2012 – Page 25 – The History Blog

18th c. warship used in dockyard floor identified

September 2, 2012

In 1995, an archaeological excavation under the Wheelwright’s Shop of Chatham Historic Dockyard in Kent discovered that 167 timbers from a warship had been recycled as floor joists. Many of the great wooden ships of the British Navy during the Age of Sail in the 18th and early 19th centuries had been built at Chatham, most famously Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, but it came as a surprise to find a ship had returned the favor and built part of the dockyard.

The wine-glass shape of the beams is characteristic of a sailing warship’s hull, and the quantity of timber indicated that it had come from a second- or third-rate ship of the line. There were carpenters’ marks on some of the beams which were identifiable as the signatures of workers at the Chatham Royal Dockyard, some of whom had left the same marks on timber in the hull of HMS Victory. It was clear from the historical layers that the floor was not original to the Wheelwright’s Shop when it was first built in the 1780s, but rather was installed during major alterations to the space done in the 1830s. A key clue was the curve to some of the timbers, indicative of the “round bow” design by naval architect Robert Seppings who was promoted to master shipwright at Chatham in 1804 after the success of his round bow and stern innovations.

So historians were looking for a second- or third-rate ship of the line built at Chatham between 1750 and 1775, repaired at Chatham and thus still in sailing form in 1804, then broken up in time for reuse in the early 1830s. It took them 17 years to conclusively identify it, but there’s only one ship that fits all the clues: it was HMS Namur, a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line that saw an extraordinary amount of action at some of Britain’s most important sea battles between her launch in 1756 and her dismantling in 1833.

The Seven Years War started in 1756, and the Namur played a major role at the Siege of Fort Louisbourg in 1758, which opened the rest of Canada to British attack; the Battle of Lagos in 1759, which kneecapped France’s planned invasion of England; and the Capture of Havana in 1762, which ended Spanish naval dominance in the West Indies. Namur also fought against the Spanish and French during the American War of Independence, defeating the former at the Second Relief of Gibraltar on April 4th, 1781, then whupping the latter at the Battle of the Saintes almost exactly a year later. Even though she was getting on in years by then, HMS Namur still fought valiantly against the French in the Napoleonic Wars, including at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797 and in Strachan’s cleanup action after Trafalgar in 1805.

All told, Namur put in an exceptional 47 years of active service in the Royal Navy and 28 more on guard duty. Most ships from this period had a working life of around 20 years. In 1805 she had her decks shaved down, leaving her a 74-gun ship, and in 1807 was deployed to the east coast of England on harbor service at the Nore, a sandbank in the Thames Estuary which was once the scene of a spectacular kicking of England’s ass by the Dutch. There she remained until her honorable demise in 1833.

As much as it seems the European powers did nothing but fight on sea and land during this period, it was actually rare for any given ship to see a battle at all. The Namur saw nine, of which seven were of decisive importance in establishing and maintaining Britain’s command of the oceans.

As if that weren’t enough of a claim to fame, HMS Namur was also home to two figures known to history for reasons beyond only their naval roles. Between 1811 and 1814, HMS Namur was captained by one Charles Austen, future Rear Admiral and brother of novelist Jane Austen. She wove the naval experiences of Charles and their elder brother Francis, future Admiral of the Fleet, into several of her works, including Mansfield Park and my personal favorite, Persuasion, her last novel wherein naval officers are central characters and society’s reaction to the new prominence of the navy a central theme.

Olaudah Equiano, former slave, merchant and author of the first slave narrative, worked on board the Namur in 1759 during the Battle of Lagos. He was a boy of around 14 and had been enslaved since he was kidnapped at 11 years of age. His owner in 1759 was Michael Henry Pascal, the 4th lieutenant on HMS Namur. Pascal put Equiano to work as a powder monkey, a dangerous job that entailed carrying gunpowder from the magazine to the gunners. Children were assigned to the task because they were small and could hide behind the gunwale when enemy sharpshooters aimed for them.

Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, published in 1789, was a smash hit and played a pivotal role in the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. He describes his experiences aboard the Namur in chapters three and four, with the Battle of Lagos featured in the latter.

This series of accomplishments, impressive though they may be, could not keep HMS Namur from returning to her birthplace at the Royal Dockyard in Chatham for dismantling in 1833. Somebody there, however, and we don’t know for sure who or why, saw fit to keep part of the legend alive by using large hull timbers and planking to make a new floor for the Wheelwright’s Shop during renovations in 1834. The long, strong beams from the hull support the full width of the floor and are of obvious structural use, but there are also smaller planks laid flat between the joists. Why include them at all?

One possible answer is James Alexander Gordon, the Dockyard Captain Superintendent in 1834. Gordon had risen from Midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet, serving an unprecedented 75 years in the Royal Navy. He is thought to have been one of the inspirations for Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forester’s fictional naval hero. In 1786, when Gordon was 14 years old (he had already been in the navy for three years by then, believe it or not), he served on HMS Namur as a midshipman. He saw action aboard the Namur at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797. It’s possible that he felt a sentimental attachment to the old bucket and saw to it that she would continue to sustain the Royal Navy in a new position: namely, as a floor.

Doubtless Gordon would have been proud to see that floor become the centerpiece of a multi-million dollar redevelopment of the Historic Dockyard Chatham which, in addition to creating a new visitor center and a Command of the Oceans gallery detailing the history of the dockyard during the Age of Sail, will also be dedicated to long-term conservation of the Namur warship timbers. The Heritage Lottery Fund has granted Chatham £4.5 million ($7,140,000) in matching funds, but the dockyard has to raise £4 million ($6,350,000) within 15 months to secure the grant.

If you’d like to chip in, you can donate online to the Command of the Oceans project here. You can also mail checks to the address listed on this page and if you’re in Britain, you can send £3 that will go directly to the preservation of the timbers by texting “SHIP01 £3” to 70070.

Murdered child at Vindolanda from Mediterranean

September 1, 2012

Ancient

A child who archaeologists believe may have been murdered in the mid-3rd century at Vindolanda Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland was not a local. Isotope analysis on the tooth enamel found that the child, who was around 10 years old when he or she died, had lived in southern Europe or North Africa until the age of seven or eight.

The skeletal remains of the child were discovered in 2010 buried in a shallow pit in the corner of a barracks. At first archaeologists thought the remains might have belonged to a dog, but when experts examined the bones they discovered they belonged to a human child. They were not able to determine gender, but named the child Georgie just so they wouldn’t have to keep referring to the poor thing as “it.”

The position of Georgie’s hands indicated they may have been tied together, but the most significant evidence of foul play is the burial site itself. Roman funerary customs required that burials be done outside the perimeter of a town or fort. Burying this child inside the barracks would have been against the law and a major cultural taboo. Someone wanted to hide Georgie’s death very badly.

Researchers have not been able to pinpoint the cause of death. The skeleton is well-preserved from the neck down — even the wrist bones, just .4 inches long, were found — but there’s not much left of the skull. This could be explained by blunt force trauma to the head, which could have been caused by a deliberate blow or by an accident. Whatever the circumstances of Georgie’s death, everyone in the barracks where she or he was buried had to know about it. Eight soldiers from the Fourth Cohort of Gauls lived in a room with a decaying corpse buried under a few inches of soil, and none of them snitched.

Before the evidence of the tooth enamel, archaeologists assumed the child was from the Vindolanda area, or at least from Britain. Now a new level has been added to the intrigue. Georgie could certainly have been a slave. Child slaves were common in the empire. Any child born of a slave was also a slave; conquered peoples (including children) were kept or sold into slavery by the legions themselves; unwanted babies who were exposed by their parents would be scooped up and enslaved; by law Roman fathers had the right to sell their own children into slavery as they saw fit, to pay off debt, say. It seems more likely, however, that child slaves would have been secured locally than having been schlepped to the remote hinterlands of Britain from North Africa as seven-year-olds.

