by Phil Mason
The map of the New World was published and what is now Brazil was christened ‘Americus’. When the celebrated cartographer Mercator produced his first maps, the tag had spread to the whole of the continent, North and South. By then Vespucci was dead, completely unaware that he had given his name to an entire new world.
New York became British because of a Dutch obsession with nutmegs. When a British adventurer and trader, Nathaniel Courthope, seized the tiny island of Pulo Run in the Spice Islands (near Java in what is modern Indonesia) in 1616, he disrupted the Dutch monopoly of the area and the lucrative spice trade which reaped gargantuan profits. A pennyworth of nutmeg bought there could be sold for 600 times that amount back in Europe. The Dutch recovered Pulo Run just four years later, but not before Courthope had got the island’s chieftains to sign a formal treaty of alliance with Britain.
Half a century later, when the British and Dutch were negotiating the peace treaty of Breda, the Dutch agreed to buy out the alliance by trading another of its colonies which it saw as having no value. For Pulo Run and its nutmegs, it swapped a then rather desolate island in America – Manhattan.
The birth of the Reformation – the religious upheaval that split Christianity into Protestant and Catholic sects – can trace its origins to its founder’s chronic constipation. Martin Luther, who famously composed his 95 theses protesting against the abuses of the papacy and nailed them to a church door in Wittenburg in 1517, regularly complained in his writings of his suffering and that he spent much of his time in solitary contemplation on the toilet.
Historians have long noted the strong lavatorial allusions that fill Luther’s work. He records having his revelatory inspiration ‘in cloaca’, Latin for ‘in the sewer’, and he frequently used barbed language to vent his frustration (‘I shit on the Devil’ and ‘I break wind on the Devil’) some of which was clearly not only theological.
He wrote that his major doctrinal insight, which would change world history, was ‘knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.’ The theses themselves may well have been drafted there too as he sat through the long quiet hours on the lavatory. It is also perhaps now easier to understand why there were so many of them.
Archaeologists excavating a disused annex of Luther’s house in Wittenburg in 2004 uncovered a brick alcove which they believed to be the actual toilet. It was a comfortable, 18-inch square seat with plumbing said to be of a quality quite advanced for its time.
Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, might have avoided execution during the French Revolution had the queen not changed their escape plans at the last minute. In June 1791, two years after the outbreak of revolution, with the government descending into anarchy and the chances of a constitutional monarchy evaporating, Louis had decided to flee Paris for the nearest border – modern Belgium – 200 miles away, where royalist allies would help him into exile.
The original plan had been for Louis to leave alone in a quick, small carriage. Marie, however, when the time came to separate, insisted that they travel together. That required a larger coach and made it a slower journey – barely seven miles an hour.
The pair left the Louvre at night, separately to avoid suspicion. Marie then got lost in the maze of the Tuileries Gardens for half an hour before she caught up with the king.
The slower pace, and a broken wheel which had to be fixed, meant that by late afternoon the next day they were three hours behind schedule for the rendezvous with their armed guard who were due to meet them en route. The guards, suspecting that the plan had misfired, had by then decided to disperse.
The escape party arrived at the small village of Sainte-Menehould where they stopped to change horses. News had already spread of their flight, and the postmaster recognised the king, according to many accounts, by checking his face against the royal image printed on a 50-livre banknote. As the escapees left, so did he and he overtook them to warn the authorities in the next main town, Varennes.
The royal pair were apprehended there, only 25 miles from safety, returned to Paris in ignominy and 18 months later Louis was guillotined, with Marie following nine months later.
A Cambridge professor put forward a theory in 2000 that the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain, rather than anywhere else, at the end of the 18th century because of the unique influence of the British population’s habit for drinking tea.
While many other countries shared with Britain the same levels of technology and skills, it was the Britons’ affection for the drink that tipped the balance in providing a steadily increasing and healthy population. For the vigorous increase in activity associated with industrialisation, it was essential to gather people together in towns and cities in proportions quite unlike anything seen before. In past history, when populations conglomerated, they usually succumbed to the spread of disease.
Curiously, in Britain there were steady reductions in child mortality and in common city diseases, especially the water-borne infection, dysentery. Professor Alan Macfarlane discovered a remarkable association between these trends and the increase in tea-drinking. His theory was founded on the fact that tea was drunk with boiled water, which killed off disease-carrying bacteria. Tea also possesses, in tannin, an antiseptic agent which made mothers’ breast milk the healthiest it had ever been.
No other nation drank tea on the same scale as the British. This, according to Macfarlane, was the key to why the Industrial Revolution was born here instead of somewhere else.
The present line of the British royal family would not be ruling today had it not been for the strangest twist of fate that saw the most fecund of all Britain’s queens fail to produce a single heir – despite giving birth 19 times.
