WHAT HAPPENED TO TIMOTHÉE VASSE?

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.

AGE OLD TALES: COULD THEY BE TRUE?

A mask by an unidentified Makonde artist of the mid-20th century QCC Art Gallery of the City University of New York, Smithsonian Magazine.

Once, they were thought to be. Then they were not. Now, it seems possible that many might be.

Recent genetic research into the origins of the Swahili people of East Africa strongly suggests that the ancient account of their kings, known as the Kilwa Chronicle, is substantially correct. In that narrative, the Swahili people of Africa are said to have originated in Persia (Iran) and began mixing with Africans one thousand or more years ago.^[1]

Other research over the last decade or so has also provided support for the likelihood that traditional narratives, previously dismissed as fables, probably do record events that happened in deep time.

The frenzy of story collecting that accompanied the mercantile and colonial expansion of Europe from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century led to the first attempts to understand the world’s massive body of folk and traditional narrative. Excited scholars proposed many theories of the origins and diffusion of these tales. Was it simply coincidence that the same stories, in one or another variation, appeared time and time again among cultures not known to have ever had any direct connection? How old were they? Could they be true?

The answer to the first question may be ‘as old as time’, at least human time.

Using the Gaia space telescope, astronomers studying the constellations and how they appear in various mythologies across the world have recently added further evidence for the antiquity of story. The star pattern known as the Pleiades was the object of mythmaking in many ancient cultures, many of which refer to seven stars that make it up. Today, we can only see six stars, but 100 000 years ago, seven stars would have been visible, strongly suggesting that the Australian Aboriginal Seven Sisters songline, the Greek story of the seven daughters of Atlas and similar storylines in African, Native American and Asian traditions had their origins in the way things were one hundred millennia ago.^[2]

The answer to the second question is equally momentous.

Stories of a great flood appear so often in so many of the world’s narrative traditions that many have concluded there must have been some such event or events in antiquity. Noah and his Ark may be the most familiar to many, but there are an immense number of variations on the theme. Until recently, the trend has been to dismiss oral traditions of historical or pre-historic events as fantasy. But research linking scientific evidence with indigenous stories has brought about a more nuanced interpretation.^[3] One topic which can now be linked to provable pre-historic events is the inundation of land. Twenty or more Australian Aboriginal stories of such events are thought to be around 10 000 years old.^[4]

One of those traditions is that of the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri and other spellings) people of Lake Alexandrina and the Lower Murray region of what is now South Australia. They recounted a tradition of their great ancestor, Nurundere (also Martummere) to German Lutheran missionary, Heinrich Meyer, in the 1840s. This version of the story, part of a longer sequence, tells how Nurundere came to create a passage between Kangaroo Island and the mainland by causing the sea to ‘flow’ and so punishing his two fleeing wives.^{^[5]} Kangaroo Island was separated from what is now the mainland of South Australia around seven thousand years ago.

In 2020, archaeologists working in north-western Australia discovered Aboriginal settlements beneath the sea near the Burrup Peninsula at Cape Brugieres. The drowning of these sites is thought to have occurred between 7000 to 8500 years ago.^[6]

Using weather patterns and other evidence, researchers have discovered that Polynesian oral traditions of sunken lands can be correlated with geological events.^[7] Subsequent research in Australia found evidence that Aboriginal stories of a great flood on the east coast of the continent reflect a verified rising of sea levels around 7000 years in the past.^[8]

Related research suggests that indigenous traditions in both Australia and Brazil might carry memories of the megafauna who were extinct by 40 000 years ago.^[9] Adrienne Mayor has looked closely at the connections between fossil remains and First American myths and legends and at the archaeological evidence for warrior women.^[10] Other researchers have used DNA evidence to trace the migration of narrative motifs from South Siberia to North America around twelve thousand years ago.^[11]

In 2020, a team of geologists suggested that the Gunditjmara story explaining the origins of the volcano they call Budj Bim might relate to an event that occurred in southeastern Australia around 37 000 years ago. They suggest that ‘If aspects of oral traditions pertaining to Budj Bim or its surrounding lava landforms reflect volcanic activity, this could be interpreted as evidence for these being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence’.^[12]

The extensive amount of archaeological and palaeontological research currently underway in all parts of the world is revealing new evidence of human occupation, journeying and interacting.^[13] In recent years some of these discoveries and interpretations of them have rewritten the history of humankind. Some important parts of that history are held in age old tales.

