The Ghost Rockets

Karl-Gösta Bartoll searching for a crashed Ghost Rocket on Lake Kölmjärv, 1946. Public Domain image from the Swedish Air Force via Wikimedia Commons.

It was May of 1946 and Europe had finally reached the end of World War II. Even so, its effects were still reverberating around the continent and disturbing the new peace. Greece had descended into civil war a few months earlier, and the Soviet Union was lowering the Iron Curtain—as was famously pointed out by Winston Churchill in March of that year. Sweden had managed to avoid the conflict by maintaining neutrality where they could and occasionally favoring the Nazis or the Allies as necessary. With the fall of Germany, though, the government of Per Albin Hansson was looking nervously at the Soviet Union. Sweden and Russia had been traditional enemies through the 1700s, culminating in the conquest of Finland by the Russians at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and its transfer from Swedish sovereignty. Now after three decades of independence Finland was back under the informal control of Moscow (leading to the new word “finlandization“) and the Swedes were concerned that they were next.

Into this tense situation flew the Ghost Rockets, which some have pointed to as the first UFO flap (predating Kenneth Arnold’s flight over Mount Rainier by a year). A description of them can be best given through an extended quote from a January 1947 article in the US War Department General Staff’s circular “Intelligence Review”:

Flying missiles were first reported over southern Sweden in late May 1946 by the press, which gave the missiles the name of ‘Ghost Rockets.’ In June, these missiles also had been reported over Finland and Denmark. By July, the number of sightings over Sweden had greatly increased, and several also had been reported over Norway. The great majority of these reports were made by untrained observers and, as would be expected, vary widely in the description of the actual missiles as well as, of their course, altitude and speed.…The two most common descriptions of the missiles were ‘a ball of fire with a tail’ and a ‘shiny cigar-shaped object.’ The reported direction of flight covered all points of the compass, with a northerly direction being slightly predominant. Variations in altitude ranged from treetop height to 160,000 feet, the higher altitudes almost exclusively being reported from Finland. Speeds reported were from 65 m.p.h. to ‘lightning fast,’ with the majority described as having great or very great speed. The missiles generally have been reported as diving into the ground or into lakes, or exploding in the air.

One was even photographed by a young Swedish couple, Erik and Åsa Reuterswärd, during the day on July 9^th. After hearing an appeal from the Swedish Ministry of Defense for any evidence of the rockets they sent in their photo, which was eventually published by the Swedish press. In all there were over 2,000 reported sightings, with the last only coming in December, 1946. Suspicion immediately fell on the Soviet Union, which had conquered the German rocketry centre at Peenemünde, on the south side of the Baltic Sea across from Sweden.

This wasn’t the first time Sweden had dealt with rocket overflights. On June 13, 1944 a V-2 (this one fired by the Germans, who still controlled Peenemünde at that stage of the war) went off course, passed on to the Swedish mainland, and exploded roughly a thousand meters above the town of Bäckebo. A great deal of debris rained down, was collected, and was eventually traded to the UK for several Spitfires. It, along with other rocket parts recovered by the Polish Home Army, was important in the Allied effort to reconstruct and understand the V-2.

This is also, unfortunately, the major problem for the theory that the Ghost Rockets were Soviet tests. Despite considerable effort by the Swedish government, not a single piece of undeniable rocket debris was recovered from the supposed overflights of 1946. At the time the Swedish Defense Staff said they had recovered several bits and pieces, but eventually they were all pinned down to more mundane origins. Much more typical was the result of an intensive push to find debris after a reported Ghost Rocket crash into Lake Kölmjärv on July 19^th: nothing. The officer in charge of that search, Karl-Gösta Bartoll (pictured above) stated that he believed the bottom of the lake had been disturbed, so the crashing rocket must have been made of some lightweight alloy that broke up completely. It’s an interesting theory, but another potential reason for the negative result should be obvious to the reader. The Bäckebo rocket yielded pieces weighing up to several hundred kilograms; the Ghost Rockets in their hundreds produced no exhaust nozzles or fuel lines, not even a nut or a bolt. So what else might they have been?

Two British officers from the then-existing MI10 who helped the investigation in the fall of 1946 noted that many of the Ghost Rockets were seen on August 9^th and 11^th. Those dates have those of you who are astronomically inclined saying “A-ha!“, but for everyone else’s benefit: they’re in the middle of the annual Perseid meteor shower. The main explanation seems to be that people, primed by recent rocket stories to keep an eye on the sky, noticed many more meteors than they normally would. It’s been pointed out by later commentators that the sightings on those two days were not at the usual height of the Perseids (early in the morning before sunrise, when the Earth rotates into the path of the cometary stream that causes the meteors), but then meteor showers do have many more stray bits of debris spread outside of their nightly peaks.

So meteors are at least part of the answer, but possibly not its entirety. After all, the earliest Ghost Rockets were seen in May, well before the Perseids came along. The British report assumed that the others were also meteors, just reported less often because they were from lesser showers or so-called “sporadic meteors” and so less noticeable. In theory all it would take would be one person seeing a meteor in May, then concluding that it was a rocket and getting that into the media, for everyone else to start looking at the sky and seeing (and misinterpreting) things they didn’t normally notice. Certainly other mysterious waves of events, like the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic, can be explained by a combination of media attention and geopolitical tension.

There are signs that the Ghost Rocket story was out of control to some extent. For example, the crash of a Saab 18 bomber on August 12^th was reported in the press to have been the result of a collision with a Ghost Rocket, even though the Swedish Air Force attributed it to pilot inexperience. The psychological explanation gets a further boost when one realizes there was even another, smaller burst of similar sightings in Sweden in the 1930s, when certainly no-one had the ability to launch missiles over the country.

