by Joe Rhatigan
Magellan Circumnavigated the Truth
Not only did Magellan fail to circumnavigate the globe, it wasn’t even the point of his voyage. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain in the service of Spain, set out with five ships to find a safe way to the Spice Islands. However, the three-year tour turned into a horror show of storms, mutiny, starvation, and war. Magellan was killed in the Philippines by natives, ships had to be burned and left behind, crew were captured, etc., until finally in 1522, one remaining ship limped into a Spanish harbor with fewer than twenty of the original crew members aboard. They were never paid their full wages.
Betsy Fraud
There’s no easy way to say this … Betsy Ross did not design the first American flag. George Washington did not, in June 1776, visit Betsy’s upholstery shop at 239 Arch Street with a rough sketch and ask her to complete and execute the design. The story didn’t even exist until 1870, when William J. Canby told this captivating tale to the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Who was William J. Canby? Betsy Ross’s grandson. While it’s true that Ross sewed uniforms and flags for the Continental Army, it’s unlikely there was an approved United States flag earlier than 1777. Historians claim this story gained popularity because Philadelphia was preparing for its centennial celebration and it jived with the patriotic mood in the city.
Would Not, Could Not with a Horse
Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was not crushed to death while having sex with a horse. (Yes, she had her lovers, but they were all human.) In fact, she passed away (very boringly, I might add) in bed. Basically, Catherine was the object of an eighteenth-century smear campaign launched by the French soon after her death. Those quick to debunk the horse myth sometimes state Catherine died on the toilet. That, too, is untrue. She may have passed out in the bathroom, but she didn’t die there.
Let Them Eat Their Words
Sorry, but Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.”
The story goes like this: In 1789, France was undergoing an economic depression and bread was scarce. A crowd of poor French mothers marched to Versailles to plead with Louis XVI. While the angry mob gave Louis a piece of their minds, Marie supposedly said, “If they have no bread, let them eat cake.”
First of all, taken in context, what Marie meant was that at that time, when bakers ran out of cheap bread, by law, they had to sell their better bread at the same price as the cheaper bread. One type of expensive bread was brioche, which is often translated as “cake.” Second, she didn’t say it, anyway. In fact, the writer Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his book Confessions, “I remembered the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat cake.’” The great princess couldn’t have been Marie Antoinette, since Confessions was published twenty-three years before Marie’s fictitious suggestion. Most likely this rumor was started by antiroyalists.
Why Is Paul Revered?
Sure, Paul Revere played a part in the American Revolution. But why is he the one (and only one) remembered for the midnight ride when it was actually up to forty different messengers raising the alarm about the Redcoats coming? On the night of April 18, 1775, he and another man, William Dawes, were told to ride from Boston to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were heading out to arrest them and then capture weapons stored in Concord. Both Revere and Dawes made it to Lexington, warning patriots along the way, although Revere did not yell, “The British are coming!” (That would have alerted British patrols, duh!) On the way to Concord, Revere was captured by the British. Dawes and Samuel Prescott (who joined them on the ride) both escaped, but only Prescott made it to Concord in time to alert the militia.
Revere didn’t become the hero of the midnight ride until nearly forty years after his death. In fact, his obituary didn’t even mention it. But when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1861, everything changed. You know the poem, even if you don’t think you know it:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Longfellow’s poem was treated as history for nearly one hundred years. It appeared in textbooks and historians referred to it. Unfortunately, Longfellow made a lot of it up. Using his poetic license, he got the lantern signals mixed up; sent Revere all the way to Concord, even though he never made it that far; and perhaps worst of all, he neglected to mention any of the other heroes from that night. So basically, he used Revere’s name because it rhymed better than Dawes or Prescott.
In 1896, Helen F. Moore, angry that William Dawes had been forgotten by history, wrote a parody of the poem:
‘Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear—
My name was Dawes and his Revere.
Napoleon’s Feet
We all think we know about Napoleon Bonaparte—Emperor of France, great military commander, and famous person of short stature. In fact, these days, many people ignore the first two facts and focus on his height. (I mean, there aren’t many basketball players suffering from a Napoleon complex, eh?) History placed Napoleon at five feet, two inches tall, and indeed that is true … if you’re using the old French foot, which was longer than the English foot. After doing the conversion math, Napoleon was actually five feet, six inches or so. No giant, but perfectly average for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Allegiance to What???
Millions of schoolchildren in the United States start the day off with a half-hearted rendition of “The Pledge of Allegiance.” It’s an oath of loyalty to flag, country, and principles (such as states’ rights, small government, low taxes, etc.), but it was penned by a devout socialist. Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister (who once delivered a sermon called “Jesus Was a Socialist”), Christian socialist, and cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy. The poem appeared in a popular children’s magazine in 1892 as a way to sell flags to public schools and boost the magazine’s circulation. Now there’s an American ideal we can all pledge to!
