Month: August 2009

Previously unknown Agatha Christie story found

Books, Modern(ish)

It’s called The Capture Of Cerberus. Christie wrote it in 1939, thinking it would be part of her Labours of Hercules short story series in Strand magazine.

Publishers turned it down, probably because there’s a rather unfortunate German dictator in there and Poirot has to solve the mystery of who shot him.

The Capture Of Cerberus (she wrote a completely different short story with the same title in 1947) revolves around a dictator called August Hertzlein, who is clearly Adolf Hitler.

In the course of the plot, Christie expresses the naive hope that Hitler could have been converted to Christianity and begun preaching love and peace.

There really were people in the Thirties who believed this. One of them was Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group, a hugely influential movement which has gone under various titles, including Moral Rearmament and Festival Of Light.

The story was found in her longhand notebooks by John Curran, a Christie enthusiast and author in his own right.

You can read the Hertzlein excerpt in the Daily Mail. (It begins about abruptly with a bold paragraph about a quarter of the page down.) The short story will be serialized in subsequent Saturday editions.

The whole of Cerberus and The Mystery of the Dog’s Ball, another unpublished story Curran found in Christie’s attic, will be published along with her notebooks in Curran’s latest book.

Incidentally, don’t believe the Mail’s gloss that Poirot’s ever so mild expressions of horniness might have scared off the publishers. His attraction to flamboyant redheads of dubious morality — the Countess Vera Rosakoff in particular — is a recurring theme in Poirot stories.

Vote for a new Hope Diamond setting

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Museums, Treasures

The Smithsonian celebrates this year the 50th anniversary of Harry Winston’s donation of the 45.52-carat deep blue Hope Diamond. He sent it to the museum via registered mail on November 10, 1958 (2 bucks for postage, $143.29 for a million dollars of insurance).

To celebrate the anniversary, the diamond will for the first time in 50 years be removed from its current setting and placed in a new setting designed by contemporary Harry Winston jewelers. There are three settings in the running, and you can help choose which one will host the Hope by voting for your favorite online.

Voting started yesterday and will remain open until September 7th, so you have plenty of opportunities to votebomb for your favorite.

Although the winning design will be announced in September, the setting won’t actually be ready until May of next year. The Hope diamond will therefore be removed from its setting in the fall and displayed nekkid until May. This is a first, and most likely a last in our lifetime.

Then it will be set in the contest winning design for and put on display until the end of the year. Hope will return to its original Harry Winston setting in late 2010.

I can’t believe it’s 2500-year-old butter

Ancient, Treasures

The miracle preservative that is the Irish peat bog has struck again, this time surrendering a 3000-year-old oak barrel filled with 2500-year-old butter. It was found by workers at a peat company who were “harrowing” the bog.

(I think getting to harrow anything is a cool job description. The only other context I ever hear it in is in the story of the Harrowing of Hell.)

The butter was found in an oak barrel three feet high and one foot wide with an intact lid. It weighs 77 pounds. The butter-packed barrel is similar in type to other (smaller) examples that range in date from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. This isn’t the first time a butter barrel has been found, but they’re not usually so complete and nowhere near so large.

Split along the middle due to the expansion of butter over time, the barrel features tool marks from a knife, chisel, adze or axe.

Inside, the butter has turned white and is now adipocere, a kind of wax.

“It’s rare to find such a well preserved butter barrel, with the lid intact and attached. It is an invaluable addition to the national collection,” Padraig Clancy, assistant keeper at the National Museum of Ireland, told Discovery News.

According to Clancy, it is likely that the butter was put in the bog for practical reasons, rather than ritual. Probably, it was the stored harvest of an Iron Age community, who used the bog as a primitive kind of fridge.

It might have been intentionally placed in the bog to preserve it. Such a huge amount would likely have been the product of multiple people, perhaps even the entire community.

The bog butter is drying out right now. Once it’s dry, it will be coated in a wax preservative and kept at the National Museum of Ireland.

Incidentally, people have tasted ancient bog butter and lived to tell the tale. :ohnoes:

Silver pocketwatch returned to family 130 years later

Modern(ish), Treasures

Diver Rich Hughes found an engraved silver pocket watch off the coast of Pembrokeshire. It was engraved with its owner’s a/s/l and Hughes took it upon himself to find out more about one Richard Prichard, 1866, Abersoch, North Wales.

He discovered that Prichard was the captain of the merchant vessel Barbara. He died on the trip and was buried at sea. His replacement proved less than competent and went down with the ship on the Pembrokeshire coast.

The watch would have been on its way back to the captain’s family. But the inexperienced new master, whose name is recorded only as Captain Jones, mistook the Bristol Channel for St George’s Channel heading towards Liverpool.

The vessel was hit by a storm and sank off the village of Freshwater West in November 1881. All the crew were rescued by lifeboat apart from Captain Jones who went down with his ship.

That means the watch was underwater for 128 years. The movement is no longer moving, of course, but the watch itself still looks great.

So Rich Hughes couldn’t find anything more about Richard Prichard, so he enlisted amateur historian David Roberts to trace the family tree.

Roberts succeeded. He found Captain Prichard’s cousin’s grandson, Owen Cowell. He’s a retired dentist and as the closest living relative, he’s getting the watch.

He won’t keep it all to himself though, ’cause he’s cool. It will go on display at a local museum at the end of the month.

Amateur finds prehistoric rock art in Scotland

Ancient, Treasures

Musician and amateur archeologist George Currie has found a large group of cup and ring marks carved on a stone in Perthshire. The stone carvings could date to anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The cup and ring style is well known in Scotland — George Currie himself has come across several hundred — but this stone has almost 90 carvings on it, an unusually voluminous collection.

Some of the cups have rings around them and a number of linear grooves can also be seen, with some still showing the individual blows of craftsmens’ tools.

Mr. Currie found the stone on land overseen by the National Trust of Scotland, so he sent them GPS co-ordinates of the find as soon as he made it.

Nobody knows what the markings mean or even if they stand for anything in particular.

NTS archeologist for the west of Scotland Derek Alexander said there was a great interest in cup and ring marks.

“There is always going to be a debate about what these things mean.

“They seem to lie on boundaries, so they could be a way to place people in a location. There are also suggestions they are maps of the stars, maps of burial grounds or tribal symbols.”