The Plantation of the Atlantic, X: Squanto's Town

Let's begin with ....say... Stephen Greenblatt. You're probably too young to remember when the New Historicism was actually new, but trust me. There was a time. We history graduate students had perhaps a different take (enough with this guy Shakespeare already!) but Greenblatt's first blast of the trumpet was a revelation. The big Renaissance figures were into "self-fashioning." In Chancellor Moore's Utopia and in the allegory-laden portraits of Hans Holbein and the Northern Mannerists (I'm not the first guy to overinterpret paintings), Greenblatt detected a conscious effort to fashion an image that could only be understood in their historic context.

It went on from there. At the risk of trivialising a powerful insight, men are lying liars.

Oh, sure. Women, too. But if you're old enough, you remember Linda Ronstadt as the First Consort of California, and you remember her husband for his brave but indiscreet repudiation of the would-be iron law of historical causality. "That was then, this is now," he said. Don't ask your prince to be consistent and unswerving or even honest. Ask him to do the right thing at the time. Whether as a guide to moral behaviour or to the Benjamins, everyone gets to be the own subject of their own stories, and that's how history has to take them.

Unless the stakes are high. Then, any kind of high wire act is okay. Say that you have an Indian from Massachusetts. He crosses the Atlantic at least twice. He has the ear of the Governor of Plymouth, who happens to be an inveterate promoter of transatlantic colonisation. Say that this Indian dies a man of the highest distinction, in an English colony erected on the very soil of his hometown.

Wouldn't you at least wonder what kind of story might make him the subject? And the answer is that no, you would not. Because once you've made Indians subjects instead of objects in the story of the plantation of the Atlantic, you've broken the corn dam, and the flood is like to carry you over the mountains to disaster.

Gather the Bones, 12: Disembedded Capital

Two inspirations for this post: first, from Benjamin Woolley's brilliant Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America, the fate of George Casson and John (Sicklemore) Ratcliffe. This one has been waiting for a while, and was much on my mind as I tackled A. Martin Byers. Second, a blogger I deeply respect jumped in on the anti-Mormon sentiment burbling around the current American Presidential election campaign. Since it continues to be my opinion that we're not going to get American history until we start taking the Book of Mormon seriously, I'm going to have another go at the Angel Moroni's revelation.

Anyway, prolegomena, check. Horror? Starting now.

The place is Tsenacomoco, Virginia between the Fall Line and the shore. More specifically, it is the fall hunting camp of the weroance Opechancanough, rich in manitou. He is attended by a skilled quiyoughcosuck, people seeking his favour, and one of the trousered men from beyond the sea, who appears to be promising to aid the weroance in making war on the Monacans above the Line, who control access to stone.

For stone is important to the people who flock to Opechancanough's hunting camp, and scarce on the outflow silt of the lowlands. The weroance surrounds himself with a guard of twenty men armed with macahuitls, while many of the poor who attend him depend on sharp shells for the heavy work of butchering. In this fall of 1607, the weroance does not yet understand that the advent of the trousered men means that the stone, copper, and crystal of the mountains is no longer precious. On the contrary, they have impressed locals by simply throwing their stone ballast by the way.

For whatever reason, not all trousered men are equal, and a common sailor, George Casson, has fallen into Opechancanough's hands at a bad time. He is tied hand and foot to two stakes, set between two fires, and when the weroance tires of berating him, a quiyoughcosuck (probably) slips up behind him

[B]randishing mussel shells and reeds. Using the edges of the shells as blades,and the reeds as cheese-wires, the executioner systematically set about cutting through the flesh and sinews of Casson's joints, stretched out between the staves. As each of his limbs was removed,it was cst upon the fire, until only his head and trunk were left, writhing helplessly on the blood-soaked ground.
Turning the torso over, so Casson faced the ground, the executioner carefully cut a slit around the neck, then slipped a mussel shell beneath the skin. He proceeded to ease off the scalp, and, turning the body back over again, gently unpeeled Casson's face from the skull. He then slit open Casson's abdomen, and pulled out his stomach and bowels, which steamed in the cold winter air. Casson's remains then joined the rest of his body to burn on the fire, until only his dried bones were left, which, according to White, were gathered up and deposited in a 'by-room' in one of the tents. (Woolley, 114.)


