Fall of France, 11: Making Free On The Land: Or, the Bailey Bridge

The Kriegswissenschaftliche Mémoiren collection of the War Archives of the Austrian State Archives contain many interesting and well-produced, even beautiful manuscripts. So many, in fact, that I've argued that you need some kind of sociological explanation to account for them. Disappointingly for those who want to raise the credibility of the whole military-intellectual racket, I found little of interest in the ones that dabbled in high philosophy. 


The technical manuals, on the other hand, are awesome. They all need to be digitised somehow and put on line. We just don't get how good those old guys were at doing stuff, because we don't understand the problems they solved. It's a lesson that historians of technology need to hammer home again and again until history finally takes cognizance of  the way that doing stuff --for example, moving artillery or 30 tonne tanks across country-- was, and is hard, and calls, and called upon, a substructure of skills and experience. It strikes me as a truism that that substructure is going to look like, and must look like, the everyday economy at work. 


That, for what it's worth, is the epiphany I had when looking at Lieutenant-Colonel Ano Turpin's two-volume treatise on artillery. (I'd like to know more about this guy, but there are all sorts of real and possible transcription problems here. Turpin may have been active in the 1720s or the 1770s. I'm thinking that "Ano" is  an abbreviation of "Antonio," and that his being a Piedmontese officer explains the Italian form of the personal name and a not-uncommon French last name. But I'm not overly satisfied with my conclusions.)


So what does Turpin have to say? That the well-known distinction between field and siege artillery is actually between "meadow" artillery and static. I'm translating freely back and forth here, just the way that a guy named Obristleutnant Antonio Turpin did, and I'm getting that "meadow artillery" gets thrown across the country so easily that commanders had to be careful that they didn't end up in a position where there wasn't enough grass around the feed the gun teams (contemplate for a moment what that means about the state of the roads and of the countryside round about), while  moving siege artillery is part of that project of moving things that aren't supposed to be moved. Imagine those massive teams and specially built bridges and whatnot that were required to move despoiled Egyptian obelisks, giant church bells or purpose-cast floodgates.


People move around easily. too easily, and end up places where they don't want to be. Armies only seem to do the same, and in reality must prepare in advance and tap into the contemporary transportation industry. But what if that industry is itself in flux? What if horses are going away and the semi is just being born? Then the times are out of joint. We really need to do a better job of fixing ourselves to times and context and understanding how human intervention has changed the landscape. Because our relationship with the landscape might go a lot deeper into our cognition than we entirely understand. 






Or we can just put the Royal Experimental Bridging Establishment to work. (This is funny and creative. I thought about embedding "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," but that would just sad. And by sad, I mean "pathetic.")

The Plantation of the Atlantic, VIII: The Rule of the Admiral

Hee. I'm hilariously riffing on Jeffrey Bannister's Rule of the Admirals. Because Christopher Columbus was appointed "Admiral of the Ocean Seas," and he came to grief when he tried to rule his discoveries in the New World, so that he died old and bitter, and maybe a bit of a religious maniac.




(Because they were playing old Johnny Cash at the local Chapters when I converted birthday money into this and this.)

Well, no, actually. It seems to me that there's a more useful way of thinking about all of this. Imagine for a second that Columbus was normal. Where does that lead us? To cassava, I think.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse, III: Sandy Pylos

I went looking for the edited collection of articles coming out of the University of Minnesota expedition to Pylos, a Middle Bronze Age--Later Bronze Age site on a ridge overlooking the western shore of the southern Peloponnese yesterday, which meant that I got to spend some time in the Koerner Library stacks. Which I love doing. Even if these days the experience all too often has me cringing in embarrassment for my alma mater, which really is getting to the point of shopping in the Adult Diapers section. (There's no Wifi in the stacks! If you're going to the trouble of installing campus-wide wifi on the one hand, and study space in the stacks on the other....I'm beginning to think that our civilisation is in decline. But where, or where, are our northern barbarians going to come from?)

But to come back to the stacks for a second, the virtue of shelf scanning is that it brings you in touch with the unexpected. In this case, Nino Luraghi's monograph on the history of ancient Messenia. I'm aware of Luraghi from shorter articles (as for example included here) that brilliantly apply the modern political/anthropological literature on ethnos formation to problematise ancient history. Well, here's the monograph that the shorter works promised. You know that class of historian who gets upset about how po-mo theory is all up in his narrative. Chances are that his supposed obvious interpretations of plain facts are just the constructions of old theories themselves. Historiographical progress isn't impeded by the theoretical deconstruction of these old narratives. It begins with that deconstruction!

Or something. Keynes managed to make this point more pithily, but what do I know about pithy?

On an Alternative Explanation for Human Demographic History: Or, I Don't Believe in Plague

I was so struck by the cleverness of my "unsettling of America" subtitle last time that it failed to cross my mind that it might not be read as the kind of revisionist contrarianism that I normally peddle here.

