewel of inborn modesty colours a virgin’s cheeks! Can have the earrings of queen’s be compared to this? And self discipline confers a mark of equal beauty. Household discipline calms the hall aspect of a maiden’s bearing, her whole temper of mind. It bows the neck, smooths the proud browsd, composes the countenance, restrains the eyes, repressive laughter, checks, the tongue, tempers the appetite, assuages wrath, and guides the deportment. With such pearls of modesty should your robe be decked. When virginity is girt with divers colours such as these, is there any glory to which it is not rightly preferred?....""You see women of the world burdened, rather than adorned with gold, silver, precious stones; in short, with all the raiment of a palace. You see how they draw long trains behind them, and those of the most costly materials, and raise thick clouds of dust into the air. Let not such things disturb you. They must lay them aside when they come to die; but the holiness which is your possession will not forsake you. The things which they wear are really not their own. When they die they can take nothing with them, nor will this their glory go down with them. The world, whose such things are, will keep them and dismissed the wearers naked; and will beguile with them others equally vain."

Forgive the scepticism, a claim is made on a yearly basis, but there is a story in today's Herald that the site of the Battle of Mons Graupius, the first recorded battle in Scottish history, between the Romans under Agricola and the native tribes under Calgacus in AD83/84, has been found. Despite stringent efforts by experts, the site of the battle between the Romans and the Caledonians – in either 83AD or 84AD – has never been conclusively identified. However, Mr Haseler believes his research strongly points to the battle taking place near Elgin, at Quarrelwood Hill to the north-west of the town. He is now asking that experts pay closer attention to the site and examine what he believes to be a possible Roman fort a short distance away. From his research and examining the formation of aerial crop circles, Mr Haseler believes he has discovered the fort just south of Elgin. "I knew the site was a really good candidate from looking at old maps, but I never thought I would find what appeared to be the ditches of a Roman fort staring out at me from the computer screen," he said. "I have looked and looked at the evidence, and everything fits. "I have been to the site, and it is just as described by the Roman writer Tacitus and, barring going up with a metal detector, which is clearly illegal, there is nothing else I can do but present the evidence I have for the public to decide." Hmmm. Anyway, full story here. More about the battle here.

On this date in 1891, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison settled a death penalty case from the remote Navassa Island by granting a commutation. Back in the 19th century, islands stacked high with guano were worth their weight in bird crap. The phosphate-rich dung piled meters-deep in some places, and could be mined for agricultural fertilization and for use in gunpowder and explosives. In 1856, Congress even passed a Guano Islands Act empowering skippers to plant the stars and stripes on any of these lucrative little turd reefs they happened to run across. That’s how the U.S. came to possess, for instance, Midway Island … and more than 100 other islands as well. Most of these claims have long since been ceded, but a few remain today. One of them is (still!) Navassa, a three-square-mile speck off the coast of Haiti, 100 miles south of Guantanamo Bay. Today, Navassa is uninhabited and administered by the Department of the Interior on somewhat disputable footing. (Haiti, just two miles away, also claims Navassa.) But in the late 19th century, its sweet, sweet guano was being extracted by a Baltimore-based firm known as the Navassa Phosphate Company. This operation employed 137 African-American laborers, moving groaning shitloads of product by raw muscle power under a blistering tropical sun … and under 11 white overseers. The nature of the assignment — an island very far from the nearest American settlement, with no other industry, community or settlement to repair to — made taking a job on Navassa almost like hitching on somewhere as a sailor: you were off to a little floating dictatorship, with no way out until the end of the contract. Navassa’s overseers turned out to have a taste for the cat o’nine tails, and worse. “The conditions surrounding the prisoners and their fellows were of a most peculiar character,” Harrison noted in his eventual commutation order. They were American citizens, under contracts to perform labor upon specified terms, within American territory, removed from any opportunity to appeal to any court or public officer for redress of any injury or the enforcement of any civil right. Their employers were, in fact, their masters. The bosses placed over them imposed fines and penalties without any semblance of trial. These penalties extended to imprisonment, and even to the cruel practice of tricing men up for a refusal to work. Escape was impossible, and the state of things generally such as might make men reckless and dangerous. Or, as a naval inspection judged it, Navassa resembled “a convict establishment without its comforts and cleanliness”: people being worked brutally to the bone during their contract, eating rancid rations and living in filth. Not surprisingly, Navassa’s “convict” laboring population rebelled in 1889, and in a vicious hour-long riot slew five overseers while maiming several others. Warships calling on the island shipped 18 back to face murder charges; ultimately, three black guano-miners were sentenced to death for the affair.* However, a huge clemency push spearheaded by the Baltimore-based black fraternal organization the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen raised the cry to spare the condemned men. Guano harvesting resumed after the riot, but was aborted in 1898 by the Spanish-American War; the Navassa Phosphate Company fell into bankruptcy, and although the U.S. later threw up a lighthouse on Navassa to aid Panama Canal-bound vessels, it’s been effectively uninhabited ever since. * The appeals arising from the Navassa conviction generated the 1890 Supreme Court case Jones v. United States, affirming Navassa’s American territoriality, and establishing Congressional jurisdiction over violations of U.S. law that didn’t take place in any particular state. This bit of jurisprudence has turned up all over the place in the century-plus since it was issued.

Washington, D.C., circa 1943. "Potomac Electric Power Co. substations. Brightwood station car barn." Photo by Theodor Horydczak. View full size.

