The Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, was only 19 years old when he defied his family and a direct order of King Louis XVI of France to join the American colonists in their fight for independence from Britain. He outfitted a vessel, La Victoire, with his own money and set sail for the one-year-old United States of America in 1777. The Continental Congress gave him a commission as major general on July 31st, 1777, just over a month after his arrival. An unpaid commission, it’s worth noting, because Lafayette offered to fight for his Enlightenment ideals on his own dime.

He met General George Washington a few days later and the two formed an instant rapport. They were both freemasons — a signficant factor in Lafayette’s prompt acceptance by the mason-heavy Founding Fathers — and Washington appreciated Lafayette’s committment to the cause. Soon Lafayette put his lifeblood where his mouth was, receiving a gunshot wound to the leg during his first engagement, the Battle of Brandywine on September 11th, 1777. He suffered alongside Washington and the Continental Army through the horrors of Valley Forge that winter and went on to fight in several important battles and use his considerable diplomatic skills to smooth over tensions between the Americans and the newly arrived French fleet.

In January of 1779, he returned to France with an eye to encouraging a direct confrontation with Britain. When he was unable to persuade anyone of the dubious wisdom of attempting an invasion of Britain, he turned his sights on securing troops and aid for a return to America. He worked with Benjamin Franklin, the United States’ first ambassador to France whose homespun style and scintillating wit made him a sensation at the French court. Together they were able to get 6,000 French troops and five frigates to reinforce the American side. Lafayette was in France for a year, long enough to impregnate his wife and name his newborn son Georges Washington Lafayette, before returning to America.

He departed from the port city of Rochefort in western France aboard the Concorde class 32-gun frigate Hermione on March 11th, 1780, and landed in Boston on April 27th. The Hermione fought the British in multiple engagements, ultimately participating in the blockade of Chesapeake Bay that kept British supplies and reinforcements from reaching Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in September of 1781. Lafayette also played a key role in the decisive Battle of Yorktown, the last land battle of the Revolutionary War. He harried Cornwallis’ troops around Virginia for months before the British put down stakes in Yorktown. Then he took a high position on a hill outside Yorktown and pinned the British in with artillery. Washington’s army soon joined his old friend’s and together they laid siege to the city. Lafayette and 400 men took Redoubt 9 on October 14th, 1781. Four days later Cornwallis surrendered.

Lafayette returned to France two months later, continuing to advocate for French support even as the war wound down to the occasional naval skirmish. He visited the United States again in 1784 and tried to convince Washington to manumit his slaves. He also made a speech in front of the Virginia House of Delegates calling for the abolition of slavery in the spirit of human liberty that he had fought for in the war. Unfortunately for millions of enslaved people and the history of this country, he failed to convince them. His last trip to America was in 1824 when he was welcomed by cheering crowds, parades and a wide variety of honors.

His efforts for democracy in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France were not so well-received by the radicals in the National Assembly, Napoleon and the restored Bourbon monarchs. He was imprisoned for five years, exiled for more, had all his properties confiscated and even when he was restored to some of his fortune and allowed to return to France, he would continue to have a fraught relationship with the government because he refused to abandon his democratic principles. In the United States, on the other hand, he was unequivocably beloved. He was considered a great hero on a par with Washington: generous, unselfish, loyal to a country that was not his own.

As for the Hermione, she ran aground on the west coast of France in September 1793 and was destroyed. In 1992, a non-profit company was founded to recreate the lost Hermione using period methods and materials as much as modern safety requirements allow. Construction began in 1997 in the same town where she was built the first time: Rochefort, site of the Royal Shipyard. In a dry dock next to the Corderie Royale (the Royal Ropemaker), the replica of the Hermione was built in public view. This video has a compilation of pictures and video showing the sloooow construction process from shipyard framing to installing the masts:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/3labVPJOLzg&w=430]

Once the ship was completed in 2014 (the original Hermione only took six months to build, but finding properly shaped oak trees for a helm these days is much harder than it was back then), 150 volunteers selected from 600 applicants had to be trained to sail as small boys could do blindfolded, malnourished and whipped 300 years ago. Seaworthiness tests in fall of 2014 went well and the Hermione was ready to follow in her namesake’s hullprints.

On Saturday, April 18th, 2015, the replica Hermione set sail from Rochefort for Yorktown, Virginia. It’s scheduled to arrive there in June, after which it will visit another 12 historic towns along the eastern seaboard, among them Annapolis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston. Mount Vernon will be the second stop, an homage to the undying deep bonds of love and camaraderie between Lafayette and Washington. The Hermione will be in New York for the Fourth of July where she will join the Harbour Parade. People will be able to visit the ship at other ports of call as well. Return to this page (it’s a little empty now) to find out more about events as they’re finalized.

