Adventures in Genealogy

      It is time I write a new blog entry, 

     I have always found genealogical research fascinating. So much is written about the wealthy and powerful but I wonder about the lives of ordinary people doing their best to navigate a turbulent world with their families intact. With little to do during the pandemic, I was helping people do their own research and became obsessed with two family histories.

     One was about a father and grandfather who went missing 115 years ago near London, England. He had 5 children with his French wife and his disappearance/death left them destitute. Eventually, they were sponsored by a charity to come to Canada, specifically Montreal, where the mother had work lined up as a domestic and her three eldest children went to work immediately as well. English do gooders were trying to clean up the slums of the UK by shipping their poor to Canada and Australia to work as farm labour or servants. Inner city boys were not well suited to the work.

     I did a deep, depressing dive into poor houses and charities trying to find this family in hopes it would reveal what had happened to the father. Were they abandoned? Did he die? Why couldn't I find a death record? Was he in jail? I had heard of the Home Children, after all 'Anne of Green Gables' was one. Anne was fiction and while some of the children found good homes, others went to abusive homes and were beaten to death and buried in some back field or raped. No one ever vetted the homes or checked up on the kids after they were placed. The poor houses were not any better.  It was a long look into how awful human beings can be to each other.

     While researching the other tree of which I will say more in another entry, I discovered how easy it was to change own's name and simply disappear in 1908. Nobody had identity papers, not even for foreign travel. You could just move to a new city or country and use a different name, lots of men abandoned their families in this way. There was a column in the newspapers of just men who had run away and were being sought by police for this reason.  I mention this because in the end, that is what he had done.

     The subject had been taboo in the family. There were rifts between siblings and cousins over the question of what had happened. You were not allowed to ask. The woman whom I was helping was in her 80's and she just wanted to know. Her father died without knowing what had happened to his father. The elder three came to Canada first with their mother, leaving him and his younger sister behind in the care of a charity, the name of which I never discovered. He was seven and his little sister was five when their turn came to cross the Atlantic alone on a ship. It is incredible to think of in this day but equally incredible that Margaret's grandmother held her family together and never allowed any charity to separate them.

     The grandfather was a telegraph operator who married his French wife in Tehran while working for Reuters in the 1890's. I would guess he met her while travelling to Persia for his new job. Their first two babies died of some unfamiliar illness so she moved back to France for the third pregnancy. The boy survived and eventually dad came back and they all moved to London and had four more children.  Telegraph operator was a skilled profession and the practitioners made a decent wage. It was not likely that poverty lead him to leave.

     I searched for months. It looked hopeless. I had found a fellow researcher online who shared his research with me. He was married to Margaret's cousin.  His father in law had really wanted closure, like Margaret's father, but had passed away without them ever discovering what happened. I became obsessed. There wasn't much to do during the pandemic and the few resources I could have accessed in the real world were closed. Many nights I would just put quotation marks around the man's name on google search and press enter. I got different results every time for some reason.  And then one Sunday night at 11:30, I decided to it was time to go to bed and I did a random search but this time a marriage record in Newcastle on Tyne came up. I decided to click on the link. Looked like him. I sent the link to a friend who I knew was still up and said that I think I found him. She looked and agreed. I didn't want to wake up Margaret for something I wasn't certain about so I waited but I could not sleep that night. Could it be after all these years? My other friend was awake all night too.

     I messaged Margaret in the morning but I also messaged her cousin's husband. Had he ever seen this record before? His response was "I think you found him". Anyway after that with that lead, we both tried to fill in everything we could and found his death record as well. He ran off and married another woman in Newcastle after his family had moved to Canada. Incredibly, he committed bigamy in his real name but then so did the other woman. They had one son together who never married or had children that we could discover. He was never included in the census after he ran off, making himself harder to find.

     Margaret did the dna test to see what would come up but no surprise relatives showed up. The only surprise really was that ancestry dna never uncovered anyone who was related to her through her grandfather's family. Her great grandparents got married after they had been together for about 20 years and five children of which only two seemed to make it to adulthood. I was never sure.  Grandfather's oldest brother was almost an adult when he disappears from the record and there is a long gap before more children were born. Eventually great grandfather died in a work accident and great grandmother died from alcohol. Grandfather and one brother were taken in by a cousin on their mother's side.

     My thoughts are that great grandfather was not actually grandfather's biological father. I think he was in prison for a while although I couldn't find any record of that. The baptism records for the children of that 'marriage' were recorded as legitimate by the Catholic priests who baptized them so the couple had no problems lying to the priest. Their only daughter was born in an Anglican poorhouse and baptized there. She did not live very long so it was probably just as well.

     Although I found where he had gotten to, I never figured out the why. I don't know when he met his second wife or where. He was living in London when he disappeared and she was in Newcastle. I think the reticence to speak about the past in the older generation came from the shame of being in the poorhouse or at the mercy of charities. People who found themselves in those circumstances  were treated as though they deserved the poverty since they were inferior beings. It was all so necessary.

A Rabbit Hole

      Once in a while, I have need of reading historical newspapers for some research project or other. I enjoy it but it is time consuming. Not just because the difficulty of finding the information sought but because I become distracted by some of the news articles I spot as I am scanning pages.

     Like this one, from the North Devon Journal, published on Thursday 12 May 1853; "May 10th-(Before the May and Robert Budd, Esq.)-Eliza Boatfield, a prostitute with a wooden leg, was charged by Policeman Chanter with using obscene and abusive language in Joy-Street, on the preceding night.-Committed for 14 days." I think most people would be curious about a one legged prostitute but the fact that she worked on Joy Street and not delivering was mildly amusing too. So then, I became curious about Eliza. Who was she? How did she lose her leg? What happened to her when she got out of jail?

     Unless the archives in Devonshire or in the Barnstaple area have more information, from Canada I was only able to fill in her story a tiny bit. I do know what happened to her leg from another article in the Exeter Flying Post, published on Thursday 24 January 1850. A young woman of 19 was operated on at the Torrington Union workhouse. The operation was noteworthy because it was accomplished while the patient was sedated with chloroform. It was Eliza Boatfield, who had been living in the South Molton Union workhouse and had been suffering from an unspecified disease for 9 months. She was brought to the workhouse in a very emaciated state, where because of the extensive disease (again unspecified) in her leg, the medical officers deemed it necessary to remove the limb above the knee joint. Everyone was pleased with the success of the operation. Eliza of course was not given an opportunity to say what she thought.

