Here’s a good question: what can we infer from the varying levels of lead in the Somerton Man’s hair?
To try to answer this, I went looking for some proper science on how the human body handles lead: the root of the modern literature tree seems to be Kinetic analysis of lead metabolism in healthy humans by M B Rabinowitz, G W Wetherill, and J D Kopple, from the August 1976 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (what, it isn’t in your Favourites already? I’m genuinely surprised).
This introduced a “three compartment” model, i.e. that lead ingested is held in (1) the blood, (2) soft tissues, and (3) bones and teeth; and that the ways (and the rates) that the body stores lead in (and removes lead from) those compartments are quite different.
Their kinetic analysis indicated that:
* the primary (blood stream) compartment holds up to 1.9mg of lead, and has a mean life of 36±5 days;
* the secondary (soft tissue) compartment holds up to 0.6mg of lead, and has a mean life of 30 to 55 days;
* the tertiary (skeletal) compartment holds up to 200mg (!) of lead, and has a mean life of ~10000 days (!).
Of particular interest to us is the observation (from the model the three authors develop) that lead only gets into the hair from the second compartment.
All the same, some internet sites tend to cite the only-slightly-more-recent report “Toxic Trace Metals in Human and Mammalian Hair and Nails”, EPA-600 4.79-049, August 1979, US Environmental Protection Agency, Research and Development as encouraging the use of hair analysis: while other sites seem to suggest that lead hair analysis can be wildly variable without useful baselines to work with, and so using lead hair analysis is essentially “futile”.
I suspect that to build up a more balanced picture, it would make more sense to read other more biochemistry-based accounts, such as this tutorial (which runs to several pages). Here, the authors note (among many different things) that one key sign of acute lead poisoning is a blue-black “lead line” in the gingival tissues (the gums), which seems not to have been present in the Somerton Man (unless you know better?)
What, then, of the Somerton Man’s hair #1? We have a nice graph of his Pb206 isotope timeline, that Derek Abbott believes covers roughly the two week period prior to the SM’s death…
…but what does it mean?
To my eyes, it seems likely from the rapid drop in the (time-reversed) graph that the Somerton Man had experienced a high short-term exposure to lead before the start of the graph (say, a little more than two weeks before his death): the steady-state value from the left (i.e. later) half of the graph would seem to indicate an equilibrium with environmental lead. The SM’s acute exposure level (as measured in the hair, remember, and so subject to different rules to the primary compartment) would therefore seem to have been at least five times his environmental lead levels, and possibly much higher.
However, I suspect that the timeline for this hair is just too short to really be sure what is going on: it’s cut off (literally) just when things started to get interesting. But if Derek Abbott’s students can successfully match this up to hair #2’s timeline, then we might well be in business. It would also be very good to know the ratio of the various lead isotopes (Byron Deveson for one will be waiting attentively for this to be documented). Interesting times!
Friend of mine was an avid pistol shooter and had to be chelated to get rid of lead in kidneys and liver. I only shoot once a week, so have less lead less lead less lead … The peaks at 1200 and 400 hours might indicate firearms use, especially the very peaky one at 1200 hours. The broader one might have to do with shipboard loading of lead?
Nick, surely, with the hair’s being so short and its higher concentrations of lead seen at the cut end, and these levels dropping quite sharply towards the root end, wouldn’t the inference be rather than during that fortnight his exposure had been less than during the foregoing period (of indeterminate duration)?
Not that it is relevant to the discussion but 10**4 (as seen in the bone compartment of the lead metabolism model) is 10,000 not 1,000.
Fred: good catch, typo fixed, thanks! 🙂
lead poisoning will cause an enlarged spleen .
Nick, the compartment model of lead metabolism in the paper by Rabinowitz et. al. 1976 contains some significant errors. Lead in hair (and bile, sweat and nails) is shown as being as being exchanged directly with lead in the soft tissues, which is not the case. Hair, and soft tissues and bone, receive lead from the blood plasma, and the blood compartment is actually two compartments – the red blood cells and the blood plasma between which there is a dynamic equilibrium.
There is more that could be said, but I have some doubts regarding the MS data. By my calculations the lead concentrations in SM’s hair are several hundred times what would be considered normal. But, what worries me is that the lead levels in the controls seem to be elevated, and this suggests that something is amiss. I have not had anything to do with mass spectrometry for more than thirty years and the modern instruments are as far removed from the instruments I worked with, as the Spitfire was removed from the Wright Brothers “Flyer” at Kittyhawk. So, the assumptions on which I have based my calculations of the lead levels may not be correct.
Byron: doubtless you are correct, what more modern paper would you recommend I look at to understand this better?
Nick, Byron: Have either of you seen or heard from Tom Spande in recent months’? He used to post from his NIHS computer. He probably would be very interested in this latest discussion.
Apologies for going off subject, sensational news!!!
The lady who runs the Ballina Dry Cleaners told me today her father used to write the docket numbers on the back of trouser pockets 30 years ago. See, I can do real research too.
Carry on.
Hi Nick! It just so happens that some tests show that I have high amounts of heavy metals in my system, and I’m undergoing chelation to remove them, so this discussion is personally relevant. Lead is one of the highest (and gadolinium, go figure.)
