Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  “In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.”

  Madame de Staël

  Mary Queen of Scots ascended to the throne when she was only six days old.

  THE REAL CAPTAIN BLIGH

  * * *

  According to Hollywood, Captain Bligh was the nastiest son of a sea-cook to ever sail the ocean blue. Well, guess again. And say hello to Captain Pussycat.

  MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

  In April 28, 1789, a group of British sailors staged a mutiny against Captain William Bligh of the H.M.S. Bounty. They forced the captain into a 23-foot open boat in the middle of the South Pacific, 3,600 miles from land.

  The mutineers who later stood trial defended their actions by testifying that the captain was a sadistic tyrant who flogged his crew at the drop of a sailor’s cap. It’s true that Bligh had a terrible temper. But evidence shows that conditions on the Bounty were no worse than on any other sailing vessel of the time, and that Bligh’s worst crime was that he was perhaps too accommodating.

  MOTLEY CREW

  The Bounty was overcrowded because Bligh couldn’t say no to various acquaintances who wanted jobs for their friends and relatives. Then, in an effort to make life more pleasant for all those sailors, the captain set up three eight-hour watches instead of the usual 12-hour marathons. Later in the voyage, the men would use this extra time to argue among themselves, complain bitterly, and plot against the captain.

  THE LAND OF SUN AND FUN

  The ship’s mission was simple enough: sail to Tahiti to pick up breadfruit trees and deliver them to Jamaica. The breadfruit, nicknamed “tropical potato,” was a big, starchy fruit that Polynesians cooked like a vegetable. Captain James Cook saw it on his voyages, noticed that the crop that took very little labor to raise, and suggested importing it to Jamaica to feed the slaves, much as potatoes fed the poor in Ireland. Bligh had served on the crew during one of Cook’s voyages, and now carried out Cook’s plan.

  But the Bounty arrived too early in the season and had to wait six months before the breadfruit plants could be transported. So instead of finding chores for the crew to do, their misguided captain let them hang out in a tropical paradise full of beautiful women where the food grew on trees, and the local (ahem!) mating customs were extremely permissive.

  Ooh, that Bligh was such a meanie.

  Notre Dame’s famous gargoyles were added after its completion.

  OKAY, TIME’S UP!

  Eventually, the breadfruit trees were stowed aboard and it was time to leave. Do you know how hard it is to go back to work after two weeks at Club Med? Well, multiply that by half a year in paradise. Take Fletcher Christian, for instance, Bligh’s second-in-command. He’d found himself a beautiful wife and didn’t want to leave her. But he and the rest of the crew sighed a deep collective sigh and got back in the boat.

  Trouble soon reared its ugly head. The men were cranky, disobedient, and derelict in their duties. Flogging was the punishment of choice in Her Majesty’s Service, so the men were flogged, and flogged again. Three weeks after they’d left Tahiti, Mr. Christian and his fellow mutineers said they’d had enough and set Bligh and 18 of his loyal crew adrift. They stocked the little boat with 50 pounds of biscuits, 20 pounds of salted meat, and 120 liters (32 gallons) of water, which Bligh made sure lasted the seven weeks it took to reach land—the island of Timor, 3,600 miles away.

  Meanwhile, the Bounty sailed back to Tahiti where 16 of the mutineers disembarked. The rest—with wives, girlfriends, and a few Tahitian men—sailed away, looking for a place to hide.

  HOW VERY UNBRITISH!

  When Bligh got back to England and told his story, the authorities were suitably outraged. They sent a warship to search for the mutineers. Fourteen men were taken into custody on Tahiti. During the trip home, four were killed in an accident when the ship ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. The rest were brought to trial.

  But it was Bligh who was really on trial. The defense implied that he had an “unnatural” attraction to young Mr. Christian and was jealous of Christian’s native wife. The prosecution countered that Christian and some of the other mutineers had sailed with Bligh before, more than once in fact, and had signed on to the Bounty of their free will. The judges found in favor of Bligh. Seven of the mutineers were exonerated, three were hanged.

  The Coliseum, which held 50,000 spectators, is one of the largest buildings in the world.

  LIFE IS THE PITS ON PITCAIRN

  Meanwhile, the Bounty found refuge on Pitcairn, a small, isolated island that hadn’t been charted correctly and so, in essence, didn’t exist. They stripped the Bounty of all contents and then set fire to the ship, fearing retribution if any European vessel were to spot them. Life in the mutineers’ new paradise was hardly idyllic. The Tahitian men rebelled against unfair treatment by some of the Englishmen, killing several mutineers. The remaining Bounty crew killed the Tahitians. By 1808, when the island was “discovered” by an American sailing ship, all but one of the men were dead by murder or suicide (or in one case, asthma).

  MEANWHILE. . .