      Now I feel really bad for Eliza because she is at such a young age alone and living in one of those awful workhouses and her leg has been cut off. How can she support herself? Clearly we know it did not have a happy ending but how did this begin even? I could not find a baptism record for Eliza although I found her on the 1851 census living in the South Molton workhouse. She said she was born in High Bickington where there are numerous Boatfields. Without a birth register I cannot figure out who her parents were but I believe she lost them at a young age. There are three or four Eliza Boatfields from that part of Devon, born within 10 years of each other but I believe our Eliza is the 9 year old who, in the 1841 census was living at a farmhouse working as a servant. 

     Poor Eliza. I was unable to find out what happened after her arrest on Joy Street. There was an Eliza Boatfield who was married in 1857 in Barnstaple but without knowing more about her I can't say for sure which Eliza Boatfield it is but I feel it is her. I am sure a one legged former (or not so former) prostitute who has a criminal record would not be marrying a great guy but I hope he was a decent guy. 

     And while trying to find out about Eliza, I came across a John Bawdon, who was in the same workhouse, referred to by the newspaper as the notorious John Bawdon, and who was thrown in jail because he refused to do his workhouse chores. I kinda like the sound of this Mr. Bawdon and I wonder why he was so 'notorious'. Truly, reading old newspapers is like taking a long trip down a rabbit hole

A thoroughly modern fable

 With all the issues in the world and lack of trust in news media in view, I was having a conversation recently with my son and I told him a story. It went like this:

Once upon a time, there was a man. His name was Walter Cronkite and he was called 'the most trusted man in America' and it was true. He earned that name, people trusted him. He was the most trusted man in America and he was a journalist.

That was the punchline. My son thought I was being funny but it is a true story. There was a time when people trusted the news. Imagine that.

Thoughts While Sitting at Home Bored.

      In the early days of quarantine, I thought it might be fun to reread Camus' The Plague and compare the global pandemic to what they experienced. I reread the book but got sucked into a lethargic rut. Many of the emotions in the book and today's reality are similar with several distinctions. The first, covid-19 is not as deadly as pneumonic plague or as easily transmitted. Secondly, there was no point in trying to escape since there is no place to go to. Ah well, here's hoping there will be a return to some kind of sanity soon.

Fahrenheit 451

     I noticed Fahrenheit 451 had been made into a tv movie and, as I was cruising by, I watched it for a few minutes. The story did not resemble the book but it had been a long time since I have read it so it was time to take it off the shelf. A nuclear war breaks out at the end of the novel which fits in well with my recent apocalyptic theme. 
     Considering how crazy politics and the discussion have gotten lately, I am amazed to see that Ray Bradbury spotted this trend back in the early 1950's as he has Beatty tell the disillusioned fireman Montag,

     "Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!

     Indeed. I think we are getting to the book burning stage. The younger generation is very comfortable with censorship.

     Having reread the book now. I can see that the HBO movie re-interprets the story in a very politically correct way. I will not compare the two since I did not watch the entire movie but there is an orthodoxy and it appears to be crime these days to disagree with all or part of the political narrative. A book on censorship was censored. 

     Somebody once suggested to me that Huxley's A Brave New World is the logical future of the society in the novel if that society was not obliterated by nuclear war.

The story opened with the glory and beauty of a large fire consuming a house and the books inside. Guy Montag was a happy fireman, or at least he thought he was happy until he met a teenage girl on his walk home from work and she made him realize that there is something missing in his life: human connection. He arrives home from his conversation with the teenaged sprite and finds his wife has committed suicide. After calling the emergency number, a non-medical crew shows up with a gadget that sucks the prescription pills out of suicides like Mildred since there are so many now. While the crew is working on Mildred, Montag could hear Clarisse and her family warmly talking on their porch and laughing. The emptiness of his life hits him even harder. 

     In the morning, Mildred wakes up and carries on as if nothing has happened. Most houses are equipped with large tv screens that take up the entire wall. There are no movies or dramas on those screens, just live action that seems to be quite a bit like reality tv. Viewers get to vote on things and can interact with characters on the screen. Mildred won the chance to speak a line on one of those programs by sending in boxtops. Except that the screens are so very large, one could be talking about social media, video games and the whole internet. 
     Montag returns to work but he is no longer the same man. The Hound, a cruel parody of the Dalmatian that fire halls used to keep as a mascot, 'senses' the change in him and begins to threaten him. Radio and television news occasionally break in with some statement about a looming war. For the next seven days, Clarisse would walk to the subway or to home with him, chattering away and then she was gone. 
     While Montage is processing the changes in himself, the firemen are sent to the house of  an old woman with a library full of books. Rather than run, she quotes Hugh Latimer, a Protestant martyr, executed in the time of Mary I. Latimer was an Oxford don who was executed for translating the Bible into English so that anyone could read it. The quote  recited by the old woman tells Latimer's co-conspirator to be of courage, that they would, with this burning (execution for heresy), light a candle that he hoped would never be put out. That candle would be knowledge. The statement is full of irony that the old lady's house and books and their knowledge are about to be extinguished by fire. Rather than go to the insane asylum, the old lady lights a match and sets herself on fire. With Montag's already fragile mental state, he is horror-struck and goes home and weeps. But he stole a book from the house and subsequent events show he has stolen books before. 
      The station captain came to visit Montag and talk to him about books and how the burning got started. It really was not necessary to burn the books, ordinary people, we, by complaining about being offended got rid of them ourselves. Considering the 'safe spaces', protests against professors who challenge the current narrative, politicians who deny scientific consensus on the basis of their feelings, one can hear Beatty say to Montag,  "the word intellectual became the dirty word it deserved to be".( A few months back there was a kerfuffle between Margaret Atwood and some Me Too activists. Atwood was pleading for due process and the rule of law while the activists accused her of being unorthodox. )
     Montag finds out that Clarisse was killed by a 'hit and run' and his rejection of social norms is cemented. He remembered an English professor he met once and goes to the man's house looking for help in exploring his new knowledge and processing it. Beatty has given him a deadline to get rid of the books. After the deadline passes and Montag screams in rage at his wife and her friends, he becomes a fugitive from the law. His house is burned, he burns Beatty and the Hound is set to track him down and kill him. He eludes capture but, because the hunt is broadcast live and the government must be seen as capable, the Hound is sent to kill a poor random man who is out taking a walk. 
      Montag escapes from the city and follows the railroad tracks to a transient community that tries to keep the books alive by memorizing their contents. While he is talking to those men, a nuclear strike hits the city and the decision is made to return to the city to help the survivors. 
      So how well did Bradbury foretell the future? Well, we are not burning books yet although some have been banned and offended minorities threaten Shakespeare and Mark Twain from time to time. Contests, diversions, people addicted to technology, a mental ill health epidemic are here now.  Bread and circuses to distract the mob from the war that is a constant backdrop. There are very few, if any years, where there has not been some war or other since 1900. As the bombers fly over Montag's house, he states there have been two atomic wars since 1990.  That has not happened but as more countries join the nuclear club, it is but a matter of time. 
      Montag also comments that they are so rich in the U.S. and the rest of the world is so poor and that may be why the world hates them. Partly true and good of him to admit not everyone loves 'America" the country. I have met many wonderful Americans but I would also say the American government's interference in the internal politics of so many sovereign nations is a bigger part of why they are hated.
         -Presidents are elected for their presence on tv, that has happened. Looks are not so important in U.S. politics but has played a part in Canadian elections, i.e. Robert Stanfield vs. Trudeau the elder. 
      - parents don't parent anymore, just shove their kids in front of a screen and leave them.
     -Bradbury did not foresee the growing income inequality. none of the science fiction writers did. Most imagined shorter work days with guaranteed income not longer days and insecure work or outsourcing. Not being greedy themselves, they underestimate the greed of others. 
    - the war began and ended in an instant. Thanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles, it is no longer necessary for jets to zoom overhead and drop the bombs. However, we will have the godawfulness of the warning to take cover while they are on their way. Once it turns nuclear, it would not last long. I do not think there would have been a third nuclear war like in the novel. 
     - the description of the blast is not realistic. There would be a light but those looking at it would likely be blinded. The city would be vaporized not lifted up in the air to crash back down. There would be a wind, a shock wave, knocking trees, buildings, men down, but it would come with heat and no one would want to walk back to the city to help survivors as there is not likely to be any and the radiation would kill the helpers. Montag and the other survivors are close enough to the city to be burned in the ensuing fires. 
     -The survivors would not need these men and their books. There will be famine and there will be disease, homelessness, cold and other manner of suffering. Novels will be of no use in such a world for a long time after. 
      -the reason for the war is never given. The public is kept in the dark as to what the government is doing, who they are at war with and why.   We are not so blind yet, but we could be. 
     -Bradbury does not try hard to imagine what life would be like after a nuclear war, the apocalypse is really the catastrophic event that it would take to change the current course of humanity. 
    

