Category Archives: MYSTERIES

SING A SONG OF JACK THE RIPPER

November 15, 2023 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , Leave a comment

Five millions of people cannot rest in their bed,

The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,

This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,

Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.

These verses are from one of a number of street, or ‘broadside’, ballads produced about the Whitechapel murders, perpetrated by someone known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’. 

When the Ripper first struck, London’s east end was already a byword for depravity and crime. From its origins and later development into a seething dockland and sailortown the district was rookery of sin which frequently proved everybody right about the bad things it was commonly said to spawn. But this was something especially grotesque.

Perhaps twenty minutes before 4am on 31 August 1888, a passing workman discovered the still warm body of  ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, not far from Bethnal Green. It was a dreadful sight. Her head was almost severed by a savage slash through the throat and her abdomen was deeply gashed with a very sharp instrument.  Her dress was pulled up to her waist, possibly related to her work as a prostitute. The attending surgeon noted a wine glass and a lot of blood in the gutter.

‘Polly’ was the street name of Mary Ann Nichols. She was forty-three years old, though looked ten years younger, and stood just over five feet tall with greying brown hair and grey eyes. An alcoholic, Polly was seen staggering drunk an hour earlier and spoke of her intention to find a client to pay for her night’s doss.

Eight days later, another dead prostitute was found. Annie Chapman has been sliced up much like Polly Nichols, but this time the killer had removed and taken away some internal organs. Alongside her right shoulder lay her small intestine. The uterus and part of the bladder had been removed. The mutilated remains lay in a yard in Hanbury Street and were discovered just before 6am. The attending surgeon thought the horrific wounds must have been inflicted by someone with ‘great anatomical knowledge’.

On 30 September, the remains of ‘Long Liz’ Stride and Catherine Eddowes are found. Swedish-born Stride, 45 years old, has her throat sliced open. She is not mutilated, unlike poor Catherine, whose body is not far away in Mitre Square. In her forties and just five feet tall, her intestines have been sliced out and placed over her right shoulder; the killer has taken a kidney for a souvenir, or worse, along with her uterus. Many of her other organs are also mutilated, including her lower eyelids. When the remains arrive at the mortuary, ‘A piece of deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing’.

These murders were committed in the streets, giving the killer little time to perform whatever dark urges drove him. The next one took place in a lodging house bed in Miller’s Court. With no one to disturb him the serial murderer now dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ thoroughly mutilated twenty-five-year-old Mary Kelly, scattering most of her body parts around her and on the bedside table. Both her breasts had been removed.

Several other women had been murdered in the Whitechapel area before Polly Nichols died. The circumstances of their deaths were not the same as those of the five women who are generally accepted as bona fide Ripper victims, but the press, the police and the public all speculated about a serial killer at work in the area. And there were other murders after the death of Mary Kelly, fueling a hysteria and a macabre mystery that persists to the present. These events were also featured in several street ballads. 

The ballad business was in decline by now, finally bested by the superior technology and more effective distribution of newspapers and the sensational ‘penny blood’ magazines. But by the following year, if not long before, at least two Ripper ballads were being sold in Scotland, where a couple of gents were regaled by a ballad seller on his route to Inverness with no less than two classics of the genre. ‘The Demon Jack the Ripper’ focused on the fate of the last victim:

“The demon Jack the Ripper,

Has begun his work once more,

His hate for women is bitter,

He delights in human gore,

The last victim Mary Kelly,

But twenty-six year of age,

Has been served much worse by London’s curse,

You will say I will engage.

Chorus

The demon Jack the Ripper,

Is at work once more,

In Spitalfields Mary Kelly he killed

and left her in her gore.

The rough and ready verses gave a fair account of the state of Mary’s remains:

In the room where she was living.

Her naked body was found,

The Ripper no clue was giving

To those who lived around.

Her body was cut in pieces,

And portions taken away,

Her flesh ’tis shown stripped from her bones,

A terrible sight she lay.

There were some details of Mary’s Irish background and how she ‘fell into shame when to London she came’. Finally, the ballad voiced the question on every mind – when were the police – now considering the use of bloodhounds – going to catch the Ripper?

Where’s the noted bloodhounds,

That such wonders were to do,

That Jack the Ripper is not found

It must seem strange to you.

The authorities in London,

must adopt some more secret plan

Without bloodhounds to hunt him down

For he must be Satan and not a man.

The other song offered by the peddler was ‘The London Murderer’, a catalogue of the Ripper’s crimes and their instant notoriety:

This murderous history has spread thro’ the world.

Of all these poor women to Eternity hurled.

Again, the question why ‘the great men of our modern times’ ‘fail to discover these cowardly crimes’ and the fear in the streets:

Five millions of people cannot rest in their bed,

The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,

This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,

Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.

The world has ne’er known such cruelty before,

Not even abroad on some savage shore,

Tho’ for a time this monster may flee,

Burnt at the stake this fiend ought to be.

The ballad seller was rewarded with the sale of a shillings-worth of his stock, and a nice tip from his listeners. [1] His songs perfectly reflected the combined fascination with the grisly murders and the fear they produced in the streets of London and much further afield. And they probably helped it to multiply and spread.

