Saltpere

His future set and his fossils packed and sent on their way, Brown returned to Punta Arenas only to discover that no ships were scheduled to leave for New York for another four months, extending his time in South America once again. Loath to take on any new expenses without Osborn's approval, Brown "decided to do some exploring," he wrote. He soon fell in with a quasi-professional gambler named Saltpere, who was never seen without gloves on and could recite several full novels by Charles Dickens from memory. Brown begged Saltpere to take him on a joy ride around Cape Horn after the man casually mentioned that he had a six-ton boat. Saltpere agreed, but told him they would first need to work together to recover the boat from a one-armed man who had stolen it and moored it near a shipwreck of Tierra del Fuego when he realized he couldn't sail it on his own. Brown couldn't tell how much truth was attached to Saltpere's tale, but decided to go along with it to see where it led. Sure enough, a few days later Brown stood next to Saltpere as he confronted the one-armed thief on the stolen boat and retook possession of his vessel. Having secured what was his, Saltpere offered to take the thief along with them on the trip to Cape Horn and was disheartened when he refused (a smart move, given that Saltpere was likely to leave him on an island as punishment, Brown later surmised.)

- from The Monster's Bones, 108

It was a serpent...

Few creatures excite such a mixture of awe, fear, and fascination as snakes. And few are the subject of so many myths and folk beliefs. One of the oldest is that it was a "snake" in the Garden of Eden which was responsible, in John Milton's words, for bringing "death into the world, and all our woe." But there is no reference to a snake in Genesis; it is, rather, a "serpent" that tempted Eve. Serpents, in antiquity, were not necessarily snakes; any creeping thing, especially if venomous or noxious, was called a serpent. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the term was applied to a variety of creatures, including both salamanders and crocodiles. Admittedly, the temptation of Eve by a crocodile does seem to verge on the ridiculous...

- from The Dictionary of Misinformation, Tom Burnam

From Asimov

- Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, commander-in-chief of the British fleet, was murdered in 1707 by an old woman as he struggled ashore after the loss of his ship on the rocks of the Scilly Islands. She killed him in the belief, current at the time among coastal inhabitants, that a body washed up was a derelict, thus giving her legal possession of the emerald ring on the admiral's finger.

- The American paleontologist Edward Cope (1840 - 97), whose large collection of fossil mammals is at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, was a Quaker and consequently refused to carry a gun during his U.S. Western expeditions, despite the very real danger from Indians. He once flabbergasted hostile Indians surrounding him by removing his false teeth and putting them back, over and over. The Indians let him go.

- Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

- Cyprus was one of the world's important mining centers in ancient times, but for reasons still unknown the Romans halted operations there and sealed the tunnels. Many of the tunnels were found and reopened in this century, thanks to clever detective work by an American mining engineer, D.A. Gunther. In the New York Public Library, he had happened to find an ancient account of the mines. Years of ingenious search in Cyprus led him to the tunnels, which he found complete with usable support timbers and oil lamps. Cyprus became an important mining center again.

- A well-intentioned philanthropist, Eugene Scheifflin, instituted a project in the 1890s to bring to America all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Hotspur talks about the starling in Henry IV, Part I; starlings were therefore let loose in New York's Central Park. The noisy nuisances now number in the millions from Alaska to Mexico, and they will be with us for as long as the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe longer.

- from Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts

Wise leeches

Last-minute negotiations having failed to avert conflict, the battle [of Shrewsbury] began about midday on 21 July 1403 with a hail of arrows from the veteran bowmen of the prince's own county palatine of Cheshire. Unfortunately for him, they had taken the rebel side and he was on the receiving end. As the royal army struggled up the slope, the Welsh and Cheshire archers drew 'so fast that...the sun which at that time was bright and clear then lost its brightness so thick were the arrows' and Henry's men fell 'as fast as leaves fall in autumn after the hoar-frost'. An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince full in the face but he refused to withdraw, fearing the effect it would have on his men. Instead he led the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that continued until nightfall...

A way had to be found of extracting the arrow that had entered his face on the left side of his nose. The shaft was successfully removed but the arrowhead remained embedded six inches deep in the bone at the back of his skull. Various 'wise leeches' or doctors were consulted and advised 'drinks and other cures', all of which failed. In the end it was the king's surgeon, a convicted (but pardoned) coiner of false money, John Bradmore, who saved the prince and the day. He devised a small pair of hollow tongs the width of the arrow-head with a screw-like thread at the end of each arm and a separate screw mechanism running through the centre. The wound had to be enlarged and deepened before the tongs could be inserted and this was done by means of series of increasingly large and long probes...When Bradmore judged that he had reached the bottom of the wound he introduced the tongs at the same angle as the arrow had entered, placed the screw in the centre and manouevred the instrument into the socket of the arrowhead. 'The, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead.' ...

The pain the prince must have suffered in the course of this lengthy operation is unimaginable...

- from Agincourt by Juliet Barker

Punching my sister

"In 1964, 300 years after he made his mark on the world, a page in one of his [Isaac Newton] notebooks, penned cryptically in 1662, was finally decoded; on it, addressed to God, was a list of sins 19-year old Newton had committed."

Some selections:

2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugars
26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade
44. Beating Arthur Storer


- from Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

I cannot call it a nightmare....

"I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long, for it measured fully the length of the hearth-rug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes..."


- from "Carmilla," J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

An unsettling article claims that "A startup company has now launched the first clinical trial in the United States to test the anti-aging benefits of young blood."

Link here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/young-blood-antiaging-trial-raises-questions

Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings.

"Bad government, exactions, the cupidity and violence of the great, wars and brigandage, scarcity, misery and pestilence - to this is contemporary history nearly reduced in the eyes of the people. The feeling of general insecurity which was caused by the chronic form wars were apt to take, by the constant menace of the dangerous classes, by the mistrust of justice, was further aggravated by the obsession of the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils. The background of all life in the world seems black. Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings. In vain the militant Church battles, preachers deliver their sermons; the world remains unconverted. According to a popular belief, current towards the end of the fourteenth century, no one, since the beginning of the great Western schism, had entered Paradise."

- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Joseph Huizinga, 1924. Page 21.

In another universe...

From the L.A. Times:

A hydrogen bomb would have fallen on North Carolina in 1961 but for one safety switch.

Possibly the best invention in history: