Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
Well here is the latest missive from the "unstable Pacific Rim." I'm a bit ahead of the news again, so you're getting this after the route on Colonial Route 4. Looks like we're going to have a Communist Indo-China soon unless de Lattre de Tassigny can stabilise the front, and I imagine that'll be the end of the Fourth Republic. Exciting times! And if that's not enough, there's talk of the Seventh Fleet enforcing the blockade. I can't even begin to express the absurdity of it, but apparently Arleigh "Thirty Knot" Burke says that the British will fold if we push it, and he's definitely the leader of the Navy's Young Turks.
I hope --I hope!-- this will all blow over, but as a matter of simple self preservation I wonder if we need to reach out to the Reds?
Robert E. Howard was born on 22 January 1906, the son of an itinerant doctor, which doesn't sound like a real job, but, then, we're talking about Texas. In the postwar boom, Dr. Howard's finances improved enough that he was able to settle his family in Cross Plains, Texas, where his son died seventeen years later by his own hand on 11 June 1936, predeceased by his mother.
Kull wasn't only a literary precursor to Conan. Howard made an explicit family connection in an unpublished essay, "The Hyborian Age," which lays out his prehistoric imaginarium in some detail, further hinting at a connection with some of his other characters, notably Cormac Mac Art, a "Gaelic pirate" of the time of King Arthur, and not the quasi-historical High King of Ireland. The comic panel opposite makes Cormac the descendant of Kull's sidekick, Brule the Spear Slayer, but close enough, because Brule is the reason for this digression.
"The Hyborean Age" presents us with a prehistory of the Earth that is catastrophism on steroids. Kull lives about 20,000BC, and is brought up on the barbaric island continent of Atlantis, to the east of the Pictish Isles. Further east is a blobby continent in place of Eurasia, where (Western) humans fight evil serpent-men. Some time later, but after Atlanteans and Picts have colonised the northwest bit of the blobby continent, catastrophe reshapes geography and causes the collapse of civilisation, such as it is. The Picts and Atlanteans became barbaric, the Atlanteans becoming Cimmerians, Conan's people. Another catastrophe brings an end to the age of Conan adventures, and reshapes the geography of Eurasia one more time, so that the Picts and Cimmerians are isolated on what becomes the British Isles, now as Celts, and, well, Picts.
In Howard's writing, although not in the published fan fiction he has inspired, the later Picts are notably more barbaric than the Cimmerians, almost to the point of being subhuman. In defence --somewhat-- of Howard, this is the Picts of popular history at the time that he was writing. Speakers of a non-Indo-European language, of "Asiatic" phenotype, possessed of an unusual, matrilineal legal system, and in some writing, so "degenerate" as to live in holes in the ground, the Picts had become an object of racist fantasy. Of particular interest to this blog is the implication of a connection with North American First Nations, who notably also practiced matrilineal succession and are of Asiatic phenotype.
Well, no. This blog post is inspired by Siân Grønlie's introduction to his 2006 translation of the Kristni saga, the story of the conversion of Iceland. Grønlie's introduction discusses both the saga and its precursor, Ari the Wise's account of the conversion of Iceland in the Islendimgabok, assuring the reader that the lacunae in the two accounts are as important as what is actually said, because these accounts are intended to create an Icelandic nationality, and one of the key features of a national identity is a "collective amnesia" about alternative accounts of national origins.
In this week of nationalism run amok, I have finally found an excuse to talk about Robert E. Howard and the Picts that is actually related to the topic at hand. "Collective amnesia" is a powerful concept, and the Picts may be its most spectacular victim.
Three of the biggest pseudo-scientific books of the Twentieth Century were published (in English) 1950. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in April; L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in May; while Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki came out in an English edition late in the year, having been first published in Norwegian in 1948. I'm not an expert on Fortean bullshit, but off hand only von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (1971) and Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle (1974) really engaged the public imagination to the same degree as 1950s' trinity of absurdity.
These three books were not, of course, the only ones. I was finally driven to write this post by a Time reviewer calling our attention to the sales success of Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers and telling me, as the self-appointed voice of posterity, that there was something going on. Behind the Flying Saucers doesn't even come close to being in the same league as the first three titles, but, as the reviewer points out, it was making money hand over fist for Scully and his "conservative" publisher, Henry Holt, and that makes it significant in its own right.
Finally, the University of Washington signed up for a single go in the Ivy League Nude Portraiture Scandal in the fall of 1950. Although definitely pseudo-science, the ILNPS seems like a pretty different kind of phenomena. But was it? The answer is that it might not be.
