Bizarre Historical Story of the Day
Fellophantians, I thought it would be fun to try and post an interesting and strange history story every day. Loki said he would be willing to help out with this. If you have a story you want to add, please catch us in chat or PM us. Of course, comments on the stories are highly desired!
Today we will talk about Mary Toft!
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/hoax9.jpg
Mary Toft was an English housewife who in 1726 began to give birth to rabbits. Or rather, parts of rabbits, and even during one expulsion "three legs of a Cat of a Tabby Colour, and one leg of a Rabbet: the guts were as a Cat's and in them were three pieces of the Back-Bone of an Eel ..." Her story was that dreaming of animals led to her birthing said animals.
The best part of the story is the credulous response of the medical community of the time. She was first examined by her local doctor, John Howard, and under his observation egested a number animal parts over the course of several days. She was then examined by National St. Andre, a physician to the royal house of George I, and George's personal secretary Samuel Molyneux. St. Andre concluded that the rabbits were formed in her fallopian tubes. Her story became a sensation, and according to Wiki:
Quote:
Every creature in town, both men and women, have been to see and feel her: the perpetual emotions, noises and rumblings in her Belly are something prodigious; all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there Day and Night to watch her next production.
http://science.discovery.com/top-ten...bbit-birth.jpg
However, after Mary was brought to London and placed under supervison the births stopped. Then an investigation showed that her husband had been buying up quantities of young rabbits. Finally Mary confessed that after a miscarriage she had placed the creatures in her uterus :wth: in an attempt to gain fame and fortune. Howard and St. Andre were discredited, and Mary was briefly incarcerated before being released, and later gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
Wikipedia article
Museum of Hoaxes
The President’s Desk, Part 2
When we last left our heroes, they were in dire straits in the far north…
Well, that’s not quite true. When we last left the members of the Franklin Expedition, they were all dead.
However, from the perspective of the Admiralty in London, they were simply out of communication. Since they expected the expedition to be gone for several years, they weren’t particularly surprised to have heard nothing by the end of 1846, for all that Lady Jane Franklin was getting restive. By the end of 1847, with still no word and Lady Franklin pressing that the Admiralty check on the expedition, the Admiralty started to admit some nervousness.
In March of 1848, the Admiralty made plans to send three expeditions to succor Franklin’s men: One coming from the east, following the path that Franklin was presumed to have taken; one coming from the west, around the north of Alaska; and a third, overland expedition to try to find Franklin’s men if they were stuck in the middle of the great unknown spaces of Canada’s uncharted north. Not satisfied with this effort the Admiralty also published a twenty thousand pound reward for anyone who would succor Franklin’s expedition or it’s survivors, and ten thousand pounds for anyone who simply found evidence of their fate.
http://i573.photobucket.com/albums/s...ice-reward.jpg
In my earlier post, I characterized the Franklin expedition as a complete, and unmitigated, disaster. There is one very, very cold-blooded consolation for the men lost: Because of the veritable flood of men and materials heading north, first in an effort to find and succor Franklin’s men, and then later, when all hope for their survival had passed, and the mysteries remained, and people kept trying to gain more clue of what had happened, or what went wrong with the expedition, the Franklin Expedition indirectly caused more of the Canadian north to be visited, explored and mapped that any successful transit of the Northwest Passage would have gained.
As I say, it is a very cold consolation.
The search for Franklin’s expedition would go on for decades. The expeditions by sea would begin in 1850, and continue for years, as ships went north, and came back, either empty-handed, or with stark, and disturbing discoveries, such as the 1850 discovery of three graves from the expedition dated back to its first year, an stunning casualty rate.
In 1852 a new naval expedition was sent forth to continue the search for Franklin’s men. Included in this effort were several exploration ships: HMS Pioneer, Investigator, Intrepid, Assistance, Enterprise, and Resolute. Four of these ships, with the depot ship HMS North Star, went north to Baffin Island, again, to continue the search under the command of Sir Edward Belcher. Two others, Investigator and Enterprise, came east through the Northwest Passage from the Pacific side.
These expeditions were hard on the ships – the crew of Investigator had to abandon ship in 1853, and joined the crew of Resolute, where she was locked in the ice for all of 1853. By 1854, when the spring showed no sign of releasing Resolute from the ice, the crew took down the sails, battened the hatches and abandoned her to the ice, then went overland to join the North Star, and the other expedition ships.