On my first job out of college, I worked at a plant manufacturing tetraethyl lead. They tested employees by urine for organic lead exposure, and by blood for inorganic lead exposure. Looking back, it’s odd that they’d test urine, because that should be an elimination rate, and not the body burden. I don’t remember the number values and standards of either.
Today, the tests they’ve run on me are of urine levels, but after chelation to provoke release of heavy metals.
The three-compartment model fits with what they’ve told me, that the long-term storage is in bone.
Fortunately, I don’t have mercury. I’ve heard that organic mercury is especially dangerous because it dissolves in fatty tissues and that only comes out very slowly. All that doesn’t fit with the three-compartment model shown here.
More as I think about it.
Thanks, Dennis
A further note. The SM’s lead exposure reminds me of how an analysis of Napoleon Bonapart’s hair showed that he died of arsenic poisoning. One book purported to identify the assassin, but I’ve also read that the arsenic could have come from the green paint (Paris green) on the walls of the house. Paris green is an arsenic compound whose arsenic content can convert to arsenic trihydride, which is a gas.
Purely FWIW.
Arsenic, lead, mercury — three chemicals which are naturally dangerous. Paris green apparently had multiple uses: household paint, orchard pesticide but also sprayed on potato plants, Victorian velveteen wallpaper prints.
In more recent times (post WWII) cobalt 60 was distributed to various medical practitioners for experimental studies in reducing cancer and/or scar tissue.
I was subjected to Co60 in the hopes of reducing scar tissue formed when surgery was done on my soft palate closure/tonsillectomy. To this day, I have constant drainage from my nasal sinuses. About fifteen years ago I discovered that U Chicago still maintains records of the studies/experiments which first began on the West Coast (California).
Thanks, bdid1dr; I’m sorry about your bad exposure. Would you have legal recourse using the U Chicago records?
Exposure standards do change. When my mother was a teenager in the 1930’s, her parents got her X-ray treatments to get rid of acne on her face. Fortunately, there weren’t any long-term aftereffects.
A cousin told me she remembers how, when we were kids, I would pour some mercury on the floor and we would play pushing the blob around. She contrasted how, when her daughter in a science lab accidentally broke some glassware containing mercury, they had to evacuate the school.
When the antiknock agent tetraethyl lead was first discovered in the 1920’s, service station attendants would simply squirt TEL from a bottle into your gas tank. When I worked with TEL 1975-1979, that casual exposure would have been unthinkable.
I have previously assumed that the failure to identify the pigment in SM’s spleen was due to lack of knowledge on the part of Cleland but I now realise that this opinion had been moulded by negative opinions of Cleland’s competence that have circulated.
Both Dwyer and Cleland were highly experienced at autopsies and I now believe that the failure to identify the splenic pigment was because it was a rarity.
Recent updated mass spectroscopy data for SM’s hair has revealed anomalously high levels of gold and silver. There are also elevated levels of several other metallic and semi-metallic elements (selenium) that seem to suggest that SM had heavy exposure to a variety of metals, and that SM may have worked in the extractive metallurgy industry. Or perhaps SM worked as a metallurgical chemist, or a fire assayer. Fire assaying (assaying for gold) could expose the assayer to a wide range of elements because of the sample preparation methods used in the past and because fire assaying drives off many elements in the form of fumes. These fumes consist of microscopic particles that are sufficiently large (larger than one micron diameter) so that they are either deposited in the airways (size greater than four microns) or deposited in the lungs (size between one and four microns). The small size of the ingested particles means that the bioavailability of elements such as lead is likely to be enhanced.
It is also possible that the elevated levels of silver and gold in SM’s hair might have resulted from medical treatment with gold and silver compounds. “Gold injections” were in vogue in the late 1940s as a treatment for a number of complaints. And treatments, including injections, with silver compounds such as Argyrol and Protargol were common in the first half of the 20th Century before antibiotic treatments supplanted them. The silver products that were used in the early twentieth century were mostly silver proteins rather than colloidal silver and the silver content was much higher, 10% to 30% by weight rather than the 0.001% silver content (10 ppm) colloidal silver used in recent years.
Under some circumstances gold or silver pigment could lodge in the spleen but I have not been able to find any descriptions of the pigment that would result.
Fire assaying was a common method of assaying ores for precious metals (mainly gold and silver) in Australia in 1948 and it involved grinding up a sample of ore and the taking a sub-sample (aliquot), usually about 30 grams, of this material which is mixed with flux, litharge (lead monoxide) and a reducing agent (charcoal, carbon, flour etc.) in a fire assay crucible. The crucible containing the mixture is then heated to 1,000 to 1,200 degrees Centigrade where the components of the ore (rock minerals and most metals) are dissolved by the flux to form a slag and the precious metals dissolve in the molten lead metal that forms at the bottom of the crucible. When the crucible and contents have cooled the lead “button” is removed. The lead button (weighing about 30 grams) is then heated to about 1,100 degrees Centigrade on what is called a cupel. The lead is removed by this process and a “prill” of precious metals (gold, silver and the platinoid metals) remains. In 1948 a fire assayer would be expected to perform about forty fire assays a day – involving the use and handling of, and the concomitant exposure to, about 1,200 grams of lead. A fair whack of lead indeed.