So assuming it’s meteors for most of the sightings, is it still possible that a few of the Ghost Rockets really were V-1 and V-2 tests by the Soviets? There’s a residue of reports that don’t fit the meteor theory very well—the “shiny cigar-shaped object[s]” in the long quote above. The Russians are known to have restarted rocket parts production in Germany for a while in 1946, and they may have used some of them. It is worth noting that Peenemünde was heavily damaged when it was captured by the 2^nd Belorussian Army Group in May of 1945, so it would have been difficult, if not impossible to conduct tests from there. The German-made parts didn’t get any known use until 1947, after the USSR had deported German rocket scientists and engineers to southern Russia; the first documented Soviet V-2 tests were in 1947 at Kapustin Yar, near Astrakhan and far, far away from Sweden. Tests of captured V-1s (a much simpler rocket) began as early as March of 1945, but they were even further east near Tashkent. Still, in the Byzantine maze that is Soviet archive secrecy it may be that we simply haven’t seen any documentary proof of earlier tests yet. Until then, though, the Ghost Rockets seem to have been a remarkable case of mass delusion.

The Land Beneath the Waves

The Isles of Scilly as seen from the air. All of the water between the islands on the left and most of the water between them and St. Mary's, the large island on the lower right, was dry land as late as 500 AD. Photo by Mike Knell, taken in March 2009, and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 License.

Beneath Land’s End and Scilly rocks
Sunk lies a town that Ocean mocks.

- Unattributed rhyme from Legend Land, Volume 2, George Basil Barham, published in 1924

The Isles of Scilly barely enter into history. About the only major event associated with them was the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707, when the gloriously named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell sailed a significant fraction of the British Navy into their shallow waters, losing four ships and approximately 1,400 sailors’ lives—including his own. The disaster led to the solution of the Longitude Problem by means of naval chronometers, and as these precise clocks spread they and their descendants revolutionized war, industry, trade, and science. Thank Admiral Shovell when the alarm clock wakes you tomorrow morning. However, the other particularly interesting thing about the Isles of Scilly looks back into the past rather than forward into the Industrial Age.

Britain is lousy with towns and even entire lands lost to the sea. H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by the story of Dunwich in Suffolk: one of the most important towns in medieval England, it was progressively swept into the ocean after a storm surge hit it in 1286. A bit further east the central part of the North Sea covers Doggerland, which was above sea level during the last Ice Age and only submerged about 6500 BC; the author owns a chunk of mammoth tusk dredged up from the area. The effect of the Ice Age on Britain hit Scilly too, but in a less obvious way. The southern half of Britain is further underwater than it should be after accounting for the melting of ancient ice caps, while the north is, in places, actually higher than it was at the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago. This is because one of the ice caps was actually on Scotland and Northern England, and the weight of the ice pressed that section of the island down. Now that the ice has been removed, Britain has been slowly rebalancing itself, and the southern reaches are subsiding as the north rebounds, like a great tectonic see-saw.

This post-glacial rebound is continuing even as we speak, so the Isles of Scilly—literally the most southern point of England—have changed well into the last couple of millennia. It’s worth looking at the British Admiralty’s depth charts for the waters around the islands. The rather small brown areas are the present-day Isles, while the green represents flats that can become exposed if the tide is low enough. The blue area is a rough approximation of what Scilly would have been like some time in the past, with a depth of four meters or less. As you can see, this produces a single large island (sometimes called Ennor after a castle on the largest of the present islands, St. Mary’s) out of most of the plural, 21^st century Scillies. The main difficulty here is knowing just when this island existed. Charles Thomas, emeritus Professor of Cornish Studies at Exeter University has suggested it disappeared some time around 1600 BC, but others have suggested that it existed until more recently—possibly as late as 500 AD. It’s worth noting that the Roman name for the Isles, Scillonia insula,  is singular.

If the latter is true then Ennor existed well into the Celtic period of Britain, which is interesting because there are several legends about drowned lands in Celtic mythology. Readers who know their Thomas Malory (or Jack Vance) are aware of Lyonesse, home of the Arthurian Tristan, and Lyonesse has long been associated with the Isles of Scilly. However, there are signs that the association is a  16^th-century invention. The first known mentions of Lyonesse in literature are just variations on Lodonesia, which is the Roman name for Lothian in Scotland; “Tristan” itself is just a variant, via Latin, of the Pictish royal name “Drust″. The identity of Lyonesse and Scilly (or, rather, the Seven Stones Reef , deathbed of the Torrey Canyon, to the northeast) wasn’t entirely cemented until Alfred, Lord Tennyson got his hands on it in his mid-19^th century Idylls of the King.

All is not lost, however. The Celtic legends go deeper than Lyonesse, to stories such as Brittany’s Ker-Is (or Caer Ys, if you prefer the more common Welsh or Narnian spelling to the Breton). It too is a sunken land, this time placed in Douarnenez Bay south-east of Brest. There is even a potential connection between it and Scilly: Mont Saint-Michel is not too far away on the border between Brittany and Normandy and it was the sister house of the remarkably similar-looking St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall—right where the British coast is closest to Scilly and where a drowned forest can be seen at low tide. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to suppose a Breton monk, familiar with the story of Ker-Is, being transferred to St. Michael’s Mount when it was gifted to the Norman monastery in the 11^th century and him making the obvious inference when he saw what was in the water.

On the other hand, the story may be entirely native. The Welsh have a similar legend, Cantre’r Gwaelod, which is supposed to be a drowned hundred in Cardigan Bay. If it comes down to it, the story could even be both native and imported. After all, Brittany was colonized by Britons from Wales and Cornwall in the 4^th and 6^th centuries (a trek legendarily led by a Welsh prince whose name hits two fantasy heroes in one blow, Conan Meriadoc). Ker-Is may just be the colonists’ version of Cantre’r Gwaelod, 1500 years on.

The main difficulty with fitting Ennor to any of these stories is that they’re all of sudden inundation. Most are about sinful lands suffering the wrath of God and feature a single survivor literally galloping his horse away from the clawing waves—a myth memorialized in the coat of arms of the Trevelyan family of Cornwall. The flooding of Scilly’s central plain would have taken many years; a snail could have escaped, let alone a horse. Still, this isn’t a fatal rupture of the connection between the two. Human beings have a knack for making stories more interesting, and it’s not too difficult to see a folk tale that “once there were farms under the bay” slowly turn into a story of dash and adventure, especially under the influence of the biblical story of Noah.