On The Beach

     Published in 1957, 'On the Beach' was one of the first novels to try to imagine and portray the aftermath of a global nuclear conflict. The bleakness of the future of the survivors near Melbourne, Australia as the deadly cloud of radioactive fallout makes its way from the Northern Hemisphere to eventually blanket the southern had such an emotional impact on readers that it gave rise to the  disarmament movement. Two years after it was published Stanley Kramer made a film of it and the message of the book reached a wider audience. Here is a great article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the film version.
     The book opens with a line from T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' - "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper". Eliot's poem has been written about many times and was hugely influential. The last lines of the poem have been connected to nuclear war thanks to Shute's book. The hollow men are dead, the people in Shute's novel are the walking dead, except unlike Rick Grimes' little tribe battling zombies in their own peculiar dystopia, Shute's characters don't get to live once they do what they have to do.
     There were a few things in the novel that bothered me, Commander Towers always addressed Moira Davidson by the term 'Honey' even though he was scrupulously faithful to his dead wife in the novel. It was just irritating and betrays an emotional detachment. Did he not remember her name most of the time? For two people sharing their last moments on earth together and presumably like each other very much, the banal conversation and pleasantries make, what should be an emotional and deeply involved relationship, into one of Austen's comedies of manners. The subtext was always deadly serious in Austen too, but here the epithet is annoying and patronizing.
     The novel also follows Peter and Mary Holmes , a young couple with an infant daughter. What are held to be some of the most emotional scenes from the book and film involve the fate of this child. Peter instructs his unwilling wife on how to inject their child with a government provided poison to end people's lives so they do not have to die of radiation sickness, if the cloud reaches them while he is away. At the end of the book the little girl, named Jennifer, is gravely ill and Peter gives her the injection after which he and his wife take the pills and end their lives. It irritates me a little that the little girl is referred to most of the time as "the baby" and "it". If Shute wanted to elicit an emotional response, he should have written her name more often and referred to her as the Holmes' daughter and make her a breathing human being rather than the doll that Mary Holmes fusses over continually to pass the time.
      Shute got the science wrong. Even in 1957, it was clear that radiation would begin to decay almost immediately and having it dispersed around the entire globe would reduce its power as well. Shute researched his subject and had the radiation grow and increase in intensity as it was being distributed around the globe by making the bombs 'dirty' or cobalt bombs. The science even then did not really back up that contention and accidents like Chernobyl have proved radiation decays faster than we thought and life is more resilient too.
     Shute's nuclear blasts destroyed life without destroying property. The last submarine roaming the world looked through its periscope at cities that were intact only the people were gone. He also claimed that certain mammals like cats and rabbits were more resilient than humans. Not likely and they will not inherit the earth, insects and grass were all that would remain wrote Jonathan Schell in the Fate of the Earth.
     I find the stoicism of the population unbelievable too. When there is no future, the old rules don't apply anymore. There are people in the novel who continued to go to work in cafes and stores right up to the end. Why would people not just leave the doors open and not bother to charge customers for purchases? There was a butler at the men's club who showed up to serve drinks even when the radiation reached Melbourne and the sickness was beginning to be felt. People don't freak out, there is no rash of murders or riots. Everyone accepts their fate, except those that continue to plan gardens and home improvements and talk about the next year as if there would be one. I agree with Kramer who had Dwight Tower consummate his relationship with Moira. His wife and children were dead after all and soon he would be too. Why would a man not take some comfort where he can?
     Shute took the lazy way out, he did not try to predict who would take the first shot or why. The Australians seem to be in the dark about how it happened. It was a mistake or some kind of misunderstanding. The novel's scientist Julian Osborne surmises the first bomb was launched by Albania against Italy. Then someone dropped a bomb on Tel Aviv. The Brits and Americans suspected the Egyptians and made military flights over Egyptian territory, without firing a shot. The Egyptians then sent out all the bombs they had six to Washington and seven to London. The bombers they used were Russian made so the Russians were bombed. With the leading statesmen of most countries dead, decision making devolved down to very junior military leaders and the Chinese released their ICBM to support Russia. The final verdict was that it was not the superpowers that started the nuclear conflict, it was the little ones, "the Irresponsibles".
     Albania was a communist state and officially atheist in 1957, although it was occupied by Italy during WWII there was no reason for there to be hostilities between Italy and Albania. An early strike on Tel Aviv is plausible enough, Israel has so many enemies, from there it gets more unlikely especially as neither Albania nor Egypt have nuclear capability. Shute did not anticipate North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
      It was an important book but it was a long and dull read as nothing happens. People go about their lives and pass the time with stiff upper lips until they have to die. And then they do.
     