[1] From The Inverness Courier, 15 February 1889. See also Paul Slade’s excellent Planet Slade site for more on murder ballads and much more besides at http://www.planetslade.com/index.html. Interestingly, Catherine Eddowes may have been involved with the street ballad trade herself in and around her hometown, see

https://www.casebook.org/victims/eddowes.html

WHAT HAPPENED TO TIMOTHÉE VASSE?

July 28, 2023 By in MYSTERIES, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Leave a comment

The ships of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia, “Géographe” and the “Naturaliste”, at Kupang, Timor. State Library of South Australia

In April 1801 French navigator Nicolas Baudin’s expedition was sailing off the south coast of what is now Western Australia. In the spirit of the age, Baudin was making a voyage of scientific investigation, as well as discovery. He was, of course, also spying on the British colony of New South Wales, though that was not verified until much later.[1]

The voyagers hoped not only to find new places and chart new coastlines but also to make contact with any Indigenous inhabitants they encountered. Equipped with his flagship  Géographe and Naturaliste, under the command of Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin, he was originally accompanied by a large group of scientists, artists and gardeners, though many of these became too ill to complete the voyage, five dying. Many of Baudin’s sailors were also at various stages of the extended expedition. One was lost in the large expanse of the Indian Ocean Baudin named Geographe Bay. 

Or was he?

Timothée Armand Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse was born into a bourgeoise family in Dieppe, France in 1774. He grew up and was educated between Rouen, where his father was a legal official, and Dieppe, where members of his extended family lived. During the French Revolution he joined the army, was wounded and later discharged. After a few years as a civil servant, he vanished and joined Baudin’s expedition as a junior assistant helmsman on the Naturaliste. Vasse was in trouble by the time Naturaliste reached Isle de France. Captain Hamelin planned to dismiss him there but lost so many other sailors through desertion that he was forced to keep the troublesome twenty-seven-year-old aboard his ship.

On 30 May 1801, the voyagers encountered what is now Geographe Bay. They landed in small boats and set up camp while the scientists conducted their investigations of the flora and fauna in the area. A few days later, one of the boats was sunk at the Wonnerup Inlet and had to be abandoned. The shore party was rescued but some equipment was left behind. 

Three days later, Vasse was aboard a small boat attempting to recover the equipment. But once again the small boat was swamped by the surf. The crew were washed ashore and only saved by a heroic sailor from another boat who swam ashore through the dangerous waters carrying a rope by which the castaways were able to haul themselves into the other boat. 

Except for Timothée Vasse. Said to have been drinking, he lost his grip on the lifeline and sank into the surf. With no further sign of him, Vasse was presumed drowned and Hamelin made sail, apparently without bothering to confirm the fatality.

The fate of Timothée Vasse would have been simply another footnote in the long history of lost sailors if not for the rumours. Soon after the return of Baudin’s expedition to France in 1803 Parisians began hearing stories that Vasse had not drowned but had survived and been cast away on a strange and very distant shore. Baudin himself was dead by now, but the official expedition account, written by the zoologist on the expedition Francois Peron, discounted the possibility that Vasse had survived. But the rumours persisted and were published in European newspapers. According to these accounts, Vasse lived with the local people for some years then walked hundreds of kilometres of coast to eventually be picked up by an American whaler, handed to the British and subsequently imprisoned in England.

No other Europeans are known to have visited Geographe Bay until after the foundation of the Swan River colony in 1829. When early settlers came into contact with the Wardandi (Wardanup and other spellings) people of the southwest region they began to hear other stories. In 1838 George Fletcher Moore was told while visiting the Wonnerup area that Vasse did not drown. With the help of the local people, he lived for several years and died of natural causes somewhere between present day Dunsborough and Busselton. 

He seems to have remained almost constantly upon the beach, looking out

for the return of his own ship, or the chance arrival of some other. He pined away gradually in anxiety, becoming daily, as the natives express it, weril, weril (thin, thin.) At last they were absent for some time, on a hunting expedition, and on their return they found him lying dead on the beach, within a stone s throw of the water’s edge.

They describe the body as being then swollen and bloated, either from incipient decomposition, or dropsical disease. His remains were not disturbed even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen.[2]

There were other versions of the tale. In one, Vasse was thought to have eventually been murdered. A ‘society in Paris’ was said to be offering a reward for the recovery of his bones – ‘the natives know where they are’, wrote one of the Swan River colony’s early settlers, Georgiana Molloy, in 1841.[3] In another, based on European features observed among Indigenous people around Geographe Bay, it was suggested that Vasse had fathered children with Wardandi women.[4]

Some attempts have since been made to resolve these conflicting possibilities. Among several books and articles on the subject[5] is one written by a descendant of Timothée Vasse. According to Alain Serieyx, family tradition holds that the lost sailor did survive and eventually return to France.[6] The book is a speculative fiction based on this belief but adds another thread to a fascinating tale. 

Whether or not Timothée Vasse lived, pined, and died as a lone white man on a distant continent will never be known for sure. Whatever his fate, his memory is preserved in the name of the Vasse River and of the Vasse region of southwestern Australia.