The bottom line is that fire assaying in the conditions that existed in most, probably all, working conditions in 1948 would expose the assayer to large amounts of lead, particularly fine particulate lead that would be ingested in large amounts. The absence of raised boron levels in SM’s hair appears to be evidence against the fire assayer hypothesis (the fire assay flux contains large amounts of borax), but I note that boron is rapidly excreted and and does not appear to accumulate in the body (or hair). The presence of a large number of elements present in SM’s hair in raised concentrations suggests to me that SM was not working at any single mine but was working in a situation where he was exposed to at least several different ores. So, for me it looks likely that SM was an assayer or possibly an ore buyer (i.e. Someone who would conduct their own assays on a load of ore before purchase and on-sale to, say, a lead smelter).
In 1948 there were individuals who bought batches of ore from mines (check the adverts in Trove or the directories) and these buyers would generally perform their own assays. Performing assays out in the mulga, particularly in 1948, would have been a grubby business (speaking from experience) and it is inevitable that the assayer would ingest considerable amounts of the ground up ore. Ore (and rock samples in general) are ground up before a sub-sample is taken for assay to make sure that the sub-sample is not biassed (technically called the “nugget effect” for gold ores).
I note that SM’s hair does not contain any barium anomalies (the apparent high value in the second graph is an artefact caused by inappropriate use of a data smoothing algorithm). So we can discard the barium poisoning hypothesis.
I note that zinc is not notably anomalous in SM’s hair and zinc minerals generally (essentially always) occur in lead ores. But cadmium 111 does occur at high levels in SM’s hair and cadmium is nearly always associated with zinc and lead in mineral ores. Maybe the zinc results need to be checked – I note that the atomic weight is incorrectly given as 22 so maybe the data do not relate to zinc. I note that the shape of the cadmium 111 graph is broadly similar to the lead 206 graph and this further suggests that the zinc results need to be re-checked.
Of course the present interpretation depends on the occupations, diet, environment etc. of the six control subjects. Judging from some of the raised values in some of the control subjects I suspect DA has chosen at least two or three who work in the mining or mineral processing industry so some of SM’s values might be more anomalous than they appear based on a comparison with the controls.
Byron: it’s a mixed bag of results, for sure, one that I’ve gone through several times trying to work out what to post (still unsuccessfully, it has to be said).
The lead, cadmium [if it is indeed cadmium], and strontium curves seem (to my eyes) to be telling a three-act story: that the Somerton Man was in place A two weeks before his death, then in place B for a week, and then finally in place C for his final week. And yet given that not that much else is happening in the traces, my prediction would be that all three places were fairly similar environments. What’s frustrating is that the lead curve seems to be just about to explode upwards at the end of his hair, to the point that a slightly longer hair might contain enough information to change our view on him completely. Hmmm…
Nick,
you mentioned that Burton’s line, a clinical sign supposedly caused by lead poisoning, was apparently not seen at SM’s autopsy. I have previously checked out the Burton’s line story, and it is just that – a story. I could find no objective proof that any of the reported dark gingival lines had ever been tested for lead content. The story is just a theoretical construct, a hypothesis that made for a good Standard Story, endlessly repeated but never tested.
Nick,
the arsenic graph for SM’s hair suggests that he probably liked seafood and that he had resided inland prior to two weeks (as indicated by the steady increase in arsenic over the last two weeks). I say resided inland because in 1948 fresh seafood would have been largely restricted to coastal or near coastal areas. The selenium and mercury graphs are consistent with an increased intake of seafood in the last two weeks of SM’s life. As you say, it is a pity that we do not have data from a longer strand of hair.
Byron: November 1948 Australia, what were the cheapest types of non-fresh seafood available? Presumably in tins?
Byron: I don’t recall any mention of fine dark blue lines (lead sulfide) on the Somerton Man’s gums in any of the examination reports, but that may only present in certain types of lead poisoning scenarios.
It may be – for example – that it requires chronic lead poisoning over a period of months to present, rather than acute lead poisoning. The absence of a Burton line might then possibly point to certain types of lead poisoning?
Nick,
my memory of such things only starts about 1950, but I can remember eating sardines on toast (with vinegar) as a child in 1950. From the following it would appear that barracouta, shark, scallops, crayfish (like lobster) and whitebait were big tinned seafood items. Australian Salamon was also tinned in Western Australia. There was also tinned fish from Canada – salamon mainly.
I suspect that shark (generally called flake in Australia in 1948) would be the big ticket item for mercury, selenium and arsenic. I don’t know if shark also contains raised levels of other elements – but I will see what I can find. Pickled oysters were commonly available even in far inland places such as Broken Hill in 1948.
The Evening Advocate (Innisfail, Queensland) 5th March 1948 page 3
“TASMANIA LEADS IN FISH CANNING TRADE
Before the war when Australians sought tinned fish they had to be content with imported products. Today they can have a fairly wide choice of Australian canned varieties. The principal canneries are
in New South Wales and Tasmania. In Tasmania the advance in this industry has been most spectacular. In the last five years Tasmanians have realised the value of the fishing industry in the economy of the State. Since 1941 the State Government and private enter prise, working in close co-operation, have expanded the industry considerably, and the annual catch has increased from 5,000,000 lb in 1941-42 to 11,500,000 lb in 1946-47. The principal species produced have been barracouta, 6,000,000 lb. crayfish, 1,700,000 lb., shark flesh and liver 900,000 lb; scallops 991,000 lb., whitebait, 750,000 lb.