Another possibility is that the child was a family member of one of the soldiers. By 197 A.D., common soldiers were allowed to marry and when the legions lived for years in far-flung corners of the empire, they often wound up finding a girl and settling down. The barracks, however, were not fit for family use and the fort would have been unlivably crowded if everyone from top to bottom had wives and kids on site. Since Georgie came from down south, if she was following her father to his post, Dad was most likely an officer.

There’s plenty of evidence of women and children living at Vindolanda Roman Fort, although from a little earlier than Georgie’s time. In 1973 archaeologists discovered an incredible collection of letters written on wooden tablets from the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. Some of them are official missives; most of them are personal, including one famous letter written by Claudia Severa inviting her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to her birthday party. Claudia was the wife of fort prefect Flavius Cerialis and she mentions in the letter her young son being with them.

Archaeological finds including woolen socks, shoes and jewelry in child and women’s sizes also testify to the presence of families at the fort. There were also civilian traders who helped supply the legions living on or near the fort. Georgie could have come from a trading settlement that grew around the military fort.

Happy 2000th birthday, Caligula!

August 31, 2012

Ancient

It’s the day before the Kalends of September and you know what that means: it’s the birthday of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka the emperor Caligula. This one is a special birthday even under a numerical system without a zero because if Caligula really had been the immortal deity he hallucinated himself to be, he’d have turned MM years old today.

Gaius was born in Anzio to military hero Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus and Vipsania Agrippina, Caesar Augustus’ grand-daughter. Gaius was just two years old when the family moved with Germanicus when he was appointed commander of the army in Germany. His father dressed little Gaius in a miniature army outfit, including child-sized versions of caligae, the hobnailed sandal boots worn by common soldiers. That’s how he got his nickname, Caligula, meaning little caliga. He became a much-beloved mascot. Suetonius says the army loved him so much that his mere presence stopped a mutiny after the death of Augustus.

When he was around six years old, Little Boot and his family were dispatched to Asia where Germanicus made Roman provinces out of Cappadocia and Commagene and was poisoned in Antioch probably by Piso, the governor of Syria. Emperor Tiberius was thought to have ordered the murder of his nephew and adoptive son. Gaius lived with his mother until Tiberius had her exiled in 29 A.D., then he moved in with his redoubtable grandmother Livia. She died that same year, so he moved in with his other grandmother Antonia, daughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia and Mark Anthony.

By 31 A.D., Tiberius had exiled/killed everyone in his family except for himself and his sisters. They were theoretically free, but in reality under constant guard and in constant danger of falling afoul of the emperor and suffering the same fate as their brothers, mother and father. Tiberius brought Caligula to live with him in his villa of debauchery in Capri, and Little Boot made himself an able collaborator. His ability to ingratiate himself with the emperor saved his life, although it may have severely twisted his morals at the same time. Suetonius seems to think he was a bad seed all along.

Yet even at that time he could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who suffered punishment, revelling at night in gluttony and adultery, disguised in a wig and a long robe, passionately devoted besides to the theatrical arts of dancing and singing, in which Tiberius very willingly indulged him, in the hope that through these his savage nature might be softened. This last was so clearly evident to the shrewd old man, that he used to say now and then that to allow Gaius to live would prove the ruin of himself and of all men, and that he was rearing a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the world.

(Phaeton was the son of the sun god Helios and Clymene who asked to be allowed to drive his father’s chariot for a day to prove his paternity. He was horrible at it, alternately freezing and burning the earth so badly that he turned half of Africa into a desert. Zeus had to kill him with a thunderbolt to prevent him from burning the globe to a cinder.)

When Tiberius died in 37 A.D., Caligula took the throne. Tiberius was old and sick, but Caligula might have had a hand in his final disposition. He is said to have poisoned the old man first, and then smothered him when he wasn’t quite dead enough to give up the imperial ring.