[1] Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby (transl. and eds.), French Designs on Colonial New South Wales: François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean, The Friends of the State Library of South Australia Inc., Adelaide, 2014. 

[2] The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal 5 May 1838, p. 71.

[3] Alexandra Hasluck, Georgiana Molloy: portrait with background, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1955.

[4] Oldfield, Augustus. “On the Aborigines of Australia.” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, vol. 3, 1865, pp. 215–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3014165. Accessed July 2023, P. 219. Oldfield mistakenly thought Vasse was one of Baudin’s scientists, but his opinion was based on his own observations of the Geographe Bay area.

[5] Thomas Brendan Cullity, Vasse: An Account of the Disappearance of Thomas Timothée Vasse, 1992; Edward Duyker, ‘Timothée Vasse: A Biographical Note’, Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations, https://www.isfar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/51_EDWARD-DUYKER-Timoth%C3%A9e-Vasse-A-Biographical-Note.pdf, accessed July 2023; 

[6] Alain Serieyx, Wonnerup: the sacred dune, Abrolhos Publishing, Perth, c2001, translation [from the French] by David Maguire.

KING OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

April 6, 2021 By in ALLSORTS, lost treasures, MYSTERIES, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Hokie Pokie Wankie Fum – The King of the Cannibal Islands by William Heath, published by Thomas McLean
hand-coloured etching, published 22 July 1830. 10 1/8 in. x 14 1/4 in. (256 mm x 362 mm) plate size; 11 in. x 16 5/8 in. (279 mm x 422 mm) paper size. Bequeathed by Sir Edward Dillon Lott du Cann, 2018. National Portrait Gallery. Used with permission Under CC Licence.

*

Oh, have you heard the news of late,

About a mighty king so great?

If you have not, ’tis in my pate?

        The King of the Cannibal Islands.

So began a broadside ballad of the early nineteenth century, a song that would live on in popular culture for generations. Herman Melville knew it, fragments ended up in a mid-twentieth century children’s rhyme and it became a popular folk dance tune. 

Who was the King of the Cannibal Islands’, and why was such an inane piece of doggerel so popular for so long?

According to the song, the King was  

‘… so tall, near six feet six.

He had a head like Mister Nick’s,

His palace was like Dirty Dick’s,

‘Twas built of mud for want of bricks,

And his name was Poonoowingkewang,

Flibeedee flobeedee-buskeebang;

And a lot of Indians swore they’d hang

The King of the Cannibal Islands.

Hokee pokee wonkee fum,.

Puttee po pee kaihula cum,

Tongaree, wougaree, chiug ring wum,.

The King of the Cannibal Islands.[iv]

The initial cause of the song’s composition was a grisly tale of shipwreck and mystery.

After transporting a cargo of convicts to Sydney Cove in 1809, the Boyd under Captain John Thompson sailed from Sydney in October that year. Aboard were around seventy passengers and crew, including a number of Maori, one a chief’s son named Te Ara. Thompson was keen to obtain some kauri spears to add to his cargo of seal skins, coal, lumber and whale oil. Te Ara recommended Whangaroa where his people lived and where he assured Thompson there were excellent stands of kauri.

The Boyd moored and Te Ara went to greet his kin after a long absence. The Maori came aboard the ship and relations were cordial at first, until Thompson took a small boat party ashore to search for spears. They never returned. The Whangaroa Maori clubbed and axed them all to death. The Maori then rowed out to the Boyd and began to massacre those aboard, dismembering the victims while a few survivors watched in horror from the rigging. 

At the end, only five of those aboard the ship escaped the butchery, aided by Te Pahi, a visiting Maori chief from the Bay of Islands apparently shocked at the scene.  One survivor was later killed, leaving Ann Morley and her baby, a two-year-old Betsey Boughton and cabin boy Thom Davies in dangerous captivity.

What caused such brutal events?

At some point before the Boyd reached Whangaroa, Te Ara was lashed to a capstan and either flogged or threatened this punishment by Captain Thompson for his refusal to work his passage. He protested that he was a chief’s son and should not be so basely punished but was mocked by the sailors and denied food. This was a loss of face among his people triggering an obligation to take revenge. [i] A dreadful vengeance it was.

According to the rescuers under Alexander Berry who arrived at the scene in December there was evidence of mass cannibalism. As Berry later wrote: ‘The horrid feasting on human flesh which followed would be too shocking for description’.[ii] They also found the charred remains of the Boyd, apparently blown up when the Maori tried unsuccessfully to make use of the muskets and gunpowder aboard. The flames ignited the whale oil and the ship quickly burned and sank, a number of Maori, including, including Te Ara’s father, dying in the conflagration. 

Assisted by Maori from the Bay of Islands, Berry secured the safe return of the four survivors as well as the government despatches and private letters carried by the Boyd. Betsey was in a poor condition, crying ‘Mamma, my mamma’.[iii]After threatening the killers with a murder trial in Europe Berry relented, avoiding further bloodletting, though so great were tensions in the region that a planned mission settlement was postponed for several years.

Berry took the remaining four survivors on his ship. They were bound for the Cape of Good Hope but suffered storm damage and eventually ended up in Lima, Peru. Here Mrs Morley died. Davies went to England aboard another ship and the two children went with Berry to Rio de Janeiro and then to Sydney.