^[1] Brielle, E.S., Fleisher, J., Wynne-Jones, S. et al. ‘Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast’. Nature 615, 866–873 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05754-w.

^[2] Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C. McCluskey and John Steele (eds), Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, Springer International Publishing, 2021.

^[3] Timothy Burberry, Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events, Routledge, 2021.

^{^[4]} Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World, Bloomsbury, London, 2018.

^[5] Collected by Meyer and quoted in Rev George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, E S Wigg & Son, Adelaide, 1879, pp. 60-61.

^[6] Benjamin J, O’Leary M, McDonald J, Wiseman C, McCarthy J, Beckett E, et al. (2020) ‘Aboriginal artefacts on the continental shelf reveal ancient drowned cultural landscapes in northwest Australia’. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0233912.

^[7] Patrick D Nunn, Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2009.

^[8] Patrick D. Nunn & Nicholas J. Reid (2016) ‘Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago’, Australian Geographer, 47:1, 11-47, DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539. See also Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory.

^[9] Patrick D Nunn and Luiza Corral Martins de Oliviera Ponciano, ‘Of bunyips and other beasts: living memories of long-extinct creatures in art and stories’, The Conversation, April 15, 2019 at https://theconversation.com/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-living-memories-of-long-extinct-creatures-in-art-and-stories-113031, accessed January 2020.

^[10] Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton University Press, 2005 and The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton University Press, 2014.

^[11] Korotayev, Andrey. ‘Genes and Myths: Which Genes and Myths Did the Different Waves of the Peopling of Americas Bring to the New World.’ History & Mathematics (2017): n. pag. Print.

^[12] Erin L. Matchan, David Phillips, Fred Jourdan, and Korien Oostingh, ‘Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanoes’, Geology, Volume 48, Number 4, 1 April 2020 at

https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G47166.1/581018/Early-human-occupation-of-southeastern-Australia.

^[13] Some further examples in Graham Seal, ‘Story Makes Us Human’, Gristly History, 11 March 2023, https://wordpress.com/post/gristlyhistory.blog/1094.

Mything in Action – The Thylacine Files

December 6, 2022 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING, THYLACINE FILES, Uncategorized Tags: myth, Thylacine Leave a comment

Recent research has turned up more fascinating facts and exposed a hoary myth about the last Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’. What the researchers had to say about their discovery of the skin of the last of these mythic beasts and the ‘bullsh..t’ that the animal was a male named ‘Benjamin’ is related at the link below. A small case study of how misinformation and myth arises and persists.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-06/benjamin-thylacine-tasmanian-tiger-naming-myth-persists/101734442

FINDING KING SOLOMON’S MINES

November 2, 2022 By Graham Seal in lost treasures, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: Karl Mauch, King Solomon's Mines, myth, Ruder Haggard Leave a comment

The Way to Kukuanaland, from King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Eça de Queiroz

A sturdy figure clothed in leather stumbles through the mostly unknown wilderness of southern Africa’s Transvaal in 1865.A revolver, compass, sextant, hunting knife and tin bowl dangle from the man’s belt. He cradles a double-barrelled rifle in his hands and a blanket slung over his shoulder – poorly equipment for his dangerous quest.

Since boyhood, Karl Mauch had been fascinated with faraway places and lost kingdoms. He spent his youth studying and acquiring the skills needed to pursue a life of adventurous archaeology – languages, mapping, minerology, history. While still young, Mauch decided he was ready to find the lost city of Ophir.

He arrives by ship in South Africa in 1865. Supporting himself as best he can he explores and maps the Transvaal. In 1866, accompanied by the English elephant hunter ,Henry Hartley, Mauch visits and maps the region between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers. He also hears many tales from Hartley about ancient gold mines and lost cities. The following year, now travelling alone, the German explorer discovers a number of old gold smelting works and fields in Mashonaland. He also discovers rich gold deposits near the Botswana-Zimbabwe border.

In 1868, still following his dreams, Mauch is kidnapped by the Matabele and is lucky to survive. He makes a brief trip in early 1869 and finds indications of gold along a tributary of the Zambezi. He has no further funds until 1870 when he travels in a leaky boat along the Vaal River in another epic journey of hardship and survival. Again, the following year he sets out to find an ancient city he believes lies beyond the Limpopo River. He is robbed by natives and left with nothing. Starving and on the verge of suicide he is rescued by another group of Africans and comes into contact with the enigmatic German American hunter, Adam Render(s).