Swan Song

     Carrying on my quest to see which science fiction writers got closer to predicting the end of the world, while the threat of another catastrophic war hangs over the world. I see some writers still hope that King Arthur is still sleeping in a hill somewhere and will rise up and smite our enemies. Or Jesus. Wittekind. Siegfried. Someone. Aliens. Anyone?
     It might not be fair to call Swan Song a science fiction novel since it is labelled 'fiction' or 'horror' but I think of any novel about a post-nuclear world as 'science fiction'. It may be easily called fantasy since the main character Sue Wanda (Swan) has magical powers as does Sister who is looking for her. One can infer from this that women will be the agents (as givers of life) that will regenerate the devastated world. The character of the man with the scarlet eye is too easily identified with the devil, especially with the flies that come out of his mouth, but this is not the Christian world of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Swan can only be a Gaia figure with Josh and Robin as her Corn Kings. One cannot regenerate the world without one's male counterpart. This makes the man with the scarlet eye something far more primordial than Lucifer. Tolkien's Sauron leaps to mind with a description like that especially knowing that Tolkien based his novels on older heathen tales.
     There is always the assumption that there will be people who will want more than everybody else and will use violence to assert themselves. In a post apocalyptic world, survival will depend so much on mutual co-operation, I would think or hope that violent despots (the Negans of the world) would not arise so quickly. Some people would survive who are authority figures and people would rally around them as we are accustomed now to a certain social structure. One problem with any post apocalyptic world, is most authors ignore the fact that gasoline has a shelf life. In a world like The Walking Dead or Swan Song, people would not be driving around two years later, if only for the reason that the gasoline would not be useable anymore. So large scale movements like in Swan Song with tanks and trucks would not be possible or the type of battles that the Army of Excellence engages in to feed its members. Trebuchet, anyone?
    The book was published in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down, but even then the Soviet Union was coming apart and the Cold War was winding down. It seems too easy to blame tensions between the U.S. and Russia for the use of nuclear weapons; especially when one considers nuclear proliferation and the ideologies that some nuclear countries subscribe to. Even in '87 North Korea was a problem and the world had seen the rise of radical Islam. Globalization has contributed a great deal to social and political instability, income inequality and mass migration. Few authors predicted this; perhaps science fiction(or fantasy) writers tend to be conservative in their views. With the exception of labour unions, few wanted to go against the free trade mantra. Nobody predicted a president like Donald Trump. And, there can be no mistake, someone like Trump was elected because large numbers of the American electorate have been disenfranchised and voted this way in protest.  Will he cause the end of the world? Hard to say. I still think we have a ways to go - 2020, if Professor Turchin's cliodynamics are reliable.
       So what did McCammon get right? I do not think you can approach the novel this way. It is very doubtful that this was intended as a predictor of the future. It seems rather that it is monomyth of the hero's quest in a modern setting and with female heroines.


Next up is Nevil Shute's On the Beach.

The Speculated Aftermath of Global Nuclear War

     I could go on about literary allusions in 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' which would be fun but I want to discuss his predictions about our future. While I was growing up, the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over us all. The nukes are still here but the powers that held them seemed to realize that there was no winning a nuclear engagement. So the Iron Curtain fell, Russia became if, not an ally, no longer our enemy.
     Part of the reason for nuclear pacts between Russia and the U.S. was due to the emotional impact of a 'made for television' film called "The Day After" made by Nicholas Meyer. Meyer had the idea of showing in as realistic way as possible what the aftermath of a nuclear war would look like. It appears from articles written about the production that he faced an uphill battle in showing the best guesses with no embellishment of any kind. It aired on ABC on November 20, 1983 to the largest audience a movie ever had. Its record stands. I was one of the audience that day.
     Walter Miller started his story six hundred years after the war with few snippets of information of what took place to devastate the planet. The reason for the 'flame deluge' is not given except that the Church taught that pride lead to world leaders ignoring their wise men and using the weapons given to them that were to guarantee lasting peace. Miller states the war ended within weeks or days. The film would give it but less than one day. Cities became puddles of glass, surrounded by vast acreages of broken stone. The strikes killed all life human, animal, fish and avian near the cities. Fallout killed large numbers of the rest. The few survivors roamed in search of safe places to live. In the years following, there was plague, hunger and madness and then came the Simplification, in which anyone who had any kind of learning was blamed for the bombs and killed.
     Meyer's film deals with the immediate aftermath of the war. He created a number of characters near a small city, Kansas City, and a possible prelude to war is reported in the background on radio and television as these characters go about their lives. Twenty-five years separate the creation of the two stories. The film is an accurate snapshot of a point in time six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It does not try to predict the future, it attempted to show what would happen if war broke out that year. For those of us following today's news, the U.S. mobilizations near the border of Russia and the invasion of Germany give one that sense of deja vu. The U.S. claims to hold the moral high ground and that it holds the right to police the rest of the world's nuclear ambitions and yet it is the only country to have used a bomb against a civilian population.
     Unlike Miller, Meyer knew the strikes would not just target large urban centers; they would also target military installations like missile silos, which were located in remote rural locations, so the devastation would be total. Meyer follows a few survivors as they bury their dead and slowly one by one succumb to radiation sickness.  The last scene is of one of the women giving birth in a clinic with no doctor and her scream at the sight of her child, who is not shown. It is a chilling for those who saw the intercontinental missiles leave and knowing they had 30 minutes at most before the response came. A professor rigs up a geiger counter and listens as the numbers climb, "Here it comes", he says.
    Miller felt that the radiation would cause many children born in the aftermath to be mutants and monsters. The aftermath of the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not show this to be the case. There was a slight increase in some defects but no two headed or otherwise deformed children were born. Agent Orange, a tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, used as a defoliation agent in the Vietnam War created worse defects in the offspring of those exposed to it.
     Meyer, too, felt that the radiactive fallout would doom people to a short life and a death by cancer although the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived full lives and experienced only a slightly higher level of cancer. Of course the entire surface of the world had not been carpeted with bombs, nor is it to be expected that the entire world surface would be destroyed. Some countries will not be targets.
    In 1982, Jonathen Schell published The Fate of the Earth, a look at nuclear war and its aftermath. He began by explaining the science behind nuclear fission, and the destructive effects of a bomb which, unlike a conventional explosive, has many. At the moment of explosion, the heat would be as hot as the stars and the pressure many times that of the atmosphere. Immediately radiation, i.e. gamma rays, would stream out as an electromagnetic pulse. Above the earth, this pulse would have the effect of knocking out electrical equipment by inducing a huge surge of voltage but that has never been tested. When fusion and fission have worn themselves out, a fireball takes shape. It absorbs xrays from the environment as it grows which then radiates back into the environment as a thermal pulse, a wave of blinding light and intense heat. This lasts about ten seconds and as it expands it emits a blast wave in all directions, flattening all but the strongest buildings and condensing air from the surrounding environment to create the mushroom cloud. A crater would be formed and the dust and dirt would mix in with the cloud. This dust and dirt is what will be the fallout as it returns to earth. Then there are the secondary effects on society and the environment which Schell (and Miller) thought might be even more destructive. There is also delayed worldwide fallout, the lofting of tons of debris from earth into the atmosphere and a resulting nuclear winter, and the third longterm effect would be the destruction of the ozone layer. He felt the primary concern was not how many people would die in the initial blast but if the ecosphere, particularly the ozone layer, could survive. He admitted to the true results not being known; it would still be better to speculate than to find out by experience.
     He went on to describe first hand accounts from survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the added info that the bombs did not touch the ground so very little dirt mixed into the cloud and the fallout was thereby minimal. Schell predicted that much of the U.S. would become a republic of grass and insects as these would survive the high doses of radiation. For most of life, he states a nuclear war would be a global extinction event.
      So the questions for most are - would there be any survivors and would that life be worth having and there is no answer for those.
     Ironically in the film, a pastor thanks God for destroying the destroyers of the earth. The president undaunted, releases a broadcast stating there had been no surrender, no retreat from principals of freedom and democracy. At a meeting of farmers discussing a government pamphlet to reconstruction generates some anger at the incongruities of the information but the film maker does not speculate if there would be a later backlash against science. One suspects people will be too desperate for medical aid and other comforts to want to destroy what little is left. 