Meanwhile, news of the massacre, cannibalism and capture of the survivors fuelled darker emotions. Men from a small fleet of whalers attacked Te Pahi and his people. This seems to have been a complete misunderstanding of the massacre as Te Pahi by most accounts tried to help the Europeans. Berry may have confused the similar names of the two chiefs in his account of what had happened. Up to 60 Maori and one whaler died in this misguided act of revenge. Te Pahi then attacked the Whangaroa Maori and died from wounds dealt in battle.

In later life, Thom Davies returned to New South Wales where he worked for Berry but was drowned on an expedition to the Shoalhaven River with Berry in 1822. Betsey Broughton married well, living until 1891. Mrs Morley’s daughter eventually ran a school in Sydney.

As the story of the Boyd massacre became more widely known in Britain and beyond, it encouraged both shock and humour. The grisly tale of blood, betrayal, cannibalism and survival fuelled the growth of a ‘savage natives’ stereotype that would become the stock in trade of rip-roaring adventures and south seas island concoctions for decades to come. Pamphlets appeared, warning people against migrating to such dangerous places. Popular comic songs like ‘The King of the Cannibal Islands’ were based on this and other colonial encounters, reflecting European attempts to process such dramatic cultural and social differences through absurdity.

By Louis John Steel (1842-1918) – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5661558

[i] New Zealand History, ‘A Frontier of Chaos? The Boyd Incident’, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/maori-european-contact-before-1840/the-boyd-incident

[ii] Augustus Earle, A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand in 1827, Whitecombe & Tombs Limited, London, 1909, chpt 11 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11933/11933-h/11933-h.htm#CHAPTER_XI, accessed November 2016.

[iii] Alexander Berry in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, volume 83, 1819, p. 313.

[iv] Eric Ramsden, ‘The Massacre of the Boyd’, The World’s News, 29 April 1939, p. 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/137004962?searchTerm=last%20convict%20expiree%20dies&searchLimits=l-australian=y|||l-format=Article|||l-decade=193|||sortby=dateAsc|||l-year=1939|||l-category=Article , accessed February 2021.

[v] National Library of Scotland, http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/16439, accessed November 2016.

LOST TREASURE IN THE CAVE OF DEATH – Part 2

July 1, 2020 By in lost treasures, MYSTERIES Tags: , 1 Comment

Wreck_of_the_American_Ship_General_Grant

Six more weeks they waited, then gave up their companions for dead. Despair and depression were balanced by the need to find ways to stay alive. They moved to another island and built a substantial house using materials left over from an abandoned Maori settlement. They learned to capture and kill the wild pigs and goats that roamed the island and began domesticating them.

Life was maintained but it was monotonous and hard, rescue constantly in everyone’s mind. They prepared signal fires, used Cape hens as messenger birds, forced written pleas for help into seal bladders which were then inflated and set afloat. Scraps of wood were carved with information for potential rescuers and cast into the sea. They made small boats of wood and metal with sails of zinc on which was scratched:

“Ship General Grant wrecked on Auckland Isles 14 May, 1866; 10 survivors to date. Want relief.”

As autumn chilled the air even more their situation seemed hopeless, Sanguily recalled:

… we were sorely afflicted with scurvy, or, as whalers call it, “the cobbler”. The entire party was attacked, and it was only later that we realized how severely our ankle and knee joints were stiffened, and the flesh so swollen that the imprint of a finger would remain for an hour or more. We had heard that the remedy for scurvy was to bury a man all but the head. This we tried in several cases, but it did no good. In closing our mouths our teeth would, on meeting, project straight out, flattened against each other. General weakness and despondency, with a longing for vegetables, was our torment. Severe exercise seemed to be the only remedy. This was our most trying time.

David McClelland, the oldest member of the group, cut his hand on a scrap of copper. The hand became infected and he passed away: ‘All cripples, we bore him to his grave.’ Who would last the longest, they all wondered?

On November 19 a sail was seen. They rushed to light the signal fire but the ship passed without seeing the desperate and despondent survivors. But two days later another sail appeared. They manned their remaining boat and’ pulled with might and main’ for the brig Amherst.

The boat reached the strange vessel, and through our savage appearance at first alarmed the crew, they received us on board. Then were we made welcome to all they could spare. The Amherst, Captain Gilroy, of Invercarghill, manned by Maoris, and bound on a sealing voyage, was the means of our rescue. Captain Gilroy beat up between the islands and anchored off the huts. We were all taken aboard, and treated in the most hospitable manner. No Persian monarch ever enjoyed such a treat as we when tobacco and tea were set before us.

The survivors remained with the Amherst for two months and eventually landed at Invercargill in January 1868. A private subscription was taken to send the Amherst out in search of the boat launched with such high hopes a year before. The search failed. The men in her had made the wrong guess about the direction of New Zealand from Disappointment Island. They sailed west into thousands of kilometres of empty ocean and were never heard of again.

The nine survivors of the wreck moved on with their lives. Some of the gold sunk with the General Grant belonged to Joseph Jewell. His life was saved but his fortune lost. He eventually became a station master on the Victorian railways. Fortunately, Mary was able to make a great deal of money giving lectures about their survival epic. Her ordeal probably accounted for her inability to bear children. In later life they were able to become parents through a surrogate arrangement.