After an adventurous life in the bush and as a soldier, Renders had deserted his family a few years earlier and was living with the Shona people. He takes Mauch in and guides him to some ruins he stumbled across in 1867. After examining the broken stones and talking with the local population, Mauch concludes that he has found the mysterious golden city of Ophir and so, King Solomon’s mines.

The city or region of Ophir is mentioned in the Bible and other early religious texts as a source of great wealth. According to the story, Ophir (various spellings) was the foundation of King Solomon’s riches. He was surrounded by an excess of gold and dispensed justice and wisdom to his people. Every three years Solomon received a shipment of silver, ivory, sandalwood, jewels and gold from Ophir, along with apes and peacocks. All these things were greatly prized in the ancient world and are the origins of what would become the legend of King Solomon’s mines.

Of course, no one knew where the mines were located. Until the early sixteenth century when a member of Vasco de Gama’s 1502 voyage to India, Tome Lopes, claimed to have found them. Lopes saw the astonishing ruins of Great Zimbabwe and decided that this must have been the region called Ophir. He wrote a report of his adventures and ideas that circulated widely in Portugal and elsewhere, popularising the idea that Ophir and therefore its wealthy mines must be in southern Africa rather than the middle east.

The rush was on. Expeditions of hopeful treasure hunters flocked to the unknown continent. Maps appeared showing the alleged location of the treasure trove. The legend grew. By the time Karl Mauch was seduced by the golden mystery Ophir and King Solomon’s mines were perhaps the world’s best-known lost treasure legend.

After his hard-won find, Mauch returned to Germany expecting, with some justification, to be hailed as a great adventurer, mapmaker and archaeologist. He was not. Without formal qualifications he was unable to gain an academic or museum post. He briefly took part in an expedition to Central America in 1874 but was only able to find work back in Germany as a foreman in a cement factory. His health failed and just before his thirty-eighth birthday he somehow managed to fall from his first-floor window while sleeping. He died a few days later.^[i] The legend claimed yet another hopeful soul.^[ii]

Karl Mauch had not found the fabled city of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, nor the King’s gold. But he had found a much greater treasure. The city of Great Zimbabwe was erected during the 11^th century and grew to be an important trading hub in the 13^th century. By the time the Portuguese arrived 300 years later, the city had been abandoned. No one knows why. Another enduring mystery in its own right.

Solomon’s mines and Ophir remained in the mists of myth but the existence of Great Zimbabwe’s ancient architecture, together with the real riches being extracted from southern Africa, fuelled belief in the mines. The legend received its greatest boost with the publication of ‘the most amazing book ever written’ in 1885. H Rider Haggard’s boys’ own adventure titled, of course, King Solomon’s Mines.

Haggard was an old Africa hand. He was familiar with the local traditions of lost treasures and Mauch’s quest, as well as the Biblical story of Ophir. Perhaps the greatest best seller of the nineteenth century, and still in print, Haggard’s romance and its many spinoffs in popular literature and movies have kept the notion of King Solomon’s mines in the public consciousness ever since. The fabled mines are regularly ‘found’ though the claims are just as regularly debunked.^[iii]

But, of course, the quest continues.

^[i] C Plug, ‘Mauch, Mr Karl’ in S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science, http://www.s2a3.org.za/bio/Biograph_final.php?serial=1867, accessed March 2016.

^[ii] ‘Karl Mauch’ in National Geographic Deutschland, http://www.nationalgeographic.de/reportagen/entdecker/karl-mauch, accessed March 2016; F O Bernhard (ed and trans), Karl Mauch: African Explorer, C Struik, Capetown, 1971.

^[iii] James D Muhly ‘Solomon the Copper King: A Twentieth Century Myth’ in Expedition, vol 29, no 2, 1987, pp. 38-47.

