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THE GREAT TEA RACE
The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chance to wander around in December 2012 while doing some lecturing in the Caribbean. Slave revolts have been an interest of mine for years, and I was familiar with the outlines of Klaas’s remarkable story – which I wrote up for the Smithsonian THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. AUDIO | A BLAST FROM THE PAST Appearances on quality podcasts. Click on a caption to go to the show. Talking about Batavia's Graveyard on Subject to Change, with Russell Hogg (2021) Talking about Spring-heeled Jack on MonsterTalk, with Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow (2013) Talking about Aqua Tofana on ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST About the blog. A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute.The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered and republished here. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limitedTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chance to wander around in December 2012 while doing some lecturing in the Caribbean. Slave revolts have been an interest of mine for years, and I was familiar with the outlines of Klaas’s remarkable story – which I wrote up for the Smithsonian THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST About the blog. A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute.The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered and republished here. INSIDE THE GREAT PYRAMID There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King's Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot CLOSING THE PIGEON GAP At midnight on November 12, 1870, two French balloons, inflated with highly flammable coal gas and manned by desperate volunteers, took off from a site in Monmartre, the highest point in Paris. The balloons rose from a city besieged—the Franco-Prussian War had left Paris isolated, and the city had been hastily encircled by the Prussian A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND My parting shot, in the sidebar to this blog, is a quote from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian writer and librarian: “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”This, to me, is a rather beautiful sentiment, and even hopeful. However, while it’s how Borges’s words are usually presented in compilations of quotations, and it turns them into something that can ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomic bomb. Yet it COLONEL PARKER: MURDERER? The Colonel always was a mystery. But that was very much the way he liked it. It was, of course, a tough trick to pull off, because the Colonel’s name was Tom Parker, and Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was the biggest name in the entertainment industry, his QUEEN VICTORIA’S £5: THE STRANGE TALE OF TURKISH AID TO Two tales in particular emerged from all this anguish and anger, and are still widely believed in Ireland today. Both involve immensely wealthy monarchs – the first Queen Victoria and the second Sultan Abdülmecid (Abdul Mejid) I, who ruled the Ottoman empire from far-off Istanbul. Both accounts deal with the ways in which powerful rulers responded to the misery in Ireland. A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. AUDIO | A BLAST FROM THE PAST Appearances on quality podcasts. Click on a caption to go to the show. Talking about Batavia's Graveyard on Subject to Change, with Russell Hogg (2021) Talking about Spring-heeled Jack on MonsterTalk, with Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow (2013) Talking about Aqua Tofana on SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limitedTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chance to wander around in December 2012 while doing some lecturing in the Caribbean. Slave revolts have been an interest of mine for years, and I was familiar with the outlines of Klaas’s remarkable story – which I wrote up for the Smithsonian THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. AUDIO | A BLAST FROM THE PAST Appearances on quality podcasts. Click on a caption to go to the show. Talking about Batavia's Graveyard on Subject to Change, with Russell Hogg (2021) Talking about Spring-heeled Jack on MonsterTalk, with Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow (2013) Talking about Aqua Tofana on SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limitedTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chance to wander around in December 2012 while doing some lecturing in the Caribbean. Slave revolts have been an interest of mine for years, and I was familiar with the outlines of Klaas’s remarkable story – which I wrote up for the Smithsonian THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST About the blog. A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute.The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered and republished here. A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND My parting shot, in the sidebar to this blog, is a quote from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian writer and librarian: “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”This, to me, is a rather beautiful sentiment, and even hopeful. However, while it’s how Borges’s words are usually presented in compilations of quotations, and it turns them into something that can ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of INSIDE THE GREAT PYRAMID There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King's Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot CLOSING THE PIGEON GAP At midnight on November 12, 1870, two French balloons, inflated with highly flammable coal gas and manned by desperate volunteers, took off from a site in Monmartre, the highest point in Paris. The balloons rose from a city besieged—the Franco-Prussian War had left Paris isolated, and the city had been hastily encircled by the Prussian KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomic bomb. Yet it COLONEL PARKER: MURDERER? The Colonel always was a mystery. But that was very much the way he liked it. It was, of course, a tough trick to pull off, because the Colonel’s name was Tom Parker, and Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was the biggest name in the entertainment industry, his QUEEN VICTORIA’S £5: THE STRANGE TALE OF TURKISH AID TO Two tales in particular emerged from all this anguish and anger, and are still widely believed in Ireland today. Both involve immensely wealthy monarchs – the first Queen Victoria and the second Sultan Abdülmecid (Abdul Mejid) I, who ruled the Ottoman empire from far-off Istanbul. Both accounts deal with the ways in which powerful rulers responded to the misery in Ireland. A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. AUDIO | A BLAST FROM THE PAST Appearances on quality podcasts. Click on a caption to go to the show. Talking about Batavia's Graveyard on Subject to Change, with Russell Hogg (2021) Talking about Spring-heeled Jack on MonsterTalk, with Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow (2013) Talking about Aqua Tofana on ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute. The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered andrepublished here.
SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limitedTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The great tea race. Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926. Captain John Keay, master of the new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866 AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE A little bit of background: The crucifixion of Prince Klaas. Prince Klaas lashed to the wheel – the image on display at the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, Antigua. The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chanceto wander
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. AUDIO | A BLAST FROM THE PAST Appearances on quality podcasts. Click on a caption to go to the show. Talking about Batavia's Graveyard on Subject to Change, with Russell Hogg (2021) Talking about Spring-heeled Jack on MonsterTalk, with Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow (2013) Talking about Aqua Tofana on ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute. The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered andrepublished here.
SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limitedTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The great tea race. Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926. Captain John Keay, master of the new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866 AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND: THE CRUCIFIXION OF PRINCE A little bit of background: The crucifixion of Prince Klaas. Prince Klaas lashed to the wheel – the image on display at the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, Antigua. The story of Prince Klaas, the rebel slave, is one of the highlights of the charming Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St John’s, which I had the chanceto wander
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST About the blog. A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute.The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered and republished here. A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND My parting shot, in the sidebar to this blog, is a quote from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian writer and librarian: “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”This, to me, is a rather beautiful sentiment, and even hopeful. However, while it’s how Borges’s words are usually presented in compilations of quotations, and it turns them into something that can ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. INSIDE THE GREAT PYRAMID Inside the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C. , sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile CLOSING THE PIGEON GAP Closing the pigeon gap. 18 April 2012. 14 October 2013. / Mike Dash. Cher Ami, an American veteran of the First World War, was credited with carrying the message that saved 200 men of the “Lost Battalion” during the Battle of the Argonne in 1918–despite losing a leg and an eye to shell splinters in the maelstrom of battle. KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is EROTIC SECRETS OF LORD BYRON’S TOMB Erotic secrets of Lord Byron’s tomb. 16 October 2010. 29 July 2018. / Mike Dash. Byron in death, Greece, spring 1824. It was hot and dusty in the crypt, and it had been hard work breaking into it. Now the vicar had gone, along with his invited guests, to take his supper. The churchwarden and two workmen armed with spades were left to wait for GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich. Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomicbomb.
COLONEL PARKER: MURDERER? The Colonel always was a mystery. But that was very much the way he liked it. It was, of course, a tough trick to pull off, because the Colonel’s name was Tom Parker, and Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was the biggest name in the entertainment industry, his A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN Dreamtime voyagers: Aboriginal Australians in early modern Makassar. The coast of Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia – scene of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Makassan fishermen, probably some time before 1700. If there’s one thing that most people think they know about the early history of Australia, it’s that the “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS The Shogun’s reluctant ambassadors. March 1839: the Japanese cargo ship Cho-ja maru, dismasted and without her rudder, wallows in the Pacific shortly before her surviving crew were picked up by the American whaler James Loper. Artist unknown; Sonkei Archives, Tokyo. When Matthew Perry sailed his squadron of warships into Edo Bay inJuly 1853
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda. Teruo Nakamura, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, survived deep in the jungles of Morotai for 29 years after the end of World War II – becoming the last of more than 120 stragglers to be rounded up on various islands in Indonesia and the Pacific between 1947 and 1974 KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN Dreamtime voyagers: Aboriginal Australians in early modern Makassar. The coast of Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia – scene of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Makassan fishermen, probably some time before 1700. If there’s one thing that most people think they know about the early history of Australia, it’s that the “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS The Shogun’s reluctant ambassadors. March 1839: the Japanese cargo ship Cho-ja maru, dismasted and without her rudder, wallows in the Pacific shortly before her surviving crew were picked up by the American whaler James Loper. Artist unknown; Sonkei Archives, Tokyo. When Matthew Perry sailed his squadron of warships into Edo Bay inJuly 1853
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda. Teruo Nakamura, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, survived deep in the jungles of Morotai for 29 years after the end of World War II – becoming the last of more than 120 stragglers to be rounded up on various islands in Indonesia and the Pacific between 1947 and 1974 KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute. The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered andrepublished here.
VIDEO - A BLAST FROM THE PAST Pablò Gene. 11 June 2018 at 9:01 pm. Hello, You spoke of time travel and “talk to those people” in your video. I live in Colorado and spend a lot of time in the wilderness and on many occasions have stumbled upon cemeteries mostly filled with children. This may sound macabre, but I enjoy time spent in these cemeteries reflecting uponthose
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional MURDER IN THE POTALA Few buildings inspire awe in quite the way that the Potala Palace does. Set high on the great Tibetan plateau, against the looming backdrop of the Himalayas, the vast structure rises 400 feet from a mountain in the middle of Lhasa, taking the uppermost apartments on its thirteenth floor to 12,500 feet above sea level.The palace is at once architecturally striking and historically significant.THE GREAT TEA RACE
The great tea race. Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926. Captain John Keay, master of the new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866 THE BODIES IN THE BOGS Borremose Man, a Danish bog body dating to around 700 B.C., was found with the halter used to strangle him still around his neck. One of the warrior skulls recovered from Alken Enge. Bocksten Man is one of the latest of the bog bodies. His remains, found in Sweden, date to the14th century A.D.
