Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The resurrectionists could be prosecuted only if they took goods from the grave, like the shroud, or if they entered a cemetery that was private property. Even so, most of them were in cahoots with wealthy and prominent doctors or universities, so they often had access to good lawyers.

  Charles Bonaparte, grandnephew of Napoleon, founded the FBI.

  MODUS OPERANDI

  They typically worked in groups. They—excuse the expression—haunted funerals, pretending to be mourners, so they could return later knowing exactly where the dearly beloved was buried. Using a narrow-bladed wooden shovel to minimize the sound of scraping metal, they only shoveled out the area over one end of the coffin, hopefully the end with the corpse’s head. When they struck the casket, they pried off the end of the lid, tied ropes to the cadaver, and jerked it out. Then they filled the hole back in.

  A BUSINESS LIKE ANY BUSINESS

  Entrepreneurs like Ben “Corpse King” Crouch of London trained rookie body snatchers in the ways of the dark profession. His teams patrolled London’s burial grounds in search of the newly dead, and their nightly take was even recorded in a ledger like some ghastly corporation. Like any capitalist enterprise, competition could be fierce, and gangs often battled with each other over fresh graves. Some enterprising body snatchers signed exclusive contracts with particular schools or surgeons.

  A NEW WRINKLE

  The famous team of Burke and Hare modernized the business in even more monstrous ways. They cut out the back-breaking part of the operation—digging up bodies—by just killing people outright. In 1828–29, these two enterprising fiends murdered 16 men, women, and children in Edinburgh and sold the fresh bodies to a delighted Dr. Robert Knox, one of the finest surgeons in the city as well as, apparently, one of the most gullible.

  THE FALL GUY

  Gullible or not, when Burke and Hare were finally nabbed, a wide-eyed Dr. Knox feigned ignorance of their murderous system, but his denials didn’t satisfy the mob and he fled Edinburgh.

  Hare testified against his partner and walked away scot-free. Burke was convicted of murder and executed. Afterward, in the ultimate irony, he was publicly anatomized at the medical college. His skeleton is on display at the University of Edinburgh, and a wallet made from his skin still graces the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

  The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people than World War I did.

  ENOUGH CADAVERS TO GO AROUND

  Burke and Hare’s horrific crime spree inflamed public sentiment and compelled the British Parliament to pass the Anatomy Act of 1832. This law improved medical schools’ access to legal cadavers and pretty much put the British resurrectionists out of business.

  THE AMERICAN WAY

  The practice continued in the United States, where most states refused to pass such laws. American body snatchers, like their British brethren, were particularly fond of preying on the poor and indigent because there were so many of them. They were less likely to have family claim their bodies, and they were often dumped in shallow graves in potter’s fields—a body snatcher’s buffet.

  ALL CORPSES AREN’T CREATED EQUAL

  But democracy meant that upscale dead people weren’t safe from the attentions of the resurrectionist either. In one celebrated case, in 1878, the missing corpse of Congressman J. S. Harrison turned up at the Ohio Medical College. Harrison was none other than the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison. This notorious event prompted some states to enact anatomy laws. But only some. A lot of other states maintained that the state had no business involving itself in legislating that sort of stuff. So grave robbers had free reign to continue their nasty ways in many parts of the United States. Certain American medical schools regularly acquired their cadavers, no questions asked, from shadowy body snatchers as late as the 1920s. And, who knows, perhaps even more recently than that.

  Down the close and up the stair,

  But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare;

  Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

  Knox the man who buys the beef.

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.

  In 1940, German spy Josef Jacobs became the last person executed at the Tower of London.

  HISTORY’S GREATEST TRAVEL BARGAIN

  * * *

  An ocean voyage to sunny beaches and unspoiled pine forests with all expenses paid by the British government. Who could ask for anything more?

  In the 1780s, English citizens demanded that Parliament solve the problem of overcrowding in the “hulks”—rotting ships along the Thames River that were used as prisons. The government would have liked to hang more prisoners, but was afraid that it might create unrest. The old practice of shipping felons off to “the colonies” had ended with that pesky American Revolution.

  BON VOYAGE

  Australia was an English colony, but it had no settlers. And therefore commercial potential. So why not offer some lucky prisoners a change of scene? Eleven ships left England on May 13, 1787, for a voyage that would continue halfway around the globe. This first fleet carried 730 convicts, including over 100 women. In January of the following year, the prisoners landed in New South Wales and founded the settlement that would become Sydney, Australia.