ALEXANDER AT THE GATES OF PARADISE

May 11, 2022 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: Alexander the Great, Folktales, legends Leave a comment

Alexander Mosaic (detail), House of the Faun, Pompeii

One historical figure has left a gigantic imprint in the traditional stories of many countries and cultures. Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) was a Macedonian king who conquered much of the known world, including the extensive Persian Empire, between 336 BC and his death at the age of only 33. Generally considered to be one of the finest military geniuses of all time, he appears in the folklore of many cultures, from Macedonia to India and in Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions.^[i] The range and variety of stories about Alexander has led at least one authority to claim Alexander is the greatest folk hero of all.^[ii] In addition to his extensive folklore, and in recognition of his historical deeds, Alexander is also revered as a Macedonian culture and national hero.^[iii]

First and foremost, though, is Alexander’s towering status as a warrior. Iranian tradition, for example, often recounts his brilliant, ruthless and sometimes bloodthirsty victories and accomplishments.^[iv] Medieval Christian stories have Alexander fighting female cannibals, six-headed giants and other monsters in the best traditions of the giant-slayer. In both Jewish and Christian tradition, Alexander is said to have fought his way to the gates of paradise in a story that suggests the futility of human endeavours, even those of one so great as Alexander.

Marching through a dusty desert, Alexander and his men came upon a small river. The beauty of the river tempted Alexander to forgo the world of violence greed and treachery and to live by the river in peace. But he resists this temptation and marches on. Eventually he and his army stop to rest by the banks of the river and a fish is caught for the great man’s supper. So fine did the fish taste that Alexander concluded the river must flow from a rich country. He followed the river and came to the gates of paradise. Never modest, Alexander announced himself as the great conqueror and lord of all the earth and demanded to be allowed into Paradise.

But the gates remained locked and a voice from the other side said that this was the home of the just and the peaceful and that only those who had conquered their passions may enter. ‘Nations may have paid homage to thee, but thy soul is not worthy to be admitted within the gates of the abode of the just. Go thy ways, endeavour to cure thy soul, and learn more wisdom than thou hast done hitherto’, says an Israeli version of the tale.^[v]

No matter how Alexander requests the right to enter he is refused. Eventually he asks for a gift to prove he has travelled to the gates of Paradise. The guardian of the gates then gives him a human skull, saying that it can teach Alexander more wisdom than he has acquired in all his conquests. The great warrior angrily throws the skull fragment down.

But then a learned man among his retinue suggests that the skull be weighed with gold. To Alexander’s surprise, the skull outweighs all the gold brought to the scales. He asks the man if there is anything that could outweigh his small fragment of skull from the gates of Paradise. ‘Yes’, says the learned man. ‘This fragment, great king, is the socket of a human eye which, though small in compass, is unbounded in desire. The more gold it has the more it craves for and is never satisfied. But once it is laid in the grave, there is an end to its lust and ambition’. The wise man then asked Alexander to have the eye socket covered in dirt. As soon as this was done, the gold outweighed the eye socket.

Great though his warrior powers might be, even Alexander is subject to human limitations and needs to become wiser. No hero, however exalted, wins everything, all the time, a theme echoed in other warrior traditions.

^[i] Cavendish, R. (ed.), Legends of the World, Orbis, London, 1982, pp. 106-107, 230-234, 283-284 for some examples. Alexander is even celebrated in countries he did not visit, notably Georgia, see Elene Gogiashvili, ‘Alexander of Macedon in Georgian Folktales’, Folklore Vol. 127, Iss. 2, 2016, pp. 196-209.
^[ii] Leach, M. (ed.), Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. 2 vols., Funk & Wagnall, New York, 1972, vol. 1 pp. 34-5.
^[iii] Abbott, G., Macedonian Folklore, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1903, pp. 279-289, Eberhard, W. (ed.), (trans. Parsons, D.), Folktales of China, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965 (1937), pp. 91, 219, Ranelagh, E., The Past We Share: The Near Eastern Ancestry of Western Folk Literature, Quartet Books, London, 1979, pp. 45-80, Stoneman, R. (trans. and ed.), Legends of Alexander the Great, J.M. Dent, London, 1994.
^[iv] Christensen, A (ed.), Persian Folktales (trans. Kurti, A.), Bell & Sons, London, 1971,
^[v] Rappoport, A., Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel, 2 vols. Gresham Publishing Co., London, 1928, vol. 1 pp. 126-129.

HOLY GRAILS!

August 27, 2021 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING, Uncategorized Tags: Holy Grail, holy relics, legends Leave a comment

Christ appears to a hermit in a vision, holding a book containing the true history of the Holy Grail. From History of the Holy Grail, French manuscript, early 14th century
Copyright © The British Library Board

There’s a lot of them about, Holy Grails, that is. But one in Spain has an intriguing tale to tell.