Leonard Joel Auctioneers in Melbourne provided this historical evidence, based on Royal Marines Historical Society records (see reference). The auction is on 19th May 2013.Charles A.F.N. Menzies (1783-1866) was born in Perthshire in Scotland, the son of an army captain. The young lad was educated at Stirling and, at age 15 commissioned as a second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, serving on HMS Holden with Lord Nelson's squadron off Boulogne during the blockade of the French Invasion Fleet.In 1803 Menzies sailed on HMS Calcutta to transport convicts to Australia and shortly after was promoted to lieutenant. In 1804 he was in com­mand of a detachment of marines that crushed an uprising near Castle Hill in New South Wales by a group of Irish convicts, who were political prisoners from an earlier uprising in Ireland. The Australian skirmish must have been horrible.In March 1804 Governor Philip Gidley decided to separate the worst offenders to establish a new settlement on Coal River. He accepted Lieutenant Menzies' offer to found and take command of the new settlement. The group sailed from Sydney on the Lady Nelson and two other small ships, and soon arrived at the new settlement that Menzies initially named Kingstown, but was re-named Newcastle by Governor King. From the very beginning of this small settlement, Newcastle was to be a work camp, from which coal and timber would be taken for the benefit of the main settlement in Sydney.General Sir Charles Menzies with sword, by Daniel Cunliffe Oil on canvas, 54 x 38 cm, 1843Royal Marines Museum in Hampshire Although still only in his early 20s this Royal Marines officer acquitted himself well and by the time he resigned his position in March 1805 to return home to Britain, Newcastle was estab­lished.Menzies resumed active service soon after returning home. He commanded the Royal Marines attached to HMS Minerva and was involved in many actions. In June 1806 Menzies was in one of the Minerva's boats that were responsible for cutting out five boats from under Cape Finisterre, the Spanish scene of many naval actions during the Napoleonic wars. He led a landing party which rushed the fort; in fact because Menzies was the first to enter, it was he who lowered the enemy's colours and safely raised the British flag. In July 1806 he planned an attack on a barge that captured a Spanish privateer and was instrumental in cutting out a Spanish vessel of war, landing at the Spanish Bay of Arosa and taking prisoners. Menzies also led his men at the capture of Fort Guardia.In 1813 Menzies was promoted to Captain of the Royal Marine Artil­lery. In 1817 he married the daughter of the physician to the Duke of Gloucester and had children. His career progressed smoothly until he was the Colonel Commandant of the Portsmouth Royal Marines.Menzies was appointed aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria in 1851, then knighted and appointed General in 1857. He died peacefully in old age. Clearly he a significant military man, yet I have three important questions:1. Why was Charles Menzies given a valuable Patriotic Fund sword that displayed the crowned arms and cypher of George III?2. What was Charles Menzies’ importance to early Australian history?3. Why did the sword come to Australia?Since 1803 Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund has worked closely with armed forces charities to identify the individuals and their families who are in urgent need of support. The contributors created the fund to give grants to those wounded in service to the Crown and to set up annuities to the dependents of those killed in action. The Fund’s prizes, awarded to those British combatants who went beyond the call of duty, could be money, a sword or a piece of silver plate.Charles Menzies was an obvious candidate for a Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund award. Not only was he brave and full of leadership; Menzies also led his men at the capture of Fort Guardia in 1806 when he was severely wounded and his right arm was amputated. He received a sword from

Karl Kurtz wrote in the July 23, 1977 issue of the Sandusky Register in his “Elderlies” column that the first silent movie shown in the Sandusky area was The Great Train Robbery. Veteran Sanduskynewspaper man and showman Dave Wood brought the celluloid melodrama to Sandusky in 1905 and showed it at Cedar Point. The first motion picture house in Sandusky was called the Theatorium, established in 1906. It was located on West Market Street between the old Post Office and the Firehouse. Charles Reark was the first manager of the Theatorium. He showed first-run silent movies, with eight changes a week. An article from a 1909 issue of The Moving Picture World stated that “Proprietors of moving picture theatres throughout Ohio who have visited Mr. Reark's cozy theatre state that he has the brightest and clearest pictures in the State. Ushers seat the patrons, a new light system has been installed, and no expense is spared to give the amusement goers of Sandusky the best of entertainment at this theatre for five cents admission.” Five Hallberg arc lamps “turned night into day” at the front of the theater. An article from the Sandusky Register of February 6, 1927, reported that the Theatorium was a long narrow room, with low ceilings and poor ventilation. By January 1907, the Theatorium had 140 seats which were all elevated. Besides the main feature of a silent movie, audiences were often treated to the attraction of an illustrated song. A soloist would sing the song played by the pianist, as colored slides were projected on the big screen. The singer would repeat the same song to several audiences each day.For many years, Manager Charles Reark had a special program at the Theatorium for members of the Sandusky Newsboys’ Association. On Thanksgiving, the newsboys were treated to a silent movie at the Theatorium between 10 a.m. and noon. The newsboys just had to show a badge or membership card for admission to the free show. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1907, souvenir Christmas cards were given away to everyone in the audience. Songs were performed by A.L. Taylor and George Upp. The movies shown that Christmas were The Wonderful Mirror, The Dog Hero, and Thieves Caught in Their Own Trap. Later owners of the Theatorium included Gustavus Dildine and Voltaire Schweinfurth. The Theatorium closed in May of 1917, but it brought many an evening of entertainment for residents of the Sandusky area for over ten years.