Review - A Canticle For Leibowitz

     I cannot believe I never heard of this book before a couple of days ago. It is brilliant. I don't even understand the criticism that the part in the middle Fiat Lux is plodding.
    The book is divided into three sections, Fiat Homo (Let there be man), Fiat Lux (Let there be light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Let your will be done).
     Fiat Homo is about a small monastery in a desert dedicated to a holy man, amusingly the Jewish Isaac Leibowitz, who had been an engineer at Los Alamos and who had attempted to save as much of science and books as he could before he was murdered by mob bent on ridding the world of the people who made the nuclear war possible. Indeed, a backlash against any scholar ensues and anyone who is literate is killed. The story begins with Brother Francis who is making his lonely vigil in the desert, fasting and meditating for the forty days of Lent, 600 years after the war. A pilgrim appears who, as time passes, becomes more apparently Isaac Leibowitz himself, raised up from the dead by God and doomed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. He remains near the shrine that honors his memorabilia (or relics) and occasionally interacts with the inhabitants of the monastery who maintain the shrine. The shrine was erected where he had been burned alive.
     Due to the intercession of the soon to be sainted Leibowitz, Brother Francis finds his vocation but also discovers a fallout shelter that proves the existence of Leibowitz and contains more of his writings as well as the remains of his wife. The process of canonization takes years and when it is completed Francis is sent alone to New Rome as his reward for creating a beautiful illuminated parchment as well as having been the witness to the saint's miracles. On his way to Rome, he is accosted by thieves who steal his parchment and on his way home, he is accosted by cannibals who steal his life. What remains of him is buried by the saint.
     Fiat Lux takes place 600 years after the canonization of Leibowitz. The world is experiencing an industrial revolution of sorts or renaissance. Humans have progressed to the point where technology is possible and the 'memorabilia' that the monastery has guarded and reproduced is now desired by the secularists who would built a new empire and, being illiterate and untutored, cannot benefit from the examples of the past. Leibowitz makes an appearance as an old hermit Benjamin. A mysterious one eyed Poet lives at the monastery. His name is unknown, he is a wanderer and non religious. Interestingly he considers his eye to be his conscience and claims it helps him to 'see' things that are hidden. These are attributes of Odin and one has to wonder if Miller intended him to be the god. If Leibowitz can wander the earth for 1800 years, why not Odin too? The Poet can see that the visiting scholar, who is a scion of the ruling dynasty of Texarkana, and the officers that accompany him are a danger to the monastery and its mission and leaves to avoid sharing the fate of the Brothers.  The fate of the monastery is not openly stated however, the Poet sees warriors in pursuit of refugees which includes three clergymen. The leader who wants to unite the continent under his own rule, pens a letter to Rome that is not dissimilar to one Henry VIII penned when he broke away from the Church over its' refusal to grant him a divorce. The dissolution of the monasteries and seizure of their treasures followed. At first not wanting to be involved but merely observe, the Poet assaults their leader who is hacking at a defenseless woman with a blunt sword. He is shot and dies contemplating the cavalry officer to whom he delivered last rites and a blow.
     Fiat Voluntas Tua takes place 600 years after the death of the Poet. The passage of time has made him a holy man like Francis and his bawdy poems are included in the sacred writings preserved at the monastery which still maintains its mission after 1800 years but the world is threatened by nuclear war once again. The Church has made provision for the continuation of faith by building a rocket and manning it with a priest, several brothers of the Order of St. Leibowitz, some bishops to consecrate new priest and some women and children. The one priest who will minister during the trip was chosen from the monastery, Brother Joshua. Joshua is one of the earthly names of the Son, an Anglicization of Jesus. Small wonder that Leibowitz, having come to the monastery as the rumblings of catastrophe have reached him, is struck by a rock thrown in the dark by Joshua at what he thinks is something slithering towards him. Leibowitz, having finally met the new Messiah, is inadvertently killed by him. Joshua has no idea what he had done but the author could have chosen many sounds to frighten Joshua and slither would be the sound of the devil. Get thee behind me Satan. Joshua and the chosen survivors leave for Rome and cast off just as the nuclear bombs proceed to extinguish all life on earth. It is left for the abbott to be the witness of the end of days, something that is the duty of all Catholic clergy - to serve as witness for the community and to keep its records.
      Walter M. Miller Jr. chose not to write a postscript to tell how successful the trip to the stars was. It is a bleak and yet humorous look at human history and speculate from the mistakes of the past that the future will include those same mistakes. The main difference will be the scale of those mistakes. One can laugh or cry about it. Miller does both. 