For many years the fishing industry in Tasmania was forced to rely on the local market to dispose of its catch.”
Note: the Australian “Barracouta” isn’t related to the Barracuda and is also known as the Cape Snoek.
King Oscar sardines in oil from Norway and Maconachies herrings in tomato sauce by appointment; and we all know what happened to George V1 don’t we? or do we?
John, yes and various smoked fish such as kippers, cod etc. were commonly available.
Well before my time, but when I hear “SA Fish(ing)” I think West of Adelaide, on the Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas (Especially Port Lincoln on the Lower Eyre – whose tuna industry inspired Colin Thiele’s book “Blue Fin”…
Regarding the lead (and being unusually conspiratorial) there was a suggestion somewhere (probably in all the archives of research pre the 1977 documentary) that a small amount of lead applied to the skin could unoticeably and almost undetectably kill people. This would leave a small, but unidentifiable lesion on the skin, and I notice in the autopsy and subsequent coronial inquest/inquiry there’s mention of between 1 and 3 marks/scars on the body (I think the one that is always mentioned is either on the inside of the elbow, or on the upper arm?). This was claimed to have been perfected by spies around this era. Of course, this was supposedly a quick way to knock someone off, and I shouldn’t think would be detectable in hair (I’d imagine the person would be dead well before that) – but I’m no scientist.
Milongal, the CIA investigated the possible use of tetraethyl lead (TEL) for assassinations in the 1940s and, judging from the material in the CIA archives, this investigation was an active measures investigation.
TEL was imported from the USA in the 1940s so there would have been stores of pure TEL in Australia (probably at the petrol refineries).
Milongal, I should have added that the presence of elevated levels of other metals in SM’s hair supports the hypothesis that SM was exposure to high concentrations of other things rather than just materials containing lead.
Sounds more likely that a gas station attendant or a mechanic would have been exposed to the lead during their routine work :
pumping the gasoline or working on the engines and under carriage parts — with use of an hydraulic lift. Lead is so soft and malleable that it can be absorbed through a person’s skin pores — and in some cases their lungs.
Some (probably largely irrelevant) articles that caught my eye in “The News” for Nov 30:
Page 4:
“Warning on Zinc, Lead” – An article about 75% of Australia’s Lead and Zinc being exported overseas
Page 9:
– “Bogy Men” (sic) – A curious article about Communism
– “Govt not to widen beach bodies scope” – an article about a development committee for Glenelg/Brighton beach improvents
– “Sky flahes may be meteoric” – I’m sure just the title is good for conspiracy theorists
Page 10:
– “Somerton Blocks Average L670” (an article about a new subdivision in Somerton that opened the day before)
– “Light Rain in the South” – predicts weather as “Mild day and moderate night” (which is what I would consider the temperatures that I’ve seen, despite everyone seeming to insist it was Warm Weather – by Adelaide Standards, it was probably below the Spring average – and that might explain the apparent lack of activity on the beach).
Dear all, Sir John Frankland’s abortive attempt to find. a Northwest passage left all of his men dead during their fruitless trek south after their two steel reinforced royal naval vessels were crushed by ice. The bodies were found later and all had high levels of lead, thought to have entered their bodies from early canned goods that had lead based solders to seal the lids. However, the cold and lack of food killed them, not the lead.
The Ethyl Corp, a division of Standard Oil supplied TEL to to the German Wehrmacht allowing them to quickly overrun Czechoslovakia. The association of many American companies (Alcoa, Firestone, Std. Oil) with IG Farben of Germany persisted right up to 1941 and Pearl Harbor, when Hitler declared war on the US, not the reverse as commonly thought.
Maybe,, that decision to declare war on his helpful suppliers of neoprene rubber, aluminum for aircraft, tetraethyl lead and other war stores rivaled his march into Russia as a really dumb strategic move. Also the occupation of Norway where there was one German per 9 Norskies, doing very little but allegedly protecting the cruisers and battleships that were parked in the fjords awaiting the pounding by the Brit’s Lancaster bombers.
Cheers, Tom
Nick, It occurred to me sometime ago when BD and I had a discussion on the corms of the alleged croccus (f94v) that the rightmost corm has what appeared at first glance to be an “A” crossed out by and “X”. Others have found a date 1433 embedded there. I can see a 1400 but the “33” is problematic for my eyes.
But the “crossed out A” can be deconstructed into an “F” (written backward as in cursive, on the left side of the monogram) and on the right side, two “A”s, one at right angles to the other. Are we looking at a monogram of Antonio Averlino mixed with the “F” for Filarete?
From “Ol’ Craze in the Basement”. Tom
Milongal, In your post of 1-3-17, I think you mean tetraethyl lead applied to the skin. Lead itself is harmless. Cheers, Tom
ps The method of choice for bumping off double agents or just annoying spies is ricine. It is slow acting and shuts down the liver in about a day. Using radioactive Polonium as on Litnivov (sp?) was really crude as it left traces all over London and the jetliner from Moskva. Our new buddy’s fingerprints (Vlad the Putin) was all over that one.
Dear all, I made a dive into Latin to try and explain why so many “that”s were of the feminine gender in Latin and found that this was true of all plants in “Old Latin”. On digging around a bit on Old Latin (Ventus Latina) I find that it was replaced by classical Latin by 75BC BUT persisted into the 19th C. There are some peculiarities that might be applicable to understanding the VM text.