The venerable Christian relic known as the Cup of Christ, the Lord’s Chalice and, most evocatively, ‘The Holy Grail’ is the centre of a twisting tale of history and myth. Every facet of its corporeality – shape, colour, size – is uncertain, as is its origins. It is said, variously, to have been the cup or plate used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper; to have been the bowl used to collect Christ’s blood as he died on the Cross, or both. Then again, it might just be a symbol encoding the mysteries and meanings of the Holy Communion.

We first hear of this relic in medieval Europe where it appears in a number of romances from around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is also the context in which we first hear of the involvement of the Knights Templar in the guardianship of the Grail, a notion that has fed a fecund flow of often farcical fiction right up to the present day. By the fifteenth century it melded into the Celtic Arthurian legends then very much in vogue at court and wherever people could afford books and were able to read them, or have them read aloud. Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) is the main vehicle for this transformation. In all these variations of the tale, the Grail is located not in the Middle East but in Europe.

How the Grail actually got from its original location in Jerusalem to Europe is a similarly slippery story. One version is that it was brought by the disciple, Peter, when he went there to bring the gospel to the west. This one, not surprisingly, seems to have at least the tacit approval of the Roman Catholic church given Peter’s significance in its founding.

Another, more folkloric tradition, concerns Joseph of Arimathea, the man who is said to have taken responsibility for the transmission of the dead Jesus to the disciples who interred him in Joseph’s garden in a man-made cave. In this version, of which there are several variants, the Grail is usually said to have been a wooden cup taken to England by Joseph, or his followers, where a Christian institution was founded at Glastonbury. This strand of the legend, which may only date from the late nineteenth century^[1] also continues to have potency in the modern era as a variety of people seeking spiritual awareness and confirmation, as well as Christians, actively venerate the Glastonbury area, with its intriguing pre-Christian resonances of standing stones and paganism in general.

None of these stories have any credible historical evidence to support them. Like the obsession of the Nazis with aspects of the Cathar version of the legend,^[2] they are purely the blended outcomes of belief and fictioneering, producing a potent and enduring myth.

But, relatively recently, another unexpected strand has been added to the rich narrative of the Holy Grail. In 2006 and 2010, a number of early Islamic manuscripts were said to have been discovered in Egypt and translated. They provide potentially verifiable evidence of the history of one particular object identified as the Holy Grail by Islamic sources as early as 400CE. According to Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega Del Río, the academic authors of Kings of the Grail, an object long identified as the Holy Grail in its place of imputed was kept in Jerusalem for the first thousand years or so of its existence. There, it was visited and venerated by pilgrim Christians for centuries.

Jerusalem was under Muslim control at this point and around 1053-54 a Caliph took the Grail and gifted it to a Muslim ruler in Spain. This man wished to develop good diplomatic relations with the Christian Ferdinand 1 of León and decided to send the object to him. By then the object, described as a stone cup, was said to have medicinal powers. The great Muslim leader, Saladin ((Salah-ad-din), would later play a part in this version of the Grail story, using a ‘fine shard’ previously struck from the object to cure his daughter’s illness. The authors of the book use these documents and other evidence to trace the journey of the Grail to where, they argue, is its current resting place, the Basilica of San Isadoro in León.^[3]

So, we now have a new and, it seems, authoritative historical identification of the resting place of the Holy Grail. Not Dan Brown’s Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland; not Rennes-le-Château in Cathar country; and not in the glowing mysteries of the Arthurian romances. It’s in Spain.

Whatever we might think of this argument, remembering that it is made by academics from the region, it seems that this line of Grail legend has some serious historical cred. Far more than any of the many other Grails around the world, including several in Britain and Ireland, some in Italy, one in Vienna, and another in America, among others.

Why does it all matter? For Christians, the answer is obvious. The Grail is a relic as closely associated with the body and death of Jesus Christ as possible. It’s up there with the True Cross, the reed used to give him water and the sponge used to cruelly whet his lips with vinegar as he died. As the authors of Kings of the Grail show, these relics were exhibited in the Temple together with their version of the Grail for centuries.

Interestingly, the Grail does not seem to have been accorded any more significance in this period than the other sacred items, until around the time that it was sent off to Europe for some diplomatic ingratiation. It may be that we owe the evolution of the Holy Grail into Christendom’s most sacred relic to the power politics of the Muslim world as much as the romancing of medieval European troubadours and writers.