September rolls to its end, and with it the peasants' attempt to challenge the mighty United States. I almost feel sorry for them, as though in another world and time it might have been an underdog story. But, in the end, a country of 10 million people couldn't resist the power, and especially air power, of the most powerful country in the world.
Fortunately for those who like to worry about things, we have the ongoing Menace of Red China, which brings you to your loving daughter-in-law, rusticating in Formosa while we wait for America to do whatever it is going to do here. Besides overfly us and deploy a few hush-hush squadron detachments, that is. With British troops in Korea, it is hard to believe that we're not going to come to some kind of agreement over piracy soon, and then I'll have nothing to do except keep house and write these letters.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS I honestly hope that I get The Economist back soon. I know that I've missed an entire cycle of overtaken predictions of doom, but I'm sure I'll be back in the swing of things in no time.
Here's your friendly letter from the frontlines of the war-to-come, the land of camphor and oolong tea! If Mao builds a navy, that is. Or needs one, because the Koumintang stops surrendering to the first Red soldier they see. You will be glad to know that we are doing our part. Reggie is pretending to atom bomb China, in hopes that the Reds . . . I don't know. What are we hoping? That the Reds bomb us first? Meanwhile, I'm a little ahead of the news again, so I've heard of Inchon, which definitely means that America has pulled it out and managed to defeat mighty North Korea. I feel so patriotic!
Considering some of the things said about Koreans and "Orientals" in the press these last two weeks, I wonder about whether it is some kind of cosmic coincdence that The Black Rose is out, featuring the long ago English hero who brought compasses, gunpowder, and paper to the backwards West. What goes around comes around? Or is this an even more subtle way of belittling Asia? Ronnie has her doubts!
Oh, and you're wondering what I'm doing. Besides doubting, I mean! Learning to cook on a wok and getting to the point where I actually want to see my subscription to The Economist catch up with me. As for yours, I am glad to think that you are already looking ahead to the arrangements for me to resume law school next fall. I've had rumblings from Chicago that my Dad wants to pay for our nanny, and if he wants to be involved, he should be. If not, I will gladly take you up on your offer, although it is early days yet to make plans, tempting fate and all.
So speaking of odd threads dangling out of the whole story of Greenland, how about the "Sinclairs of Greenland and Rattar"?
This is one of those tangles that doesn't really have a starting point as such, so I'm going to begin with a Sixteenth Century Venetian historian, Niccolo Zeno, who in 1558 published a series of letters between one of his ancestors, and his brothers. They described various exciting adventures in vaguely located Atlantic islands, back at the turn of the Fifteenth Century. (The best known of the brothers was a Venetian naval hero active in 1400.) This was an exciting era on the triple borderland between Christianity and Islam, the known world and unknown. It was full of Christian adventurers in Muslim lands, Muslim adventurers in Christian; Of converts both ways, both paladins and saints; and of little taifa states trailing down the coast of what the kings of Morocco declined to allow to be Morocco out of their commitment to the inland caravan trails.
Of course, it was also an age of entertaining fictions about the same, and as far as we can tell, that's what the Zeno letters were. That is not, however, what Johann Reinhard Foerster, Calvinist divine and former naturalist on James Cook's first Pacific voyage thought when he encountered the letters, mainly because he fastened on a supporting character in the colourful story, one Prince Zichmni, which Foerster decided was a Venetian attempt to render "Sinclair." This would be an odd error on a late medieval Venetian's part, inasmuch as "Sinclair is just a Scottish form of "Saint Clare," and Santa Clara of Assisi, founder of the Poor Claires, is perfectly well rendered into Italian as Santa Clara.
Foerster's error, if error it was, isn't actually that hard to understand --now that we have Google. The Sinclairs of Greenland and Rattar are an extremely obscure branch of a Scottish noble house that became extinct in 1784. Short of pouring through old genealogies no Nineteenth or Twentieth Century reader is likely to have heard of them before the rise of Google's awesome powers of aggregation. On the other hand, the extinction of the house, which involved its last heir committing suicide in London at the age of 33 two years after being "wounded in the groin" while reconnoitering the works at Yorktown in the company of Lord Cornwallis is not a story that anyone, or, at least, any man, who was alive at the time was likely to be forget!