Patric Caughey returned to Ireland and went into the insurance industry. He was known as a storyteller, often regaling people with yarns of his adventures, whether they wanted to hear them or not.

‘Yankee Jack’ was from the eminent French-Cuban family of Sanguily Garrite. He returned to Boston to follow a less adventurous but safer career as a shop keeper, later marrying an Australian. He and his wife returned to Sydney where she gave birth to several children. William died in 1909.

Two months after the survivors of the General Grant were safely back in New Zealand, the first salvage attempt put to sea. Accompanying the expedition was James Teer. He led them to the ‘cave of death’ where the barque had gone down but the waves were too powerful. They failed to find the wreck, as did the next few attempts in 1870. The first of these was accompanied by another survivor, David Ashworth. He disappeared with five others lost in a whaleboat as they tried to find the fatal cave.

At least a further eight expeditions are known to have searched for the General Grant’s sunken gold. Coins, cannon balls and a range of miscellaneous artefacts have been recovered, probably from a number of the ships wrecked on these bleak islands. But no one has come across 4000 ounces of gold and despite all these attempts, the General Grant herself has not been located.

They say.

LOST TREASURE IN THE CAVE OF DEATH – Part 1

June 19, 2020 By in lost treasures, MYSTERIES, Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

 

Wreck_of_the_American_Ship_General_Grant

Sailing from Boston to Melbourne late in 1865 the 1000 ton barque General Grant lost a man overboard in a gale. The young William Sanguily and others among the crew, thought this was an ill omen. Their ship reached Melbourne without further incident then loaded for London. But then:

By one of those coincidences, which sailors dread, we took aboard part of a cargo that had been intended for the steamer London. This ill-fated vessel had sunk in the Bay of Biscay on her voyage out, and there were many gloomy prophecies that no freight of hers would reach London in any ship.

The superstitious sailors also noticed that the rats had left the General Grant, a sure sign of doom in the lore of the sea. Nevertheless, the General Grant set sail for England on 4 May 1866 with a load of sixty men, women and children returning home from the diggings and a crew of 23 officers and men. Among the wool and hides in the hold was the unwelcome but hugely valuable cargo of gold – four thousand ounces.

After five days of good running, the ship was blown westward towards the sub-Antarctic Auckland Island. Several days of thick fog eventually lifted and land was sighted. But later, the breeze died. Despite the efforts of the captain and crew, around 1 in the morning of May 14 the General Grant smashed into the rocky shores of Auckland Island. She was forced further and further into the pitch darkness of a large sea cave. Crewman Joseph Jewell described the scene:

… such a night of horror I think was never experienced by human beings as we passed in the cave for seven long hours. It was so dark that you could not see your fingers before your eyes, and there we were with falling spars and large stones tumbling from the roof of the cave (some of which went through the deck), and so we remained until daylight.

The helpless crew and passengers huddled at the stern of the ship, still free of the cavern slowly sucking in their vessel. At daylight the mizzen top gallant mast collapsed through the ship’s hill and she began to sink.

The scene at this moment was one of such utter misery as few men ever see, and fewer still survive to tell of. Every sea washed over the stern and swept the deck. The long-boat was crammed with all who could gain a foothold. It was partly filled with water, and several poor creatures lying in the bilge were crowded down and drowned before she was clear of the ship. Women clinging to their children, and crazy men to their gold, were seen washing to and fro as the water invaded the upper deck.

One wretch saw his wife and two children driven by him in this way without making an effort to save them, while the last man who got aboard nearly lost his life trying to persuade the mother to be saved without her children.

The boats were launched into a swelling sea but only a few were able to reach them, most being trapped aboard the General Grant. The lucky few watched helplessly as men, women and children were washed away and the ship disappeared beneath the heaving water, her captain waving farewell from what was left of the rigging as he went down with his ship.

The two boats with their fifteen survivors, including one woman, spent two miserable nights and days in search of a place to camp. They had little food, few supplies and no water. Their clothes were inadequate for the climate and some were without shoes. A landing was eventually made at a place known as Sarah’s Bosom on the ominously named Disappointment Island. Here they confronted the possibility of cannibalism if they were unable to make a fire. Fortunately, they were. Albatross and shellfish made a welcome stew. From that time the fire was never allowed to go out.

The survivors split into two groups, existing as best they could in huts erected by earlier shipwreck survivors and a failed colony. They suffered greatly. There was dysentery, cold and a form of scurvy caused by their survival diet. Passing ships were sighted but they were unable to attract their attention. In October they decided to prepare one of the boats for a desperate attempt reach the New Zealand mainland, almost 500 kilometres away.

On Boxing Day 1866 they finished refitting their boat. Four men volunteered to sail her and they left on 22 January 1867. But without a chart or compass they would need to be both clever and lucky to reach safety.

Eleven souls watched their four companions depart. James Teer, Patric Caughey, Nicholas Allen and David Ashworth had all been passengers aboard the ill-fated ship. Aaron Hayman, Cornelius Drew, William Ferguson, William Newton-Scott, William Sanguily (known as Yankee Jack’) and David McClelland were all sailors, as was Joseph Jewell who was accompanied by his wife, Mary.