By late 1854 Sir Belcher had given up on even extracting the majority of his ships, let alone making any further discoveries. He ordered the other three exploration ships abandoned, and packed his surviving crew aboard North Star for the trip home. Fortunately, before he could leave, another pair of relief ships showed up at North Star’s anchorage, and so the survivors were transferred among all three ships, and returned to England.
As an afterthought, the Admiralty published that the five ships abandoned in the north were still considered to be part of the Royal Navy and thus unsuited for salvage under admiralty law. Which is where things stood until 1855, when Resolute was found again: this time by the crew of an American Whaler out of New Bedford. The ship was approximately 1200 miles from it’s last reported position, and sound in hull, if tattered in its rigging. Using stores aboard his whaler, and the Resolute, the captain restored the Resolute to seaworthiness, and brought her back to New Bedford harbor with him.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...te_cropped.jpg
HMS Resolute in an 1856 woodcut
At the time this caused a small diplomatic crisis: The RN still had that official claim for possession of the Resolute, but admiralty law is also clear about the right to salvage for derelict ships. I believe that there were even a few calls to have the captain of the whaler tried for piracy! Even then disputes in international law could get pretty hairy, and the decisions of the courts sitting such cases often were influenced most by the recognition of which country the court was being held in. Fortunately, for all involved, the British government chose to relinquish all claim to Resolute shortly after her arrival in New Bedford, defusing what could have proven to be a messy situation.
Shortly after that, an American, Henry Grinnell, maneuvered through Congress the idea of purchasing Resolute, refitting her as she had been when she originally set forth from London, and returning her to the British, as a gesture of national courtesy. Grinnell, like many others of the time, was fascinated with the fate of the Franklin expedition, and had already funded several search and rescue expeditions of his own to the north.
So, for the sum of $40,000 Resolute was purchased and refitted. No detail was spared in her refitting – when she returned to England she is said to have had copies of all her original fittings, and supplies aboard, to replace any that had been lost, damaged, or used during her adventure in the arctic waters. The ship was presented to Victoria, as a gift from the United States. The gesture is said to have greatly moved Victoria, as did the loving care used in refitting the ship.
In the end, Grinnell’s hopes that Resolute would go north again to continue the search for Franklin and his men were overcome by the news that one of the overland expeditions had found conclusive evidence to indicate that the men of the expedition were all dead.
Resolute was put into service in Canadian waters for the next twenty years, until age, and the changing face of nautical trade caught up with her. She was retired from service in 1878, and sent to the breakers the next year. But, even as the ship was being consigned to the breakers, Queen Victoria remembered the gesture from the American government that had so moved her. She ordered that some of the lumber from the ship be salvaged for a specific purpose: to make a pair of desks.
The first desk, a small woman’s desk, was presented to the widow of Henry Grinnell. The other desk was presented to Rutherford Hayes, in his position of President. Since then, only three Presidents, Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford, have eschewed the desk for their working desk in the Oval Office.
And so, that’s how the desire to avoid the treacherous waters of Cape Horn lead to the desk that you can see the President sitting behind, here.
http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/west...sk-kennedy.jpg
Fun Times with Greek Statuary
This is the story of a time long ago. When the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and they plagued mankind with suffer ... Wait. Sorry.
Ancient Greece could be a bit of an odd place. A city-state like Athens wasn’t just full of lovely fluted columns attached to architecturally impressive temples; the Greeks had some odd ideas about public statuary.
Case in point: the herma. A herma was a square column with a carved head of Hermes at the top. And a carved set of genitals in the front. See here (possibly NSFW). This is the sort of thing the Greeks liked to have marking boundaries and crossroads. Or just set up outside of houses. For luck.
So yeah. Penis statues all over the place in old Athens. Nothing particularly remarkable happened with them until 415 BC. Athens was in the midst of a decades-long conflict with Sparta and other members of the Peloponnesian League. The Athenians were about to launch an expeditionary force against the Sicilian city of Syracuse. The night before the fleet was set to leave, all of the hermai in the city were vandalized. Vandalized in a castrate-y kind of way. Lacking a modern sense of humor, the Athenians thought this was sacrilegious, rather than hilarious. It was also seen as a bad omen for the expedition (which ended up being correct – the Sicilian Expedition was a tremendous disaster for the Athenians).
Blame for the incident fell on Alcibiades, an Athenian general with a reputation for impiety. He was also a student of Socrates, mentioned in Plato’s Symposium. It was behavior like herm-castrating that was on the Athenians’ mind when they tried Socrates for “corrupting the youth”.