Ultimately, we’ll learn more about Ennor only through archaeological investigation. Surprisingly for the heritage-mad United Kingdom there’s never been a large-scale investigation of the waters around the present-day isles. But the so-called Lyonesse Project began in 2009, and is to run until 2011. Its goal is to determine what the Isles of Scilly were like prior to inundation. Results are expected in the next few months.

Van de Kamp’s Planets

The intrepid E. E. Barnard on one of his final scientific missions, in this case a solar eclipse watch in Green River, Wyoming, June 8th, 1918. Barnard's most famous discovery was Barnard's Star, which was suspected to have planets for a while in the 1960s and '70s. Public Domain image.

In the history of astronomy up to 1992 there were only two people who could cleanly claim to have discovered a planet: William Herschel found Uranus and Urbain Le Verrier can claim Neptune; if you’re feeling somewhat charitable, you can give half of Neptune to John Couch Adams. For almost eighty years Clyde Tombaugh was in this group, but Pluto was famously demoted in 2006. The discoverers of the first four asteroids (Giuseppe Piazzi who discovered Ceres; Pallas’ discovery by Heinrich Olbers; Karl Harding who claimed Juno; and Olbers again with Vesta) had a similar fate. For close to forty years they were planet-discoverers. All their “planets” were discovered between 1801 and 1807, and were considered important enough for the title because they were the only known planetoids until Astraea was discovered in 1845. But that discovery signaled a rash of new inhabitants for the Asteroid Belt—eighteen more by the end of 1852, and a total of 62 by 1860; it became clear that the previously lonely four were something quite different from planets and so they were downgraded.

Since the 1990s, though, a variety of new techniques has uncovered more than 500 more planets to date—the difference now being that increases in instrument sensitivity make it possible to see planets outside of the Sun’s system, in the systems of the much more distant stars. For a little while in the 1960s and early ’70s, though, one other astronomer made a plausible claim that he’d discovered a planet, and it too was outside the Solar System.

That astronomer was Piet “Peter” van de Kamp, from 1937 to 1972 the director of Sproul Observatory of Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College. Van de Kamp’s claim needed to be taken seriously because his specialty was the tiny motions of  stars in the sky and the announcement depended on just that.

It seems that while studying the proper motion of 18,000 stars he started considering the possibility that he could find a planet or planets around Barnard’s Star. Barnard’s Star is notable for two main reasons: it is the second closest star system to the Earth (third, if you count the Sun), and it has the largest proper motion of any star. In other words, it changes its position in the sky faster than any other, taking “only” 173 years to cover a width equal to the full Moon’s. Van de Kamp’s insight was that while planets themselves were invisble to the technology of the time, no star with planets would move in a straight line. Instead, the planets would tug it this way and that as they orbited the star, causing it to make tiny loops in the sky. As Barnard’s Star was so close, the loops would be relatively large and easy to see.

Of course, “relatively” is the key word here. Barnard’s Star was already making little loops because of the Earth’s own motion around the Sun, and they would be about 100 times larger than the ones caused by any planet orbiting the distant star. Depending on exactly how big the hypothetical planet was, and how far away it was from the star, the displacement it caused would be on the order of a micrometer (one one-millionth of a meter) on Sproul Observatory’s photographic plates. Nevertheless, van de Kamp thought he could pull it off.

He began his observations shortly after moving to Sproul in the spring of 1937, and kept them up for 26 years before announcing that he had in fact discovered a planet around Barnard’s Star. By his calculation it was about 60% bigger than the planet Jupiter, and it orbited the star at a distance of 4.4 AU (a bit shy of Jupiter’s distance from our own Sun). His discovery made quite a splash, as being the first to see an extra-solar planet (even indirectly) was a major coup. Other scientists had a hard time duplicating his results, but this was no great surprise: it relied on the Sproul Observatory’s 24-inch refractor, a kind of photographic telescope that was being mothballed in other observatories in favour of spectroscopic ones; furthermore van de Kamp had needed more than two decades of observations to be sure. It was going to take time for anyone else to check his results.

The first sign of trouble came after van de Kamp announced planets around other stars too: Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, and one he’d mooted back in 1951, Lalande 21185. Another astronomer, Bob Harrington, noticed that the shape of the planetary wobbles was the same for all three, and for Barnard’s Star too—as if it were the photographic plates that were moving, not the stars. That turned out to be the case. When it was first made the Sproul Observatory telescope van de Kamp was using had had one of its lenses inserted the wrong way, and while the effect on its operation was very small, in 1949 it had been removed and reset the proper way. The slight change in the lens had made a slight change in the way light focused on photographic plates taken with the telescope, and by bad luck the change was about the same size as what van de Kamp had been expecting to see from his planets. He agreed that all of his data prior to 1950 was now suspect, but still argued that everything taken since then still supported his discovery.

With the idea of instrument error now in the open, though, another astronomer by the name of George Gatewood published a paper in 1973 which demolished van de Kamp’s planets. The consensus is now that there was a cycle causing the image of the stars to move, but that it was down here on Earth. The telescope underwent regular maintenance, and every time it did its focus shifted ever so slightly and made any star it observed appear to have moved. Ironically, Gatewood eventually changed his mind about one of van de Kamp’s claims, Lalande 21185, but this too has turned out to be instrument error

After retiring, van de Kamp returned to his native Netherlands, where he died on May 18^th, 1995. To the end he believed he had found at least one planet around Barnard’s Star, and maybe two. One real set of planets, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12, had been discovered in 1992 but they were a peculiar case having probably formed after a supernova and not giving any real insight into planets in the universe as a whole. The Golden Age of Extra-Solar Planets began when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced they had discovered 51 Pegasi b (AKA Bellerophon) just under five months after van de Kamp passed away. Its existence, as well as that of hundreds of others of new planets since then, has been demonstrated conclusively using two new techniques called the Doppler Method and the Transit Method. Van de Kamp’s photographic method is now considered a dead end.

Terra Preta, or, The Lost Cities of Amazonia

The Ingá Stone, a possibly pre-Columbian set of petroglyphs found in Paraíba State, Brazil. It's one of several pieces of evidence that the Amazon once held civilizations which were wiped out by disease after contact with Europe. Public Domain image by Jp. Juarez, from Wikimedia Commons.