They waited hopefully. The weeks passed with no sign of rescue.

The anxious waiting which ensued told more severely on us than all the privation. The feverish excitement of hope caused a cessation of labour one day, and blank despair rendered us helpless the next. One man would accuse the unhappy crew of deserting us, and curse their selfishness. Another would, sobbing, deplore their cruel fate, and realise the noble men who ventured on a hopeless task.

Six more weeks they waited …. See Part 2

HOW DID LINNAEUS KNOW THAT?

February 1, 2020 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , , , , ,

Andromeda drawing by Linnaeus

Sketch by Carl Linnaeus 1734. The drawings clearly reference the Andromeda story in which the heroine is chained to a rock and in danger of being killed by a sea monster

Around 1444, Queen Maria of Castile had a manuscript made for her by an unknown author. The document was a collection of plant drawings, together with their medical and culinary uses. The modern system of naming and categorising plants invented by Carl Linnaeus, would not be in existence for centuries and so the plants in the manuscript are identified according to their folk names. One plant was named Andromeda, after the Greek myth of Andromeda and Perseus.

There are many versions of most Greek myths, but the basic story of Andromeda is reasonably stable. She was the beautiful daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia, rulers of an upper Nile region. Cassiopeia’s boasting of Andromeda’s great beauty offended the Nereids and as a result of this hubris, Poseidon had Cepheus and Cassiopeia’s lands ravaged by a sea monster. Cepheus and Cassiopeia chained Andromeda to a rock as a propitiatory sacrifice to the monster. Luckily, the travelling hero Perseus was in the neighbourhood and slew the monster just in time. Andromeda and Perseus were married and lived happily with many children in Greece. When Andromeda died, Athena had her whisked up to the night sky as the constellation named after her, near those of Perseus and Cassiopeia.

Ahh. Great story, no wonder people remembered it, including Linnaeus. So, what did he do with it?

In the fifteenth century, and probably long before, it was believed that the Rosemary-heather was good for preserving womanly beauty, an early anti-ageing potion. Mixed with holy water into bread dough, and with the uttering of certain magical words, Rosemary-heather was believed to reverse the ravages of ageing. It seems that this knowledge, or belief, was subsequently lost.

But it was known to Linnaeus. When he came to name Rosemary-heather, he drew on this ancient knowledge to call it Andromeda polifolia, his use of that term based on the connection between the Greek myth of the beautiful Andromeda and the alleged anti-ageing properties of the plant. It used to be thought that Linnaeus had simply made up the name based on the general popularity of Greek myths, but we now know that he was making use of a traditional connection between the two.

But how did Linnaeus know that? No-one else seems to have had the knowledge. Was he heir to some informally transmitted repertoire of ancient magic and medicine? He was a man of science, but at that period the modern rational character of scientific inquiry was not fully established and scientists, including the great Isaac Newton, among others, frequently delved into or were influenced by all sorts of esoteric traditions. Alchemy, magic and mysticism often coexisted with rational inquiry and experimentation. Linnaeus’s notes on his drawing of Andromeda show that he was familiar with the esoteric tradition associated with the plant. The Latin translates as ‘fiction that is true’, ‘mysticism that is genuine’ and ‘forms that are depicted’. He happily adapted that connection to give the Rosemary-heather the scientific name it has had ever since.

We’ll probably never know the answer to this intriguing mystery. But what it does highlight is the survival of venerable knowledge and ideas over considerable periods and the transmission of that knowledge independent of formal channels. A great deal of serious scientific and medical interest is now being taken in traditional medicines of indigenous peoples around the world, as modern science re-discovers the efficaciousness of natural treatments previously ignored and refuted. This is beyond quackery and a reminder that, despite the technological and other wonders of our modern world, we don’t know everything and it pays to keep an open – and always critical – mind.

rosemary from ms

The Rosemary-heather as drawn in the original manuscript.

SOURCE:

The information and images in this post are drawn from Gerard E Cheshire, Plant Series, No. 6. Manuscript MS408. Andromeda polifolia at https://www.academia.edu/41594847/Plant_Series_No._6._Manuscript_MS408._Andromeda_polifolia, Jan 2020.

THE MYSTERY OF MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER’S DISAPPEARANCE ON THE CANNIBAL COAST

December 27, 2019 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , , ,

Michael_Rockefeller

Michael Rockefeller in the U.S before his disappearance.

 

New Guinea’s river-riddled southwest is the home of the Asmat people. Under the control of the Netherlands for many years, it was not until the 1950s that officials and missionaries finally made contact with the fierce Asmat, confirming that they practiced cannibalism as part of their spiritual and warrior culture. The waters of the Arafura Sea fringing their territory became known as ‘the cannibal coast.’

In the early 1960s, a young adventurer from the wealthy Rockefeller family came into contact with the Asmat during an anthropological filming expedition. Impressed with their culture and fascinated by their way of life, the 23 year-old Michael Rockefeller organised a return trip to study the Asmat more closely. Rockefeller was seeking adventure and also anxious to experience one of the world’s rapidly disappearing frontiers as well as documenting the customs and beliefs of an indigenous tribe.