I append a few derived from the Wiki piece on Old Latin:
single for double consonants: Marcelus for Marcellus
Double vowels for long vowels: aara for āra
q for c before u: pequnia for pecunia
gs/ks/xs for x: e.g. regs for rex, saxsum for saxum
c for g: Caius for Gaius
The comparisons are between Classical (first term) and Old Latin (second term)
In particular, note that Old Latin used “cu” rather than “qu” and that doubled letters were used in Old Latin as in the Marcellus example.
An idea occurred to me and that is the gallows might be a bridge between Classical and Old Latin with the double looped, double stemmed gallows representing “ll” with the single looped, double stemmed gallows being “l”.
All for the moment. I’ll try and find some support from the VM text.
Cheers, Tom
Dear all, It was common during the middle ages to use “mixta”, a mix of Old and Classical (i..e. New) Latin. Cheers, Tom
I’m almost certain that amongst those wide and varied tasks required to be undertaken by your average third mate of the day, pertaining to general freight shipments and refrigerated cargos in particular, would of course have been to arrange for fumigation of same within confined containers and holds. Of course I admit to knowing nothing at all about the possibilities of the risk of personal residue absorption that might be likely to occur whilst engaged in such procedures but I’m quite certain that I’d rather be tasked with something above decks if I had the choice. I know of cases both military and civilian where hands succumbed to the effects of poison and gas build-up in empty holds and either died immediately or else sustained debilitating residual problems arising therefrom. In another related case during a refrigerated hold inspection prior to sailing, a ships officer was not missed by the crew and he was either overcome by fumes or by cold. He was found naked and hidden away some days later, presumably having died of hypothermia but there was no apparent media reporting of the case. Subsequent inquiry into the death indicated that there were no grounds for suspecting any foulplay and departure was not overly delayed.
My daughter in law told me the story of their ‘boat’ trip from Vietnam, in the hold of a cargo ship. She and her mother were not able to discuss the lost son. I still have fond memories of a dear person: Loan’s Mother.
bd
BD: Two of the incidents referred to in my previous post involved the RAN, one off Fremantle I think, and the other Darwin and my good mate was injured to the extent that he is now TPI. The other occurred many years ago on a refrigerated mixed cargo vessel operating between two Mediterranean countries and it seems that the crewmember’s body was left in the hold where it was found until taken off with the load semi surreptitiously upon arrival at its second port of call. I’m led to believe that in such instances an intact human body, if deceased by hypothermia, will probably not go through the process of rigor mortis until anything up to three days following it’s being returned to a normal temperature environ. Supposing we were to put SM into a similar situation, but instead of keeping his body aboard, the captain and crew made arrangements to put him ashore and have it appear that he had died insitu of natural causes. I’m sure all who are familiar with the case would know the kind of measures necessary to be undertaken then for the eventualities to work out just as perceived by the planners and as did actually occur in fact. A couple of minor hiccups perhaps but nothing that can’t be overcome including the tickets, the suitcase, transportation from the ship to Somerton Beach and especially the book, then the lads kp the hook and be underway with the morning spring tide. We can forget about the Thomsons and old Alf Boxall and easily put the whole thing to bed if only the case scenario were true and our man was really T. Keane.
I don’t know if we can dismiss it all so easily. The clothes link to the Rubaiyat. The clothes must have been local shortly before SM was found. so if the body is taken ashore the clothes appeared at that time, including the pants with the “Tamam Shud”. Further Somerton Park is a fair ways from the closest port. While there did use to be a jetty where boats could dock in Glenelg, this had been destroyed by storms not long before, so Port Adelaide or Port Stanvac (not sure if Port Stanvac was active in the 40s) – both more than a walk away (not massive distances, but in those days of fewer cars no trivial distance either). Of course, maybe Thompson’s taxi’s were engaged to ship the body, and perhaps PT told Jess about it, and perhaps the reality hit when she saw the bust…..
The tickets are still odd (they are no matter how you look at them). Planting a use ticket for a nearby bus route makes sense, but planting an unused train ticket seems superfluous unless you are trying to make people think something in particular (and other than PT, the only thing that seems an obvious Glenelg/Henley link is that both had convalescent homes – but it’s not a very well thought out plan to plant a ticket that must have been purchased in the city as though SM had not found room at Glenelg and was looking instead at Henley). It suggest either the train ticket was accidentally planted or there was a very specific ‘alibi’ (can’t think of a better word at the sec) someone was trying to give this body….
And did these ships serve pasties to their crew?
Looks like Professor Cleland has met his match here.
Valjean Joshevema and several of his relatives were more than just code-talkers. Mr Joshevema re-started and trained returnees (and using nickels: 5-cent coins) to restart the art of silver and turquoise jewelry and ornaments.
I just now took a look at the inside curve of the Hopi ring I’m wearing. Yup, inside is the makers mark ! Now I have to find Mr. Joshevema’ trademark in his twice published books. (“Somewhere in my toppling piles and sagging book shelves, I WILL find my second purchase of his books.
Offline I shall now go !
bd
John, I was wrong and yes, refrigeration prolongs rigor mortis so your hypothesis is possible.