One of the many inexplicable statements in historical literature is Gaspar de Carvajal’s description of his travels down the Amazon River with Francisco de Orellana. He says in numerous ways that the banks of the Amazon were stuffed with people, literally village after village for most of its length. No-one else reported this. All subsequent expeditions found the Amazon Basin much as it is today—thinly inhabited. Indeed it had to be this way, as Amazonian soils are notoriously poor for farming. The tragedy of modern-day deforestation of the jungle there is that the poor Brazilian farmers doing the cutting end up with farms that can’t support them for more than a few years before the soil’s nutrients are gone. Even the native Amazonians have to resort to slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing an area then moving on after a while to let the soil recover rather than settling in villages. De Carvajal, like many early explorers, must have been embellishing his tale to the point of lying.

Except maybe not.

De Orellana’s expedition was the first to reach the deep Amazon jungle, in 1541. Surprisingly he began from the west coast of South America, crossing the Andes from the Spanish conquests in Peru and then working his way down to the mouth of the river where the Portuguese had a presence. In between was terra incognita to Europeans. From the end of this expedition in 1542 until until 1637 there were no other trips up or down much of the Amazon (barring the bizarre Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre episode two decades later).

Pedro Teixeira was responsible for that new expedition, and he reported a green desert: trees and rampant foliage, and no villages worth mentioning let alone entire civilizations. So it’s been down to the present day: if de Carvajal were telling the truth, the ninety-five years between the two expeditions concealed the death of literally millions of people and an entire way of life.

As archaeology climbed out of pseudo-science during the 19^th century, its practitioners developed a hard-nosed attitude about lost civilizations. The Mayans may have been disappeared but Chichen Itza remained; we don’t even know what the Indus Valley people called themselves, but Mohenjo Daro is a monumental testament to their existence. Atlantis and the Lost Tribes of Israel, though? Well….

Until recently, Amazonian civilization fell into the latter category, and may end up there still. For a long time, De Carvajal’s account was the lonely piece of evidence that it ever existed, and since early travel accounts brought us such non-existent wonders as the gold-digging ants of Central Asia, archaeologists were skeptical.

A major problem is the Amazonian environment itself. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, archaeology is easiest in cold, dry environments where all sorts of artifacts can survive. Incan civilization’s remains include beautiful items made of cloth and wood thanks to the high desert in which many Incas lived. But the Amazon presents the opposite conditions: rampant moisture and life literally eat anything other than metal or stone. Worse, the Amazon is extremely short on stone, and no metals besides gold and silver (and a little copper in the Andes) were used south of Panama. Of the wood, bone, plant materials, cloth, and ceramic that could have been the foundation of Amazonian civilization, only the latter could have survived.

This leads to terra preta de Indio, or just “terra preta” for short, the Brazilian Portuguese name for an unusual phenomenon. Good farming soils have many silicate particles, which trap the nutrients a growing crop needs. Amazonian soils are low in silicate and high in aluminum and iron oxide; those oxides have the opposite effect to silicate, making nutrients susceptible to leaching when the rain comes down.

But here and there through the Amazon are patches of terra preta (“black soil”) that are extremely fertile despite being low in silicates as well. A high fraction of carbon particles from burned trees and plants, which also have nutrient-trapping properties, take their place. Furthermore, the carbon is buffered from rain by large amounts of crushed pottery mixed all throughout the soil. Some argue that terra preta patches are the remnants of Amazonian waste dumps and so happened by accident; the potsherds are just the broken leftovers of everyday items. Others argue that there’s just too much of it mixed in with the soil—that pre-Colombian Amazonians deliberately made pottery for the sole purpose of smashing it and using it to make farmable plots.

The final answer to this question depends on just how much terra preta there is, and for the moment we just don’t know. Estimates have varied between 6,300 square kilometers spread over the whole Amazon (in which case it’s reasonable to think its creation was an accident) to one hundred times that—in other words, the size of the entire Ukraine, the country with the fifth largest amount of arable land in the world.

Even if we accept that this question is nowhere near answered, though, we can understand something about pre-Colombian Amazonian life from terra preta. With one notable exception (the ancient Jōmon culture of Japan), pottery is only known in settled cultures: heavy and fragile, it’s just too much trouble for hunter-gatherers to carry around. Modern Amazonians aren’t settled in the present day, so the obvious inference is that their culture must have been settled the past and then changed for some reason.

There’s even another clue in a similar vein. An aristocracy, or even a simple chiefdom, depends on a surplus of goods, usually food (land aristocracies like “The Duke of So-and-So” are as they are because the land is worked by farmers). Permanent social hierarchies don’t develop until agriculture develops. Hunter-gatherer cultures or slash-and-burn agriculturalists are invariably egalitarian—there is no surplus of anything for a chief to hoard, and in the event someone starts trying to impose on the rest of his group, his prospective subjects can just walk away. Within limits any bit of land is as good as any other for gathering food or a new slash-and-burn plot.

But some Amazonian tribes do have aristocracies. The Yurimagua were known to have a “high king” of sorts into the 1700s, a time when the tribe was living at a hunter-gatherer level. Even in the modern day many tribes (for example, the Kuikuro) have complex social hierarchies, which is unique for societies that don’t engage in settled farming.

We even have evidence of one relatively advanced Amazonian culture, which was at the mouth of the river on Marajó Island. While not up to the standards of the Aztecs or Inca, the Marajoara culture raised funeral mounds full of pottery and built canals and weirs to raise fish.

So what happened? There’s still argument about when the Marajoara culture disappeared, with some saying before Columbus about 1400 AD and some saying as late as 1650. If the latter, it’s not unreasonable to assume that it gave way under the same pressure as destroyed the similarly unencountered central North American civilizations: the introduction of several European diseases to which Native Americans had no resistance.

The gap of 95 years between de Orellana and Teixeira is what makes this a workable hypothesis. If Europeans accidentally introduced smallpox, measles, and others to the central Amazon basin, they had time to repeatedly devastate the population to the point that they’d be reduced to hunter-gathering. The passing decades would have given enough time for the non-durable products of their civilization to decay and the passing generations would have blurred the Amazonians’ memory of their ancestors. Come the explorations of Europeans from 1650 onwards, there’d be little clue that Amazonians had lived any differently.