Looking To The Future

     I have always enjoyed reading Science Fiction. My undergraduate alma mater carried a course on Science Fiction (which is often sneered at in literary circles as not really literature).  The head of the English department was looking at my transcript once and noted the course with surprise and delight. Surprise, most likely, because I was planning to major in Medieval Studies, and delight, it seems, because it was an attempt at embracing alternative forms of literature and I was willing to embrace it. The course did not last very long. It did introduce me to some new writers and new visions of what the future holds for humanity. Science Fiction writers are not just about big breasted alien princess and conquest, they have always considered the future  and social advancement which never seems very bright.
     So, I am considering some of the many dystopian novels I have read and what they got right and what they got wrong. First off, most novelists in the more distant past expected life to look more like the Jetsons by this point in time and second, nobody anticipated the rise of radical Islam and the effects of massive migration to the West on the West or the huge income inequality now present in the West.
     The first book that leaps to my mind is Kurt Vonnegut's 'Player Piano'. In the novel, Vonnegut accurately predicts that automation would make the productivity of the worker rise to a point that one engineer can run a whole factory of robots. He made the mistake of thinking the educated men of the executive class would realize that, without a middle class and disposable income, the consumer society is not possible. He thought the CEO's of the world would provide some means of income for people so that there would be a market for their products. He was wrong but Vonnegut, being a good man, could not anticipate how greedy and short sighted educated humans could be. The novel ends with a revolution and the machines being smashed but also with people failing to learn and the effort to rebuild society without replacing it with a better model begins immediately after the destruction. He did consider the flight of capital to third worlds in his other novel, 'Cat's Cradle', but failed to consider its logical conclusion since the world is destroyed by science's lack of ethics. A brilliant scientist created a new way for ice to stack itself and, without considering if it should be done, set about amusing himself with figuring how if it could be done. His children unwittingly unleashed this horror on the world with stupid self interest. They were not terrible people but, like many, figured their one little thing that would make their life better would not have a huge impact on the world. It did. In an uncontrolled chain reaction after Ice-Nine fell into the ocean, everything froze and nearly obliterated all life on earth, human and animal. The handful of survivors would struggle to go on emotionally after such a catastrophe. This puts one to mind of the first attempt to split the atom; the scientists who did so were not certain they could contain the reaction and that the entire fabric of the universe would not unravel but they went ahead and did it anyway.
     The second book that leaps to mind is Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World'. In it, individual freedoms vanish in exchange for security of home, job and place in society. Technology replaces the family and people take drugs to keep happy. Nobody suffers but nobody creates or loves or looks up at the stars and wonders. Crime and poverty are nonexistant but the life created by this planned society is not worth living. We see this world through the eyes of John, the outsider, created inadvertently by two members of this social order. He is raised on a free reservation but without being accepted as a member of that social group. Having been raised on reading Shakespeare, he is disappointed with the community that is organized but lacks intellectual or artistic enquiry and which his mother represented to him as a utopia. The leader of Western Europe declines to exile John to one of the islands where misfits live out their days. He is fascinated that John wants the right to be unhappy and wants to watch him a little longer. The experiment ends with John's suicide since he cannot assimilate into society and any means of finding an alternative community is denied him. Interestingly, Huxley's named the leader of Western Europe, Mustapha Ford, after the pioneer of the assembly line and the leader of Turkey who was leading that country into secularism not because he anticipated the later migration patterns but it was remarkably prescient. So Huxley's worry was that we would dumbed down so much that we would stop reading and thinking. Looking at millennials, that may be the case.
     He also deemed, accurately that we are social animals and need some sense of belonging somewhere, even if occasionally unhappy, in order for life to be liveable. This is the conclusion, Erich Fromm came to in his 'Escape From Freedom', in which he, as a psychologist, looks at historical forces to explain why people, having achieved democracy, would elect a dictator. He wrote that book in the 1930's in response to the rise of fascism across Europe but also accurately could see that 'monopolistic capitalism' was already then a danger to social equality and thought that unions had the potential give people the community and support they need. Churches should have been that force in people's lives but organized church is generally perceived by authors (and myself)  as being a tool to preserve the privileges and position of the moneyed classes. Huxley accurately predicted reproductive technology and but, like Vonnegut, failed to take into account the greed of the upper classes, their hatred of people outside their class, and their unwillingness to provide for people. Fromm was not trying to predict the future, his book was the backward glance.
     The fourth book has to be George Orwell's '1984'. The year came and went and people felt a sense of relief that Big Brother did not materialize but they were wrong. The rise of radical Islam has given governments new powers to suspend individual freedoms and privacy so that they can prevent terror attacks. The west has been in an almost constant state of war for decades. One premise of Orwell's book was the the government would artificially keep the country at war, although the enemies of the state kept inexplicably shifting, because social equality has to take a backseat in times of crisis. They ensure the crisis never ends and the need for surveillance never ends. The amusing thing is Orwell thought the danger came from Communism but it was unregulated markets that created the oligarchy with the means to effectively protect their hegemony although, I doubt they thoroughly considered the social instability that is arising from their policies. Again, underestimating the greed of the upper classes and overestimating man's altruism. To be fair, none of these have considered the huge growth of population and its impact on the environment or social stability and or the increasingly large numbers of refugees and the impact this is having world-wide. They anticipated war but it seems they assumed these wars would be imaginary and without consequences.
     There are so many novels. In my next post, I will consider some others.

Porro Omnes Fulgemus

It has been a while since I have done anything in Latin so I have decided it was time for a 'Beatles' song translated. I heard this on the radio yesterday and wondered how it would sound it Latin (as one does). Did my best. Modern colloquial English does not translate well into Classical Latin.
Answer will be in the column on the right.

Porro omnes fulgemus

Statim Erinyes te puniturae sunt,

In caputem te sic percussurae sunt,

te ipsum ordinare moneris

Mox morieris

Mehercule, quid est quod putatis

Ridens Amor praesens,

Mehercule, quid est quod tempatis,

Est solus tu faciens.

Statim Erinyes te puniturae sunt,

In facies aspecturae sunt

Ocelle, te ipsum ordinare moneris,

Res humanae coniungaris,

Mehercule, quomodo videbis

Ridens ad stultam per se me?

Di Immortales, quis te aestimas esse?

Astram Praeclarum?

Hem, rectus est!

Sic omnes porro fulgemus

Instar luna et astra et sol

Sic omnes porro fulgemus

Agite Omne!

Statim Erinyes te puniturae sunt,

ab  pedibus perculsurae sunt.

noscere fratros tui moneris

Omnes convenis.

Di Immortales, cur hic sunt?

Certene vivere in dolore et metu?

Di Immortales, cur ibi es

Ut ubique es?

Age! Portionem nanciscere!