THE FAYUM MUMMY PORTRAITS The picture comes from the Fayum oasis, a wealthy district on the left bank of the Nile about 65 miles south of Cairo. It was dug up from a graveyard there more than a century ago, and is one of about a thousand such images, dating from around the time of Christ until 300 AD or later, that have survived long years underground and now lie scattered among the collections of the world’s great AN ABANDONED LIFEBOAT AT WORLD’S END The unidentified whaler or ship’s lifeboat found abandoned on Bouvet Island on 2 April 1964. There is no more forbidding place on earth. Bouvet Island lies in the furthest reaches of the storm-wracked Southern Ocean, far south even of the Roaring Forties. It is a speck of ice in the middle of a freezing fastness: a few square miles of GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich. Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomicbomb.
A RUSSIAN PRINCE ON A WICHITA ROAD GANG A Russian prince on a Wichita road gang. The imposter’s imposter. Prince Michael Romanoff, AKA Harry Gerguson of New York, AKA Harry Ferguson of Litchfield, IL, AKA Herschel Geguzin of Vilna, Lithuania: bellhop, day labourer, drinks salesman, international confidence man and famed Hollywood restaurateur. For most of the 1940s and 1950s A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN Dreamtime voyagers: Aboriginal Australians in early modern Makassar. The coast of Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia – scene of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Makassan fishermen, probably some time before 1700. If there’s one thing that most people think they know about the early history of Australia, it’s that the “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS The Shogun’s reluctant ambassadors. March 1839: the Japanese cargo ship Cho-ja maru, dismasted and without her rudder, wallows in the Pacific shortly before her surviving crew were picked up by the American whaler James Loper. Artist unknown; Sonkei Archives, Tokyo. When Matthew Perry sailed his squadron of warships into Edo Bay inJuly 1853
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda. Teruo Nakamura, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, survived deep in the jungles of Morotai for 29 years after the end of World War II – becoming the last of more than 120 stragglers to be rounded up on various islands in Indonesia and the Pacific between 1947 and 1974 KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN Dreamtime voyagers: Aboriginal Australians in early modern Makassar. The coast of Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia – scene of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Makassan fishermen, probably some time before 1700. If there’s one thing that most people think they know about the early history of Australia, it’s that the “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD Islam’s medieval underworld. 22 July 2013. 29 April 2017. / Mike Dash. An Arab city of the early medieval period. Urban centers in the Middle East were of a size and wealth all but unknown in the Christian west during this period, encouraging the development of a large and diverse fraternity of criminals. From a contemporary manuscript. THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS The Shogun’s reluctant ambassadors. March 1839: the Japanese cargo ship Cho-ja maru, dismasted and without her rudder, wallows in the Pacific shortly before her surviving crew were picked up by the American whaler James Loper. Artist unknown; Sonkei Archives, Tokyo. When Matthew Perry sailed his squadron of warships into Edo Bay inJuly 1853
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda. Teruo Nakamura, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, survived deep in the jungles of Morotai for 29 years after the end of World War II – becoming the last of more than 120 stragglers to be rounded up on various islands in Indonesia and the Pacific between 1947 and 1974 KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute. The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered andrepublished here.
VIDEO - A BLAST FROM THE PAST Pablò Gene. 11 June 2018 at 9:01 pm. Hello, You spoke of time travel and “talk to those people” in your video. I live in Colorado and spend a lot of time in the wilderness and on many occasions have stumbled upon cemeteries mostly filled with children. This may sound macabre, but I enjoy time spent in these cemeteries reflecting uponthose
THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Record-setting old lag Richard Honeck on his 23,420th – and final – day in jail. Richard Honeck (1879-1976), an American murderer, served what was, at the time, the longest prison sentence ever to end in a prisoner’s release. Jailed in November 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard CorrectionalTHE GREAT TEA RACE
The great tea race. Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926. Captain John Keay, master of the new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866 THE FAYUM MUMMY PORTRAITS The picture comes from the Fayum oasis, a wealthy district on the left bank of the Nile about 65 miles south of Cairo. It was dug up from a graveyard there more than a century ago, and is one of about a thousand such images, dating from around the time of Christ until 300 AD or later, that have survived long years underground and now lie scattered among the collections of the world’s great THE BODIES IN THE BOGS Borremose Man, a Danish bog body dating to around 700 B.C., was found with the halter used to strangle him still around his neck. One of the warrior skulls recovered from Alken Enge. Bocksten Man is one of the latest of the bog bodies. His remains, found in Sweden, date to the14th century A.D.