There are now increasing signs that this theory is correct. Starting in the late 80s and much more so in just the last few years a mixture of forest clearing and satellite surveying in the upper reaches of the Amazon have found evidence of a fairly advanced native culture in the uplands between stretches of Amazonian flood plain. Gaspar de Carvajal’s account is not the only evidence any more.

The SS John Harvey, Saviour of Millions

One of the 2,751 Liberty Ships built during WWII. One of these, the SS John Harvey, sunk and caused a terrible disaster, but it was one which led to a major medical breakthrough. Public Domain image from the Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

Medicine is tricky work because the human body is so complex that it’s resistant to traditional science. Ever since René Descartes systems are broken down into their individual components, studied, and then when those components are understood the capacities of the larger group are understood as well. But biological systems often interact subtly, and in non-obvious ways.

This means that for every medical discovery that was made systematically there’s one that was heavily dependent on luck. The most famous example is penicillin, which was discovered after a chance observation by Alexander Fleming. Far less well-known is the story of the SS John Harvey and its effect on cancer research.

The John Harvey was an American Liberty Ship, assigned to a cargo run during the invasion of Italy in World War II. On her final voyage she was carrying a secret load of chemical weapons. All the combatants in WWII swore off chemical weapons (even Hitler: he’d been gassed and temporarily blinded as a military runner in the last month of World War I, and was extremely leery of that kind of weapon), but all hedged their bets. Franklin Roosevelt had chemical weapons shipped to the Mediterranean theatre beginning in August of 1943, just in case they were needed, and so in November of that year the John Harvey found itself in the port of Bari, Italy with a hold containing 60,000 kilograms of mustard gas in shells.

As its mission was secret, its captain couldn’t ask port authorities for priority; as Bari was one of the major ports supplying the Allies during the invasion of the Italian mainland, the ship was stuck in line for some time waiting for its cargo to be offloaded. It never happened, as on December 2^nd Bari was struck by a major German air raid (so big that it shut down the port for more than two months; sixteen ships were sunk and it was dubbed “Little Pearl Harbor” at the time). The John Harvey was not hit, but it was showered with flaming debris, caught fire and blew up. Its cargo was unleashed on its crew and the defenseless town.

Every member of the Harvey‘s complement who knew what was in the hold was killed, so rescuers dealing with the casualties had no idea what they were up against. Mustard gas (which is actually an oily liquid which vaporizes very easily) needs to be countered before contact with a very specific treatment or, preferably, the entire area needs to be washed down with bleach or a mixture of substances named DS2. Not realizing that they needed to do this, many people succumbed to the attack while trying to rescue the first victims. For example, the HMS Bicester fished 30 casualties out of the water but, being damaged itself, was towed to nearby Taranto for repairs. By the time it got there many of its crew were suffering from chemical burns and blindness.

By the time mustard gas causes symptoms, it’s too late to do anything about it, but even at that point the medical personnel couldn’t figure out what was going on—partly due to the secrecy covering the cargo and partly because few doctors had seen mustard gas in action since 1918.  When someone was pulled from the water he was often covered in oily mustard gas, only to be dismissed because the substance was assumed to be diesel or gasoline dumped into the bay from ships split open by the air raid. Victims of a dunking were often suffering from exposure too, and so were wrapped in blankets that trapped the oil next to their skin.

Mustard gas does have a garlicky smell, though, and both the smell and the developing burns over the next few hours (and days, as still no-one knew to clean up the lingering chemicals) led medics to suspect some sort of chemical. An expert on chemical warfare, Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, was sent by the Deputy Surgeon General of the US Army to figure out what was going wrong. Lt.-Col. Alexander ran every test he could think of and eventually pinned down mustard gas as the culprit; he also used the technique pioneered by John Snow of mapping the location of casualties to pinpoint the cause and determined that the John Harvey was the centre.

War-time secrecy clamped down on the accident reports, but too many witnesses had seen what was going on and the US Army eventually admitted a few months later that the John Harvey had been carrying mustard gas. Nevertheless, the incident got lost in the tumult of 1944 and documents pertaining to it weren’t declassified until 1959.

In all there were 628 known casualties, including 86 deaths, but there were probably many more. As well as the oily residue on the waters of the port, a cloud of vaporized mustard gas had drifted across the town; civilian Barieses had scattered into the country after the raid and would have had to deal with the slow-burning chemical on their own, far away from where anyone could take official notice.

In the midst of the disaster, though, Lt.-Col. Alexander made an interesting discovery because he had had to do so many tests to narrow the field of suspects down: mustard gas kills white blood cells. Among their many other properties white blood cells divide quickly, which got the Lieutenant-Colonel to thinking about cancer cells, which are also noted for their quick growth. As part of his report, he suggested that someone might want to look into mustard gas, or hopefully something related that was a little less fearsome, as an anti-cancer drug.

As it happened, in 1942 Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman of Yale University had received a commission from the US Army to study the underlying chemistry of mustard gas’ effect on animal cells. They’d noticed the white blood cell-killing effect as well, but this too hadn’t got out to the medical world at large due to military secrecy. They’d idly considered the medical implications of their discovery, but then along came Alexander’s report to light a fire under them. They tested mechlorethamine, a derivative of mustard gas, on animals and then humans and found that it was effective as a treatment for lymphoma, including Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The latter was once a common killer of children, with a mortality rate of 100%; mustard gas-derivatives now make it very curable.

Mustard gas kills rapidly dividing cells by preventing DNA molecules from uncoiling, a necessary step for cell division. In 1943 DNA hadn’t even been discovered so the chemical’s effect was a mystery, but once James D. Watson and Francis Crick correctly interpreted Photo 51 in 1953 it was just a matter of time before the underlying chemistry was understood and other substances that worked on cancer cells the same way could be developed. Mechlorethamine was just the first many alkylating antineoplastic agents, a major class of chemotherapy drugs. If you know someone who’s survived a bout of cancer, or if you’ve you’ve survived it yourself, that victory can quite possibly be traced back to the only known release of chemical weapons in the European Theatre of WWII, and one of the worst disasters to strike southern Italy in the 20^th century.