The First Execution by Electrocution

     I am distracted by articles completely unrelated to my research subject when I am poking through old newspapers, like the headline in the August 14, 1890 Barrie Examiner which caught my eye "Execution by Electricity". It would appear as though the first execution by these means was not a success, the editor declines to describe the details of what went wrong but simply states they are sickening and harrowing. Even the inventor of the process, who had gone through a competitive bidding war against George Westinghouse to obtain the contract, Thomas Edison agreed that the work was 'sadly' blundered. One can only imagine how awful it was.
     The editor of the Medical Record of New York and eyewitness to the execution, Dr. Shrady is quoted as saying if this system was generally adopted with the same problems, the public would soon demand an end to capital punishment. Westinghouse was later widely quoted as saying "It could have been done better with an ax."
      The unfortunate, who was dispatched in such a disgusting fashion, was William Kemmler from Buffalo, New York. He was convicted of murdering his girlfriend Mrs. Tillie Ziegler. They were both married to others but had abandoned these relationships and were living together. Kemmler had a jealous disposition and beat Tillie to death in a drunken rage.
      The Aberdeen Evening Express had no qualms about giving greater details on the execution. Kemmler had to be strapped in, a long and fiddly process but he managed to remain calm. The first blast of current failed to kill him and, as he was appearing to recover consciousness, the 'dynamo' had to be restarted. On the second try, the prisoner began to drool, convulse and moan and the electricity remained on for 73 seconds or four and a half minutes (depending on which account you read) of awful, while a vapour emerged from the top of the head and the room filled with a stench of burning flesh.
     The botched execution of Eduard Delacroix scene in The Green Mile film is very close to how this execution ran. Newspapers widely predicted that this form of execution would be swiftly abandoned. They were wrong.

Ravens and Ash

It has been a while since I translated a story from the Gesta Romanorum or The Deeds of the Romans.
Here is story #110 About Ash and Ravens:

     "The philosopher reads in a book about animals that if one wishes to make it so that a raven, after it has built a nest in a tree, is never able to hatch chicks from its eggs, one should place ashes of glass (?) among the trees and, while those ashes are there, the raven will not produce chicks."

One would think shards of broken glass might I don't know that ashes of burnt glass would unsettle a nesting bird.

Ned Myers and the Sinking of the Scourge

     Ned Myers was born in Quebec in c.1793, the son of a British soldier. He had no recollections of his mother and little memory of his father. When the father was sent to serve in Halifax, Ned and his sister went along. There they were abandoned. Myers did not know what became of his father except that he was re-assigned to another location and left without taking his children with him. It was assumed he had died in a battle somewhere, leaving the two children alone and without any family to care for them. They had been left with a clergyman, who continued to care for them after it seemed the father was not going to return. At the age of eleven, Myers got the urge to go to sea and ran away, without telling anyone, to join an American merchant vessel.
     James Fenimore Cooper met Myers in 1806 when Cooper had just graduated from Yale and went to sea on the same ship. It was in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, about a year after the famous Battle of Trafalgar. Ned described how ship was searched by the British looking for deserters from their navy and, when war broke out between the U.S. and Britain, Ned fought on the side of the U.S.. He joined Chauncey's fleet on Lake Ontario and gives a fascinating perspective of life on the other side. He took part in the attack on York in April 1813 and witnessed the explosion that took the life of  General Pike and the subsequent looting of the town.
      In May that same year, Ned took part in the successful attack on Fort George and in August was still in the Niagara area when Sir James Yeo showed up with the British fleet. Myers was on the ill fated U.S.S. Scourge which went down in a storm on August 8 along with the U.S.S. Hamilton. He was picked up by the crew of the Julia but there were few other survivors from his ship. In a case of 'out of the frying pan and into the fire', the Julia and the Growler were captured by the British. As the British were boarding the vessel, the enlisted men found two barrels of whiskey and were sampling the contents. The sailors from the Julia joined in the orgy of drinking that ended only when the British officers stepped below and kicked the barrels over. Myers was taken on board the Royal George and sent to York. From there, he was interrogated and sent to Halifax, from where he managed to escape and return to the U.S. His story shows how uncertain the loyalties of the ordinary citizens were at the time and why General Brock didn't and couldn't trust the local militias.
        After the war, Myers remained a sailor and looked up his old friend Fenimore Cooper, who decided to publish Ned's memoirs in 1843. Going by memory, Ned probably errs in many of the facts but one rarely gets the opportunity to see the life of the unlettered, poor sailors in these conflicts and it is a valuable account nevertheless for anyone interested in the War of 1812 history.

Postage Stamp Commemorating Captain Worsley's Deeds on Lake Huron

     I visited the Nancy Island Museum this summer. It is the 200th anniversary of the burning of the HMS Nancy in the Nottawasaga River. I did not go for any of the historical re-enactments because the truth is stretched far too much in those re-enactments to make me happy. It is rather like trying to get me to say the Lord of the Rings trilogy on film is a great adaptation of the novels. I think my head might explode.
    It seemed to me that the museum displays could use a little updating and fact checking but most annoying of all is this stamp that is only available at Nancy Island, depicting Miller Worsley, the Commander of the Nancy.

There are other things I find objectionable about the image but worst of all and least excusable is the grey hair. Worsley was 23 years old when he took command of the Nancy. He died at the rather young age of 43. It is doubtful that he ever looked this old. The vigorous young man who rowed across Lake Huron with supplies and who lead a daring attack on two American warships in those same rowboats is not this guy. He looks like he is some crazy old guy scaring teenagers off his front lawn. Grrrrr, indeed.
      At 23, Worsley was an 11 year veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He was a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar at the age of 14. He was credited with having genial manners and self discipline and I have never pictured him as this snarling old fart. 

Eat this! Mmmmmmmm!

     The February 6, 1832 Hampshire Telegraph was reporting on a duel between two lawyers over a case that had recently been tried in London. It was interesting but just below it was an even more interesting story.
    At the Queen Square Police station, a case had been heard about a dispute of wages between a master butcher and his journeyman. Part of the evidence heard was that the two had dressed an old cow that had died of udder disease and sold it to a sausage maker in Cow Cross. The journeyman also told the court that he had been hired to dig up some pigs which had died of disease and had been buried. They dressed those pigs and sold them to the same sausage maker.
     This is why we have and need government meat inspectors and they are worth every penny.