AN ABANDONED LIFEBOAT AT WORLD’S END The unidentified whaler or ship’s lifeboat found abandoned on Bouvet Island on 2 April 1964. There is no more forbidding place on earth. Bouvet Island lies in the furthest reaches of the storm-wracked Southern Ocean, far south even of the Roaring Forties. It is a speck of ice in the middle of a freezing fastness: a few square miles of GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich. Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomicbomb.
COLONEL PARKER: MURDERER? The Colonel always was a mystery. But that was very much the way he liked it. It was, of course, a tough trick to pull off, because the Colonel’s name was Tom Parker, and Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was the biggest name in the entertainment industry, his A RUSSIAN PRINCE ON A WICHITA ROAD GANG A Russian prince on a Wichita road gang. The imposter’s imposter. Prince Michael Romanoff, AKA Harry Gerguson of New York, AKA Harry Ferguson of Litchfield, IL, AKA Herschel Geguzin of Vilna, Lithuania: bellhop, day labourer, drinks salesman, international confidence man and famed Hollywood restaurateur. For most of the 1940s and 1950s A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN The Makassans who dealt in trepang were the unwilling subjects of what was then the largest corporation in the world – a Dutch monolith called the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the United East India Company, or VOC – and this fact helps to explain why the trade grew in the way it did.Like its British equivalent in India, the VOC was a merchant company that operated like a state “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS After about 1780, though, the study of western ideas and inventions became slowly more respectable in Japan. This gradual shift can be traced in the language, in which the word bangaku (literally “barbarian learning”) slowly gave way to rangaku.. This new word – derived from Oranda, the Japanese for “Dutch” – simply means “foreign studies,” and for the first time Dutch texts FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is A BLAST FROM THE PAST The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH SEVERED HEADS • A year later, in September 1880 – at least according to the later account of a certain Dr Dassy de Lignères, of whom nothing else seems to be known – some experiments were conducted on the head of a particularly unpleasant murderer named Louis Ménesclou.Ménesclou, 19, who had lured a little girl into his room with a spray of violets, raped her and killed her, was a man “of limited AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH The story as it is commonly told is this: Aqua Tofana was the creation of a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, who lived and worked in Palermo in the first half of the 17th century. It was a limpid, harmless-looking liquid, a scant four to six drops of which were “sufficient to destroy a man.” Its principal ingredient was arsenic, and, while its use spread throughout much of southern DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN The Makassans who dealt in trepang were the unwilling subjects of what was then the largest corporation in the world – a Dutch monolith called the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the United East India Company, or VOC – and this fact helps to explain why the trade grew in the way it did.Like its British equivalent in India, the VOC was a merchant company that operated like a state “THEY DON’T LIKE IT UP ’EM…” REVISITING THE SORDID DEATHS To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one's privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly ISLAM’S MEDIEVAL UNDERWORLD The year is—let us say—1170, and you are the leader of a city watch in medieval Persia. Patrolling the dangerous alleyways in the small hours of the morning, you and your men chance upon two or three shady-looking characters loitering outside the home of a wealthy merchant. Guessing that you have stumbled across a gang of THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS After about 1780, though, the study of western ideas and inventions became slowly more respectable in Japan. This gradual shift can be traced in the language, in which the word bangaku (literally “barbarian learning”) slowly gave way to rangaku.. This new word – derived from Oranda, the Japanese for “Dutch” – simply means “foreign studies,” and for the first time Dutch texts FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO The idea of a fanatical Japanese soldier, unaware the war is over, fighting on for decades in the jungles of some remote Pacific island is so familiar it has become a cliché. But Teruo Nakamura, the very last of more than 120 such known stragglers, broke almost every rule of this game – and his KHRUSHCHEV IN WATER WINGS: ON MAO, HUMILIATION, AND THE The list of things that Nikita Khrushchev would never be and could not do was long; some of them would change history. It has been seriously suggested, for example, that the reason Khrushchev survived the murderous Soviet-era purges of the paranoid 1930s and early 1950s—when tens of thousands of other apparatchiks were rewarded for their loyalty with a bullet in the back of the neck—is ABOUT A BLAST FROM THE PAST About the blog. A Blast from the Past has been around, in various incarnations, for quite a while now. The earliest material on this site dates back to 2006, when I took up a longstanding invitation to write for the Charles Fort Institute.The material I produced for them was pretty varied, but some of the history content has been gathered and republished here. VIDEO - A BLAST FROM THE PAST Hello, You spoke of time travel and “talk to those people” in your video. I live in Colorado and spend a lot of time in the wilderness and on many occasions have THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED Who has spent the longest time confined in prison? This ongoing investigation – begun in 2010 and still regularly updated – not only answers that question , but also takes a look inside the cells, at the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly MURDER IN THE POTALA Few buildings inspire awe in quite the way that the Potala Palace does. Set high on the great Tibetan plateau, against the looming backdrop of the Himalayas, the vast structure rises 400 feet from a mountain in the middle of Lhasa, taking the uppermost apartments on its thirteenth floor to 12,500 feet above sea level.The palace is at once architecturally striking and historically significant.THE GREAT TEA RACE