^[1] S. Baring-Gould, A Book of The West: Being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall (2 Volumes, Methuen 1899; A Book of Cornwall, Second Edition 1902, New Edition, 1906.

A W Smith, “‘And Did Those Feet…?’: The ‘Legend’ of Christ’s Visit to Britain” Folklore 100.1 (1989), pp. 63–83.

^[2] Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, Maclehose, 2013. Chapter 8 ‘The Migrations of the Grail’ on Otto Rahn’s Nazi fantastications and also good on other aspects of Grail legendry. See also chapter 14 on the modern crypto-historical invention of The Priory of Syon and the alleged bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, as popularised in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

^[3] Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega Del Río, Kings of the Grail: Tracing the Historical Journey of the Cup of Christ to Modern-Day Spain, The Overlook Press, New York, 2015. Translated from the Spanish edition of 2014 by Rosie Marteau.

KING OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

April 6, 2021 By Graham Seal in ALLSORTS, lost treasures, MYSTERIES, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: Boyd sailing ship, cannibalism, colonialism, imperialism, King of the Cannibal Islands, Te Ara, Whangaroa Leave a comment

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.

THE APPEARANCE OF TRUTH – Why People Believe Lies

January 19, 2021 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: conspiracy theories, urban legends 1 Comment

The Power of Narrative

Some of the most widespread and pernicious forms of untruth come in the form of stories. Urban legends (or ‘myths’), fake news and conspiracy theories have a story structure.

An old favourite horror legend tells of a young couple making out in their car at a lonely place. They hear a noise outside and the man goes to investigate. While he is gone, his girlfriend turns on the car radio to hear a news bulletin that a dangerous maniac has escaped from the local asylum. The boyfriend does not return and the girl become very frightened. Suddenly, she hears a thumping noise on the roof of the car – ‘thump, thump, hump. Terrified, she screws up her courage, opens the door and gets out to see what is causing the noise. Squatting on the roof of the car is the grinning maniac holding the bloodied head of her boyfriend and banging it on the car roof – ‘thump, thump, thump. A favourite among teenagers, this modern legend was always told as a true story and gave nightmares to generations. It might still do so.

Conspiracy theories also have a story structure. The QAnon delusion is that a network of Satanic paedophilic cannibals is running a global sex trafficking network. President Trump is waging a desperate, covert war against the shadowy figure of ‘Q’ who heads the network. This story, or one of its versions, is worthy of a superhero movie, possibly in production as I write. It is a complete fiction, of course, but very many Americans, and possibly others, believe it to be true.

Stories like these are told as truth by someone, or ones, the hearer knows, whether personally and face-to-face or through social media. This certifies the claims in the stories as credible through the curious human tendency to believe what we are personally told.

These stories fill an information gap, answer questions, solve a mystery etc., satisfying the human absence of knowing, something we have found unbearable throughout history and probably long before. We must have information, explanation, something, no matter how unverifiable and incredible.

The End of Experts

In the past (before the WWW), it was possible for fake news and other misinformation to be rebutted by those with authoritative credibility – scientists, academics, politicians (some, at least). With the growth of doubt and the demotion of ‘experts’ to simply wielders of another opinion, this is no longer possible. Now, one opinion is as good, or bad, as another, no matter whether it is informed or not.

Paradoxically, greater access to tertiary education since the 1960s has demystified them. Professors are no longer rarefied geniuses pronouncing on their subject from afar as unchallengeable experts. Wafter spending lots of face to face time learning with them, we know they are just the same as the rest of us. While this is good form an equalitarian perspective, it has contributed to the undermining of experts.

Social Media

The growth of the WWW dimension of the internet, particularly that part of it called ‘social media’, has been the single most damaging element in this decline of truth. The sludge that makes up conspiracy theories, urban myth and fake news and the like was always present in society. But individuals only heard, and repeated, it through their limited oral networks, limiting the damage.

Social media, by contrast, expands everyone’s networks, amplifies what is said on and through them, as well as diffusing it instantaneously around the globe. The ability of social media to mimic the intimacy we all associate with personal, face-to-face interaction is a major element in the spread of misinformation.

Information Overload

To some extent, what is often referred to as ‘information overload’ is a part of the problem. As we have all become increasingly inundated with information through innumerable channels, our ability to screen it, verify or even absorb it has plummeted. Now, we all search for the quickest and shortest scrap of information we can find. Twitter, with its 140-character limit, is the ideal medium to satisfy this need.