A brief overview of the history of the ship and the construction of the replica:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/7BYPPr84wfU&w=430]

Boarding the crew:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/44iW5v6QFmo&w=430]

Preparation of the boat:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/gQffmYYcs_s&w=430]

The Hermione sails for America:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/QqIzodNG5Wc&w=430]

Last year Parks Canada released a minute of the video taken by the remote operated vehicle which found the HMS Erebus and a minute of the film taken by divers when they discovered the ship’s bell was included in a brief video about the recovery and analysis of the bell, but other than that, we’ve only had a few photographs of the wreck.

On Thursday, VIP visitors to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto got an unexpected treat when what they thought would be a few minutes of recorded footage of the new Erebus ice dive turned out to be a live broadcast of a dive to the wreck complete with narration by underwater archaeologist Ryan Harris. The ROM event was attended by government types like Treasury Board president Tony Clement and parliamentary secretary to the Minister of the Environment Colin Carrie and by an extremely lucky seventh grade geography class from University of Toronto Schools. After the video tour, they were able to ask questions about the ship to diver Marc-Andre Bernier.

Now Parks Canada has released a recording of that live stream so those of who are neither government officials nor in the seventh grade can get their first long, hard look at the wreck of the HMS Erebus. It shows Harris, supported by an off-screen Leading Seaman Caleb Hooper, moving from stern to bow pointing out areas and artifacts of interest like the bronze six-pound cannons, the tracks that allowed the crew to lift the screw propeller out of the water when ice was heavy, the quarterdeck, the ship’s very long tiller, the capstand, the remains of the mainmast and the port side bilge pump.

The quality of the picture is excellent, thanks in part to the two feet of ice on the surface that block waves and allow particulate matter to sink to the seafloor. There are moments when it’s a bit dark down there, what with it being 36 feet deep under a thick ice sheet, but you can still see what Harris is describing just fine. The video is just short of 10 minutes long (time totally flies, though, so don’t let that daunt you) and ends a little abruptly which I hope means there will be a part two released soon.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/eBaoa__OieM&w=430]

The dives only began last week because they were delayed by bad weather and are expected to continue through Friday. There’s a photo gallery of the Erebus base camp, the triangular holes cut into the ice sheet, the blocks of ice removed after being cut out and more here. Also, Parks Canada Archaeology tweeted this amazing picture of a tent shot from the hole in the ice.

Here’s the video about the HMS Erebus bell released in November 2014. It’s short but awesome:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/VKzrVZC5EZw&w=430]

Inspired by my recent foray into Swiss watchmaker automata, I decided to revisit one of my old favorites from the archives: the creepy Creeping Baby Doll. When I first posted about this monstrous hybrid of human baby and machine four years ago, it was within the context of the National Museum of American History’s extensive collection of robots which includes the patent model for a crawling (called “creeping” in the 19th century) baby doll patented in August of 1871 by one George P. Clarke. The only photograph of robobaby was a blurry black-and-white which while dissatisfying still managed to convey the disturbing incongruity of the baby face and limbs attached to a heavy mechanical torso.

The museum has lately expanded its online collection so now there’s a full entry dedicated to the Creeping Baby Doll patent model complete with a proper high resolution color picture. Feast your eyes upon her, I dare you!

Now you can see her ice blue eyes and toothy grin which add a whole new dimension of horror. What’s that you say? You wish she were staring right at you, sucking your soul out through your uncontrollably slackened jaw? Done!

Temporarily satiated, she can now move on to her next victim, leaving your empty zombified body to shuffle behind her, another drone in her growing army.

To be fair to George Pemberton Clarke, whose model was an improvement on one invented by his boss, Robert J. Clay, earlier that year, the final production toy was nowhere near as terrifying as the patent model. The National Museum of American History has one of those too, although they’re not certain when it was made.

You can just see the gear and wheels peeking out from under her belly and armpit, but all dressed up with her little bonnet she’s significantly less spine-chilling. Still not much of a cuddly toy for little girls to play house with, however. Indeed, she ultimately found a market as a novelty, one of a number of wind-up metal toys including Girl Skipping Rope and Toy Gymnast made by the Automatic Toy Works, a small New York mechanical toy company founded by Robert J. Clay.

In 1872, a year after the first Creeping Baby made her debut, he submitted a patent application for another so-called improvement to the design: the Crying Creeping Baby Doll. A projecting blade made of rubber or paste would strike the notches of a toothed wheel as it turned, thus producing a sound that Clay assures us is “in imitation of the crying of a child, or of an animal voice.” I like that baby and animal cries are entirely interchangeable, in his opinion. Sadly, I have been unable to locate a recording of whatever god-awful ululations this mechanism produced, or even any evidence that this version of the toy ever went into commercial production.