I want to argue that the emergence of European demand for furs caused a widespread cultural modification of the Eastern Woodlands in favour of fur production. So my "unsettling" is a human abandonment of the bottomlands, perhaps with very few significant human consequences. The "settling" is their resettlement. Largely between 1760 and 1776, in response to the crisis in the fur trade upon which early Americanist/military historian Walter Dunn insists so strongly, the Indians came down from the upper benches, built towns in the bottoms at places like Cooperstown, and chose to become Americans. Scalp/ceremonial poles became Liberty Trees became flagpoles, Earth Lodges became Masonic Temples, and the councillors all went to Congress in 1794.

But it's the general consensus that the Americas were "unsettled," in the sense of being depopulated, in the wake of first contact with Europeans. I cast around on Youtube briefly for a canned explanation, and found much that was dramatic and pseudo-plausible. But also this, which is fun:



Poor Gwen Stefani. It's an old story: she comes, she goes. It's unfair that someone like Gwen Stefani can't come back from a maternity break, that bringing new life into the world ends a woman's (public) life. Biology should not rule us! On the other hand, if you don't like Gwen Stefani, her sudden emergence and equally sudden disappearance is typical of a kind of artist and, well, like.... Well, it's like a plague. Biology should rule us! At least if it comes to getting rid of annoying girl singers. If anyone disliked Gwen Stafani (hard to believe), that's perhaps what they would think.

Pop culture's like that. Things come, go, get all jingle-jangled up 'till we have no idea what ever happened. Was that ship of corpses that carried death into the land the one that carried the Black Plague into Sicily, or Dracula into Whitby? I forget. Or was it both? Are the two things all mixed up? Subversive, infectious dangers from the East, come to take our wimmins?

I know this, though: I jumped into the middle of the story of the unsettling of America because the story makes no sense. Maybe I should try to, y'know, communicate why I think that.

Gather the Bones, 10: Unsettling America

I just caught a Vinyl Cafe rerun of an episode on "children's songs that are worth a listen." This was on it.



Good news. (For me.) There's still some CBC Radio listeners who are older than me, who remember wearing coonskin hats. (Cringe.) Some.

And that's today's provocation. Specifically, the apotheosis of Davy Crockett, striding off into the wilderness at the head of the western march, which "had just begun."

Really? Put it another way, with the authority of a real historian, William R. Polk, author of The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. Now, this is a bit unfair. Professor Polk is a Middle Eastern specialist, not an early Americanist. He is giving us a big picture review, perhaps out of some sense, well-merited but kept where it belongs, of having a personal stake in the antebellum and "the western march." In some ways, the worst that can be said of the result is that his treatment of the Indians as a little on the noble savage side.

In some ways. In 1962, the future professor worked in the restoration of a 1692-built Harvard home, an experience that he apparently found formative enough to discuss on pp. 144--45.

I get that: I worked for home restorers one summer as an undergraduate, and was deeply impressed with their faith in, and commitment to, the future, and their family's place in it. It's a very grounding perspective. Now, I don't know if that's the social context of Polk's experience. He's awfully private about some aspects of his life, and he could have been anything from summer labourer up to home owner.

So now I feel like a real heel. I'm bashing a worthy book by a good scholar, and I've chosen an episode that is clearly a happy episode from Polk's youth(ishness).

But he insists that the architectural novelties of this house, built by a shipwright in a shipbuilding town of lumber sawed for shipbuilding are due to its being a "garrison house." He cites Turner's "frontier thesis," and points to evidence from 1645, 1669, and 1675 as proof that in 1692, the "frontier" ran through Harvard Yard.

The Plantation of the Atlantic, VII: A Sea of Islands?

This is a song of my parent's generation, dating to a time when Canada's interaction with Newfoundland and Labrador was rather more offensively colonialist than it is now. The version, or perhaps phantasm, that sticks in my mind from those days is rather different from that of Great Big Sea. According to errant memory, it borrows some of the lyrics of "Spanish Ladies," as well as the tune. (Not that I can find a version of "Spanish Ladies" on Youtube, either.)

Let's just imagine someone, somewhere, singing about a "true Newfoundlander's" voyage ending when he struck soundings off Penzance. Because there was a time when the Newfoundland fleet did aim for the mouth of the channel, and find it, and journey's end, by feeling their way across the shoaling European continental shelf with lead and sinker. That's an old time sailor, with a map of the geography of the sea in his head, of plains of gravel and sand, of dangerous shoals --and a vast wilderness, where the leadsman shouts, "No bottom!"

This wilderness.

Medieval churchmen, of a certain breed, sought God in the wilderness. It's a search that is a great deal easier to prosecute with places to stop. That's a point often made of Saint Brendan's voyages to the Isles of the Blessed, and is an insight that could be applied more closely to both the story of Vinland and early accounts of Plymouth Colony.

This is supposed to be Google Maps satellite view of actual islands in the wilderness. Actually, I've zoomed out far enough that  it's pretty much a Mercator perspective. An actual satellite view doesn't tell us very much. There the Azores are, covering a great deal of sea in extent (600 km northwest by southeast), if not land area (2306 km²), but still out there, all alone. They are not closer than 1500km from the nearest European landfall, in Portugal. The Wikipedia article implies that they are even further from the American continent. The westernmost point in the archipelago, it suggests, is 3880 km from the New World.