Mainstream Media

The mainstream, mostly commercial, media of press, TV and radio has had a paradoxical role in all this. On the one hand, journalists and some organisations have honoured their ethics and traditions in battling lies, half-truths, dodgy statistics and so on. The emergence of fact checking organisations, sometimes linked with universities, is symptomatic of the desperate need to control the flow of misinformation.

On the opposite side of the ledger, we have seen the rise of ‘shock jocks’ and similar thunderers, usually employed by right-leaning media, belligerently trumpeting fake news and generally playing to the prejudices of their audiences. This has come at the expense of respect for credible, informed opinion and comment, as the possessors of such knowledge are execrated as ‘experts’ who have somehow come to be unreliable, biased or simply wrong because the shock jock, somehow, knows better.

Altogether, these powerful, intertwining forces have produced an information environment where lies rule and verifiable, evidenced facts are dead. The most dramatic demonstration of this process, and its consequences, has been in the United States of America over the last four years. It seems that more than seventy million Americans believe the demonstrable lies about the Presidential elections of 2020, as well as a bubbling brew of conspiracy theories, fake news and simple lies. The end result was the storming of America’s Capitol in January 2021 by thousands of such people, some armed and apparently determined to do harm to their democratically elected representatives.

Incredible scenes, yes, but the result of widespread credulity created by the appearance of truth.

MYTH-MAKING IN THE TIME OF THE VIRUS

May 12, 2020 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: COVID-19, fake news, memes, Myth-making, Prejudice Leave a comment

Alissa Eckert, MS, Dan Higgins, MAMS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ID 23312, 2020

In general usage, a ‘myth’ is a statement or fact believed to be true, a falsehood. Myths are given credence and spread by rumours and, increasingly, as ‘fake news’ or ‘memes’.

They usually arise as misunderstandings of historical events, statements, and sometimes as deliberate lies invented and spread for political, commercial or religious purposes

A well-known example of a misunderstood statement is an observation once made by the eminent anthropologist, Franz Boas, about the Inuit words for snow. The myth is that the Inuit people of Southwestern Alaska have more words for snow than any other language.

What Boas actually observed, in relation to the linguistic complexities of Inuit and its dialects, was that there were four root words for snow that might be vastly expanded by their use in a variety of linguistic combinations, or lexemes, that might also include individual semantic flourishes.

This fundamental subtlety was subsequently misunderstood by many to mean that the Inuit did have one hundred distinct words for snow. In fact, they might have one hundred or more lexemes for snow but not one hundred individual words, as the myth has it.

A more significant issue than the number of Inuit words for snow is this: what was it about the Inuit people (then termed ‘Eskimo’), their language and its cultural meanings, that led to the spread of this misstatement and its perpetuation to the present day?

The answer is that it’s all about ‘us’, not ‘them’.

When Boas and others were studying the Inuit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a widespread fascination with these indigenous people and their inconceivably hard way of life. For a few decades, the Inuit, and other indigenous groups in polar regions, were the darlings of folklorists, anthropologists, filmmakers and journalists. In short, the Inuit were seen through western eyes as ‘exotic others’. ‘Their’ lives were so drastically different from the western norm that something that so clearly and conveniently represented that difference made sense to ‘us’. Of course, such different people somehow surviving in perpetual ice and snow would have lots of words to describe their situation. Makes sense. Mmm.

This small popular delusion is pretty harmless, unlike many other prejudiced and pernicious myths western culture has evolved about exotic others. Perceptions of black people as monkey-like have a long history and have not gone away, for the same reason the Inuit words for snow myth has not. ‘They’ are not like ‘us’ whites.

One popular perception of human evolution is that non-Europeans are further down the evolutionary scale and therefore closer to the apes. Obvious, isn’t it? That’s what Darwin said.

Of course, Darwin said no such thing, but his biological ideas were applied to culture in the perversion usually called ‘social Darwinism, and it was asserted by experts that just as the plant and animal kingdoms evolved through natural selection, popularly understood as ‘survival of the fittest’, so did people. Obviously western culture was the preeminent result of this process and any culture that didn’t have our technological, religious, organisational and (supposedly) moral attainments was obviously at a lower stage of evolution and, therefore, inferior. Closer to monkeys than clever us. Science proves it. Mmm.