The non-crying Creeping Baby went on to have a long career. Clay’s company was in business from 1868 until 1874 when it was bought by Connecticut toy makers the Ives Manufacturing Company in 1874. Ives continued to produce automata under the Automatic Toy Works imprimatur for years after the acquisition, expanding the line with clockwork mechanisms that make the Creeping Baby look like the teddy bear from the Snuggle commercials.

This trade catalogue from 1882 has made the rounds of the Internets because of its wide array of painfully racist toys. Out of 17 toys on offer, seven are caricatures of black people, including a fiddling Uncle Tom and “The Woman’s Rights Advocate” who is unnamed but is an unmistakable reference to Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate who had been born a slave in upstate New York and became nationally famous as an anti-slavery and gender equality advocate. Her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” became a rallying cry for abolition and the women’s rights movement. Two more toys are caricatures of the Chinese (doing laundry, of course) and one is an Italian Organ Grinder, who while stereotypical does not have the cringe-worthy exaggerated caricature features of the other racialized toys. He also plays music, unlike the fiddler, with a mechanism the catalogue proudly attributes to those masters of automata, the Swiss.

On the last page of that catalogue you’ll find the one, the only Wonderful Creeping Baby, “the best doll ever made.” She’s the second most expensive at $5 (the Organ Grinder runs $6, doubtless because of his Swiss music box) and her “resemblance to life is almost startling,” we are assured.

The Ives Manufacturing Company was the top producer of mechanical wind-up toys in the 1880s, but by the end of the century cheaper copycats were so widespread the business shifted to focus on toy trains. After a fire leveled the Ives factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1900, they rebuilt as a state-of-the-art toy train manufacturer. They were hugely successful, the largest toy train company in the country, until model railway makers Lionel overtook them in 1924. Four years later they were bankrupt and were eventually bought out by their rivals Lionel in 1933.

As for George Clarke, the patent office records his long career, before and after his foray into toy design. Here’s his 1857 application for first a new arrangement of steam boiler safety valves. Ten years later he was living in New York and was inventing more entertaining mechanisms like this extremely cool globe made of discs he called “zones” depicting the “animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms of the earth.” That would have been just before the time when he worked with Clay at the Automatic Toy Works.

A decade after that his patents returned to more practical mechanisms, including this cane with an electric current in the head (1878) that would gently zap the hand wielding it. Although Clarke noted in the patent application that “the effect of a gentle galvanic current on the human organization is not in the present state of electrical and physiological science fully explained” but that doesn’t stop him from claiming it “functions as a battery for the relief or cure of diseases of the nerves.” As if that weren’t a sufficient selling point, the mechanism can be fitted inside the “handle of any portable tool or weapon, as a policeman’s club or the like, if desired.” Billy club and taser all in one. I’m amazed it never went into production.

There are 38 historical markers in Lower Manhattan. None of them acknowledge the city’s massive debt to the slaves who literally built it. That will change this year because the city council has approved a marker on the site of New York’s first slave market at the corner of Wall Street and Pearl Street.

In 1627, a year after the Dutch West India Company imported the first 11 African slaves to New Amsterdam, slaves built the wall that Wall Street was named after. It started out as a defensive earthwork embankment along the northern boundary of the settlement meant to keep Native Americans from attacking the settlement, a Manhattan version of Hadrian’s Wall. When Governor Peter Stuyvesant ordered the construction of a more elaborate palisade wall spanning Lower Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River in 1653, slaves again formed the bulk of the work force.

The Wall Street wall came down in 1699. By then slavery had grown exponentially. The Dutch had imported slaves to do the hard work of clearing land for houses and farms, filling shore areas for docks and building roads that free Dutch immigrants refused to do preferring the easier and more lucrative route of the fur trade which allowed them to make money quickly and return home. When the English conquered the colony in 1664, they continued to rely heavily on slave labour as farmers, dockworkers and household servants. New Amsterdam was renamed New York after the Duke of York, the future King James II, who had received a vast swath of the newly conquered territories from his brother King Charles II. The good duke just happened to be the major investor in the Royal African Company which had the monopoly over English trade with West Africa, a trade which primarily consisted of the sale of human beings. James gave slave ships priority access to docks and warehouses in New York City.