The Lakeview Gusher

A magic lantern slide of the Lakeview Gusher, taken on the 34th day after oil burst to the surface. The surrounding derricks are approximately 80 feet high (24 meters). Public Domain image, courtesy of Berkeley Geography Collection.

The largest oil spill of all time is a special case, the deliberate opening of the valves at Kuwait’s Sea Island terminal by the Iraqi army during the First Gulf War. Nearly 10,000,000 barrels of oil ended up in the Persian Gulf before American air strikes closed the pipelines in January of 1991.

If one sticks to accidents, though, most of the famous spills—for example, the Amoco Cadiz or the Exxon Valdez—don’t really approach the volume of the #1 accident of all time (the Deepwater Horizon‘s ultimate output is unknown as of this writing, but has only a remote chance of hitting the record). Almost all the big spills happened because of oil tankers and their enormous size, but surprisingly the record-holder was on land, in the California oil fields.

California is not generally thought of as an oil-producing state, but between the opening of commercial oil production in Pennsylvania that peaked in the 1890s and the commercialization of the enormous East Texas oil field in the 1930s, Southern California was the most important source of oil in the United States. Starting in the 1880s large amounts were extracted in the Los Angeles basin (urban LA still produces a noticeable amount of oil), but by the turn of the century the big action was out in the semi-desert of the southern San Joaquin Valley, near Bakersfield.

Lakeview Number One was drilled over the course of fifteen months by the Lakeview Oil Company, partnered with Union Oil of California (later Unocal and now part of Chevron) beginning in 1909. Charles Lewis Woods was the man tapped to do the work, and it’s become quite difficult to determine the exact events leading up to the oil spill. In 1910 America was in the habit of semi-mythologizing the people responsible for the US’s rapid economic development, whether it was giants like Thomas Edison, fictional personifications like Paul Bunyan, or minnows like Charles Woods. Edison was at least important enough that he left a trail of contemporary reports that can be turned into biography. Woods has little left besides a raft of contradictory legends.

That said, the basic story is that Woods had earned the nickname “Dry Hole Charlie” for his lack of success in the oil drilling business. Looking deeper suggests that this is because his specialty was exploratory drilling—he didn’t bother with places where people already knew oil could be found, but rather spent his time trying to open new fields. A second legend is that he was actually told to close up the Lakeview Number One as a failure, and that he ignored orders to drill for one more day, the evening of that day being when he hit oil. That seems a little too “just so” to be true, but the story is part of Woods’ legacy.

So, whether or not he was supposed to be drilling any more, Woods reached 740 meters down and the oil started flowing. The California oil fields are usually under pressure, so standard practice at the time, once the layers of impermeable rock above a pocket of oil had been punctured, was to let the pressure pump the well for you. Rather than the stereotypical horse head pulling the oil to the surface, the oil would spurt out of the ground like a geyser — a “blowout” which produces a “gusher” — at which point it would be capped, and the pressure used to push the oil into nearby storage containers. Unfortunately, the Lakeview Gusher was such a monster that the capping step was a problem.

Later analysis would show that Woods’ hole had actually missed the pocket of oil it was tapping by more than a meter, but that the pressure within was so high that it actually fractured the last stretch of solid rock on its own. Initially the Lakeview Gusher flowed at a rate of about 15,000 barrels per day, but as it eroded its well shaft the rate increased. At its peak, it was firing anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 (some estimates are as high as 125,000) barrels of oil up to two hundred feet in the air every 24 hours. Even worse, its oil was what’s called “low ratio”—it wasn’t pure, but was mixed up with sand. Every “barrel” was actually six to eight cubic meters of muddy goulash, raining down on the landscape for fifty or more kilometers depending on how hard the wind was blowing.

At the well-head the pressure was so high that the first attempt to build a cap (at the time, a heavy box of timber beams) was literally blown to pieces. Eventually the oil company gave up trying to cap the gusher and settled on a second strategy, which had been used elsewhere but not to the same extent. Just like when a river floods, workers were hired to build an embankment of timbers and sandbags around the gusher. The local terrain required them to build a wall 150 feet wide at one end of a nearby gully and 250 feet at the other. It was, in places, 75 feet above the edge of the folds in the ground. In total, it could hold 16 million barrels of oil (or, in more commonly understood units, 672 million gallons, or 2.5 billion liters). Though the oil lake never quite reached the rim, at times the reservoir was up to 30 meters deep. The well was in the middle of this, so workers had to paddle out to it in small boats. This undoubtedly would have broken any number of health-and-safety regulations, if California had had any in 1910.

A “semi-cap” was eventually placed over the wellhead to at least keep the plume of oil in its gully and stop it from spewing all over the landscape. Some idea of the power of the gusher can be obtained by understanding that this new box hovered about ten feet in the air despite weighing several tons. To keep it from being propelled off into the middle distance somewhere, it had to be anchored to the ground by steel guy wires, which were in constant tension as the oil and muck roared and played against the underside of what was essentially a giant timber raft. Eventually the growing weight of the oil lake (and its growing depth) above the wellhead brought the tip of the gusher down to man height.

Most large gushers give out after a short while; the famous Lucas Gusher in Texas’ Spindletop oil field was as voluminous as Lakeview One, but dwindled away to much lower levels within a few months. Lakeview kept going at roughly the same volume, diminishing slowly to 60,000 barrels per day, until September 10th, 1911 when the bottom of the hole it had been eroding collapsed and filled in the well (some sources say September 9th). For 544 days the Lakeview Gusher had produced a significant fraction of all the world’s oil—to the point that, even with something like 40% of its production being wasted by being absorbed into the soil or flying all around the landscape at the top of an uncapped plume, what Union Oil could recover drove down the world oil price by 70% (from roughly $1 per barrel to 30¢ per barrel).