SIDE NOTE: The original hand instructions for the pledge called for the right hand to be removed from the heart at the mention of the word “flag” and extended outward toward the flag. This ended during World War II because it looked too much like a Nazi salute.
Bad Call
Abner Doubleday wasn’t the biggest name to come out of the Civil War, but he was involved in many key battles as a Union officer. He is, however, one of the biggest names in baseball—known far and wide as the inventor of the game. Too bad he had nothing whatsoever to do with its invention.
A committee was formed in the early twentieth century to determine the origins of baseball. Instead of attempting to find the truth, the committee wanted a feel-good story that proved baseball was a red-blooded American sport. The report stated, “The first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.” Their evidence was a single letter from a man named Abner Graves, a mentally unstable man who later killed his wife. A prolific writer, Doubleday left no notes or mention of even playing baseball. Also, he was at West Point in 1839, as his family had moved from Cooperstown the previous year.
In 1953, Congress set out to correct this inaccuracy by officially crediting the invention of modern-day baseball to Alexander Joy Cartwright, a volunteer firefighter and member of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. He supposedly was the first to draw a diagram of a baseball diamond and write down the rules on which baseball is based. Legend has it he also taught the game to people he met while traveling to C
alifornia during the Gold Rush. Though he did play for the Knickerbockers, there is written proof that the rules for the game already existed and that Cartwright’s descendants simply exaggerated his role.
So who invented baseball? Nobody. It evolved over time from a children’s stick and ball game played in England for centuries.
Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Now it’s no big stretch to say that a popular schoolyard chant is historically inaccurate, but since it’s all most people know about Lizzie Borden, it’s probably a good exercise to clear up the facts here. First off, Lizzie’s stepmother was the one murdered, and she only received eighteen or so whacks from an axe. Her father received only eleven. Also, though Lizzie was indeed accused of these murders, she was acquitted—mostly because police refused to use a newfangled crime prevention tool: fingerprinting.
The Rub on the Tub
On December 28, 1917, journalist H. L. Mencken published a fictitious history of the bathtub in the New York Evening Mail. In it, he wrote that the bathtub was introduced into the United States in the 1800s and that Americans didn’t take to bathtubs until President Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House. He wrote it to “have some harmless fun in war days”; however, he soon began to find his “preposterous ‘facts’” in other newspapers, medical literature, and reference books. Mencken wrote years later: “The success of this idle hoax … vastly astonished me. It had, of course no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity … Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”
Some historians think Mencken was up to more than some harmless fun. They believe that he was out to prove that Americans would believe any nonsense as long as it appealed to their imagination or emotions. Whatever his motives, this “fact” is still in circulation to this day.
The Tribe That Was … or Wasn’t … or Was
Manuel Elizalde, Jr., a Philippine government minister, announced to the world in 1971 that he had discovered a Stone Age tribe that had had no contact with the outside world. The tribe, called the Tasadays, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothing, used stone tools, and didn’t have a word for “enemy.” The tribe was featured on the cover of National Geographic and received worldwide attention. After scientists started asking questions, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared the tribe off-limits. In 1986, after Marcos was deposed, a Swiss anthropologist and two journalists searched for the Tasadays and found members of a local tribe who said they pretended to be a Stone Age tribe at Elizalde’s instructions. However, in a different interview, two Tasaday members who had originally claimed they were bribed by Elizalde admitted they had also been bribed by journalists with “cigarettes, candy, anything we wanted—if we would say what he told us to.” So what’s the truth? No one truly knows.
The War of Breakfast Foods
In 1683, as one hundred thousand Ottoman Turks besieged the city of Vienna, the bakers of the city, who had to be up early in the morning to make the bread, heard what sounded like digging. Indeed, the Turks were attempting to tunnel under the city’s walls. The bakers raised the alarm and the Turks were unable to take Vienna before King John III of Poland showed up and drove them away. Legend has it that the bakers celebrated the end of the siege by creating a commemorative pastry in the shape of the Turks’ flag—a crescent moon. It was called a kipfel, which is German for crescent … now commonly known as the croissant. Meanwhile, the bakers, unable to contain their excitement, also created a new roll in the shape of a stirrup to honor King John. The Austrian word for stirrup is bugel—which is where we could have gotten the word bagel. Unfortunately, neither story is true.
Corrections to the Historical Record
There is no William Tell, and he didn’t shoot an apple off his son’s head.