Despite the overwhelming abundance of evidence to the contrary, this apparently authoritative explanation provided an expert validation of a prejudice that had existed in European society since at least the medieval era. *

As well as the story itself, mythmaking also depends on those who tell the tale. The role of the ‘expert’ in confirming and spreading myth has recently expanded. Unqualified celebrities, politicians and those with usually fringe political agendas have increasingly taken over from experts as arbiters of opinion, masquerading as ‘fact’. The reasons for this are complex and include the erosion of trust in civil institutions and traditionally prominent influencers since the 1960s. In this century, the internet has accelerated and amplified this trend to its currently dangerous levels.

Right now, we are seeing the influence of the new storytellers in the context of the Corona virus pandemic. Large numbers of people prefer to believe random commentators and opinionists in the mainstream and social media about medical and scientific matters, particularly those related to so-called ‘cures’.

Alongside this we have another example of negative perceptions of exotic others, in this case, the Chinese, who have been blamed for the outbreak due to their culinary habits, alleged poor hygiene, incompetence or, the conspiracy theory version, by deliberately manufacturing and spreading the virus.

There are many other prejudicial myths that originate, evolve, and proliferate through these complex processes of history, ignorance and delusion. They persist because they fill a cultural and psychological need to perceive otherness in usually negative terms.* The particular combination of the progressive erosion of trust, the proliferation and consequences of new communication technology, and the always existing compulsion for humans to see things in terms of ‘us and them’, has now reached a potentially disastrous moment for us all.

* For a useful overview of this process see https://theconversation.com/comparing-black-people-to-monkeys-has-a-long-dark-simian-history-55102

* For a more detailed look at the complex psychological and cultural processes involved in mythmaking, see David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes https://davidrobson.me/the-intelligence-trap/

THE RETURN OF TYPHOID MARY

March 2, 2020 By Graham Seal in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: AIDS, AIDS Mary, COVID-19, disinformation, fake news, Mary Mallon, memes, pandemics, Public Harm Auntie, rumour, Typhoid Mary Leave a comment

‘Typhoid Mary’

Now she is called ‘Public Harm Auntie’ – in South Korea. In the 1980s and 90s she was known in the western world as ‘AIDS Mary’, a virulent and reckless transmitter of the HIV virus. In the twentieth-century America she was known as ‘Typhoid Mary’.

These creatures of twisted history and folklore were – and are – said to be spreading deadly disease. In early 2020, Public Harm Auntie is wantonly infecting South Koreans with Corona virus, or COVID-19.

How durable are these mass delusions, the spawn of fear and misinformation? Mary Mallon, born in Ireland in 1869 migrated to the USA where she worked as a domestic and cook for wealthy households. In 1906, it was discovered that the families she worked for had developed typhoid. It turned out that Mary was a carrier of the disease, and immune to it herself. Authorities quarantined her and later let her free on condition she never worked as a cook again. Unfortunately, Mary did. When she was discovered, she was again quarantined – for twenty-three years until her death in 1938.

Over this period, a worldwide typhoid epidemic raged, killing one in ten victims. Assisted by the press, panic erupted in America centred on Mary’s grim reaper status. Hysteria, misinformation and prejudice did their usually dirty work and Mary became the cause of untold typhoid deaths across the country.

As always, the reality was much different. Mary was a carrier who never contracted the disease herself, as were about fifty others. Mary only infected 33 people, three of whom died of the disease.

AIDS Mary (sometimes ‘Harry’) was, according to popular belief, at least as lethal. But, unlike Mary Mallon, she never existed. And while Public Harm Auntie appears to be an actual person, the alleged number of her infections with COVID-19 is undoubtedly swelled through the transmission of rumour as much as the virus.

Typhoid May, AIDS Mary (Harry) and Public Harm Auntie were [products of the pre-digital era. Now we have the greatest transmitter of falsehood, ignorance and fake news ever invented. The World Wide Web will ensure that this information virus spreads much faster than the disease itself.

REFERENCE:

David Mikkelson, ‘Did Typhoid Mary Cause the Deaths of Thousands of People?’, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/typhoid-mary/. The Snopes investigative and fact checking site is highly recommended as a vaccination against bullshit.

GRISTLY HISTORY

chewy chunks of the past by Graham Seal

Category Archives: MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING