May 2011 – Page 3 – The History Blog

Captain Kidd’s gibbet hangs again on Thames shore

May 21, 2011

Just in time for the 310th anniversary of William Kidd’s hanging at Execution Dock in Wapping, along the Thames, the Museum of London Docklands has opened a new exhibit dedicated to the infamous pirate. Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story displays over 170 objects related to Captain Kidd and piracy in general, including an original Jolly Roger pirate flag captured by Midshipman Richard Curry in 1789, a gibbet used to display corpses as a cautionary tale for other would-be criminals, and the silver Admiralty Oar that was carried by the Admiralty Deputy Marshall when leading execution processions. The oar hasn’t been seen in public since the last execution for piracy in 1864.

The most famous of all the pirate booty on display in the exhibit is Captain Kidd’s last letter wherein he claims to have hidden £100,000 (about 5,000 times a sailor’s annual wage) of treasure in a secret Caribbean location. That letter launched many a treasure hunt and inspired literature from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold-Bug to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Kidd’s letter is the origin of what is now the most well-worn trope of all pirate movies and adventure novels.

The exhibit doesn’t leave the Captain swinging alone. It makes the argument that high-ranking politicians and businessmen from the American colonies and England were at the very least complicit in the crimes he swung for. His privateering operations attacking French ships in the Caribbean were commissioned by Whig MPs, the English East India Company, the governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, and even King William III himself, among many others. It was while pursuing these commissions that he committed the act that would ultimately get him hanged from the neck until dead.

On October 30, 1697, gunner William Moore encouraged Kidd to attack a Dutch ship. Kidd refused because that would constitute piracy rather than privateering (it’s all about picking the proper enemy, in this case the French) and because William III was from Orange and thus would not be likely to look upon the attack with favor. Kidd called Moore a lousy dog. Moore said if he was, it was because Kidd made him one. Kidd hit him on the head with an ironclad bucket and Moore died the next day.

Kidd also began to gain a reputation for piratical acts like torturing prisoners and theft, even though it seems that many of these instances were perpetrated by his mutinous crew against his will. It was his capture of the Quedagh Merchant, an Armenian ship sailing under French passes, on January 30, 1698 that sealed his fate. The French passes marked it as fair game for British privateers, but the captain of the ship was English. When news reached home of the capture, the Royal Navy was ordered to capture Kidd and his crew for acts of piracy.

They didn’t catch him, though. It was his investor Bellomont who betrayed him, luring him to Boston with a false offer of clemency then arresting him on July 6, 1699. He remained in jail in Boston for a year before being sent to England for trial on charges of piracy and the murder of Moore. The political tides had shifted and his powerful backers were no longer so powerful. He kept his silence, never naming names, thinking that his loyalty would garner him their help when in fact they ran the other way. Evidence that was material to his defense disappeared, including the French passes proving that the Quedagh Merchant was fair game. They would be found in a London building in 1911, misfiled along with some other government papers.

He was executed by hanging at Execution Dock in Wapping, London on May 23, 1701. They had to hang him twice because the rope broke the first time. Once he was dead, his body was coated in pitch and stuffed into the gibbet — an iron cage that had been made to order to fit him — to serve as warning to all who would follow in his footsteps.

Thanks to modern technology and the Museum of London, the Captain lives again. You can now follow William Kidd’s adventures on Twitter.

1,247 Roman coins found buried in Colchester

May 20, 2011

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the site of the former Hyderabad and Meeanee barracks (turn of the century barracks that housed the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment until new quarters were built in 2008, now slated for redevelopment) have uncovered a hoard of 1,247 Roman coins from the 3rd century A.D. The coins were packed in a large pot. Another pot was found alongside of it, but it was empty; most likely the owner had cashed in its contents but kept the empty pot in place in case he needed it for future hoarding.

We can tell from the way the coins are layered — not in date order — that the pot was filled and buried at one time, not by adding coins over time piggy bank style. The coins are still in little stacks, suggesting that the owner counted them and carefully added the piles to the pot.

The coins are of a type known as antoniniani. The hoard is made up of issues of at least nine Roman emperors ranging from Gallus (251-3) to Victorinus (269-271). The latest coins in the hoard point to a date for its deposition in the early part of AD 271.

The antoninianus started life off as a silver coin issued in the early 3rd century but, by the time of the Hyderabad hoard, it had become very debased and ended up as a copper-alloy coin with a very thin silver coating. Severe inflation reduced its monetary value which is why later antoniniani are common finds on archaeological sites of the third quarter of the 3rd century. The Hyderabad hoard belongs to this period.

This was a turbulent time for the Roman Empire known as the Crisis of the Third Century. Twenty-five emperors reigned between 235 and 284, and in 260, under pressure from barbarian invasions, the empire split into three warring sections. The province of Britannia joined Gaul, Hispania and Germania to form the Gallic Empire under the control of the Batavian usurper Postumus. Postumus was himself usurped and was killed by his own troops in 268. The Gallic Empire fell apart and a chain of would-be emperors followed for a few years until the Emperor Aurelian reclaimed the provinces after his victory in the Battle of Châlons in 274.

The unrest would have been keenly felt in Colchester (aka Camulodunum), which was the first Roman city in Britain and was garrisoned with Roman troops since the Legio XX Valeria Victrix set up shop in 43 A.D. Garrison towns stop being protected and start being dangerous when the military is infighting and throwing up usurpers every other month. Postumus’ troops killed him because he wouldn’t let them sack the city of Mainz, after all, so burying pots full of coins in a field was probably a wise strategy not just to avoid thieves prospering under the chaos, but also to avoid the military run amok.

The field in question was part of the system of defensive earthwork walls (known as dykes despite no water being involved). The hoard was buried in the ditch behind the Berechurch Dyke, part of 15 miles of earthwork defenses originally built a hundred years before the Claudian invasion of Britain and reinforced by the Romans.

This isn’t the first hoard of Roman coins found in the Colchester area, and the others have all been from the mid-to-late third century as well. Two hoards were found a hundred years ago, and a huge group of 6,000 antoniniani was discovered in 1983.

The hoard has been reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme as potential treasure. When, as seems inevitable, it is declared treasure, the property owners, developing firm Taylor Wimpey, plan to donate the find to the Colchester Museum as they have done with everything else that has been found on the barracks site thus far.

Library gets portrait of French surgeon, huge tumor

May 19, 2011

Modern(ish), Museums, Treasures

London’s Wellcome Library, one of the world’s foremost collections of medical history, has acquired a portrait of French surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert Delonnes and the famous 28-pound tumor he removed from the testicles of Charles-François Delacroix, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a risky operation on September 13th, 1797.

The black chalk and white gouache drawing by Pierre Chasselat is dated Year 8 of the French Revolutionary calendar (1799-1800 in our calendar) and it depicts Imbert Delonnes seated in neoclassical dignity penning a manuscript of his book “Progress of the art of healing.” Behind him to the right is the gigantic tumor itself proudly displayed in an oversized bell jar on a marble plinth. In the library behind him there’s a statue of Aesculapius, Greek god of medicine and healing, perched on a plinth that looks identical but smaller, which just goes to show just how proud of that tumor Imbert Delonnes was.

He had good reason to be. Delacroix had eight doctors consulting on what to do about this 30-pound groin situation. Seven of them agreed that it should not be touched, that the tumor could not be removed surgically and that the attempt would pose far greater risk to the patient than just leaving the benign tumor alone to keep on growing. Imbert Delonnes was the only one who disagreed. After Delacroix read his treatise on the treatment of hydrocele (an accumulation of fluid in body cavities or around a testicle), he decided to let Imbert Delonnes remove the tumor surgically.

The operation took two and a half hours and was a success, not just for the patient but for the surgeon and even for surgery itself, still at this point considered a craft of barbers, distinct from and distinctly inferior to pure medicine. The statue of Aesculapius and the rich library he presides over in the drawing represent Imbert Delonnes’ elevated status: surgeon, yes, but in the classically educated tradition, not from the barbershop.

(Related historical fun fact: the tumor rendered Delacroix impotent, so when his wife gave birth to a son eight months after the operation, rumors abounded that little Eugène was actually the son of Charles-François’ successor as foreign minister, Maurice de Talleyrand, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Eugène Delacroix would grow up to become the great French Romantic painter of Liberty Leading the People fame.)

Delacroix’s tumor was not the only one Imbert Delonnes removed. Another one of his famous surgeries is also referenced in the portrait. In the left foreground there is a painting of Périer de Gurat, mayor of Angoulême, who had a large disfiguring facial tumor. Imbert Delonnes successfully removed that one too and reconstructed his nose afterwards. He commissioned artist Joseph Boze to make a painting of de Gurat’s tumorous face on the night before the operation, and it’s that painting you see in Chasselat’s drawing.

This remarkable drawing is a recent discovery. It was found by Marc Fecker of Didier Aaron Ltd. who then researched assiduously to find out who its noble subject was. He was able to identify the sitter as Ange-Bernard Imbert Delonnes when he found an engraving in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of just the doctor’s head and shoulders copied from the drawing and labelled as a portrait of Imbert Delonnes.