  Bligh wasn’t faring all that well either. He’d served two years as governor of New South Wales when the top officers in the army, citing the same reasons as the Bounty mutineers, forcibly removed him from office and sent him back to England. The British Navy would have none of it, of course, and promoted the captain to rear admiral in 1811 and vice admiral in 1814. . . although records show that he was on half-pay, so these were probably desk jobs that didn’t involve actual command.

  Bligh died of cancer in London in 1817, and thanks to those darn movies about him, is still remembered as the meanest man to ever command a ship. History just isn’t fair!

  IT’S A BREAD, IT’S A FRUIT, IT’S BREADFRUIT!

  Captain Bligh did finally make it to Jamaica with a cargo of breadfruit. Records indicate that 347 breadfruit trees arrived on the H.M.S. Providence on the fifth of February, 1793, and were distributed throughout the island. Today, the breadfruit is a staple in the Caribbean. The breadfruit is used as a vegetable when mature but not ripe. Highly starchy, it is paired for good nutrition with leafy green vegetables. Ripe breadfruit is sweeter, and thus used for dessert dishes.

  Breadfruit evolved in Indonesia’s Sunda Archipelago and became the staple diet for islanders throughout the tropical Pacific islands, where they were spotted by James Cook.

  Brasilia, founded in 1960, is one of the newest cities in the world.

  ROME AT THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE

  * * *

  What it was like to be in the great city of Rome around A.D. 476, the official date of the fall of the empire.

  Talk about a morale crisis: if the foreign invaders or the rampant disease didn’t get you, the taxman did. Of course, all these problems didn’t surface in 476 exactly. It’s just that scholars picked that date as the official date for the fall of the Roman Empire because it was the year the German king, Odoacer, took control of Rome and permanently forced the last western Roman emperor out of office.

  HAS-BEEN CITY

  For over 800 years, Rome had been the center of the great pagan republic, the home of emperors, and the capital of a vast empire. By the late 400s, though, the capital of the Roman Empire wasn’t in Rome any more: Constantinople was the “New Rome.” Power had shifted east, and what authority remained in Rome was only bureaucratic. And you know what that’s like.

  All through the fifth century, barbarians made Rome a regular stop in their sacking and pillaging trips. By the time 476 rolled around, the once-great empire had been gobbled up, divided up, and generally taken over by Vandals, Visigoths, and other invader types. King Odoacer ruled the entire Italian peninsula.

  SICK, SICK, SICK

  Rome had always depended on imported goods from its provinces, but now there weren’t any more provinces, so supplies of virtually everything ran out. Also, the city had been built on the edge of a swamp, and no engineering could fix it. From the time of the fall to the
middle of the sixth century, the great aqueducts crumbled, the city’s walls were torn down, the drainage backed up, and Rome could have been renamed “Malaria City.”

  In fact, all diseases associated with dirty water were a threat. Like the plague which, spreading from the east, swept through Rome in the sixth century, taking about half the population.

  Machiavelli’s The Prince may have been based on Pope Alexander I’s cruel son, Cesare Borgia.

  THIS CHURCH ISN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US

  Most of the invading tribes were Christians, as were most Romans, but already a schism had developed in the Church. Citizens could be imprisoned or tortured depending on which side they were on, and depending on the beliefs of whomever happened to be in power at the time.

  THE TAXMAN COMETH

  Taxes—in cash, or goods (such as food or wood), to support a dwindling army—had become a huge burden to the average Roman. The Roman IRS got hungrier and hungrier, partly because of inflation, and partly because the tax base was shrinking. As invaders carved away chunks of the empire, they were taking away productive farms and estates.

  Tax collectors had an added incentive: they had to make up any shortfall in collections themselves.

  THE TAXMAN LEAVETH

  After a while, Publius Q. Public couldn’t pay his taxes any more. So he had to desert his farm and his house. He and a lot of his fellow Romans fled to the estates of the very wealthy, or to villages run by army officers. Once there, they signed away their possessions, labor, even their freedom in return for protection against the tax collector.

  In the end, even the tax collectors were running away, leaving the gates wide open for the German chiefs encroaching ever further upon the empire.

  “The rise of a city, which swelled into an Empire, may deserve. . . the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness [. . .] The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions. . . acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries [. . .] The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline [. . .]; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.”

  Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1787)

  Six nations’ flags have flown over Texas, more than any other state in the U.S.

  DEATHLESS PROSE

  We got to wondering if writers, poets, and other various intellectuals were more creative than the rest of us when it came to those famous last words. What do you think?

  Louisa May Alcott

  “Is it not meningitis?”

  Jane Austern

  “Nothing, but death.”

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  “Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.”

  Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian d. 1702

  “I am about to—or I am going to—die: either expression is correct.”

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  “Beautiful.”

  Lord George Byron

  “Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight.”

  Emily Dickinson

  “I must go in, the fog is rising.”