The Sailor and the Princess

      One finds the most extraordinary stories in old newspapers. I spotted an article in the August 4, 1834 Hampshire Telegraph about the captain of an American whaling ship the Erie who had married a princess. The captain was from Newport on the Isle of Wight, hence the interest from the Telegraph, but they seem to have gotten the name of the kingdom wrong. They identified her as being from Hawaii which they spelled 'Gwyhee'.
     Always looking for confirmation of extraordinary stories, I went searching for other sources to confirm this event. When distance is involved, newspapers are not reliable. I found a French book on curiosities called Le Livre des Singularités by G.P Philomneste, published in 1841 . He too found the story interesting enough to relate on page 43. Philomneste stated that Captain Charles Spooner of the Erie married Kingatara-Oruruth, the daughter of a chief in Tahiti,  in 1834. There were some racist and snide comments about the bride's tribal markings. The bride, who was a skilled swimmer, celebrated the marriage with a demonstration of her skills for the guests. He ended the story by commenting he did not know how the marriage worked out since the maritime annals were silent on the subject.
     On page 150, Whaling by Charles Boardman Hawes, published in 1924, also describes the marriage. Hawes stated that the wedding took place in 1843 but this was a typo since news of the marriage clearly appears in the Telegraph in 1834. He states that the marriage took place at Otahete in the Society Islands, which Tahiti was a part of. He repeated the humorous and racist comments the editor of the Philadelphia newspaper saw fit to print adding that the princess was 16 years of age and a giant at 6'6" in height. Nobody masticates sugar cane. Using that term applied to a human is clearly making her less evolved. The article goes on to say that the Erie left its captain in New Zealand and took on a new commander Captain A.W. Dennis but the fate of Spooner and his bride were unknown.
      A more recently published book(1976): Islands and Empires: Western Impact on the Pacific and East Asia by Ernest Stanley Dodge also described the marriage. I do not have a copy of the book so I cannot read what Dodge had to say about it but the Telegraph did have something to say about the fate of the marriage. Two weeks after the marriage had been reported in the Telegraph, there had been an update. Miss Cingatara Oruruth had gone into the water to amuse her husband with an exhibition of her extraordinary feats of swimming when she was attacked by a large shark. The unfortunate princess was cut in two by the shark that had seized her in its jaws. The story was a reprint from the Bristol Gazette so it is difficult to say if in fact the poor girl died but surely, if there had been a Captain Spooner, he would have returned to England or whaling upon her death and there would have been some kind of confirmation that the story was true. 

The Circus Comes to Town (1891)

Found this ad in the Orillia Packet. It must have been quite a show - a $30,000 parade for such a small town financed by a 50 cent ticket. The biblical spectacle must be a pious way of featuring dancing girls since it includes the Queen of Sheba and - a Roman Hippodrome and three monster menageries!!

Canadians! Look Out For the Man-Stealers.

    This was one of the headlines in the September 24, 1847 Barrie Magnet newspaper under a column called Colonial Items. Also in bold letters was the phrase 'IMPORTANT SLAVE CASE'. The article relates to an escaped slave case that began with a slave by the name of Brown who had been murdered by his owner Mr. Somerville of Maryland. Mr. Somerville was later also the victim of murder and the brother of the killed slave was accused and tried for the offence. Astonishingly he was acquitted but Somerville's family sold the brother into what was described in the Magnet as the "desolating bondage of the South". He then escaped and reached Philadelphia, where he expected to live in some safety. He also had a wife and seven children in Maryland that he was anxious to free as well and had assumed the name of Russell. Somerville's family learned of his whereabouts and sent men from New Orleans to claim that Brown was a murderer. "This is a favorite and hackney mode of seizing a victim" Two men showed up in Philadelphia at a magistrate's office and had the man put in prison but the Abolitionists succeeded in having him released as the warrant was improperly done.
     After such a narrow escape,  the man made his way to Canada accompanied by Rev. Young from New York.  They laid a case before Lord Elgin claiming the protection of the British crown, which the Governor General agreed to. On the next day, the two bounty hunters arrived in Montreal demanding Brown's surrender. They were turned away but the writer carried on saying "some magistrate, from ignorance of the facts, may possibly give him up on a charge of murder, although this is not likely. However to prevent it, we have to request our contemporaries, as an act of justice and mercy, to hand around this not of warning. Let it never be said that there is a single magistrate in the length and bread of British North America so ignorant, or so indifferent as to surrender a fellow man into the hands of the relentless slave holder - Globe"
     For good measure, the Magnet's editor added, "We have always been decidedly opposed to Lynch-law, and should deem it a very hard case if the above mentioned 'free and unlightened' citizens, during their 'n***** hunt' should happen to get unmercifully tar'd and feathered!" It is awkwardly worded but the editor is clearly outraged on behalf of the fugitive and his treatment.
     If only this had been the last time an American bounty hunter forgot that Canada is politically and legally separate from the U.S. and one cannot just come here and grab fugitives.
    Curious if there is any information on the escapee, I am delighted to find an article from the Maryland archives that the fugitive was named Isaac Brown and he escaped to Canada with his family.
Full article here: http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/refserv/bulldog/bull05/bull19-02/bull19-02.html and there is more information included in this book: Fugitive Slaves and American Courts: The Pamphlet Literature, edited by Paul Finkelman. There are a large number of webpages devoted to the case which must have been very important in 1847. As well, a Canadian, researching his own family history with an ancestor also named Isaac Brown, wrote a book about the case and Brown's history. The book is called One More River to Cross by Bryan Prince. In it, he states that Brown kept his alias of Samuel Russell in Canada and eventually settled in Chatham, Ontario where he died. 

1956 News from the Elmvale Lance

     Spring makes people want to clean up their houses, garages, basements and sheds but what to do with all that garbage? As I drive around the countryside, I see that for many people the solution is to drive to the nearest farm and pitch it into the ditch by the side of the road. People use all kinds of excuses for that behaviour, such as they resent having to purchase tags for additional garbage bags or that tipping fees are too high. In 1956 garbage disposal was not the problem it has become and landfills were new and not full to bursting.  In the April 26th Elmvale Lance, Dr. P.A. Scott from the Simcoe County Public Health was quoted as 'deploring the garbage that was thrown along roadsides'.  Some things never change.
     While we are looking at the Elmvale news, in May 1957, there was a prediction by Billy Graham that the end of the world was in sight. He was quoted as saying, "I have not only God's word for it that the end of the world is in sight but I also have the word of the scientists." He cited the arms' race as the reason why and expressed the certainty that the end of the world would take place during the lives of the generation that was being born. Lucky for him that he did not give a specific date and thereby avoided the embarrassment that has followed other unlucky predictors of the end of the world.
    In the August 13, 1957 edition a Toronto judge, Fred Bartron was quoted sniffing at the 'people who would not think of getting drunk and disorderly near their own homes but don't mind going to Wasaga Beach and drinking themselves into a disgraceful state'. He added "I can't understand why all the people from Toronto come to Wasaga Beach to drink and get drunk." Indeed.
     The more things change, the more they stay the same.