Richard III, King of England from 1483–1485, was not a hunchback. Paintings of him were touched up after his death to make it look like he was. He also didn’t murder his brother, his son, or his wife. He can thank Tudor slander and a hack named Shakespeare for turning him into such a villain.
Here are two shockers: Vikings didn’t wear helmets with horns attached to them, and pirates didn’t make people walk the plank.
Most people in the 1490s knew the world was round. Columbus didn’t have to convince anyone. Also, the first European to discover America was Bjarni Herjolfsson in the late 900s.
Lady Godiva didn’t ride through the streets of Coventry naked.
“Ring Around the Rosie” does not refer to the Great Plague.
The great pyramids were not built by slaves. Excavated skeletons show that the builders were actually Egyptian laborers who were paid for their work.
Benjamin Franklin told the story of flying a kite with a key attached to the string, but never did it.
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, did not say, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
WAR STORIES
“[History is a] mixture of error and violence.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.”—David Friedman
“If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?”—Joan Baez, singer/songwriter
“I think war might be God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”—Ambrose Pierce
I’ve read in a couple of different places that during the last 3,500 years, the world has had around 230 years when there were no wars. I can’t confirm those numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 230 days. Or hours, even. War seems as inevitable as death and taxes—with war making those two even more inevitable. The stories in this chapter focus less on the heroes, winners, and losers and more on the overall weirdness that goes on when humans fight.
The Soccer War
Also known as the Football War or the 100-Hours War, this battle was fought by El Salvador and Honduras in July 1969. Tensions were already high between the two countries (border disputes, among other things) when their respective national soccer teams met during a qualifying round for the 1970 World Cup; however, when Honduras beat El Salvador in the Honduran capital on June 8, things went downhill quickly. First, an eighteen-year-old Salvadoran girl, despondent over the loss, shot herself. She quickly became a martyr and the national soccer team even attended her funeral. Then, after two more games, both of which El Salvador won, diplomatic ties were severed and war broke out. After four days, fighting ceased, and though El Salvador gained some concessions from Honduras, their team lost all three games at the World Cup without scoring a goal.
Washington’s Gamble
One morning in 1776, British troops in Boston woke up to a surprising sight: Washington’s troops and cannons on top of the city’s hills preparing to attack. The British counted the cannons and realized they needed to retreat against such a demonstration of firepower. They evacuated the city as quickly as possible and Boston was freed without firing a shot. And it was a good thing for Washington that it went down the way it did, because it was all a total bluff. Sure, Washington’s troops had loads of cannons and guns, but they didn’t have the gunpowder to use them. If the British had attacked, the patriots would have been able to shoot off a few cannons before running for their lives.
Patton’s Stagecraft
By the spring of 1944, Hitler knew Allied Forces were going to create a second front in Europe … but where exactly? One good location would be East Anglia and southeast England, where troops could threaten the Port of Calais in France. And that’s just what it looked like was happening. General George Patton was there, and so were t
housands of troops, tanks, trucks, aircraft, and more. This massive buildup forced Hitler to keep troops stationed at Calais, even as the Allied invasion of Normandy, more than one hundred miles away, began. So what about Patton’s massive army? Well, one morning, a British farmer in East Anglia woke up to find a column of American tanks on his land. He noticed one of his bulls size up a tank and then lunge for it. The farmer, expecting a sad end for his bull, was more than surprised when, after impact, the tank started hissing and deflating. All the tanks were fake. So were the aircraft, trucks, and most of the troops. It was all part of Operation Quicksilver—an imaginary army group of set designers, artists, and actors pretending to prepare for attack. The tanks were inflatable rubber, the airplanes were canvas, and the soldiers were made out of wood. Soldiers (real ones) even used rolling tools to create fake tread and tire marks on the dirt roads. Quicksilver was so convincing (including hours and hours of fake, scripted radio traffic) that Hitler kept his panzer divisions in place across from the fake army long after the Allies stormed Normandy on June 6.
Operation Mincemeat
Here’s another World War II deception that actually worked. It was 1943 and the Allies were planning to invade Sicily, but wanted the Germans to think they were planning to invade Sardinia and Greece instead. Hmm … what to do … what to do? Well, the British decided to find a dead body, give it a Royal Marine’s uniform, chain a briefcase full of top-secret documents to its wrist, throw it from a submarine off the coast of Spain … and then hope for the best. Sure enough, the body washed ashore, the briefcase was opened (they found money, love letters, and a cryptic letter outlining an invasion of either Sardinia or Greece), and the Germans bought it. They pulled thousands of troops from Sicily to defend Sardinia and Greece, and the British parachuted into Sicily.
