An eerie photograph arrives in the post from Salim Fadhley
If you click to enlarge, you will see clearly that the name of this big ship is the Deutschland. Yet as we know, because Father Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ told us, the Deutschland was wrecked off the Kentish Knock on the morning of the seventh of December 1875. Five nuns were drowned! So could this be a ghost ship? And if we peer very very intently at the photo, can we see, there on deck, the Tall Nun? It is all very mysterious.
Many thanks to Glyn Webster for alerting me to this exciting headline:
Fears for goat-man in Utah wild herd
I cannot help wondering if the fellow togged up as a goat might be related to the goat-boy in that favourite children’s rhyme, which I am sure all Hooting Yard readers have by heart:
Incey-wincey goat-boy, creature of two realms.
We can see you darting in between the elms.
Half of you is human, the other half’s a goat.
Incey-wincey goat-boy, drowning in a moat.
The house in Deal where Charles Hawtrey lived in the last years of his life. Snap taken by Pansy Cradledew, yesterday.
Further to that earwig business, I found this reference to Speke and earwigs at snopes.com:
John Hanning Speke, remembered for tracking down the source of the Nile River, recorded that the interior of his tent “became covered with a host of small black beetles, evidently attracted by the glimmer of the candle.” Exhausted, Speke went to sleep with them crawling over his person, only to be awakened by one of the “horrid little insects” struggling into his ear. Trying to remove the beetle only pushed it in further. The beetle continued into Speke’s ear as far as possible, and then “he began with exceeding vigour like a rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description . . . What to do I knew not.” After trying to flush the critter out with melted butter, Speke tried to dig it out with his penknife, succeeding only in killing it and increasing the damage to his ear. Infection followed, distorting his face and causing boils. “For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed. Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of the beetle – a leg, a wing, or parts of the body – came away in the wax.”
(Quotes are from Speke’s journals, as referred to in Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton by Edward Rice, 1990, Scribner’s, New York.)
Glyn Webster has been reading How I Found Livingstone by Henry M Stanley, and sends this splendid extract:
Mpwapwa, though the traveller from the coast will feel grateful for the milk it furnished after being so long deprived of it, will be kept in mind as a most remarkable place for earwigs. In my tent they might be counted by thousands; in my slung cot they were by hundreds; on my clothes they were by fifties; on my neck and head they were by scores. The several plagues of locusts, fleas, and lice sink into utter insignificance compared with this fearful one of earwigs. It is true they did not bite, and they did not irritate the cuticle, but what their presence and numbers suggested was something so horrible that it drove one nearly insane to think of it. Who will come to East Africa without reading the experiences of Burton and Speke? Who is he that having read them will not remember with horror the dreadful account given by Speke of his encounters with these pests? My intense nervous watchfulness alone, I believe, saved me from a like calamity.
Mr Webster adds:
I haven’t been able to learn more! Not of Burton and Speke’s earwig experiences nor the nature of unnamed horror a plague of earwigs implies.
I am going to embark on further research myself, but in the meantime if any reader knows what Stanley is getting all worked up about please leave a note in the Comments.
An important letter arrives from Antipodean Hooting Yard researcher Glyn Webster. The heading is “Supermarket”. I reproduce it in its entirety:
The elderly man ahead of me was buying a big bag of zeolite, two bottles of Shiraz and a funnel. And I said nothing! Lord knows what he has gone and done.
A superlative discovery from Ptak Science Books . . .
In the midst of a storm, [Antonio Pigafetta] writes,
“The body of St Anselm appeared to us . . . in the form of a fire lighted at the summit of the mainmast, and remained there near two hours and a half, which comforted us greatly, for we were in tears only expecting the hour of our perishing. And when that holy light was going away from us, it gave out such brilliance in our eyes that for nearly a quarter of an hour we were like people blinded and calling for mercy . . . It is to be noted that whenever that light which represents St Anselm shows itself and descends on a vessel in a storm at sea, that vessel is never lost. Immediately this light departed, the sea grew calmer, and then we saw various kinds of birds among which were some that had no fundament.”
This is not a hallucination – he is describing the electrical phenomenon known as St Elmo’s Fire – but the language tends towards the visionary, and ends with this decidedly odd seabird that lacks an anus.
Charles Nicholl, in “Conversing With Giants”, collected in Traces Remain : Essays And Explorations (2011), quoting Antonio Pigafetta, who met giants in Patagonia. Pigafetta was a supernumerary passenger on Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation (1519-1522), one of the few who made it back to Seville.
Here is the entire brief life of Dr Richard Stokes:
Scholar to Sir William Oughtred for Mathematiques (Algebra). Made himself mad with it, but became sober again, but I feare like a crackt glasse. Became Roman Catholique. Married unhappily at Liège, dog and catt, etc. Became a sotte. Dyed in Newgate, prisoner for debt, April 1681.
One of the briefest of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, quoted in “Noticing Everything : A Celebration Of John Aubrey” in Traces Remain : Essays And Explorations by Charles Nicholl (2011).