The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had THE BODIES IN THE BOGS In an ancient bog at the foot of a fairy-haunted hill, peat-cutting work lays bare the body of a giant. Carbon dating suggests that the man died at the height of the Iron Age, around 275 B.C.; forensic examination shows that he died hard, stabbed through a lung and then decapitated with an axe. THE FAYUM MUMMY PORTRAITS The picture comes from the Fayum oasis, a wealthy district on the left bank of the Nile about 65 miles south of Cairo. It was dug up from a graveyard there more than a century ago, and is one of about a thousand such images, dating from around the time of Christ until 300 AD or later, that have survived long years underground and now lie scattered among the collections of the world’s great GAVRILO PRINCIP’S SANDWICH Gavrilo Princip is arrested for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife–Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomic bomb. Yet it AN ABANDONED LIFEBOAT AT WORLD’S END Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March and 9 April 2016. There is no more forbidding place on earth. Bouvet Island lies in the furthest reaches of the storm-wracked Southern Ocean, far south even of the Roaring A RUSSIAN PRINCE ON A WICHITA ROAD GANG David Niven, who knew Mike better than most, suggested that there was good reason for his life-long role-play: “As the years passed, it seemed as though he increasingly came to believe a large part of his Romanoff fantasy.” Alistair Cooke, the British foreign correspondent who wrote a weekly ‘Letter from America’ for more than 50 years, saw things rather differently; for A BLAST FROM THE PASTBY MIKE DASH
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THE TWOPENNY HANGOVER 19 May 202124 May 2021/ Mike
Dash / 11 Comments
The image above shows a recreation of what is supposed to be a “twopenny hangover“. It’s
a term increasingly commonly found on Google, and it purports to describe a type of cheap Victorian-era doss-house in which indigents could secure shelter and rest for the night more cost-effectively than by paying the cost of a bed, which typically cost fourpence or fivepence. The idea was that, in exchange for the payment, the poor would be allowed to sleep, several men at a time, draped over a rope that had been suspended across a room at chest level. Acceptance that such places actually existed has become widespread over the past few years, and a look at a Google Image search for the term “twopenny hangover”shows
at least four different pictures that supposedly depict examples. This one, which is by a distance the most detailed and explicit, is actually a still from a 1978 Sean Connery/Michael Crichton caper, _The Great Train Robbery _, which is set in the London of the middle 1850s; the others have been pulled into the gallery below. Two of these, which seem pretty similar at first glance, can be seen to depict a rather different sort of lodging house when they’re examined closely. So let’s look into this a bit more more deeply. So far as I can tell, the term “twopenny hangover” (sometimes corrupted, in online sources, to become the “penny hang“)
originates with George Orwell, who – in his highly influential _Down and Out in Paris and London_ (1933), a book which was based on his own experience of living on the margins of poverty during the Great Depression – wrote that Continue reading →ASK MIKE
18 January 201931 December 2020/ Mike Dash
/ 3 Comments
For almost three years now, while my other responsibilities have prevented me from updating the main blog as I would wish to, I’ve been adding material to this site on a new page, “Ask Mike,” which you can access via the menu above. This page contains original material I’ve contributed to AskHistorians , the world’s biggest and busiest public history site. The contents are slightly less rigorously researched and written than the material on the main site – which is why I’ve been able to keep up some sort of contribution to AskHistorians – but the questions I’ve tackled are very much in line with the sort of content you’d expect to find on A Blast from the Past. I’ll be getting back to more regular posting here in 2019 2020 2021, but for now there’s somewhere in excess of 100,000 words of fascinating history posted on the Ask Mike page, and I hope that it will help to keep you going during the main blog’s hiatus. You can access more answers I’ve posted to the AskHistorians site hereas
well.
See you soon.
DREAMTIME VOYAGERS: ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN EARLY MODERN MAKASSAR 31 October 20162 April 2021/ Mike Dash / 38
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The coast of Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia – scene of first contact between Australian Aborigines and Makassan fishermen, probably some time before 1700. If there’s one thing that most people think they know about the early history of Australia, it’s that the continent remained suspended, in unchanging isolation, for countless thousands of years before the arrival of the convicts of the First Fleetearly
in 1788. Cut off from the rest of humanity ever since the end of the last Ice Age, the Aboriginal population lived on for generation after generation in a hazy, mythic stasis: a “Dreamtime” in which the passage of the years, and even the notion of history itself, had practically no meaning. Theirs was a pure, pristine existence; the first Australians were part of the land itself, rather than living off it and exploiting it. And when the British arrived and claimed the continent, they sullied an Eden, degrading the noble savageswho lived in it.