By 1703, slaves were found in 42% of the households in New York City, more than anywhere else in the north and second only to Charleston in all the English colonies of America. In 1711, almost 1,000 of New York’s population of 6,400 were black people, most of them enslaved. Their masters often sent them to make extra money by renting themselves out for short and long terms. All those slaves milling about, rubbing elbows with each other and free people of color without supervision, gave the powers that be agida, so on December 13th, 1711, the New York City Common Council passed an ordinance “Appointing a Place for the More Convenient Hiring of Slaves”

Be it Ordained by the Mayor Recorder Aldermen and Assistants of the City of New York Convened in Common Council and it is hereby Ordained by the Authority of the same That all Negro and Indian slaves that are lett out to hire within this City do take up their Standing in Order to be hired at the Markett house at the Wall Street Slip untill Such time as they are hired, whereby all Persons may Know where to hire slaves as their Occasions Shall require and also Masters discover when their Slaves are so hired and all the Inhabitants of this City are to take Notice hereof Accordingly.

It wasn’t just slaves for hire who were contained in the market at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets. Market House — known as the Meal Market since 1726 when the city granted it exclusive rights to the sale of grains — was the first official slave market in New York City. People were bought and sold there for more than 50 years and the city taxed every sale, thus making New York City itself not just the beneficiary of slave labour, but an active participant in the trade.

Other sites in Lower Manhattan sprang up where slaves were traded, and by 1762, the Meal Market had become an eyesore to the elite who for decades had enjoyed the prosperity and convenience its human cattle provided them. They submitted a petition to the Common Council:

Said Meal Market greatly obstructs the agreeable prospect of the East River, which those that live on Wall street would otherwise enjoy. That it occasions a dirty street, offensive to the inhabitants on each side and disagreeable to those that pass and repass to and from the Coffee House, a place of great resort, that same be removed.

Heaven forfend anything spoil the view of the East River or sully the way to the Merchants Coffee House. The Council responded with alacrity. In February 1762, the Meal Market was demolished. Slavery was far from over in the city. Even after the Revolutionary War when slavery began to wane in the northeastern states, New York doubled down. In 1790, Philadelphia had a population of 28,522, 300 of them slaves. Baltimore which, like New York, was a busy port city but which unlike New York was in close proximity to the plantations of the south, had 1,300 slaves out of a population of 13,503. New York City, for the first time overtaking Philadelphia as the most populous city in the nation with a population of 33,131, counted more than 2,300 slaves among them.

In 1799, the state legislature passed a gradual emancipation law declaring children of slaves born after July 4th, 1799 free, but even that half-assed measure was only technical freedom. Those children had to serve as indentured servants to their mothers’ masters until they were 28 years old (for men) or 25 years old (for women). Slaves born before that date were still slaves until they died, but they would now be called indentured servants. On July 4th, 1827, black people in New York held a parade celebrating their official freedom, but the sad truth is there were still slaves in New York until the 1850s.

Despite the enormous role of slaves in the birth and development of New York City, the African Burial Ground National Monument is currently the only memorial that makes any reference to slaves in all of Lower Manhattan. The new marker

The new plaque may be unveiled on Juneteenth (the anniversary of the official announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas by Union General Gordon Granger on June 19th, 1865, which has evolved into a wider celebration commemorating the abolition of slavery in all of the Confederate states), but the date is still up the air. The council hasn’t decided where exactly the plaque will be installed yet nor even the exact wording. Wall Street is swaddled in scaffolding at the moment; they need to pick a spot where the memorial will actually be visible.

Archaeologists excavating a latrine in the Podwalu suburb of Gdansk, Poland, discovered a 18th century dildo on Tuesday. The sex toy is eight inches long and made of high quality leather with a carved wooden tip. It is filled with bristles. This would have been a very expensive object, and its long sojourn in the low oxygen environment of the latrine has preserved the organic materials in excellent condition. Marcin Tymiński, spokesman for the Regional Office for the Protection of Monuments, noted that it was probably dropped in the toilet, either deliberately or in a tragic slippery fingers accident.

The dig has been ongoing for the past seven months. Most of the discoveries have been small items like fragments of pottery and jewelry, but they also found wooden swords and arrowheads, evidence that the site was once a fencing school. The dildo was found on the last day of excavations. It dates to the second half of the 18th century, the same period when archaeologists believe the fencing school was in operation.

These kinds of artifacts rarely survive, because they were intimate, embarrassing and kept hidden. When people were done with them, they were destroyed, not passed down through the generations. One of the archaeologists on the team recalled finding another archaeological phallus, but it was ancient and made of wood and more likely an object of cult worship. This one most definitely had a utilitarian purpose, not a religious one.

The dildo has now been removed to the Archaeological Museum of Gdansk for conservation. No decision has been made on whether or where it will go on display. You never know how museums are going to react to sexually explicit artifacts. Sometimes they put them in storage for decades and only whip them out on very special occasions; other times they sell replicas in the museum shop for £129 ($191) a pop.