Gushers are much less common these days, as the blowout preventer was invented in 1924 and they’re attached to most modern wells. A gusher in Qum, Iran in 1954 was one of the last major ones on land, though it’s worth pointing out that the recent Deepwater Horizon accident seems to have been a blowout as well (and its gusher, somewhat amazingly given the extent of the oil spill, is probably no more than half as big as the Lakeview Gusher at its peak).

In Bakersfield’s semi-desert landscape, there are still remnants of the sandbags that surrounded the gusher, and the sandy ground still contains enough oil residue that it sticks together in cake-like layers. A plaque dedicated to the event is found near the now dry hole. Legend has it that Dry Hole Charlie then went on to live up to his nickname for the rest of his career.

(A remarkable set of historical and current photos of the Lakeview Gusher can be found here on Flickr).

The Unquiet Rest of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (along with five members of his family) is removed from a temporary grave Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois, to be buried for the final time. Public domain image taken in 1901, probably by Guy Mathis, the owner of a camera store in Springfield.

March’s news featured the odd case of Tassos Papadopoulos, the ex-president of Cyprus who was kidnapped, apparently for ransom, but recovered before the plot could be completed. What turned the kidnapping into an international sensation is that Papadopoulos was an ex-everything—he had died in December of 2008, a year before his abduction.

As ever, what’s old is new again. The late Mr. Papadopoulos was not the first corpse of state to have been body-snatched for gain.

Abraham Lincoln is a perennial contender for the title of Best US President, with really only Washington and perhaps FDR in the same class. He is also arguably the least popular president ever—Nixon may have had Watergate, but Lincoln was the first president to inspire someone to assassinate him (successfully, anyway, as Andrew Jackson could tell), and roughly a third of the United States were so unhappy with his election that they left the Union. After his assassination, more than a few people were concerned that unrepentant Confederates would dig him up for propaganda reasons—a similar thing had happened to Oliver Cromwell, for example, after the restoration of the English monarchy.

The most serious challenge to Lincoln’s peace wasn’t motivated by misplaced patriotism, but greed. By the 1870s the Secret Service (not-then charged with protecting Presidents, a role they wouldn’t pick up until after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901) had done a particularly good job of cleaning up counterfeit currency in the US money supply, and counterfeiters were on the run. After the high-profile 1875 arrest and conviction of master plate-engraver Benjamin Boyd, several Illinois criminals who had distributed his ill-made gains faced ruin.

In 1876, one of these—Jim Kennally, often mis-spelled “Kinealy”—hatched a scheme to get Boyd back in business. He and some accomplices would steal Lincoln’s corpse from its tomb in Springfield, Illinois and offer it back to the federal government in return for Boyd’s release.

Lincoln’s tomb had only been completed two years previously (his body, as well as that of his three sons who’d died at early ages, were interred two years before that when the bottom part of the structure had been completed), so there was a great deal of information about the burial still available to Kennally. He knew that Lincoln rested in an easily accessible marble sarcophagus in a barely protected part of the mausoleum. Would-be thieves had only to get through one lock and break a series of bolts that fastened the lid of the sarcophagus to its bottom.

Kennally’s main problem was getting competent criminals on his side. His first attempt on Lincoln’s body was scheduled for the evening of July 3^rd, 1867, and actually got quite far before falling apart. One of Kennally’s partners in his counterfeiting ring was Thomas Sharp, who set up a saloon in Springfield partly to act as a base for the grave robbery and partly to help launder the counterfeit money they had left.

Unfortunately for the plan, Sharp got drunk in his own saloon, visited a nearby brothel, and spilled the story to one of the ladies, Belle Bruce. She in turn told Springfield’s chief of police, Abner Wilkinson, who passed the rumor on to the custodian of the tomb, John Carroll Power.

The cat was well-and-truly out of the bag; Sharp and his other associates fled, and the first kidnapping attempt was over before it really could start.

Kennally had made a point of arranging an alibi for the night of July 3^rd (he was in St. Louis, at a boarding stable he owned), as he was worried about being connected to the crime. So his second attempt involved a new gang of thieves: he made a point of selecting men unconnected to him so as to shake off any investigators of the initial, botched attempt. Unfortunately for him, he had to trust his new men, and one of them turned out to be untrustworthy.

The grave-robbing took place on November 7^th, 1876. This was a Presidential election day, with the corrupt government of Lincoln’s elected successor, Ulysses S. Grant, leaving office and giving the Democratic party their first real chance at the presidency since the start of the Civil War. Kinealy assumed that the town of Springfield would be hung up on the results of the vote and few people would be in the cemetery. (He, incidentally, chose better than he knew—the 1876 election was similar to the 2000 election, hanging in the balance for weeks until resolved in a controversial way).

So, that evening the second gang made an attempt on Lincoln’s tomb. Terrence Mullen was in charge of cracking the door and sarcophagus, Jack Hughes was to do the heavy lifting, and Jim Morrissey drove the getaway wagon.

Mullen managed to get through the door (after first breaking his saw trying to do so), then dealt with the copper bolts that locked down the lid of the sarcophagus. Unfortunately the lid proved too heavy for Hughes to move himself, so Mullen and Hughes called in Morrissey to hold their light while the two of them shifted the lid together. Then Morrissey was sent back out to bring his wagon into position.

Unfortunately for them, “Morrissey” was actually Lewis Swegles, a criminal-turned-informant in the employ of the Secret Service. Jack Hughes had, for reasons entirely unrelated to the kidnapping, come to the attention of the Service (he was a minor member of the counterfeiting gang, and had been passing fake currency), and Swegles had been detailed to find out what he was up to. Posing as “Jack Morrissey” he had stumbled across the plot and, unaware of its goal, had coincidentally claimed to be a grave robber who sold to medical schools. His lucky shot intrigued Mullen, and the government informant was in to the conspiracy.

After he exited the door, Swegles signalled to several Secret Service agents who’d taken up position outside the tomb. The agents came into the tomb as quietly as they could, but found no-one inside—Mullen and Hughes had gone outside a minute or so after Swegles, though whether out of fear or a coincidental desire for fresh air is unclear. Lincoln’s coffin was partly exposed, but still in place and intact. Mullen and Hughes escaped back to Chicago, and weren’t captured until the next evening when the Chicago police picked them up.