Murderous or not, there was an auspicious beginning to his reign. The first few months were pure honeymoon. The army still loved him as Little Boot, son of the great general Germanicus, and everyone else was just so thrilled to be rid of the blood-thirsty, treason-happy degenerate Tiberius that they gloried in the dawn of a new day. He recalled the unjustly banished, stopped the censorship of certain authors, allowed magistrates to take independent action, called new elections and restored the vote, threw lavish games, cut taxes and finished public works that stingy Tiberius had defunded.

All this largesse was costly. By 39 A.D., the treasury was broke and Caligula had to resort to increasingly desperate means of fundraising, from levying new taxes to auctioning off the lives of gladiators to starting a brothel staffed by senators’ wives and daughters to executing rich men for treason and confiscating their wealth. The last two years of his reign were characterized by increasing insanity, sadism and perversion. Of course that makes for the best reading, which is why you should definitely not quit halfway through Suetonius’ Life of Caligula. He even gives you the perfect starting point. Chapter 22 begins: “So much for Caligula as emperor; we must now tell of his career as a monster.”

The stories of brutal murders, incest, going to war against the sea, declaring himself a god greater than all the deities in the pantheon, declaring his sisters goddesses first and then eventually killing them all, planning to make his horse Incitatus a senator and ever so much more crazy are Caligula’s primary legacy. I, Claudius draws liberally on Suetonius as does the hilariously atrocious quasi-porn movie Caligula, which started off as a legitimate film with a script by Gore Vidal starring Malcolm McDowell as Caligula and Helen Mirren as his favorite wife Caesonia, but ended up as a Bob Guccione Penthouse special.

The Senate was a favorite target of Caligula’s and over the years several senators hatched conspiracies to assassinate him. They all failed. It was officers in the Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s bodyguards, who finally did the deed in 41 A.D., apparently instigated by one too many gay jokes.

When they had decided to attempt his life at the exhibition of the Palatine games, as he went out at noon, Cassius Chaerea, tribune of a cohort of the praetorian guard, claimed for himself the principal part; for Gaius used to taunt him, a man already well on in years, with voluptuousness and effeminacy by every form of insult. When he asked for the watchword Gaius would give him “Priapus” or “Venus,” and when Chaerea had occasion to thank him for anything, he would hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an obscene fashion.

Some senators were also in on the plot. On January 24th, 41 A.D., Cassius Chaerea and some other guards approached Caligula in a passageway under his palace on the Palatine and stabbed him. Chaerea struck first, then the others took their turns, but still he lived. It took dozens of blows to kill him. Once he was dead, the guards killed his wife and their daughter.

After his death, all the statues of Caligula (and there were lots of them because at one point Caligula had insisted that every statue be of him, going so far as to replace the heads of ancient statues of gods and heroes with portraits of him) were destroyed. The few statues that have been found of him are often in pieces.

This is how Suetonius describes him:

He was very tall and extremely pale, with an unshapely body, but very thin neck and legs. His eyes and temples were hollow, his forehead broad and grim, his hair thin and entirely gone on the top of his head, though his body was hairy. Because of this to look upon him from a higher place as he passed by, or for any reason whatever to mention a goat, was treated as a capital offence. While his face was naturally forbidding and ugly, he purposely made it even more savage, practising all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror.

He didn’t seem to have practiced them before a sculptor. The heads of Caligula that have been found are rather mild and sweet-faced, as befits a man who died six months before his 30th birthday. One of the best preserved ones is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are still traces of the original polychrome paint (a lot of the weathering on the white marble is actually paint remnants) on the head, which allowed experts to create a reconstruction of the original colored version.

They examined the portrait using raking light (light held at an angle almost parallel to the surface which reveals the effects of painting that impressed itself onto the marble over the centuries even though it’s gone now), ultraviolet and infrared to get as much information as possible about how the original was painted. A second head was computer-carved into marble to be an exact copy of the original, then it was painted according to the scheme determined by analysis.

I’m not seeing the goat, but he’s definitely got sunken temples and a broad forehead.

But it’s his birthday, so let’s not just wallow in Little Boot’s bad reputation. As much as the ancient sources uniformly depict Caligula as a depraved madman, they have their own agendas. It was common practice to depict notable figures fallen out of favor as hopelessly insane and sexually perverse. There’s also an echo chamber effect as the ancients borrow from each other and from original works that are now lost to us.