Milongal: Morning of 29th and ship is in Outer Harbor or more likely Port Adelaide, things were about to get underway and the sting about to go down. The ship’s engineer is sent into town on reported pre sailing mission for engine parts, with suitcase to drop off at railway office, probably got a lift and time is important because captain has been warned for essential imminent departure. Afterwards engineer buys train ticket and calls ship to announce all correct and returning but captain belays and advises change of plan to take effect due to sailing orders received and so now underway. Engineer to go to Somerton beach for reconoiter of back up plan and prep deposit site, thence to Pier Hotel for the exposure element. Late afternoon ship calls port to advise phony engine problem in ‘roads’ off Glenelg and puts down temporary pick after being given clearance to remedy problem. Engineer returns to beach and takes up post below stairway where he awaits further developments. Maybe he has also managed ship to shore contact with his captain at some stage and maybe he’s with a shipmates that resembles SM, but no matter he’s a sailor and knows his orders verbatim. Sometime towards late evening crew brings SM body in on ship’s cutter with change of togs for engineer who dresses our man in his own day clothes, including tickets and sundry items for effect and then they plant him with half smoked bumper. All attended to without being spotted, then uneventful outward course back to the ship and soon underway. Sans the original third mate, though his replacement, the midshipman/cook who just happens to make the best dambed potato pasties this side of Port Said seems to have replaced his usual scowl, with a grin like the proverbial Cheshire cat….Well thats the five minute solution and can be improved upon, with details on the silly code book and how the coppers stuffed things up so soundly that they almost solved the case. Sorry folks no KGB or NKVD and certainly no Alf Boxall nor Jessica.
Let’s call our vessel MB Benjo Maru of 4000 tons burthen nd with a crew of 12 all up. The deceased 3rd officer was a German national named Werner aka ‘Achilles’ and he had been taken on in Singapore on the way out from Japan, to replace a Britisher named Tom Keane who’d taken up with tart from Lorong 37. He was officious and a bully of a man, having been a maritime sea captain pre war and had ended up in a Labour camp at Hay until ’47; he was not going to be missed and on the day of his passing, coming in to Adelaide, his belongings were thrown overboard unceremoniously. Before sending off Keane’s case and belongings to Adelaide left luggage depot, the Barbour thread had been used to do running repairs on Werner’s jacket and duds so that it would not be missed by the cops. Likewise the Tamam shud slip was discreetly secreted and the Omar Khayyam poetry book added to the suitcase contents as an aid to identification should the Barbour clue not be picked up. The book had come from the radio shack aboard and had been there since the war years when operators devised their own word ciphers to pass the time and practise their coded signals with their shipmates. Len Brown had borrowed the book when it was found and it had been left forgotten on his work desk until the slip was found by John Cleland months later. When the Thomson lady called in, he wrote some details down on the last page for which he was chastised by Errol Canney, so he tore it out, and later wrote down her home number, but carefully in almost indiscernable writing which showed him as being a fast learner. All the efforts made by the conspirators to conceal their cunning stunt almost came unstuck due to the ineptness of the various investigators to pick up the clues on offer, which would have resulted in speedy decision by the courts to declare a death due to undetermined, though not necessarily suspicious causes. All that the captain and crew wanted was to clear port and not be tied up for weeks because of a time delaying money losing death inquest. I’ll leave it for now and I’m almost certain to have omitted some relevant point, so swing by as you wish and throw your two penneth worth at my ridiculous fanciful tale.
John Sanders: I don’t know why Pete Bowes is so dismissive of your blog comments, you could have saved him months of plotting.
NP: And not a trace of that pesky Hillman Minx. I done it, special like for you Nick.
John sanders: …(*splutters*) but that’s the only piece of evidence worth half a politician’s promise!
Hey Nick, Sandy, and maybe Pete:
My husband just brought home a book published Turner Publishing Company: copyright 1996: United States Ship : U.S.S. TICONDEROGA CV-CVA-CVS-14
I don’t have the energy to do more than refer you to the ship’s activities/actions AND MANY PHOTOGRAPHS and ship-related activities and battle engagements.
So far, I’ve found no names/photos which are familiar to me.
Mitral valve prolapse is somewhat overactive this a.m. Gonna lay down for a while. I shall thumb through this 8 x 11 half inch thick book whiich each page is three columns of packed information and interviews of quite a few members of the sailors and commanding officers.
@Pete — My husband just drove off to our post office (which Amazon sez is waiting for me). Later, y’all ! Not that I’m going to read Pete’s book out loud — or excerpt from it…. until Pete gives permission .
bd
@ Pete : Gotcher book finally (moments ago). Still PO’d at various experts who apparently have ‘tunnel vision”. You are still at the very top of my reading list (which I have already begun reading, Lansky and Luciano !? Going back to the beginning of this book. Misca is a girl ? Whee!
Onward or onwords? Or back to the first page and still be able to go onwards toward the last page !
Cheers !
bd
Sorry Misca — I promised not to reveal other persons identities in any way. So, for today, ennyway, I shall go offline, now, to give other persons a chance to say sumthing.
beedeeoneder
I still no likey…
Why the case to the Railway Station?
Why the unused train ticket, and who used the bus ticket?