Casson was already in bad odour down at Jamestown. He was linked to one of the early Governors of the Jamestown Colony, a John Sicklemore. Unfortunately for himself, if he dis so innocently, Sicklemore travelled under an alias, by which he was better known. He was John Ratcliffe, one of the early governors, although he had already lost a power struggle by the time a condemned man, another common sailor, blurted out his secret identity in a vain attempt to stay his own execution. Ratcliffe is thus a bit of a mystery, upon which others have attempted to build further. A Ratcliffe received a major land grant in Beaufort County, North Carolina, and only two Ratcliffes are known in America in this timeframe to have received it. There is Ratcliffe himself, and a Roanoke Colony man, and the myths to which I refer attach this grant to the Roanoke man, who must then have survived the failure of that colony and shown up at Jamestown a generation later to receive his due, and in all this never recorded. At least, in a surviving text. (That is, if I read the sanitised account in Wikipedia correctly.)

Which is all very unlikely, and the only reason that we attend it is that in the winter of 1609, Govenor John (Sicklemore) Ratcliffe died the same death as George Casson, except at the hands of the weroance known to history as King Powhatten.

That's right. A former and recent Governor of Jamestown with powerful patrons at home was stretched out between the fires and ritually butchered by the great Powhatten. And, in later times, this was taken as a thing that happened by the men who attended on Powhatten and sued for his daughters' hands. Because that's the way that things happened in the Seventeenth Century --on both sides of the Atlantic. Although on the eastern shore the king set the quarters about the city rather than reserving the bones to his private ossuary. Bearing in mind that Sicklemore may have been a former Catholic priest and informer, his fate might have an element of ironic justice to it.

Either way,we have a very different use of the same thing: people disembodied and thus turned into a sort of symbolic capital. Powhatten had the bones of a governor, Opechancanough a mere common sailor, and so we see how Powhatten on the way out in 1607, was back on top in 1618. (He was even dispossessed of his capital, a part of modern Richomond, when the  weroance Parahunt sold it to John Smith for a likely slave boy, Henry Spelman.

Powhatten's movements from one to another "capital," illustrate the anthropological meaning of the phrase "disembodied capital." Ever since Nimrod erected the Tower of Babel, rulers have attempted to register new departures and social revolutions by building themselves new residence cities. Sargon's Akkad may have been one. I've already talked about Epaminondas' move with Messene; Constantine's Constantinople marks an epoch. St. Petersburg is the model of record for Washington, D.C. One could take my basic argument and make an overly romantic move with it and have Cahokia a model for Washington. More defensibly, you could make Teotihuacan the model for Cahokia via intermediaries.

I'm going to try to unpack this with the history of technology: specifically, the technology of Mode IV stone tools. But first I'm going to talk about Mormons.

Running Away to the Air, 5: Wooden Wings

Have you ever been told that "The wings of the Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain were made of British Columbia spruce?" Probably not. Chances are, you're not British Columbian. It's untrue, but you might have been persuaded by more plausible versions,such as that it was the Hawker Hurricane or De Havilland Mosquito. (And you will have heard stories about this.) Actually, BC's aeronautical-grade lumber was staked in a frenzy of ration allocations in 1942, and went into machines like this and this.  But who wants to hear that? Certainly not anyone who has ever lived north of the Skookumchuk.

Because you've felt the November rains.

And you've gone out to the cut blocks in old crummies smelling of wet rain gear. I remember being told, rather arrogantly, in Toronto in the early 90s, during one or another manufactured standoff in the woods, that my interlocuter would prefer to see Vancouver Island evacuated and turned into a nature preserve.

(The scenery isn't from Vancouver Island, but it is authentically straight out of the cutblocks, so here's the Be Good Tanyas again illustrating the point.)

It's because there's just not a lot of people out there (some half million, but far fewer than that on the northern half) and a great many trees. Old time boosters used to dream of integrated regional development, that the sawmill would bring houses and schools, and hobby farms, and garages, then real farms and factories; finally a Gothic city hall and a militia regiment and a university and a cathedral.

It didn't work out that way. Perhaps it might have. Perhaps it was starting to happen in the 1920s, but then it stopped, sometime in the 1920s. Some mills still run, but they shed more jobs all the time. The rest have shut down, sweeping their towns away with them: Ocean Falls, Gold River... Sometimes the community fails, sometimes it doesn't. People have to live somewhere.

It's like history reached just so far, like the tide.  So it's some consolation that we floated out a few wooden wings before it was too late. Does it matter whether it was for Spitfires, or Hurricanes, or Mosquitoes, or these? They all played their part.

I almost gave up on this post. We've past the anniversary of Operation Typhoon, and all the old German excuses about the quality of Russian roads are being dredged up again, as though "we couldn't campaign" is an excuse an army can use. So I thought about writing about armies, and roads, and pavements. But I wanted to check whether I've used some of my quality anecdotes already. Besides, this morning, a CBC sportscaster talked about wooden aerodynamic test models of the Avro Arrow: wo Canadian patriotic urban myths in one. And on top of that, going through my notes on the wartime run of Aviation, I came on one of Robert Neville's editorials from the fall of 1944, patiently explaining why the rapidly rising national debt didn't portend a postwar apocalypse, that the crucial thing was maintaining economic growth, not stringent austerity.

Now, you've never heard of Robert Neville. He certainly doesn't have a Wikipedia page. He's just a former editor-in-chief of the McGraw-Hill stable of technical monthlies who cranked out wise, thoughtful editorials each month for many years. Now, he's gone and forgotten, and the same things still get said, again and again,   into the same dull, uncomprehension. Thinking about Robert Neville is a reminder, if a reminder were needed, that people have been patiently saying wise and sensible things for many years. And that we've been ignoring them and substituting our own preferred narratives.

For example, that the RAF somehow "forgot" that you could make planes out of wood (presumably over five years in the late 30s, because allegedly in 1932 it was still building wooden planes indistinguishable  from the aircraft of WWI), and was blindsided by the wonderful Mosquito when it appeared out of nowhere in 1939. It's not true. And not true in a usefully informative way.

Gather the Bones, 11: 1450: Turtle Island Before Columbus: Or, The Conquest of Paradise By Something I'm Not Really Responsible For

Look! It's snide mockery of Charles C. Mann. And a reluctant appreciation of John Ralston Saul, not afraid to issue a book that rips off the Canadian Bandaid and sinks like a stone. Ordinarily not the kind of compatriot that I appreciate, (Cry me a river, Tubby),but I commend his courage.

So let's start with a review of the facts at hand.

No, let's start with today's dubious musical provocation. At the end of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe references Christ, "who was born across the sea." I've heard it said (strawman alert!) that she captures the problem of American Christianity.* It's a foreign import with no authentically American roots.

 Yeah, right. If you want to pull the other one** after this, I'll dig up snake-handlers.  

No. Wait again. I'll dig up snake handlers anyway.

The Plantation of the Atlantic, IX: The Road to Norumbega

Eben Norton Horsford might deserve to go down in history as the single worst American patent troll of the Nineteenth Century. I know that would be a pretty impressive accomplishment when we look at how much money Andrew Carnegie extracted out of the Bessemer process, or find Linus Yale's patent locks in archaeological sites from before history began, but at least those early locks are made of wood, and, unlikely as it might seem, one can only be skeptical about the American rival patent to Bessemer's on the basis of an absence of evidence. Horsford, on the other hand, managed to make a fortune by "inventing" baking powder well after Oetker and Bird had done the same in Europe.

What's more, although I may be hallucinating a memory, I think that there's a scene in Little Lord Fauntleroy where the intermittently obnoxious Hull is asked to show off American democratic culture in song, and stumbles through a rendition of the "Golden Griddle Song." Memory, fantasy, whatever. The next stop on my personal free-association train finishes off the line of thought.

So perhaps some minor sense of inadequacy with regards to astronauts, or, on the other hand, inanimate carbon rods. And more; for while Horsford was rich, respected, and philanthropic, he was also a Bostoner. And nearby Newport, Rhode Island, had this.

The Eighteenth Century: Building a Better Future Through Higher Energy Density?

No "series" post here, but I missed a moment in the blogosphere a few weeks ago when people were talking about how the transition to high intensity energy use (burning coal, that is), created modernity. So this whole global warming thing has us back on the road to the caves, or something. It's nice to see John Landers' closely argued thesis finally get some traction.

On the other hand, I was disappointed by The Field and the Forge. It's not that I disagreed with it or anything. I just thought that Landers was offering the wrong global explanatory framework, one that has already gone sideways in Chinese history. So now that the moment has passed me by, my unfashionably late thoughts.

Also, links to myself: this isn't one of my little series, but it is a sequel to this, this, and above all, to this. Above all, it's bout taking Daniel Szechi seriously.
So let's get  in the mood!