Some modern historians have tried, as much as possible, to sift through the limited information to reassess Caligula’s character and reign in a more objective light. For a less lurid look at this most lurid of emperors, check out the work of Sam Wilkinson, Aloys Winterling and Anthony A. Barrett.

WWII-era bomb detonated in downtown Munich

August 30, 2012

Modern(ish)

Another unexploded Allied bomb from World War II was discovered in Germany on Monday, but unlike some of the earlier examples which were removed and defused without difficulty, this one was destined to play a more dramatic role.

The 550-pound US bomb was found during construction work at the site of the late, lamented Schwabinger 7, a post-war dive bar known as the “darkest bar in the world” which was demolished last year to howls of protest from people who wished to preserve its grungy charm as characteristic of an increasingly bygone Munich, replaced by gentrified soullessness. Fortunately for last year’s demolition crew, the bomb was buried three feet deep, so they never encountered it. The workers digging the foundations of the new office building going up at the site, on the other hand, found it.

Authorities attempted to defuse the bomb on the spot but had trouble with the chemical delay-action detonator, a mechanism that was used in only 10% of bombs, but because it had a bad habit of not working appears in a disproportionate number of unexploded bombs. Finally they gave up trying to defuse it and decided to explode it inside. Even a controlled explosion is dangerous in the densely populated center of Munich, so 2,500 people in the area around the bomb were evacuated and cars removed. Streets were blocked off, three subway stations closed and people further out were asked not to leave their homes.

Bales of hay and thousands of sandbags were stacked around the bomb to help absorb the explosive shock, and then, just before 10:00 PM on Tuesday night, this happened:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BQIE00_3o8&w=430]

The strength of the explosion shattered surrounding windows. Some of the hay drifted up to rooftops and set them on fire. Firefighters were on alert and were able to put them out promptly with only minor damage. No people were injured.

Experts say that the undiscovered bombs in Germany become more dangerous with each passing year. Last year, a former bomb disposal chief told SPIEGEL ONLINE that “unexploded bombs are becoming more dangerous by the day through material fatigue as a result of ageing and through erosion of safety elements in the trigger mechanisms.”

Bombs are found so often in Germany — thousands a year, an average of 15 a day — that most of the time the removals don’t even make the news. Only the really big ones do, or the rare ones that put on a sound and light show like the above.

Germany isn’t the only country affected. Also on Tuesday, a massive 1.5-ton German mortar bomb from the 1944 bombardment of Warsaw was found by construction workers underground in the Polish capital. Three thousand people were evacuated from the area, and the bomb was defused and removed without incident. On Wednesday a section of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport was closed after a suspected Allied bomb from World War II was found near the main terminal.

Smithsonian buys Benjamin Franklin’s silk suit

August 29, 2012

Modern(ish), Museums

A three-piece silk suit Benjamin Franklin wore in 1778 while serving as the United States of America’s first ambassador to France has been purchased by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The iconic garment had been on loan to the museum from the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston since the 1970s for conservation and research, but its fragility only allowed it to go on display three times: in 1974, in 2006 at an exhibit in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday, and in April of this year for the American Stories exhibit. Recognizing the long-term preservation needs of the garment that it could not fulfill, the Boston society has now allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the suit.

It must have been hard for the MHS to let it go after so many years. It was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society by Elkanah Watson in 1803, just 22 years after he received it as a gift from Benjamin Franklin himself. As a young man, Elkanah Watson was apprenticed to merchant, slave trader and committed Federalist John Brown, co-founder of what would later be named Brown University in honor of him and his brothers. In 1779, Brown and some other Revolutionary leaders asked the 21-year-old Watson to carry some dispatches to Benjamin Franklin in France. Elkanah, dissatisfied with what he’d seen of the merchant gig and yearning to see more of the world, gladly took the assignment.