So Foerster probably had "John Sinclair,Seventh and Last Lord of Greenland and Rattar" on his mind when he encountered "Prince Zichmni." Foerster had no trouble finding a candidate "Prince Zichmni" in the Sinclair family line, albeit one two centuries before a branch of the family named itself for a farm estate in Caithness that, coincidentally, bore the same name as Greenland's icy mountains. Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Lord of Roslyn (c. 1345--c. 1405) was a Scottish/Norwegian nobleman from the strange era of Sottish/Norwegian condominium in the vaguely defined "Northern Islands" that, I guess, a particularly expansive mind might take to include Greenland and Vinland along with the Orkneys. Henry owed fealty to Scotland for minor properties in Lothan, and to Norway for the Orkneys. In respect to Norwegian affairs, he is recorded as a supporter of King Erik. As far as Good King Robert of Scotland was concerned, he was mainly known as a pest about his Lothian properties, and we might speculate, over the reversion of his wife's lands, which originally included the entire suppressed earldom of Strathearn. Then he was "cruelly killed" by invaders of the Orkneys who might have been English seafarers avenging an attack on an English fleet at Aberdeen by ravaging the Orkneys. The rest is pseudo-history, culminating in "Prince Henry" sailing all the way to Nova Scotia to build some matching New World structures to a classic puzzle-structure in the Old, Rosslyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh. It has to do with Knights Templars and the Holy Grail, you see.
This isn't actually where I started down the rabbit hole. That would be the claim that a Sinclair crest has been found on a tiny bit of jewelry recovered at a dig in Greenland. I don't know. I've been having trouble locating the story online, and if it's in Kirsten Seaver's Frozen Echo, I can't find that, either. (Not to worry, it'll show up on one of my shelves the moment I hit "Post.") It's all pretty irrelevant considering that the old Sinclair crest was a simple saltire cross, so it would be ridiculous to think that a signet ring (or whatever) with a saltire cross on it was a "Sinclair" piece and proof of the doings of Prince Zichnmi.
The issue is that I carried that factoid into my investigation of Arthur St. Clair, himself a fascinating figure in the primordial days of the plantation of North America, as he was the Governor of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan) in the earliest, pre-Constitution days of the American Republic, and yet is a surprisingly shadowy figure. I mean, there's almost four times as many people in Ohio as there are in British Columbia, and I cannot even begin to imagine how many graduate students at BC history departments would be on the trail of Sir James Douglas if there were half as many loose ends in that fascinating man's back story as there are in that of Arthur St. Clair!
(Because there weren't any big Christmas songs charting in December of 1950, although see below)
Whenever I put a hyphen after "Techno" in the titles to these appendices, I'm afraid that I will be too ambitious and ride of in all directions. But, c'mon. It's the Korean War. It'sMASHand the war that Chuck Cunningham must have died in to traumatise his family so much they never even mentioned him again. It's a rich text!
According to Wikipedia, John Clarence Woods was born in Wichita in 1911, enlisted in the US Navy the year he turned 18, went AWOL within months, was found too crazy for the navy, then worked as a general labourer until he was inducted into the army in August of 1943. Soon after he was allowed to volunteer as a hangman on the basis of a claim to have assisted at four hangings in Oklahoma and Texas that could have been disproved by even the slightest research. Sergeant Wood went on to botch at least 11 of the hangings he carried out for the Army (out of only 60 to 7) before he arrived in Nuremberg to add some Nazi war criminals to his list of the slowly strangulated. The Nuremberg trials! I have no words.
But some anonymous US Army poets do (as reported by Janet Valentine):
Hear the patter of running feet
It's the old First Cav in full retreat
They're moving on; they'll soon be gone
They're haulin' ass, not savin' gas
They'll soon be gone.
Over on that hill there's a Russian
tank
A million Chinks are on my flank
(Chorus)
I'm movin' on, I'll soon be gone
With my M-1 broke, it ain't no joke
I'll soon be gone
Million Chinks comin' through the pass
Playin' burp-gun boogie all over my
ass
(Chorus)
Standin' in a rice paddy up to my belly
From then on, they called me "Smelly"
(Chorus)
I sung this song for the very last time
Gonna get Korea off my mind
I'm moving on; I'll soon be gone
I done my time in the shit and slime
I'm movin' on.
("Well, if they go fast enough, maybe some of them will be home by Christmas" --General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in unintentional irony)
The particular ordeal of the Ch'ongch'on River was a run through a "gauntlet" of enemy harassing fire through a highway cut where the Japanese-built road leaves the valley of the Ch'ongch'on to climb and then descend a bench before arriving in the town of Kunu-ri. Lacking any anti-armour weapons or even much artillery, PVA blocking forces couldn't lay down anything more than a harassing fire, but over the length of the roadblock, casualties were heavy, and broken-down soft-skinned vehicles blocked passage for artillery and heavy engineering equipment that was eventually abandoned to the enemy. Not for the first or last time in the Korean War, US troops suffered heavily for lack of armoured personnel carriers to move infantry and engineering troops, which brings me to my final and actually significant bit of US Army incompetence:
