December 2009 – Page 4 – The History Blog

Now this I can believe is butter

December 16, 2009

Unlike the scary 3000-year-old adipocere bog butter, the latest aged butter actually looks like butter. It’s 97 years old, and it’s been living at no more than 10 degrees Celsius since Captain Robert Scott left it at base camp during his ill-fated final expedition to the South Pole.

The Antarctic Heritage Trust has been restoring Scott’s Cape Evans hut. Despite the steady low temperature, the past couple of years have seen a lot more snow than usual, and it’s damaging the structure. While working on the pony stable (yes, Scott brought a bunch of Siberian ponies with him; it didn’t end well for them either), they found a wrinkled bag amidst a stack of empty boxes. Inside the bag they found two blocks of butter, much to their amazement.

“I think the butter was absolutely a treasure find,” Lizzie Meek of the Antarctic Heritage Trust told TV NZ. “It looked like an old wrinkly bag and you look inside and saw the wonderful Silver Fern logo,” she said.

She desribed the butter’s smell as “very pungent.”

“What’s amazing is how strong that smells,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d want it on my toast.”

Yeah no. Even in the freezer 100 years is a long time for any dairy product. On the other hand, maybe they just liked a bit of funk back then, like a cultured butter.

The silver fern is a familiar symbol to New Zealanders, most famous today as the logo of their legendary Rugby team, the All Blacks. Captain Scott’s team set off from New Zealand, so all their supplies were purchased there or donated by locals.

The maker’s label on the butter reads CCCDC, which probably stands for Canterbury Central Co-operative Dairy Company, a Christchurch company established in the 1890’s.

The AHT team plans to restore the butter, believe it or not. They’ll carefully remove the pieces of grit embedded in it and then just put it right back in the stable where they found it. Assuming its condition does not deteriorate, it should be fine in the frigid temperatures for another century at least.

Captain Scott’s second expedition set out to be the first to reach the South Pole, but adverse weather and some questionable choices on Scott’s part ensured they got there second, five weeks after Norwegian explorer and sled dog expert Roald Amundsen.

Dejected by their loss, Scott and his team trudged through Antarctic blizzards for 3 months, until the final three of them died on March 29 , 1912, just 11 miles from the food and fuel depot. Scott himself appears to have been the last man to die. His touching final diary entry, found by a search party 8 months later, and the tragic finale of the expedition, made him a hero in the Commonwealth.

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last […] Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

You can follow Captain Scott’s last expedition as recorded in his diary entries posted on Twitter and on this blog for the full experience.

Update: flowers in Scottish Bronze Age burial

December 15, 2009

Ancient, Treasures

The unique 4,000-year-old cist burial found in Forteviot, Scotland, this summer has turned up an even greater surprise than the carvings on the massive capstone over the human remains on a bed of quartz pebbles and birch bark lattice with metal, wood, leather accessories: whole flowerheads.

This is the first concrete evidence of pre-historic peoples intentionally burying someone with flowers. Pollen has been found in ancient graves thousands of years older than this one, but it could have gotten in there in a myriad ways, including in honey or mead sacrifices. These complete meadowsweet blossoms prove once and for all that our ancient ancestors used flowers in burials.

Dr Kenneth Brophy, from the University of Glasgow, said the flowers “don’t look very much. Just about three or four millimetres across.”

“But these are the first proof that people in the Bronze Age were actually placing flowers in with burials.”

The dark brown heads were found, along with a clump of organic material which archaeologists now say is the stems of the flowers.

The bunch had been placed by the head of the high-status individual known to have been buried in the grave.

Meadowsweet is a fragrant flower which has been used medicinally and for its fragrance for millennia. It’s mentioned as one of 50 ingredients of a beverage called “save” in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth I’s, it was most likely the flower strewn by Queen Gertrude over Ophelia’s grave when she says “Sweets to the sweet, farewell!” (Act V, Scene 1).

In more recent history, Italian Rafaele Piria first produced salicylic acid from meadowsweet and willow bark in 1838. When Bayer synthesized a related compound 60 years later, they called it aspirin after the botanical name for meadowsweet, Spiraea ulmaria.

The largest slave graveyard in the world

December 14, 2009

Modern(ish), Social policy

Archaeologists have found a burial ground containing the bones of an estimated 10,000 slaves on the island of St. Helena.

That desolate spit of land in the middle of the Atlantic is best known today for having hosted a certain Napoleon Bonaparte during the six years between his final defeat at Waterloo and his death, but decades after Napoleon died, the British used the island to bury dead slaves captured from slavers after the trade was abolished.

The bodies, many of them children, were discovered where they had been buried after being brought to St Helena between 1840 and 1874 by Royal Navy patrols hunting the slavers. The captured ships were forced into the island where the traders were arrested and their victims liberated. By then, however, many were already dead in the fetid holds where they had been packed together for the long journey.

Many of the survivors also died soon after they were brought to Rupert’s Valley, near the capital Jamestown. It was used as a treatment and holding depot by the navy’s West Africa Squadron. Smallpox, dysentery and other diseases claimed many of those who had endured hunger, thirst and the terrible conditions below decks.

This is a major discovery in the history of slavery, not just because of its huge scale, but also because the vast majority of the other slave burials we know of are in the New World. It will fill in some tragic blanks in the history of the Middle Passage, and the 19th century slave trade as practiced by the East India Company which owned St. Helena from 1658–1815 and 1821-1834. The EIC kept slaves on the island until 1832, long after Britain outlawed the trade in 1807.