The expedition began in October 1961. Michael and his companions followed a busy schedule of collecting and buying Asmat artefacts, trading for them fishing hooks and liens, cloth, tobacco and axes. He was particularly fascinated by the six meter carved wooden bisjpoles central to the spiritual practices and headhunting of the Asmat. The tall poles represented the ancestors and operated to ensure fertility of the soil and the continuation of human life.

A month later, Michael, together with a Dutch anthropologist named Rene Wassing and two local boys, was travelling in a motorised canoe through the Arafura Sea. Their intended destination was a wild area of southern Asmat country where the European presence was just one missionary. As they crossed the mouth of the Betsj River the canoe was swamped by a large wave. All four passengers were thrown into the wild water. The boys swam for the shore to summon help while Rockefeller and Wassing waited helplessly with the overturned boat, drifting further away from the coast. When it got light, Michael stripped to his underwear and tied two plastic jerry cans around his waist. With the extra buoyancy they would give him he began to swim towards the distant shore.

Unknown to Rockefeller and Wassing, the two boys had reached the town of Agats after many hours struggling through the swamps. They raised the alarm. A search plane spotted the capsized hull later that day and a rescue plane arrived the following morning. Wassing was saved but Michael Rockefeller was never seen again.

A desperate search followed. Did he drown from exhaustion and exposure? Perhaps he was taken by a shark or other predator? Or …? The Rockefeller family hired a Boeing jet and flew media to the area but they were unable to get closer than 240 kilometres to the coast where Michael was last seen. Official and unofficial efforts to find the missing millionaire were made and the event was reported around the world. But less than a week after his disappearance, the Netherlands government declared there was no hope of finding him alive.  A few weeks later the search was ended. But the mystery of Michael Rockefeller’s fate began to grow.

Michael Rockefeller was declared legally dead in 1964 but that did not stop the flow of speculations and dark rumours about the time, place and manner of his death. Or even if he was dead at all. One of the earliest elements of the legend had it that the missing adventurer was alive and living in the jungle, either of his own free will or perhaps as a captive.

In 1968 an Australian smuggler and gunrunner named ‘John Donahue’ claimed not only to have seen Michael Rockefeller but to have spoken with him. Donahue had been pursuing his nefarious business interests in the Trobriand Island group off northeastern New Guinea where he met a bearded and crippled white man being held captive by the Trobrianders. The man identified himself as Michael Rockefeller. He told Donahue that he had managed to swim to the coast from the drifting canoe, wandered through the swamps for several days, then broken both his legs in an accident. He was fortunately rescued – or captured – by a group of Trobrianders who were in the area on one of their regular extended sea journeys. They took him back to their home and were keeping him in their village. Why the Trobrianders wanted to hold this man was not specified. Donahue apparently disappeared before he could provide further details.

Little, if any, credible evidence exists for this throwback to the myths of castaway sailors forming colonies or integrating into local indigenous populations. And there are other stories.

Asmat canoes

Papuans on the Lorentz River in Western New Guinea during the third South-New-Guinea expedition of 1912-13. Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures.

 

One popular explanation had it that the Netherlands authorities murdered a number of Asmat people in 1958. Asmat custom called for killings to be revenged and it is speculated that Michael Rockefeller did make it to the coast but swam into a revenge cycle initiated by the murders. The Asmat saw his sudden appearance as an opportunity to avenge themselves against the white men who had attacked them a few years before. In those days, Asmat revenge killings included taking the heads of their victims and eating their bodies.

More lurid versions of this explanation claim that the Rockefeller family hired private investigators to determine the fate of their son. One allegedly obtained three European skulls from the Asmat and, in return for a $250 000 fee, presented these to the family as evidence of Michael Rockefeller’s fate.

The Rockefeller family continues to mourn the loss of this naïve but passionate adventurer. In 2012 Michael’s twin sister published a memoir of her and her family’s struggle to deal with Michael’s disappearance. The enigma is still rehearsed from time to time in films, books, plays and the media.

Many of the Asmat artefacts collected by Michael Rockefeller, together with his photographs can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at The Peabody Museum at Yale University. While the man’s memory lingers on, so does his mystery.

THE PORTUGUESE PLATYPUS

September 25, 2019 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , , , , , ,

 

Viseu

One of the many myths of terra Australis incognita– the unknown southland – is that the Portuguese navigators made it that far south. There are wrecks and artefact finds that are claimed, by some, to be Portuguese and so to prove that those adventurous mariners were present early along Australian coasts, as were English and Dutch explorers.

The navigational skills of Portuguese explorers were certainly extraordinary and provided the basis for what became an empire, so it is certainly conceivable that they did visit Australia. Unfortunately, no-one has yet found any incontrovertible evidence that they did, despite some clever manipulation of old maps and charts.

I wrote about all this in The Savage Shoreand had to conclude that there just wasn’t enough evidence to put the Portuguese on these shores.  But recently, a reader of my book emailed me with an intriguing note.