There is plenty that is wrong with this portrait of pre-contact Australia. It owes more to the New Age enthusiasms of the 1970s than it does to the realities of history. It lumps together hundreds of tribes, and dozens of major language groups, into one undifferentiated mass – conflating lives lived in an almost infinite variety of landscapes, from the deserts of the red centreto the
lushness of the tropical north – and it perverts a rich, complexmythology
,
turning what we inadequately term “the dreaming” into little more than a synonym for the whole period before the days ofCaptain Cook
.
Most dangerously of all, it imposes striking limitations on the Aborigines themselves. In insisting they were pure, it makes them primitive; in sketching them as absolutely isolated, it encourages us to think of them as people so alien that they were barely capable of interacting with the rest of the world. “The source of life.” A painting by Zhou Xiaoping, from the Melbourne Museum exhibition “Trepang: China and the story of the Macassan-Aboriginal Trade” (2010). All this is a distortion of a less straightforward but vastly more compelling history. Australia was never entirely cut off from the rest of the world; there is evidence of frequent contact with the peoples of New Guinea and, beginning in the 17th century, there were also sporadic encounters with Dutch mariners along the western and northern coasts. Most remarkably of all, the Aboriginal peoples of the far north – what Australians today call the “Top End” – were, for several centuries at least, part of a vibrant and extensive trading system, one that brought them into annual contact with seagoing merchants from Indonesia, and linked them to civilisations as far away as China and Japan. Continue reading → THE BODIES IN THE BOGS 4 September 201629 July 2020/
Mike Dash / 47 Comments Bog pool beneath Errigal Mountain, County Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Gareth McCormack, reproduced with permission. Clicking on the photo takes you to Gareth’s site and more outstanding landscapephotography.
In an ancient bog at the foot of a fairy-haunted hill, peat-cutting work lays bare the body of a giant. Carbon dating suggests that the man died at the height of the Iron Age, around 275 B.C.; forensic examination shows that he died hard, stabbed through a lung and then decapitated with an axe. After killing him, his executioners chopped his body in half at the diaphragm, and at some point, perhaps while he was still alive, they also inflicted two pairs of unusual wounds on him. Deep cuts almost severed both his nipples, and his arms were vigorously pierced so that twisted lengths of hazel withy could be threaded through from side to side, presumably to pinion him. After that, his mutilated torso was sunk in a pool where, over the years, bog moss grew up to cradle and cover him, until he became part of the mire itself. As the dead man’s assailants were most likely perfectly aware, the unusual properties of the bog and the moss combined to preserve his remains. The sour waters of high bogs are as acidic as vinegar, and they support practically no life, yet they contain bog oak – which deeply tans organic matter – and _sphagnum_ moss, which uniquely binds both nitrogen and oxygen, inhibiting bacteria. Trapped in this nutrient poor, anaerobic environment, human remains are preserved almost intact; bones may be leeched and gradually demineralise, but flesh and wood, horn, fur, hair and textiles can and do survive for millennia. So when ditching work uncovered the torn remains that archaeologists now call “Old Croghan Man” outside the little village of Croghan, in County Offaly in the heart of Ireland, investigators could still make out the pores on his skin and inspect the well-manicured fingernails that showed that he had done no manual work and hinted at high status. They could calculate that he had once stood 6 feet 5 inches tall: a great height now, freakish for his day. And they could feel reasonably certain that that height had been made possible by an unexpectedly rich diet, predominantly comprised of meat. Continue reading → KING, MAGICIAN, GENERAL … SLAVE: EUNUS AND THE FIRST SERVILE WARAGAINST ROME
16 July 201617 June 2020/ Mike Dash / 25
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Buried in chains – a Roman-era skeleton, thought to be that of a male slave, excavated near Bordeaux. The body was buried with shackles around the neck, and dates from the 1st century AD. The omens had been terrible that year. In Rome, a slave girl gave birth to a monster: “a boy with four feet, four hands, four eyes, double the usual number of ears, and two sets of sexual organs,” most likely a case of Siamese twins . In Sicily, Mount Etna erupted “in flashes of fire,” spewing gouts of molten rock and scorching ash that torched rich landowners’ property for miles around. It all pointed to trouble – to trouble in Sicily, and most of all to trouble with the slaves. And when that trouble came, it made sense of the portents, for it was the work of a slave who was in Roman eyes a monster. He was a magician who belched flames like the volcano, an adept who foretold futures, and a messianic priest-king who served a grotesque foreign goddess, and led his people in a revolt that lasted half a decade, taking five large Roman armies to put down. A statue of Eunus outside the walls of the citadel at Enna, in the interior of Sicily. The formidable hill-top fortress was once hisancient capital.