Anne, last of the Stuart line, who became queen in 1702, had been pregnant every year of her life from her marriage in 1683 until 1700. She suffered 14 stillbirths or miscarriages, and gave birth to two sons and three daughters. Only one survived early childhood. He died aged 11 in 1700.
She died in 1714, her body worn out, aged only 49. With no direct heir, the royal line transferred to the Hanoverians. Her second cousin, George, the Elector of Hanover, became George I, from whom our present monarchs are directly descended.
Queen Victoria’s rule could have been rendered entirely invalid had the Sub-Dean of Westminster not been paying attention at her coronation in 1838. Towards the end, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who was presiding at this point, turned over two pages of the order of service by mistake, missing out important parts of the ceremony. The Queen had left Westminster Abbey before the Sub-Dean pointed out the error. She had to be brought back to finish the service properly.
Robert Clive, founder of Britain’s empire in India, and one of history’s most dynamic military and political leaders, tried to shoot himself in 1744 when he was just 19 – weeks after his arrival in India – because of his debts, but he failed to do so when his pistol misfired twice. He is reported to have announced, ‘It appears I am destined for something. I will live.’
He rose to become commander of the East India Company’s army, later won the key battle of Plassey which brought large swathes of India under British control, frustrating French ambitions for an Indian empire and establishing the foundations for the British Raj.
He ended up as Governor of Bengal. He also amassed a personal fortune estimated at £4.5 billion in present-day values – all in a career, excluding breaks back in England, of a little under 12 years. He retired at 42, and was dead by 49.
Several hundred Parisians were massacred during a military coup led by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851 because the general leading the gendarmerie happened to have a bad cold. The massacre ensured that the coup succeeded and a year later France had another Emperor Napoleon – and all because of that cold.
The nephew of the original Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, had got himself elected as President of France in 1848 after the overthrow of the French monarchy. But his dynastic genes were as strong as his uncle’s. As he neared the end of
his term of office, he engineered a coup in December 1851 to take dictatorial powers. He had brought back from the Foreign Legion in Africa a favourite general, Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud, to lead the troops in securing Paris.
The change of weather from the heat of Algeria to a European winter gave Arnaud a terrible cold. As he led his forces to confront a mob resisting the coup he is said to have had a coughing fit. As it ended, he cursed ‘Ma sacrée toux’ (‘My damned cough!’). The head of the Guard misheard it as ‘Massacrez tous’ (‘Massacre them all’) and launched an assault on the crowd. Up to 800 people are believed to have been killed. It was the pivotal moment in turning the tide of the coup, and paved the way for Napoleon’s seizure of power, and eventual elevation to Emperor as Napoleon III. And it all stemmed from Saint Arnaud’s misheard curse.
Had a Swiss businessman obtained more efficient customer service from the same Napoleon’s bureaucracy, the world might never have had the Red Cross. The idea for the organisation began after another Napoleonic massacre, this time at the Battle of Solferino in June 1859 as the Emperor waged a war of territorial expansion against Austrian control of the minor states of northern Italy. It was an entirely fortuitous coincidence that Jean Henri Dunant was heading for Solferino too, to seek the Emperor’s personal help in agreeing concession details for his company. He had spent fruitless months trying to sort out matters with civil servants in Paris.
Dunant arrived in the evening of the day of battle, and witnessed the horrors of the aftermath of ‘modern’ war. Some 30,000 soldiers were dead or wounded, and there was a complete absence of any medical facilities to aid them.
Appalled, Dunant organised the townspeople to prepare temporary hospitals and with his own money bought medicines. He stressed a neutral attitude of helping both sides without favouritism, which was to become the hallmark of the organisation he was to found when he returned to his home in Geneva.
The horrors had scarred him so much that he wrote up his experiences, published the account in 1862 from his own pocket, and campaigned internationally. He convened the first meeting of an International Committee of the Red Cross in February 1863 in Geneva, which would become the headquarters of the worldwide effort to reduce suffering from war. The following year, the Red Cross produced the first Geneva Convention on the treatment of the wounded in war. Dunant chose the organisation’s name and symbol by simply reversing the colours of his own national flag.
He devoted the rest of his life to the cause and, in 1901, nine years before his death, was awarded the inaugural Nobel Peace Prize.
One of the biggest ecological disasters of all time came about because an emigrating hunter missed his pastime. Thomas Austin, a settler in Victoria, Australia, introduced 24 rabbits on to his Winchelsea estate near Melbourne in 1859, with devastating results.
With no natural predators, they had multiplied within 10 years to the extent that it was claimed that upwards of two million could be caught annually without any impact on their numbers. It was the fastest spread of any mammal in recorded history.
By 1950, there were an estimated 600 million rabbits plaguing the countryside. They were reduced to a mere 100 million by an eradication programme through the deliberate release of myxomatosis, but immunity soon developed and numbers are now thought to have risen again to over 300 million.