How (and why) does the Rubaiyat fit in (I don’t really buy that it was in the case rather than car and never mentioned)? It’s totally unnecessary in that scenario – in fact all it does is stirs interest. It can’t be an accident, because the scrap is in the pants, and the rubaiyat never needed to show up at all (unless the scrap and the rubaiyat is deliberate – but it just don’t make no sense)
Don’t get me wrong, I sort of like the idea, and I like Prosper’s Cabs as the transport (with a mention to Jess about a dead body, which sort of explains her freaking when looking at the bust and the realisation that Prosper’s body was actually a person sets in) – but I still think some of the evidence is too hard to fit without assuming that the sailors could accurately predict the confusion it would cause (which I think unlikely).
‘Asking blog commenters for speculation is like asking dogs for turds.’
Nick Pelling, yesterday.
Copies to Sanderson, Misca, Byron, Milongal, Bids et al.
Pete: the longer I work with cipher mysteries of all sorts, the more I see unbridled speculation as the thing that stops them being cracked. An ounce of useful evidence will always outweigh a ton of speculation.
I don’t mind blog commenters speculating, but the real point of this blog is to try to get to that ounce of useful evidence, something which never seems to have been particularly high on your personal agenda.
Your sentence says two things:
blog commenters are dogs
their speculation is dog turd
Which one do you want to back out of?
Peteb: funnily enough, you seemed to have missed the point of the context. In your previous comment, you had asked (apropos of nothing):
“A couple of questions: did Jessica work in the George’s Head convalescent hospital? Did foreign agents enter Australia on merchant steamers during WW2? Was Alf Boxall trained to use one-time code when he was with the Nackeroos?”
So it was your asking commenters for speculation which I was drawing the comparison with.
But perhaps that all points to the real function of your blog: which is neither to celebrate, nor to solve, nor even to genuinely understand the Somerton Man mystery, but rather to troll sufficient speculation from your blog comments to fashion a book from.
Remember this?
Both certainties and uncertainties are fundamental types of knowledge.
So when was speculation, an uncertainty, not a fundamental type of knowledge?
peteb: hypotheses are indeed fundamental parts of the chain of knowledge. But knowledge is the chain you gain when you test hypotheses, not what you get when you form hypotheses.
Relying purely on speculation for your knowledge would be like trying to live on a diet of Haribos.
Milongal: For the operation to be guaranteed foolproof, certain things had to take place, something like a precision naval exercise. The suitcase had to be found in order for it to connect to the newly discovered body, and its assumed identity as T. Keane supported by labeling on selected apparel. The Barbour thread matching repairs to jacket and fob pocket and both the book connecting to the slip as back-up being the ultimate game sealer if all the other deliberate pointers failed. As it turned out none of those items ultimately proved necessary as far as operation security went, but the plotters saw a need to cover all angles nevertheless and fortunately for them it all worked out. So the lads were not out to create any confusion at all, especially not for the police, who they felt would surely be competent enough to follow the obvious clues presented. For example, how could they have missed the Tamam Shud slip in the fob pocket, repairs to which, especially with the totally inappropriate use of the heavy duty Barbour thread being a direct invitation to check the contents. Now with the tickets, which we know have been a source of absolute frustration for you in particular, I don’t think I can make their position in the scheme of things any clearer than my plot plan proposition laid out. The train ticket to Henley Beach was purchased in belief that it would be necessary in accordance with the original body dump site, plan A, so when that was belayed and plan B was taken up, our ship’s engineer, then went out to Glenelg/Somerton on the St. Leonard’s bus. When the body was dressed up that evening in the office’s gear, well of course both tickets were transferred to SM. Now the whole subsequent investigation process would be very difficult for anyone not connected therewith or knowledgeable thereupon to make comment upon so lets not criticize what we don’t understand, suffice to say that certain evidence appears to have been overlooked and the operation may have been flawed due to those officers assigned to the case, seeming to be out of their depth. I’m quite happy with my hypothetical case scenario, believing that it may have gone down along the lines described, could probably do with some fine tuning admittedly, but it’s certainly no worse a theory than some others on offer. And not to forget, the ship’s crew really did have to cover a range of possibilities unknown to them at the time of planning their operation and we can only speculate about the SM’s cause of demise. Whether it might have been by undetermined natural causes, misadventure, accident, suicide or of course cold blooded murder, the latter of which would of course necessitate the most carefully thought over method for ultimate deception and cover-up.
John sanders: all of which goes to show just how hard anyone has to work to come up with a Somerton Man scenario that threads through all the disparate datapoints.
I’ll conclude on this. Your research is almost solely based on the identification of the ‘Keane’ body. You look to solve the mystery as eagerly as a man does when he buys a lottery ticket.
My approach was different. I preferred to build a history on known and indisputable facts. All of them. The whole jigsaw, made to together, every piece.
I’m your worst enemy, @Nick, because I’ve created an alternate truth.
peteb: I’ll happily admit that my Somerton Man research is largely based on the identification of the body, by working out exactly what happened – but that’s what cold cases are all about, that’s how you do it.
Your approach is to instead build up a story, which – as far as I can tell – is no better or worse than (say) John Sanders’ efforts. The difference is that John doesn’t take himself 1% as seriously as you, and he’s all the better for it.
You’re utterly kidding yourself if you think I’m your worst enemy: all I want to do is work out what happened, not what might have happened. All the while you can’t tell the difference between what might have happened and what did happen, you remain your own worst enemy. Me, I’m just a bystander.