Robert Bremner, himself a historian, lived for many years in Portugal and some years in Mozambique. He was once told by a long-time English resident of Lisbon that the sixteenth-century choir stalls of Viseau Cathedral (picture above) bore an extraordinary wooden carving. It was described by some as a ‘duck-billed rat’ and Robert was intrigued. He took the time to visit Viseu and found the choir stall, now apparently upstairs in the museum, and took a photograph. It seems that the carving could represent the platypus, the odd creature unique to Australia. If so, it would certainly strengthen the case for an early Portuguese encounter with the great southland.

Unfortunately, over the years, Robert has lost track of the photograph. But, if some intrepid adventurer should happen to visit Viseau – which looks like a great place – do take a pic and zip it to me. You could be making history!

 

1808 mermaid tattoo

WRAITH OF THE COPENHAGEN

May 14, 2017 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , , , Leave a comment
Copenhagen, 1921

 

She was the largest sailing ship in the world. When the Copenhagen (Kobenhavn) was launched in 1921 she was immediately dubbed ‘The Great Dane’, her 131 metre hull supporting five masts towering nearly twenty stories into the winds that would bear the barque twice round the world before her still inexplicable disappearance en route for Melbourne, Australia.
The Copenhagen carried some cargo but was primarily a training vessel for young sailors between fifteen and twenty years of age seeking an officer’s ticket. Her voyages provided an opportunity for seasoned mariners to teach young men the many skills they would need to make a career in sail, still a serious option in Scandinavian countries at that time. 
On her tenth voyage, the Copenhagen sailed from Northern Jutland bound for Buenos Aires with a cargo of cement and chalk. Aboard was the experienced Captain Hans Anderson together with 26 crew and 45 cadets from many of Denmark’s leading families. Unloading at Buenos Aires, the ship was unable to find another cargo for Australia and so Anderson decided to set sail without one. Now with a crew of only fifteen, they set a course to Adelaide (then Melbourne) eleven days before Christmas, a trip expected to take just under seven weeks. On December 22 the Copenhagensignalled ‘all is well’ to a passing Norwegian steamer around 1500 kilometers from the island of Tristan da Cunha. 
Captain Anderson was known not to make much use of radio and often went for long periods without signalling. In those days, marine radios had a very limited range. The Danish East Asiatic Company who owned the ship were not unduly concerned when they had no word. But as the weeks slipped by and there was no sound from their magnificent vessel, nor any sight of her, they became increasingly alarmed. The Australian press echoed Danish fears for sons, brothers, fathers and uncles. ‘Where is the Kobenhaven’, asked the Adelaide Advertiser in mid-March, initiating a lengthy chronicle of newspaper articles in the Australian press and around the world.
A search vessel was sent to Tristan da Cunha. A large sailing ship with a broken foremast had been sighted in late January. With her sails only partly set and low in the water, the drifting vessel showed no signs of life. Locals were unable to reach her because of bad weather but had found no wreckage and thought she must have passed by the island. With the assistance of a small Australian intestate steamer, the Junee,  the search continued for some months, but without result. At one point it was surmised that wreckage might drift to the Western Australian coast. A plane was chartered to fly from Fremantle to Northwest Cape, but again nothing was found. The Danish government declared theCopenhagen, her captain, crew and cadets lost. Another mighty ship joined the untold others foundered in the world’s ocean deeps.
But then the sightings began. Over the next few years Chilean fishermen reported a five-masted ship in their waters. Sailors aboard an Argentinian freighter saw a what they called a ‘phantom ship’ fitting the Copenhagen’s description as they fought a gale. Other sightings came from Easter Island and the coast of Peru. It was also reported that a ship’s stern section with the name København had washed up on a West Australian beach.
And then they found the bottle. In 1934, the son of Argentina’s President visited the United States telling a strange story. Men from a whaler working off Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic had found a sealed bottle containing a ‘log’ or diary of a surviving cadet of the Copenhagen. The log told a grim story. The Copenhagen struck an iceberg. There was no option for those aboard but to take to the lifeboats. In the distance they saw their fine ship crushed between two icebergs. The diary ended with ‘It is snowing and a gale blows. I realize our fate. This sea has taken us beyond the limits of this world.’
Whatever the authenticity of this now-missing document, the story fitted the predominant theory about the disappearance of the Copenhagen, like the Titanic, victim to a drifting iceberg. The following year another grim find appeared to provide further support for this explanation. It was reported that the remains of a ship’s boat with seven skeletons had been found on the southwest coast of Africa, over 600 kilometers north of the city of Swakopmund in Namibia. Nautical experts ridiculed the suggestion that this might be a boat from the Copenhagen. “It is a far- fetched theory, absolutely without justification, said Captain Davis, Victorian Director of Navigation.
Other speculations abounded. The Copenhagen might have encountered a tidal wave. As her holds were empty and she sailed only in ballast she might have capsized in bad weather. Rumours, theories and searches for the lost barque have continued ever since. In 2012 divers found a wreck on Tristan da Cunha that some believe might be the missing ship. The Danish government and the Danish East Asiatic Company were reportedly taking the suggestion seriously enough to establish the truth of this possibility. But nothing has since been reported and today, the fate of the Copenhagen and her crew is regarded as one of the world’s greatest unsolved maritime mysteries.