So far 325 skeletons have been excavated, mostly male and many of them children, some of them infants younger than one year old. They were often buried in groups, which makes sense because of the captured slaver ships. Some of the deceased were buried with their personal effects and/or with artifacts like metal tags relating to their enslavement and later rescue.

The analysis of the bones won’t be finished until May, but already just from looking at the remains anthropologists might be able to pinpoint tribal heritage based on notches filed on their front teeth. This is a lot more than the British were able to do in the late 19th c. when slaves were freed. The rescuers weren’t familiar with African languages and customs, so liberation rarely led to repatriation.

All the burials uncovered were found on a swath of land being excavated for a new airport road. There are thousands more in the valley, but archaeologists do not plan to disturb those graves. Once they’ve finished studying the remains already found, they will be reburied either in Rupert’s Valley or in an ossuary built near where they were discovere.

Good night, sweet Prince

December 13, 2009

Medieval, Modern(ish)

His Tremendousness Prince Giorgio I of Seborga has left this mortal coil, and it is very much the poorer for his absence. Born a mimosa flower farmer, son of a mimosa flower farmer, in the tiny Italian Riviera cliffside town of Seborga, Prince Giorgio singlehandedly convinced the locals to elect him prince in 1963.

Seborga had been independent principality a thousand years before, you see, when the Holy Roman Emperor granted the abbots of the Cistercian monastery the fiefdom and title. It remained independent until it was sold to the House of Savoy in 1729 and absorbed into its kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

There was a hitch, however. Giorgio Carbone researched assiduously and found that the purchase of Seborga was never officially registered, nor was the principality mentioned in subsequent territorial treaties like the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 which restored the nearby Republic of Genoa, or the 1815 Congress of Vienna which apportioned the spoils after Napoleon’s defeat. It didn’t make the act of unification of Italy in 1861, or even a mere footnote in the formation of the Italian republic after the abdication of the last Savoy king, Victor Emanuel II, in 1946.

Armed with all this absence of evidence/evidence of absence, Giorgo took it to the people, all 308 of them.

After convincing his Seborgan neighbors of their true significance, Giorgio Carbone was elected prince in 1963. He gracefully accepted the informal title of His Tremendousness, and was elected prince for life in 1995 by a vote of 304 to 4. Voters then ratified Seborga’s independence, which, by the prince’s interpretation, it already had.

Prince Giorgio established a palace, wrote a Constitution, and set up a cabinet and a parliament. He chose a coat of arms, minted money (with his picture), issued stamps (with his picture) and license plates, selected a national anthem and mobilized a standing army, consisting of Lt. Antonello Lacala. He adopted a motto: Sub umbra sede (Sit in the shade).

I think we can all agree Prince Giorgio I was the coolest prince ever. Oh sure, Italy didn’t exactly recognize Seborgan sovereignty, nor did any other stable nation, and sure, Prince Giorgio’s subjects still paid Italian taxes and elected an Italian mayor, but if anything that only makes His Tremendousness more tremendous.

In 2006, one Princess Yasmine von Hohenstaufen Anjou Plantagenet, self-styled heir of the Holy Roman Emperors, tried to claim the throne of Seborga in order to return it to Italy, but nobody cared. Even a combined Disney-German-French-English princess just couldn’t compete with the awesomeness of Prince Giorgio.

He passed away at home on November 25th of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Since dedication to his people kept him from taking a wife — as he told People magazine in 1993, he loved all his female subjects equally — the succession is now in question. Can they find another prince so awesome? I doubt it. The standing army, Lt. Antonello Lacala, might have to institute some sort of coup.

Behold His Tremendousness surveying his wee domain in this story from a few years ago:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/gtNcgswhQCM&w=430]

Here’s a lovely panorama of Seborga with the sea and the for real real Principality of Monaco in the distance:

Volunteer finds medieval gold coin

December 12, 2009

Medieval, Treasures

The York Archaeological Trust is excavating a medieval dump in the Hungate area. They’ve opened the dig to volunteers, and one lucky railway controller struck 14th century gold.

The coin, known as a Quarter Noble was found two weeks ago and is estimated to be worth about £200, but back in the reign of Edward III, it’s loss would have been a bitter blow to its owner.

Jon Kenny, community archaeologist at York Archaeological Trust, said: “It would be fair to say that it’s the sort of thing that, if you weren’t that wealthy, it could have been your life savings.

“Whoever lost it would have really regretted it.”

The Quarter Noble is from what is know as the Fourth Coinage (1351-1377). You can tell because there’s a fleur de lis in the middle of the cross on the tails side. Here’s the only picture I could find of the coin from the dig:

Here’s a more detailed version of a Quarter Noble from a coin sale site:

It’s valued at £550 – 600, three times the estimate of the York coin. It looks much shinier, so I suppose it’s worth more money because it’s in better condition.

The York one is cooler anyway because this is the first time anybody on the dig has found any gold at all. Precious metals didn’t get tossed on the trash pile much in the Middle Ages. (Or now for that matter.)

Richard Daniel, the finder, has been volunteering on the dig for 18 months. He used to press his face against the glass during a previous York dig but never imagined he’d get the chance to join in the fun.

Find out all about the Hungate dig on its website.