 This isn't true, although the Mercadian distortion makes it very difficult to see it. The capital of the 205 square-kilometre northwesternmost island of the Azores, Flores, is at 39° 27′ 18″ N, 31° 7′ 53″ W. Cape Farewell, Greenland, is at 59° 46′ 23″ N, 43° 55′ 21″ W; St. John's, Newfoundland, is at 47° 34′ 3″ N, 52° 42′ 26″ W; and Sable Island, Nova Scotia, is at 43° 57′ 0″ N, 59° 54′ 57″ W. I'd plug these coordinates into a Great Circle Distance calculator for you, but the one I found is giving me those old unhelpful-error-message-make-me-scream-at-the-screen-in-rage blues. Let's just say that it's about 2200km from Saint John's, and let it go at that. The American continent runs southwest-by-northeast, and on the right course, the Azores are half way to the New World.


Parry's "leapfrog" argument is that the Atlantic islands presented themselves to the Portuguese as a series of highly lucrative settlement opportunities. The intersection of politics and trade explains why Portugal jumped into the business in the middle years of the 1400s, and the broad implication is that a self-reinforcing cycle of investment-return-investment explains why they continued in it. Depending on whose claim we take seriously, the sea of business might have begun to wash up on Flores as early as 1451, but we find Columbus' future mother-in-law subletting the island to a Flemish entrepeneur in 1479 in contemporary documents that provide us with a more certain historical starting point.

After all, this version has Columbus in it. We're getting to the New World now, for sure. And we're already half way! Isn't this the logical place from which to discover the Americas?

The traditional sailor's explanation for what happens next is that the winds were wrong. And while sailors can be unreliable witnesses, prone to confabulation in the service of a good story, they aren't wrong about this. Columbus eventually set out from the Canaries (or succeeded because he set out from the Canaries) with a commission from the Castilians, rather from the Azores, because of the winds. Dom Henrique's failure to conquer the Canaries cost Portugal the New World, leaving it with "only" India and Brazil. That's quite the Age of the Renaissance fail, Portuguese player.

So, the winds. Here's that global trade wind system again, per Wikipedia:

Unless you want to laboriously beat your way against the winds, you want to sail west south of 30, and east north of 35 degrees north latitude. The Azores lie in the "horse latitudes" of "variable winds mixed with calm." That actually explains why they were discovered so early. Sailors headed there weren't blown east and away from them, or west and out to sea in a way that would send them beating back to land at first opportunity.

But hold on there for a moment. These are coordinates that apply to the sea. Let's track them onto land for a second. Cape Bojador, traditional ne plus ultra on the southward track around Africa lies at 26° 8′ 0″ N, 14° 30′ 0″ W. New York, we're occasionally told, is virtually the same latitude as Rome. That means that Charleston is south of Morocco, while London lies at 51 degrees north, in the same latitude as Labrador.

I don't think we absorb this fact as well as we ought. For all the talk of the distorting effect of the Mercator projection, it is this modification that really informs our understanding of the world. Like is grouped with like, so north Europe must be in the same latitude as the old Union.

Well, fine; apart from the occasional frustration of explaining to the old "it's all about clocks" folks that the experience of dawn and sunset in old Europe was very different from that in New York or Toronto or Los Angeles, I can't see the harm of forgetting this point.* Until it comes to the point that, in historic times, if you wanted to sail between the hemispheres, your route took you by the Barbary Coast, certainly westbound, and perhaps eastbound, too. But I'm not at the point where I want to take that anywhere just yet. I just want to stand on Flores and look west and north.

*The point, such as it is, being that since early clocks were less accurate than just looking at the Sun, and since non-Europeans didn't go in for them, medieval Europeans must have embraced them/had them inflicted upon them as part of some vast cultural transformation. Which might even be true if the length of the solar hour didn't change at roughly one second/day in, say, London.

Innovation and Trolls: The Auld Alliance

My internet buddy Brett Holman was musing about counterfactual history today. Specifically, that one about steam engines in the Roman Empire, which, to be fair, sounds  reasonable and gets a great deal of play in science fiction. (I was going to find a few examples, but someone's gone to a great deal of the necessary effort already.)

But, well, this is the problem with counterfactuals. You like the ones you like, and you pitch a fit about the ones you don't. And, truly, the haggis is in the fire in this one. That's a reference to one of Star Trek's Lieutenant-Commander Montgomery Scott's more excessive stage-Scottish moments. Although there's probably complicated sociological reasons that we associate Scots with ship's engineers (I'll let you know if I ever extract something useful from my prosopographic sample  of Institution of Mechanical Engineers obituaries), a lot of it does come back to James Watt and the steam engine.

As the title suggests, I've got some issues here. By now any regular reader will suspect that I see Scotland and Scottishness as a Trojan Horse in many dimensions. So here's my take on what actually happened with the steam engine, in a season when we're talking about how we can never, never, raise tax rates, lest it do awful things, like stop innovation.

But first, some Nineteenth Century American music, as interpreted by a Star Fleet engineer played by an actual Irishman for someone with a Scottish name who fell for a Trojan horse.