  THE NOT-SO-LUCKY WINNERS

  It was like a bad scene from Survivor. The prisoners were separated from their families and everything familiar by thousands of miles of ocean. They were dumped into a vast wilderness without the proper clothing, supplies, or tools. Who were these imprisoned pioneers? Although the intent was to export violent criminals, many were merely desperately poor folk who had been found guilty of stealing food or clothing.

  Benito Mussolini was named for Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez.

  TROUBLED IN PARADISE

  Over the next 50-plus years, thousands of convicts were sent to Australia. Assigned to work for the government, private settlers, traders, they built the early immigrant settlements and provided the labor for the new agricultural economy. Life was grim for prisoners in New South Wales, too. Reports received in England claimed that the system had turned prisoners into slaves. By the 1830s, the practice of transporting prisoners down under began to die out. By that time, the convict population, now paroled and released, accounted for the majority of settlers.

  TASMANIAN DEVILS

  But it was Van Diemen’s Land, now called Tasmania, that gave the Australian settlement plan its truly evil reputation. This was where the “troublemakers” went, arriving at the picturesque city of Port Arthur, the penal colony once known as “hell on earth.” Once there, convicts were sentenced to hard labor, sometimes in chain gangs hauling lumber and working in quarries. Punishment for minor infractions was severe, and lashings with the infamous cat-o’-nine-tails were common. Life was so brutal that some men made suicide pacts. One man would agree to kill another, then would escape himself by going to the gallows.

  GREAT ESCAPES

  Naturally, escape became a favorite pastime. In 1822, a convict named Alexander Pearce escaped with some other prisoners. When he arrived in civilization, he was asked where the rest of the guys were. He confessed that he’d survived by eating them!

  Some convicts stole weapons and took off into the wilderness to become outlaws (and cultural heroes) called “bushrangers.” They didn’t have to do much to win the support of the general population, since most of them had once been prisoners, too.

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  In Charles Dickens’ famous novel, Great Expectations, the hero Pip gets money from a convict who made his fortune in Australia. Dickens’ fiction was based on fact. Many former felons became Australian success stories. They created everything from farms and ranches to newspapers and great architecture.

  THE INCREDIBLE HULKS

  For years, the Aussies kept quiet about their ancestors’ origins in the “hulks” of England. But times change. Now, descendants of the first
fleet dress up in historic costumes to celebrate the day when a weary group of prisoners landed in what the Aussies affectionately call “Oz.”Dahling, it has become trés chic to flaunt your ancestors who once traveled courtesy of the king!

  In the 1800s, New Zealand had both a gold rush and a jade rush.

  STOMPED TO DEATH BY “LITTLE BOOTS”

  * * *

  Caligula was the emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 He’s remembered as a vicious and cruel despot, a sadist, and a megalomaniac—and those were his good points!

  Gaius Caesar grew up in a military camp where his father’s soldiers nicknamed him “Caligula” (“Little Boots”) for the child-size military boots he wore. His father, Germanicus, was a great Roman general and adopted son of Emperor Tiberius.

  LITTLE ORPHAN CALIGULA

  In a scenario so Roman you can almost hear the lions munching on Christians: Germanicus’s military victories made him so popular with the Roman public that Tiberius got jealous and had him killed. Later on, Tiberius killed Caligula’s mother, Agrippina, and the rest of Caligula’s brothers.

  SNEAKY LITTLE SON OF A GENERAL

  For reasons unknown to historians, Caligula was spared and went to live with Tiberius on the island of Capri. Eventually Caligula gained the confidence of Tiberius so that when the emperor died, he named Caligula and his grandson Gemellus joint heirs to the throne. Caligula had no interest in sharing power, so he managed to get the Roman senate to declare Tiberius’s will invalid and to choose him as emperor.

  HAIL, CALIGULA!

  For the first six months he was a good ruler, but that all changed when he became ill with what was called at the time “brain fever.” This may have been an attack of encephalitis, which can cause a marked character change resulting in behavior similar to schizophrenia. Anyway, after the illness, Caligula’s character changed all right: He became a vicious tyrant. Historians believe that he probably became insane. Witness the following.

  THE POSTER BOY FOR BRAIN FEVER

  From then on, he racked up a series of exploits that only a total wacko could think up.

  The Zulu army that beat the British at Isandhlwana included a regiment in their 60s.

  • He banished or murdered most of his relatives and had people tortured and killed while he watched. He would sometimes eat dinner at the same time.

  • He declared himself a god and had temples erected and sacrifices offered to himself.

  • He had his horse, Incitatus, made a senator.

  • He was hated and despised by the Roman senate because he conducted treason trials in which many senators, both guilty and innocent, were condemned to death. One unlucky official was flogged with chains for several days while Caligula watched, and was finally put out of his misery only because Caligula was offended by the smell of the gangrene that developed because of his injuries.