So what does coal have to do with romanticising the Celts this time? Here's the meditation: sure, "The Skye Boat Song" is another sporran-full of schmaltz. ( I was going to post the Real McKenzies' version, but that particular selection challenged my heteronormative assumptions, and how often does an old-fashioned historian get to say "heteronormative?" Besides,  it's not a particularly impressive reinterpretation.) Old Kenneth McKellar, on the other hand, is pretty powerfully affecting. At least, to me, but then I've probably been exposed to more of his over-orchestrated prime than most. The Skye Boat Song is about the whole "lost cause" thing, and having an old man sing it seems to catch what the song is about (now) very well. "Seems," he said. There those Hanoverian spin doctors go again. People get old. Countries and political options don't. Find a way to buy enough people (and, admittedly, it would have to be a very large "lots"), and the Jacobite restoration could happen tomorrow.

What's really going on is simple enough. If you can't put a solid, rational argument for preferring the Hanoverian dynasty to the Stuarts, you use illegitimate rhetorical devices instead. If that makes the practice of history harder two centuries down the road, well that's a problem for the historians of two centuries in the future.
That is, if you care enough to be seen making bad arguments in public, something that good people don't do unless they think there's something important at stake. So it's time to talk about what's important, and where it leads.

Sigh. It's money, of course. And the conjunction of money and politics and guilty, weak arguments leads to foreign military misadventures, and corrupt people getting rich. But before I mutter about how the more things change and retire to cultivate my garden, I am going to stop and propose that it also led to the industrial revolution, in a much clearer way than the notional proposition that people suddenly discovered that coal burned real good.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse, IV: Why Pylos?

Another month's end, another set of disappointing economic results. Endless arguments about how public policy should respond to what seems to be a slide towards deflation. Maybe it is because it is election time in the United States that things seem both to be at their worst. (But when isn't it?) Is this going to be the new normal? Take it from this sometime Germanist: deflation can be normal. And that's not a good thing. Clearly, deflationary cycles can be broken by public policy. There's the Great Depression for an example, and also the way in which, in the early modern and above all the Nineteenth Century, deflationary cycles were broken by gold rushes and silver booms.It might seem apparent that the more valuable money becomes, the more there is to be made in winning it from the ground, but in reality, this was public policy at work.

How so? Money is not bullion. Money is a social artifact. We know that. We can define it as bullion,but an act of policy (specifically, the act of policy of saying that we don't understand these things and don't care to) is an act of policy. And we have a counter-example. For, whatever the causes of the end of the Roman Empire(it is, after all, far more common to read this as an episode of inflation than my counter-intuitive speculation abut deflation), there was evident currency disorder that didn't lead to the opening of the Saxon mines. If the end of the Roman Empire were a deflation, it was one in which increases in circulating money was not enough. There was a lack of demand that needed slating, but by, I suggested, by the restoration of  credit. I don't know. Does that make sense?

Anyway, if we're going to talk about policy lessons from past catastrophic, state-system-ending deflations, perhaps one accompanied by the appearance of a major new technology is more relevant to modern times. (Also, plant lipids, if anyone's wondering.) That would be the Late Bronze Age Collapse, perhaps the clearest case of a state system collapse accompanied by the rise of a really fundamental new technology, ironworking. In 1300BC, iron was a precious guest-present for kings, a metal given value by rarity and a connection with the Stormgod of Heaven.  In the c. 1050BC Lekandi "heroön" burial, iron tools and weapons have largely displaced bronze. That's our framework: state collapse and the appearance of a socially-disruptive but transformative technology. It only remains to find a deep causal link and really get this gloom-fest on the road.

Or not. All this modern talk is really just a framing device. What I really think is that the LBA collapse and following "Dark Age" is just too fascinating not to explore. The Middle Bronze Age collapse was "normal." These things happened all the time back then. The fall of the Roman Empire was earth-shattering. So the LBA collapse is a transitional moment --more reason to ask whether this particular technological change was somehow irreversible.

So just to refine our temporal parameters, I'm going to lay out what looks like a timeframe to me. Sometime after it occurred (obviously) Suppiluliuma II recorded a 1210 BC naval victory over Alasiya. Some people take that as foreshadowing, but I don't. Admirality is expensive, something for powerful rulers to indulge in, and the fact that it is commemorated in an impressive and expensive new monument at Hattusa tells us more.  Yet our only account of Suppiluliuma's later years is a king list that closes his reign in 1187, done by a pretender to his throne at Carchemish. And, nice as Carchemish is, it is not Hattusa. On its face, while a Hittite successor state may survive, it has lost its capital and its heartland. .

Another way to look at the time frame of the collapse is through the Assyrian annals. These sources suggest  the death of Tiglath-Pileser I in 1076 as a date for decline, and the accession of  Adad-nirari II (911BC) for a restoration. Or we can take the decision by the priests of Amun at Thebes to consolidate all of the royal mummies from the tombs at the Valley of the Kings in a single cache as an admission of defeat. State power had lost the fight against social disorder.