Both were sentenced to one year in prison, which is worth noting. Some sources say that Illinois had no law against corpse-lifting, and that the two were actually sentenced for conspiracy to commit theft of an item valued in excess of $75 (to wit, Lincoln’s coffin, not Lincoln himself). This appears not to have been the case, but the law against grave robbery was so weak that the conspiracy charge was pushed by the prosecutor because it led to more jail time. Kennally’s alibi held up, and he was never charged, though the story of his involvement circulated freely.

Afterward, the trustees of the tomb were worried about more attempts on Lincoln’s remains, but were so strapped for cash they could do little about it. In the end, the coffin was secretly moved to a side room in the tomb and hidden behind some lumber, while the general public was given the impression that the now-empty sarcophagus was still occupied.

In 1900, plans were made to repair some damage to the tomb and Robert Todd Lincoln found the money to upgrade the coffin’s security while he was at it: it was enclosed in a steel cage and put three meters under ground, then two tons of concrete were poured over it and allowed to set. This arrangement was borrowed from the burial of the younger Lincoln’s business partner George Pullman, who had similar problems to the elder Lincoln—though in his case it was employees infuriated by his violent strikebreaking and not unreconstructed Confederates who were suspected of wanting to defile his grave.

This interment was to be so final that on September 26^th, 1901 Lincoln’s coffin was temporarily opened for one last positive identification.  The body was not available for public viewing, but 23 people are known to have seen him at the time, including a thirteen-year-old boy, Fleetwood Lindley, who would be interviewed five days before his death in January 1963 for Life magazine as part of a story on the disinterment.

The Russian Woodpecker

One of two Duga-3 arrays, this one deep in the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation. Photo by Wikimedia user Necator, taken in January of 2003 and released to the public domain.

April 26^th is the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and twenty-four years after the accident the area around the plant is still a wasteland. Everyone who lived in the area was evacuated in the days following and, by and large, they have not been allowed to return (though reportedly a few elderly residents have given in to homesickness and come back to live a clandestine life). The so-called Zone of Alienation extends for thirty kilometers in every direction, and severe fallout conditions existed even outside that. The nuclear plant itself is a silent monument to the Soviet era, but it just so happens that it’s not the only mysterious site abandoned because of the accident.

The English Sweate

“In this same yere a newe kynde of sicknes came sodenly through the whole region eueⁿ after the first entryng of the kyng into this Isle, which was so sore, so peynfull, & sharp that the lyke was neuer harde of, to any manes remembrance before that tyme”

—Hall’s Chronicle, Edward Hall, 1542

It feels like new diseases are a modern scourge, what with HIV successfully crossing over to humans from chimps in the early 20^th century, Ebola from bats in the 1970s, and SARS from civets in the early 21^st. If you want more of them then there’s also less well-known newcomers like Nipah virus and once-famous but now nearly forgotten ones like Legionnaires’ Disease. But while it might be true that new diseases are getting more common, they’re not a new phenomenon. The Roman Empire suffered the Antonine Plague, which was likely the first major appearance of smallpox, while a few hundred years later the Byzantine Empire barely withstood the Plague of Justinian: the first pandemic of bubonic plague, one that was only ever matched by the famous Black Death of the 14^th century.

What made the difference in many of these cases was a decrease in travel times. AIDS, for example, only got going once there was quick and common travel between central Africa and the rest of the world. There were multiple cases of the disease back into the 1950s, but the necessary integration between the source and destination for a true outbreak didn’t really happen until the late 1970s—and fortunately so, as the genetic science and technology necessary to understand, fight, and eventually control a retroviral disease was only developed at that time. It doesn’t bear thinking what would have happened if AIDS had taken flight in 1959.

The older “new plagues” got themselves going for similar reasons. Modern outbreaks are depending more and more on fast, technological travel like airplanes, but easy travel in the past could sometimes come for political reasons. The Antonine Plague likely came from the far upstream regions of the Nile, and could do so because the Roman Empire had pacified Egypt and made it part of a large peaceful state with good roads.  The Plague of Justinian may have happened when it did, in the sixth century, because the Yersinia pestis bacteria had a permanent hold in Hunan Province and the sixth century was not long after the chaotic Sixteen Kingdoms period ended. China was finally integrated into Asia as a whole, driven by new state support of India’s exported Buddhism and subsequent contacts between the two regions. The bubonic plague just came along for the ride.

It also helps if there’s some unrest in the context of the larger peace. To continue with the Plague of Justinian, China may have become part of the larger world but it was also subdivided between the Northern and Southern Dynasties until 589 AD, and they warred more or less constantly. Poor harvests and population displacement make societies less able to withstand disease, which ultimately might help to explain one of the more mysterious outbreaks of new disease in history.

The Empire of the Calabash

"Samoan Island", by Joseph Dwight Strong. Strong was the state-assigned artist for the Hawaiian Ka'imiloa expedition to Samoa in 1887, though this picture is from a few years later. Public Domain Image.

How prospered the alliance grand
Among the Chiefs of Isles of sand
By the eternal trade winds fanned:
How there among the breaker’s dash
Is planted, now with armed clash
The Empire of the Calabash!

— Anonymous anti-Hawaiian-expansionist poem published in the Hawaiian Gazette, 1887

The 1880s were not a good decade  to be a non-European country. Colonialism had entered its final push; “the good parts” of the world had been parcelled out more than a century ago, and now Europe’s attention turned to the leftovers. The Scramble for Africa got underway at the Berlin Conference in 1884. Southeast Asia was subdivided between the British, French, and Dutch. The nations of the Pacific Ocean had long resisted European control, partly from sheer distance and partly because they were so small (and so the same for any profits they’d bring). But now it was their turn.

In the central Pacific, Hawaii had a pre-eminent position. It was still independent, an internationally recognized kingdom that was larger and more populous than anything else east of the International Date Line or north of the equator. In all of Polynesia only New Zealand’s Maori had more potential strength than the Hawaiians—and the Maori had been under the control of the British since the 1840s. As it became more and more clear that the remaining unclaimed islands in the Pacific were in danger of falling under European control, some Hawaiians resolved to do something about it.