Babcock resented Popper, or his shadow, and he was uneasy around Ed, who was all too palpable. He took Ed for a Southerner and tried to stay clear of him. He seldom spoke to him, and then only in the imperative mood, master to servant. Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough – Boyce and Broadus and Buford and Othal, and queried the spelling of their names – and Ed’s manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers through toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements. Later, through a quiet investigation, using his court connections, Babcock found that Ed was actually from Nebraska, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, though Nebraska was bad enough.
from Masters Of Atlantis by Charles Portis (1985). I am very grateful to Nige for alerting me to this comic masterpiece. The above is merely one excerpt from a novel whose every page provokes guffaws of mirth.
The British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon jungle, along with his son Jack and a friend of Jack’s, in 1925. Fawcett was searching for the remains of an ancient mythical (and mystical) city he called Z. Over the following years, many attempts were made to find him…
Many Brazilians told us that, over the past few decades, religious cults had spring up in the area that worshipped Fawcett as a kind of god. They believed that Fawcett had entered a network of underground tunnels and discovered that Z was, of all things, a portal to another reality. Even though Brian Fawcett had concealed his father’s bizarre writings at the end of his life, these mystics had seized upon Fawcett’s few cryptic references, in magazines such as the Occult Review, to his search for “the treasures of the invisible World”. These writings, coupled with Fawcett’s disappearance and the failure of anyone over the years to discover his remains, fuelled the notion that he had somehow defied the laws of physics.
One sect, called the Magical Nucleus, was started, in 1968, by a man named Udo Luckner, who referred to himself as the High Priest of the Roncador and wore a long white gown and a cylindrical hat with a Star of David. In the 1970s, scores of Brazilians and Europeans, including Fawcett’s great-nephew, flocked to join the Magical Nucleus, hoping to find this portal. Luckner built a religious compound by the Roncador Mountains, where families were forbidden to eat meat or wear jewelry. Luckner predicted that the world would end in 1982 and said that his people must prepare to descend into the hollow earth. But, when the planet remained in existence, the Magical Nucleus gradually disbanded.
from The Lost City Of Z : A Legendary British Explorer’s Deadly Quest To Uncover The Secrets Of The Amazon by David Grann (2009)
An exciting tale of soup and woodland peril from the Funny Old World column in the latest issue of Private Eye:
“It all started because the soup was too cold,” sixty-nine-year-old Yuri Ticiuc told reporters from his hospital bed in the remote Russian republic of Altai, “and I complained about it to my wife. The complaint turned into a row about her lousy cooking, and I got so angry with her that I stormed out of the house, and out into the woods. I walked and walked for hours through the dense woodlands, until I gradually calmed down, and when I did, the truth started to dawn on me. I was in the middle of the forest in the middle of winter, I didn’t have any idea where I was, and I couldn’t find my way back home.”
Ticiuc was speaking after being lost in frozen forest for more than a month. “I thought I was going to die. The temperatures were sub-zero, and I was getting really weak by the end. I survived by eating berries and leaves, and grain from a haystack, until I became too weak to move. Then one day I heard voices and saw some farm workers nearby. I called them and they managed to get me to hospital. The doctors tell me I’m lucky to be alive, but they may have to amputate my legs. They’re damaged from frostbite, and it may not be possible to save them.
“No matter what happens in future, that’s the last time I ever criticise my wife’s cooking. Her soup may be cold and tasteless, but anything is better than rotten hay.”
10/20 : Attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over one tenth of an inch in length; mosquito nets no protection; gnats bite all night allowing no sleep.
10/21 : Another sleepless night on account of blood-sucking gnats.
10/22 : My body mass of bumps from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep – simply terrible. Rain during noon, all afternoon and most of night. My shoes have been soaked since starting. Worst ticks so far.
10/23 : Horrible night with worst biting gnats yet; even smoke of no avail.
10/24: More than half ill from insects. Wrists and hands swollen. Paint limbs with iodine.
10/25 : Arose to find termites covering everything left on the ground. Blood-sucking gnats still with us.
10/30 : Sweat bees, gnats and “polverinahs” (blood-sucking gnats) terrible.
11/2 : My right eye is sadly blurred by gnats.
11/3 : Bees and gnats worse than ever; truly “there’s no rest for the weary”.
11/5 : My first experience with flesh- and carrion-eating bees. Biting gnats in clouds – very worst we have encountered – rendering one’s food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one’s own blood.
from the 1920 Amazonian expedition diary of Ernest Holt, quoted in The Lost City Of Z by David Grann (2009)
A splendid postage over at Ptak Science Books gives us some compelling seventeenth-century religious nicknames.
“Christ Came Into the World to Save” Barebone
Accepted Trevor, of Norsham
Redeemed Compton, of Battle
Faint Not Hewit, of Hearthfield
Make Peace Heaton of Hare
God Reward Smart, of Firehurst
Earth Adams, of Warbleton
Called Lower of Warbleton
Kill Sin Pimple, of Witham
Return Spelman, of Watling
Fly Debate Roberts, of Britling
Be Faithful Joiner, of Britling
More Fruit Fowler, of East Hadley
Weep Not Billing, of Lewes
Meek Brewer, of Okeham
Further to yesterday’s musing on Jethro Tull, a reader has sent me these snaps from Crowmarsh Gifford in Oxfordshire. Clearly I shall have to up sticks and move to this paradise on earth immediately.