The long span of dates is justified by a centre-periphery mode,according to which the decline begins at the edge of the larger Middle Eastern world and moves inwards. Thus, when,in the very same annals we use to reconstruct the rhythms of the Assyrian state, we find consistent mention royal campaigns against "the Hittites," we find a change in the expected geographical perspective. For us, the story of the end of the Hittites is the fall of one centre (Hattusa), because we understand it as the Hittite heartland. That the Assyrians take this heartland to lie elsewhere perhaps signifies a contraction of highly organised state action towards its heartland. not of a claim to political continuity and ethnic identity. At the same time, we may reasonably ask why it was Cappadocia, specifically, that was abandoned. Because it was further away from Assyria is not much of an answer!

As for the priests of Amun, they are certainly preserving the ideologically vital mummies of dead royalty, but you don't have to be a dialectical materialist to notice that they didn't they re-inter most of the precious treasures  originally consigned to the royal graves. I can make up a story about deflation here, and others have, according to which all of this buried money must be recirculated, but the when of that recirculation matters.

Another way to tell this story is the way that Ángelos Chaniótis does here,quoting Curtis Runnels' fascinating observation (presumably from here; Google Books doesn't seem to want to let me look at bibliographies) that metals, which embed investment, experience and exchange, make an excellent medium for the storage of (social) capital. On the face of it, bronze, although less expensive than bullion, makes a better store of value. For while both gold and silver could be mined with the Middle East, tin entered the region from outside. From a strictly practical analysis, it would make little sense for a Middle Eastern state to turn bronze into a currency standard without knowing the rate at which tin was entering the region, but it is likely that no prince of that era would have even realised that such a statistic could potentially be known, much less what a currency standard might be. An exogenous collapse in the "price" of bronze due to a steady acceleration in the inflow of tin is surely a part of this story, but only a part of it, or we would find an effort to sterilise this inflow, something on the order of the explosion of tripod dedications at Olympia in the 700s.  


This is because, as I understand or recall some half-remembered articles encountered while browsing that lately deceased institution, the periodical stacks, the Late Bronze Age already had the rudiments of an international bullion standard, with standardised weights in lieu of coinage.* It clearly lacked a theoretical apparatus that would have allowed it to understand the workings of its own financial sector, but if bronze hoards weren't sustaining the state, silver and gold hoards would seem able to serve. But it didn't. The near-simultaneous collapse of Pylos and the other Mycenaean palace-principalities is still difficult to understand or conceptualise in this framework. The  financial instrument upon which they relied to store labour and speculative gains and reputation was suddenly, inexplicably losing its value, and the world was unwinding. Sure. Sort of like this, I think. Deflation breeds a hunger for money, but we're still left to explain the collapse in demand. Can iron do that, ahead of its introduction as a tool metal? Yes, I think that it can. (Or, rather, it can if we get away from too much specificity about the actual material.)

Or, it's a theory, anyway. Pulled out of my nether regions, of course, but remember: the project is a world history. That's like a license for ass-pulling!

And, thanks to the Web, I can also circle back on things that I can at least claim to know, specifically, the Battle of Navarino. Poor old Richard Helmstadter** would probably shake his head at hearing me claim to understand the Nineteenth Century context of the Greek Wars of Liberation way back there in London, but I do have a PhD field to my credit, enough to see that the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Navarino is a pretty good summary, and well linked. Here's an aerial, apparently a 1943 RAF surveillance photo. of the Bay of Navarino. Pylos seems to be just north of the crop, but you can see the flat and fertile land below it on the way to the Bay.

Linked via Wikipedia article***

In 1827, something happened here. 10 battleships-of-the-line and 10 frigates against 3 battleships and 17 frigates, plus lots of lesser vessels of very little importance. Was it this?



Or this?





That's history for you: one event, multiple interpretations. We humans. Bubbly Dutch girls against bare-armed leather boys. Warriors of the Faith verus warriors of Progress. 


Yeah. Enough of that. Here's a utilitarian point: the Bay of Navarino is an excellent anchorage, and big enough to stage a naval battle. Yet the lord of Pylos went to the trouble of excavating an artificial port in the dunes only 10 miles north. That, I modestly argue, tells us something concrete about the Late Bronze Age collapse. Sure, it's all a complex tapestry (if you're a real Simpsons fan, you'll remember the context of the quote from a little later in the episode), but here's a telling fact.