The impact on the Australian ecology has been devastating. An eighth of all mammalian species on the continent is now extinct, with rabbits being the prime cause. The Australian government currently estimates that the damage to crops and production each year is in the order of $600 million.
An equally bizarre and costly ecological legacy from a gesture of small intentions is the presence in North America today of the common starling. It is not a species natural to the continent, and is regarded by Americans as a nuisance bird. It arrived by virtue of an eccentric 19th century Shakespeare obsessive who gave himself the mission to introduce into America every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays.
Eugene Scheifflin, a wealthy drug manufacturer, released just 100 starlings in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890s. Within 50 years they had spread across the entire United States. They are now thought to number at least 200 million. Capable of eating one to two times their own weight every day, they are regarded by grain farmers as scavengers, and ornithologists have blamed them for pushing some native species, such as the bluebird and woodpecker, close to extinction. Nationwide, the US Wildlife Service kills a million a year in a losing battle to control their spread. They cause nearly $1 billion of damage to agriculture crops every year.
Ironically, throughout all of the Bard’s plays, the starling is mentioned on just one single, solitary occasion (in Henry IV, Pt I).
America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 turned out to be one of the best bargains ever transacted for the United States. At under two cents an acre, the vast land has since yielded billions of dollars worth of treasure, through precious minerals and oil.
But at first, the deal was ridiculed by American politicians and Congress nearly did not agree to provide the funds required. It also proved a complete misfire in regard to the aim America actually had as the reason for the purchase.
Negotiated literally overnight on 29/30 March, the US Secretary of State William Seward saw the main value of the transaction as making it easier to annex Western Canada, a long-held American objective. Anti-British feeling after the ending of the Civil War two years earlier, in which Britain had been sympathetic to the rebellious Confederacy, had begun to spur expansionist sentiment against Britain’s presence in Canada.
In fact, the Alaska purchase worked in the opposite direction. It pushed the western provinces even more strongly down the path towards joining the Federation, which was about to be established by the eastern provinces that year. Within four years, British Columbia, the most vulnerable colony, had actually become part of a Federal Canada.
For Russia, the motivation was even less profound. Tsar Alexander II’s government was desperately short of money. Part of the reason had been an expensive naval expedition the Russian admiralty had laid on during the American Civil War to send a fleet of ships to visit New York and San Francisco as a goodwill gesture and a tacit warning to Britain against its support for the Confederacy.
One story has it that of the $7.2 million the United States paid for Alaska, $5.8 million (80 per cent) was to reimburse the Russians for the costs of the tour. Had the Russians not wanted to cock a snook at Britain, they might have been able to afford to keep Alaska long enough for its true worth to emerge and, a century later, the Cold War could have taken on a completely different dimension.
The Eiffel Tower in Paris was originally built for the 1889 Universal Exposition held to mark the centenary of the French Revolution. The city authorities granted the builders of the tower a licence to occupy the site for just 20 years, after which the tower would be demolished. (One of the rules of the original competition was that the resulting tower could be easily taken down.)
When 1909 came, the city was still intent on demolition. The presence of a single radio antenna at the summit saved the tower. The city was persuaded by French telegraph officials and the army that the tower was serving as a useful transmitting beacon. It was on those grounds that the Eiffel Tower was allowed to remain.
The Panama Canal would have been built in Nicaragua had it not been for a lobbyist’s use of a postage stamp.
After the success of its Suez Canal, France had, as far back as 1878, purchased the rights to build a canal across Panama, but had failed for years to put together the necessary finances. In 1902, the most fervent advocate, engineer Philippe Jean Bunau-Varilla, went to the United States to lobby for American interest in backing the project. He discovered that a Bill was before the Senate proposing a canal further north, across Nicaragua, taking advantage of its huge lake which could be used for nearly half the 140 miles required.
The prospect severely threatened French interests. Bunau-V
arilla countered by pointing to the array of volcanoes in Nicaragua, which by implication threatened the viability of the canal there. The US State Department, the ‘experts’, suggested that they never erupted. The majority opinion in the Senate accepted this and appeared to be heading inexorably in favour of endorsing the Nicaraguan route.
Bunau-Varilla then pulled off his masterstroke. He was aware that a current Nicaraguan five-pesos stamp proudly portrayed an image of one of the country’s small volcanoes in full eruption.
He wrote a letter to every senator emblazoned with one of the stamps, asking whether American taxpayers would be happy to risk their investment to the volcanoes. The letters arrived on senators’ desks three days before the crucial vote. When it was taken, the Senate decided in favour of Panama by 42 – 34. And so it was to be.
The headquarters of the United Nations would have been in Philadelphia, not New York, had philanthropist tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jnr not gifted $8.5 million (worth close to $250 million in modern values) for the purchase of derelict land along the East River for the purpose. But his motivation was not entirely altruistic. Had a rival idea for using the land not been viewed as a clear threat to his own business empire, he might not have bailed out the new international organisation with his incredible generosity.