His name was Eunus – which may be translated, roughly, as “the kindly one” – and although he is practically forgotten now, he was a leader fit to rank alongside Spartacus– or, in truth,
above him, for while both men were slaves who masterminded wars against Rome (Spartacus six decades later), Eunus’s rebellion was four or five times as large, and it lasted something like three times as long. He built a state, which Spartacus never tried to do, and all the evidence suggests that he inspired fierce loyalty in ways the Thracian gladiator could not – after all, Spartacus (to the surprise of those who know him from romantic film and television portrayals) was undone as much by dissension within the ranks of his own army as he was by the might of the legions that were sent against him. And when the end came for Eunus, it did so in a_götterdämmerung_
reminiscent of nothing so much as the fall of Masada, the Jewish
mountain-top fortress taken by Rome around 74 A.D. At Masada, the 960 surviving defenders committed suicide _en masse_ rather than fall into the hands of their enemies. In Sicily, the thousand picked men of the slave-king’s bodyguard hacked their way out of encirclement, only to kill one another in an identical pact when their position became hopeless – leaving their leader and his last four followers to be hunted down in the furthest reaches of the mountains that had protected them for years. Continue reading → SORCERERS AND SOULSTEALERS: HAIR-CUTTING PANICS IN OLD CHINA 30 May 20168 October 2016/ Mike Dash / 5
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A Chinese prisoner – wearing the long pigtail, or queue, that was mandated for all indigenous subjects of the Celestial Empire – is interrogated by a Qing magistrate. Painting from Mason & Dadley’s voyeuristic classic The Punishments of China (1901). China, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was the largest nation in the world – and also by a distance the most prosperous. Under the rule of a strong emperor, Hungli, and a well-established family (the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty), the Middle Kingdom was by then half-way through the longest period of calm in its long history. It had grown larger, richer and more cultured, its borders reaching roughly their modern extent. But it had also grown vastly more crowded;
political stability, and the introduction of new crops from the Americas, led to a doubling of the population to around 300 million. At its peak, this growth was accelerating at an annual ratein excess of 13%.
This meant trouble, for it meant that wealth was far from evenly distributed. China remained a country of great contrasts: its ruling classes rich beyond the dreams of avarice, its peasants scraping a bare living from the soil. For those living at the bottom of the food chain – both metaphorically and literally – starvation was a constant possibility, one that grew ever more starkly real the further one travelled from the rich agricultural floodplains around the Yangtze River. By the late 1760s, many peasants were forced to turn to begging to survive, wandering miles from their homes to throw themselves upon the mercy of strangers. Tens of thousands of such forced migrations led inevitably to conflict. They also led to one of the strangest outbreaks of panic and rumour known to history. China under the Manchus, showing the empire’s growth between 1644 and 1800. The soulstealing panic took place along the country’s eastern coast, between the Yangtze and Beijing. Click to view inlarger resolution.
Among the hundreds of victims of this panic was an itinerant beggar by the name of Chang-ssu, who came from the province of Shantung. Chang-ssu travelled in company with his 11-year-old son, and between them the pair made an insecure living by singing a romantic folk song, ‘Lotus petals fall,’ to crowds of peasants whom they drummed up in their wanderings from village to village. By the end of July 1768, the two beggars had got as far as the gates of Hsu-chou, a city about 200 miles south of their home, when – at least according to Chang-ssu’s later confession – they were accosted by a tall man whom they did not know. The stranger asked them what they did for a living and, on hearing that they begged, he offered them employment – 500 cash for every peasant pigtail they could clip. (The cash was the imperial currency at the time; 500 cash was worth approximately half an ounce of silver.) The stranger refused to tell Chang-ssu and his son what he wanted the hair for, but he did offer them some help: a pair of scissors and a small packet of powder which, he explained, was a “stupefying drug.” Sprinkle the powder on the head of a victim and he would fall to the ground insensible. Then his pigtail – or queue – could easily be clipped. The work sounded easy enough, and Chang-ssu accepted the commission – so he said. He and the stranger parted, making arrangements to meet up again later on the border with a neighbouring province, and father and son continued on their way, making for the city of Su-chou. In the course of their journey, at a village named Chao, they tried the stupefying powder on a local labourer. Gratifyingly, the man collapsed; Chang-ssu took out his scissors, snipped off the end of the man’s queue, and tucked scissors and the hair in his travelling pack. The beggars did not get far, however. Only a mile or two outside the village they were overtaken by a group of constables, arrested and hauled off to the county jail – suspected, they were told, of the vile crime of soulstealing. Continue reading → THE BRETON BLUEBEARD 28 December 201527 November 2019/ Mike
Dash / 21 Comments