He continued to act as courier between the nascent United States and its delegation in France for several years. On one of those trips he met Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright, an eccentric widow who supported her family after her husband’s death by turning her hobby of sculpting faces in bread dough and wax into a wildly successful profession. So successful was she that she moved to England and sculpted the likes of the King and Queen — whom she called George and Charlotte — as well as William Pitt and Admiral Richard Howe. She also spied on them all in support of the Revolutionary cause. Legend has it that she would make wax heads of Patriots, then hide them under her apron when a Royalist came to her studio. Legend also has it that she would hide spy notes inside the wax heads, then ship them back to the States. During 1775 and 1776, she was one of Franklin’s best sources of intelligence about what the British were planning.

In 1781 Watson commissioned Mrs. Wright to make a wax sculpture of Benjamin Franklin’s head. When the work was done, Franklin invited them both to dinner at Passy. Here’s the passage describing the events from Elkanah’s memoirs.

I employed Mrs. W. to make the head of Franklin, which was often the source of much amusement to me. After it was completed, both being invited to dine with Franklin, I conveyed her to Passy in my carriage, she bearing the head upon her lap. No sooner in presence of the Doctor, than she had placed one head by the side of the other. “There!” she exclaimed, “are twin brothers.” The likeness was truly admirable, and at the suggestion of Mrs. Wright, to give it more effect, Franklin sent me a suit of silk clothes he wore in 1778. Many years afterwards, the head was broken in Albany, and the clothes I presented to the “Historical Society of Massachusetts.”

There’s an inscription inked on the inner lining of the vest that claims Franklin wore this very suit when he signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France on February 6, 1778, but in the letter he wrote to the Massachusetts Historical Society from Albany in 1803 Watson wrote:

This may certify that in the year 1781, being at Paris, in France, the celebrated Mrs. Wright executed for me an excellent likeness in wax of the immortal Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Dining with her at the Doctor’s, in Passy, and on comparing the heads, I suggested that such a head deserved a suit of his own clothes, on which he rang for his servant, directing him to bring the suit he wore…in the year of the signing of the famous Treaty of Alliance between France and America, in February, 1778.

Watson then wrote a follow-up emphasizing that the clothes were from the year Franklin signed the treaty, not the precise time he signed the treaty. This doesn’t in any way decrease the historical importance of the suit. Franklin’s clothes played a massive role in the ginger diplomatic balancing act he had to do to secure the vital support of France for the baby United States. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance, both signed on the same day, ensured that the raggedy new country would have economic and military support from one global superpower in its war against the other. Without France’s contribution of money, weapons and supplies, the American Revolution would have had a very different outcome.

Franklin’s “ditto” suits, so called because they were all designed in the same simple style out of the same silk, projected an image of America as virtuous, plain, hard-working, frugal and sober. Instead of rejecting Franklin for his rustic presentation amidst the embroidered silks, satins and brocades of the court, French high society went completely gaga for him. He was a huge celebrity, so often depicted in portraits that people all over the country would recognize him and flock to him wherever he went. He was the incarnation of the democratic spirit of the new country, and everyone from King Louis XVI to Queen Marie Antoinette on down thought he was the bees knees.

This particular suit looks a very somber brown now, but it was originally a plum or claret color. Still modest and restrained, of course, but not quite as much as his brown homespun he called his “Quaker” suit. The fading of the color is one of the main conservation issues the Smithsonian will have to tackle. Although the structure of the three pieces — breeches, waistcoat and coat — remains sound, as does the linen lining, there are places where the fabric is puckering and flaking. Now that the museum owns the suit outright, it can work on a conservation plan based on their years of research and the latest technologies that will stabilize it to ensure it remains in the American cultural patrimony for centuries to come.

Below is the account in Elkanah Watson’s memoirs of Mrs. Wright’s creation of the wax head of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s donation of one of his suits to complete the look, and the later wacky adventures of the suit and the head in France and England. Keep reading for a few pages after the first two because it’s awesome. Watson pulled many a Weekend at Bernie’s with that suit and wax figure, bless his youthful scampery.