  O. Henry

  (William Sidney Porter)

  “Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  Thomas Hobbes

  “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”

  Victor Hugo

  “I see black light.”

  James Joyce

  “Does nobody understand?”

  Walter De La Mare

  “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.”

  Eugene O’Neill

  “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room—and God damn it—died in a hotel room.”

  Edgar Allan Poe

  “Lord help my poor soul.”

  François Rabelais

  “I owe much; I have nothing; the rest I leave to the poor.”

  Dylan Thomas

  “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record. . ..”

  H. G. Wells

  “Go away. I’m all right.”

  Oscar Wilde

  “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

  They called it the White House even before its paint job.

  SPOONER: THE MAN AND HIS “ISMS”

  * * *

  Nineteenth century Oxford academic Dr. William Spooner muddled his words so often that he unintentionally gave his name to a “tip of the slung” known since the 1890s as a “spoonerism.”

  Dr. William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930) was an albino. Even when he was a boy his hair was white as skim milk and his skin was translucently colorless because he was missing the right sort of pigments. That explains why his pinkish eyes were very weak. But surely it doesn’t also account for the unusual habit he had of mistakenly referring to a “well-boiled icicle” when he meant a “well-oiled bicycle” or saying “cattle ships and bruisers” when he was trying to get his mouth around “battleships and cruisers.”

  IS THE BEAN DIZZY?

  Our Spooner went solemnly “up” to Oxford (as they say) as an undergraduate in the 1860s and stayed for 70 years. But his resume would have made impressive reading all the same.

  He taught ancient history and classics, but since only clerics made it to the top in Oxford Colleges in the 19th century, Spooner got himself ordained in 1872. It paid off. Four years later he was the busy dean of New College, his pale complexion and verbal gaffes—potentially so hilarious and even risqué that his students no doubt listened attentively to his every word. In 1903 he got the top job of warden, or president. He held the warden’s job until he retired at the age of 82.

  THESE TICKLE MY BUNNY PHONE

  “You have deliberately tasted two worms and hissed all my mystery lectures,” Spooner is alleged to have shouted angrily at a lazy student he was trying to dismiss. “You can leave Oxford by the town drain.” He toasted Queen Victoria with, “Here’s to our queer old dean!” At chapel he prayed, “Our Lord is a shoving leopard.” Then there was the occasion when he preached about the poor hopeful camel finding access through the knee of an idol. And another time when he officiated at a wedding and asked if it was “kisstomary to cuss the bride.”

  After Lindbergh’s historic flight, the Spirit of St. Louis ’s first passenger was Henry Ford.

  MAY SOD REST HIS GOAL

  There’s no doubt Reverend Spooner really was given to the speech blunder that’s named after him. But sadly, quite a few commentators now think he probably didn’t originate most of the priceless ones attributed to him. It is more likely, say those boring debunkers, that Spooner’s students—by definition a clever lot—made them up and started rumors that they were Spooner’s alone.

  Does it matter who said “hush my brat” when he meant “brush my hat” or—still on matters millinery—“pat my hiccup” instead of “pick my hat up” when it blew off in a wind?

  Or imagine trying to fight a liar in roaring pain when, say, camping with a scoop of boy trouts. Spooner’s uniqueness lives on in countless coinages, historical or newly invented.

  SPOONER’S OTHER GAFFES

  Remembered chiefly for his nervous tendency to transpose initial letters or half-syllables in speech, Spooner was quite capable of a good many kinds of other verbal blunders as well. A respected classical scholar, he was perhaps the archetypal “absent-minded professor.” Check out some of his nonetheless hilarious non-spoonerisms below.

  “You will find, as you grow older, that the weight of rages will press harder and harder on the employer.”

  “I remember your name perfectly,

  but I just can’t think of your face.”

  “Now let me
see. Was it you or your

  brother who was killed in the war?”

  Donald Duck was Mussolini’s favorite cartoon character.

  MILK, MICROBES, AND MAD DOGS

  * * *

  Enjoy that milkshake and think of a Parisian named Pasteur who made sure it won’t give you TB.

  The word “pasteurized” on your milk carton doesn’t mean that the cows grazed in a pasture. No, what’s been done to the cream in your coffee and the cheese on your burger was to zap the bugs and stop them from giving you all sorts of nasty illnesses—a process invented by a clever chap named Pasteur.

  GOOD EVENING, LADIES AND GERMS

  Everyone should have a hobby, and Louis Pasteur was no different. Born in 1822, he set to work in his youth studying the chemistry of sugars. He puzzled for a long time about what puts the fizz into fermentation. In 1865, he decided that there must be some sugar-fed organism in wine and beer that was busy reproducing and giving off gas, a micro-organsim so tiny that it was invisible to the naked eye. This came to be known as “germ theory” and it led to Pasteur being dubbed “the father of microbiology.”