“Widower Bluebeard and the Red Key” – a painting from Cassia Lupo’s wonderful series “Fables and myths.” Reproduced with permission and grateful thanks. For very nearly all its course, the Blavet is a placid river. It winds its way through central Brittany: broad, unhurried, gentle and unthreatening, a favourite among fishermen, and – for the century or so since it was dammed at Guerlédan, creating a substantial lake – a magnet for holidaymakers, too. Yet even there, at the heart of an ancient county that knows its history as well as anywhere in France, not one person in a thousand could tell the awful history of the river. Few realise that there were times when it was not so tame, or can point to where the outlines of an ancient fortress can yet be traced, up on the heights above the dam. And almost nobody recalls the lord of that forgotten castle, or could tell you why, until about 150 years ago, Breton peasants crossed themselves at the mere mention of his name. His name was Conomor the Cursed, and he lived in the darkest of the Dark Ages – in the first half of the 6th century, 150 years or more after the fall of Rome, when much of Brittany was still dotted withdolmens
and covered
by primeval forest, when warlords squabbled with one another other over patrimonies that were generally less than 40 miles across, and the local peoples were as likely to be pagan as they were Christian. We know almost nothing about him, save that he was probably a Briton, very probably a tyrant, and that his deeds were remembered long enough to give rise to a folkloric tradition of great strength – one that endured for almost 1,500 years. But the folk-tales hint at someone quite extraordinary. In local lore, Conomor not only continued to roam the vast forest of Quénécan, south of his castle, as a _bisclaveret _– a werewolf – and served as a spectral ferryman on another Breton river, making off with Christian souls; he was also the model for Bluebeard, the monstrous villain of Charles Perrault’sfamous
fairy tales. Continue reading → THE LONGEST PRISON SENTENCES EVER SERVED: REDUX 17 December 201516 February 2016/ Mike Dash / 4
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Who served out the longest prison sentence known to history? My extensive investigation – begun in 2010 but now comprehensively updated – answers that question . It also takes a look at some of Fossard’s unwitting and unwilling rivals, and tries to go inside the cells, to hear from the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly compelling. The full story – which includes numerous case studies, a state-by-state listing of the longest sentences served everywhere from Alabama to Wisconsin, a look at record stretches from elsewhere, some notes on extraordinary cases of protracted solitary confinement, and a listing of all 16 known cases of men who spent in excess of 60 years behind bars – can be read here.
FINAL STRAGGLER: THE JAPANESE SOLDIER WHO OUTLASTED HIROO ONODA 15 September 201512 April 2018/ Mike Dash / 40
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Teruo Nakamura, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, survived deep in the jungles of Morotai for 29 years after the end of World War II – becoming the last of more than 120 stragglers to be rounded up on various islands in Indonesia and the Pacific between 1947 and 1974. Japan’s past met its present, four decades ago, by a river in a rainforest on the island of Lubang. The encounter took place late in the tropical dusk of 20 February 1974, as the breeze died and the air grew thick with flying insects. Representing the present was a college drop-out by the name of Norio Suzuki, 24 years old and clad in a T-shirt, dark blue trousers, socks, a pair of rubber sandals. He was stooping, making up a fire from a pile of twigs and branches, quite unaware that he was watched. The past, meanwhile, peered out from the cover of the jungle, wondering if the young man was some sort of trap. The man gazing from the forest fringe wore the remnants of an army uniform, and he carried a rifle. At the time of the encounter, he had been hiding in the interior of Lubang for almost 30 years, steadfastly continuing to wage a war that had ended with Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. The past’s name was Hiroo Onoda. He was an intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army, he was then just shy of his fifty-second birthday, and he was about to become famous. Continuereading →
AQUA TOFANA: SLOW-POISONING AND HUSBAND-KILLING IN 17TH CENTURY ITALY 6 April 20153 April 2020/ Mike Dash / 66
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Detail from “The love potion”, by the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite Evelyn De Morgan. The tangled tale of Aqua Tofana is intimately connected to the “criminal magical underworlds” of the 17th century, which supplied love philtres, potions, medicines and poisons to a mostly female clientele. Early in the autumn of 1791, while he was still hard at work on the great requiem mass that would form such a large part of his legend, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell seriously ill. Convinced that there was no chance of recovery, he > began to speak of death, and asserted that he was setting the > Requiem for himself… “I feel definitely,” he continued, > “that I will not last much longer; I am sure that I have been > poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea… Someone has given > me _acqua tofana_ and calculated the precise time of my death. Scholars have wrangled now for two full centuries over the circumstances of the great composer’s passing. A handful have concluded that he really was murdered. Most support rival diagnoses of syphilis, rheumatic fever or even the deadly effects of eating undercooked pork chops.
Whatever the truth, though, and however he died, Mozart was certainly convinced that there existed a rare poison, one that was colourless, tasteless, odourless, beyond detection – and also so flexibly murderous that a carefully-calculated dose could guarantee a victim’s death a week, a month or even a year after it had beenadministered.
Nor was the composer alone in this belief. Forgotten though it is today, the mysterious liquid that he feared so much was one of the great whispered secrets of early modern Europe. Aqua Tofana was credited with what amounted to supernatural powers, and blamed for hundreds of agonising deaths. Which is odd, since it is very far from clear that it ever existed – and, if it did, what it was, where it was invented, where first used, and when and how it got its name. Continue reading →POSTS NAVIGATION
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