Robespierre auction results update

May 18, 2011

Modern(ish), Treasures

The state preempted the sale. Director of the French national archives Hervé Lemoine announced it to the room after the hammer fell, to the applause of the crowd. “Bravo, sir!” cried the auctioneer in response, because hey, Sotheby’s is getting paid no matter what, and no small amount either. The papers sold for far above the estimate. Sotheby’s valued them at €200,000-300,000 ($287,000-$431,000) and the final hammer price was €750,000 ($1 million). The state also preempted the sale of another group of documents, letters written by Augustin Robespierre and Phillipe Le Bas to Maximilien. That lot sold for €40,000 ($57,000), so altogether, including buyer’s premium, the final price tag is €979,400, or approximately $1.4 million.

The Society for Robespierre Studies had already raised $100,000. Now they and the government have to raise ten times that amount to keep the papers in country. No small feat, especially since Robespierre remains a conflicted figure in French history, what with the mass murders and the Terror and all. Hervé Lemoine declared himself optimistic that the money would be raised, then coupled that optimism with an appeal to the French people to chip in vigorously.

French rain terror on Robespierre manuscripts sale

May 17, 2011

Modern(ish), Treasures

Sotheby’s Paris is offering a previously unknown collection of Maximilien Robespierre’s personal papers for sale tomorrow, and French historical societies and political parties (particularly leftist ones) are not happy about it.

The 116 pages, all handwritten by Robespierre between January 1792 and his death in July 1794, include drafts and notes for five articles and four speeches, plus one letter written to an unknown correspondent on the difficult relationship between Happiness and Liberty, a central question in Robespierre’s political philosophy. Not only do these spontaneous writings illustrate Robespierre’s dynamic thought processes, but they also cover some of the most important moments in French history.

One of the papers details his opposition to allowing King Louis XVI to live and describes how Convention members who supported clemency for the king grouped to the right of the hall, while those who wanted to separate his neck from his head stood to the left. That division in the chamber would be the foundation of the political terminology of right (reactionary, conservative, royalist) and left (revolutionary, liberal, socialist).

Another document, perhaps the most historically significant of the lot, is a draft of Robespierre’s 8 Thermidor (July 26th) speech to the Convention wherein he defends himself against charges of dictatorship and warns darkly of conspirators acting against the Revolution in the Convention itself but refuses to name names. The next day the Convention declared Robespierre an outlaw according to the Law of Suspects that Robespierre et al. had passed just two months earlier so they could arrest and execute people without trial or even evidence. He was arrested at the Hôtel de Ville along with this brother Augustin and BFF Saint-Just, among others. The day after that he was guillotined, without questioning, trial or appeal, along with Saint-Just and a dozen of their coterie.

With Robespierre at the Hôtel de Ville on 9 Thermidor was Phillipe Le Bas, a close friend and comrade who shot himself to death rather than be taken alive, as Robespierre had tried to do but only succeeded in shooting off his own jaw. Le Bas was married to Élisabeth Duplay, a younger daughter of Maurice Duplay, Robespierre’s landlord. Her eldest sister Éléonore Duplay was reputed to be Robespierre’s mistress (after his death, she wore black the rest of her life and was known as “La Veuve Robespierre,” i.e., the widow Robespierre) and she hid many of his papers before being herself arrested. The documents coming up for auction now have been kept in the Le Bas family for over 200 years.

Given the momentous history covered in these documents and the new insights on Robespierre’s thoughts they can provide historians, it comes as little surprise that the French are not at all keen to see them sold to God-knows-who and end up God-knows-where. The Society for Robespierre Studies has been raising money to try to buy the documents while also petitioning the French national archives and the culture ministry to buy them for the nation. The Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the Radical Left party have asked the the Ministry of Culture to “make every effort to ensure that such records of inestimable value to the history of the French Revolution and Robespierre’s political action can be preserved in our national institutions.”

On Thursday Patrick Ollier, the Minister of Relations with Parliament, responded to the parties that the Ministry is on the case and will take care of its responsibilities. That’s vague enough to mean nothing at all, but France does have a handy legal mechanism to stop these sorts of sales from happening. It’s called the right of preemption and the way it works is, once the hammer falls on the sale, a government representative announces to the room that what was just sold is “subject to the right of preemption of state.” The government then has 15 days to decide whether it wants to purchase the property for hammer price plus buyer’s premium or let it go.

Should make for an interesting day at the auction hall.