  • He quickly emptied the Roman treasury to support his lavish lifestyle, building projects, and the games he staged for the citizens. To refill it, he introduced new taxes. He also began to acquire the property of the wealthy citizens of Rome by forcing them to bequeath him all of their property and then having them killed.

  • He was married four times and cheated openly on all of his wives—with both men and women. He even committed incest with his own three sisters. Whenever Caligula kissed the neck of his wife or mistress, he’d say: “This lovely neck will be chopped as soon as I say so.”

  • He proclaimed his mastery of the sea by building a three-mile-long bridge on top of hundreds of boats lined up across the Bay of Naples. He then crossed the bridge by chariot, and claimed that he had ridden across the waters like the god Neptune.

  • He planned to invade Britain and so marched his troops to the northern shoreline of Gaul. But instead of crossing the channel, he ordered his men to collect seashells, which he called the spoils of the sea. Then he returned triumphantly to Rome expecting to be welcomed as a hero.

  FAREWELL, CALIGULA!

  The Roman people finally had enough and were ready to give “Little Boots” the boot. Caligula and his fourth wife were killed by the officers of his guard, who—just to prove that brutality wasn’t only the province of emperors in ancient Rome—also smashed his infant daughter’s head against a wall. He was succeeded as emperor by his uncle Claudius, a kinder, gentler emperor. But compared to Caligula, who wouldn’t be?

  The Boer War was the first time motorcycles and trucks were used in war.

  HISTORICAL HINDSIGHTS

  * * *

  Some very smart people can be downright cynical about history. Keep the following quotes in mind as you leaf through the olden days as Uncle John remembers them.

  “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

  —George Santayana

  “History is more or less bunk.”

  —Henry Ford

  “History is nothing but a parade of crimes and adversities.”

  —Voltaire

  “I often think it odd that [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”

  —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

  “History (n.): An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  “The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.”

  —A. Whitney Brown

  “God cannot alter the past, but historians can.”

  —Samuel Butler

  “Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.”

  —H.L. Mencken

  “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

  —Edward Gibbon

  “History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.”

  —Will and Ariel Durant

  “Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!”

  —Thomas Carlyle

  “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”—James Joyce

  Despite his name, Bernardo O’Higgins was the first president of Chile.

  THE GREAT LEAP BACKWARD

  * * *

  China goes into the steel business and calls it the “Great Leap Forward.”

  In the mid-1950s China’s Chairman Mao Tse-Tung realized that he was the leader of a backward country. He looked at Britain, France, America, and the Soviet Union, and saw that there was one crucial area where China was a long, long way behind—steel production. If China was to become a modern country, it needed to start producing as much steel as its competitors.

  MAN OF STEEL

  Like most Chinese people of his time, Mao didn’t know much about science or technology. He consulted his advisers, and one of them came up with a brilliant idea. They would build small blast furnaces in every village. The peasants could convert their iron plows and sickles into high-quality steel that could be used to build warships, bridges, and factories, and China would enter the 20th century. Within 15 years, Mao foresaw, Chinese steel production would equal that of the United States.

  MAJOR MELTDOWN

  The peasants didn’t know much about science and technology either, but they did what they were told. Soon enough every village square had a tall, conical “blast furnace.” Tons of precious fuel were used up to melt good tools into useless black lumps of slag. But excitement was running high.

  Darius I of Persia connected the Nile to the Red Sea with a canal.

  THE CHAIRMAN DROPS IN

  Chairman Mao spent most of his time at his luxury villa, reading in bed or lounging by his swimming pool. But every now and then he would go by special train to inspect the progress of the steel production at some provincial village. No one wanted to tell him that his great plan wasn’t working, so they sent another train on ahead, loaded with imported steel girders. They’d stack the girders up in the village square b
efore the chairman arrived and tell all the villagers to pose proudly beside the pile. Mao was delighted at the progress his country was making. He’d take a quick look around, congratulate everyone on how well it was going, and get back on his train.

  THE RESULTS

  When harvest time came around, all the tools had been melted down, and the best the Chinese could do in the time they had left over from steel production duty was to try pulling the plants up with their hands. Most of the crops rotted in the fields, thus beginning a famine that lasted until 1960 and killed an estimated 30 million people.

  NOT AS DUMB AS HE LOOKS

  Mao eventually realized that there was no steel. Now there was no food and no agricultural tools either. Communist China, which had been making fair progress since the revolution in 1949, went into a sudden decline. The Great Leap Forward brought China’s economic development to a standstill for another 15 years.