@John – if the Keane identity was so important, how come we have Keane and Kean? How come we have other clothes with labels removed?
And regarding the tickets, we need to simultaneously believe incredible foresight (to plan for Henley) and a massive carelessness (to accidentally leave both tickets).
Simailarly, if the Tamam Shud fragment was there to be found, why was it concealed at all? Why not thrust in larger pockets – or tucked under an arm, or something like that? Again we need to believe that a lot of effort has gone to make this look like a suicide and yet we conceal our number 1 pointer.
FWIW I don’t intend to criticise – there’s aspects of your theory that seem as plausible as any other theory, but I think without thoroughly questioning every angle it’s just a theory like so many others. And I think like most other theories I’ve seen, it raises as many questions as it answers…And individually, I think some of those questions can be dismissed as naive oversight, but when a seemingly meticulous plan is full of naive oversights then it becomes difficult to believe either the meticulousness of the plan, or the plausibility of the oversights.
Finally, as you point out in your last paragraph, some knowledge of Adelaide would be required for any of this – and neither ticket clerk nor bus conductor seemed to recall anyone asking even mundane touristy questions (perhaps they weren’t specifically asked, or perhaps the police didn’t record them mentioning it – but mildly curious all the same).
And if we’re to believe the engineer took the St Leonards bus how did we end up at Somerton? It’s a good 2-2.5 km walk South from the closest St LEonard’s bus stop (which is the one every assumes was used – at the corner of Adelphi Tce. The bus actually then travels Northish – and the banks of the Patawalonga or even the beachfront in that area would have been far more desolate than Somerton (I’ll assume Glenelg itself was far too busy to make this plan work).
Not to mention that someone not familiar with geography but familiar with tides would surely be afraid that that stretch of beach would flood and wash away any evidence they’ve planted…..
So while there’s aspects of this that are plausible, I think you need a local to make it work (and Prosper and his car business would make an interesting fit) – although even then I’ll hold some reservations…..
@Pete – sorry to be pedantic, but I disagree with this bit:
Nick: “Asking blog commenters for speculation is like asking dogs for turds”
Pete: “Your sentence says two things:
blog commenters are dogs
their speculation is dog turd”
‘….is like…’ doesn’t mean it’s the same think. it’s an analogy, and it’s an analogy about the usefulness of asking for speculation and perhaps the quality of that speculation – but I’m not sure how you infer from that an implication that blog commentors are dogs (nor particularly that their speculation is dog turd – but I don’t have too much issue even if it did).
Milongal: I’m not wanting to put my latest offerings forward as being anything more than a mere proposition, or more to the point, a suppositional synopsis of my own thoughts, on a possible case scenario. For anyone who has ever lived in a maritime environment or knows anything pertaining to the plottings and brewings of seafaring folk, they would understand. Sailors methods of overcoming adversity by stealth and ingenuity are legendary and descriptive words such as scheming, meticulous, contingency, versatility and committed determination come readily to mind. They are impeccable planners, follow orders implicitly and are committed fully to any undertaking placed before them . Needless to say, they do not comply with landlubber laws which to their way of thinking are only made to thwart their means of having a jolly life at sea. Likewise they do not tell tales out of school, so that anything they do or say will not come back at them; ‘loose lips sink ships’, as we are wont to quoth. Master mariners are themselves crafty old campaigners with a wealth of close run, ‘before the mast’ experiences under their tattered caps, and as any sea captain worth his salt will attest, life on the ocean waves is not for the inaudacious or faint hearted. And as a final aside, for those who cannot ‘fathom’ the workings of a full blown naval operation, then they are destined to remain ‘all at sea’.
Milongal: How about a trade off mate. It may not alter my case for a sea-bourne assault as opposed to your own preference for Prosper’s taxi delivery. I’m prepared to grant you the improbability of my matelots planting the TS slip, if your happy to cease worrying over apparent logistical problems with the rail and bus tickets. Sure I’ll own that my shi’s engineer likely alighted at Glenelg, which actually suits my fine tuning to the extent that I’d like to think it likely the lads from the ship were there waiting in the cutter to confab re the evening drop off operation. If we can agree on that angle, there is the one other matter which unfortunately there is no escape from, as far as Prosper or his mate Jim delivering our SM by road. You’ll surely remember those beach stairs at Somerton we discussed some time back. Well there’s a better photo on the Adelaide City Explorer web site and yes, that stairway is without top rungs and therefore completely unsuited to delivering a deceased fare, then assisting him down to the beach. Unless of course you have another place further along The Esplinade, then be prepared to drag a body of some size back along through the which is certainly going to take some of the shine off a good pair of MacNaught of Sydney 204 bespokes. Do we have a deal chum or must we fight it out to the provebial with no light at the end of the tunnel.
Omissions: ship..through the sand…Now we’ve sorted all that out, it then leaves us with Byron’s No. 1 villain the notorious Dr.Cowan and his planting of the Tamam Shud slip which I’m now perfectly fine with. So who else needs a suicide?, it could only be the coppers Len Brown and his boss Leon Leane realistically for obvious reasons. They are not capable of solving what for them, appears to be heading towards a full blown spy murder, which they are neither qualified or desirous of investigating and so a suicide supported by qualified medical opinion suits them fine. Whats more they’ve had the Rubaiyat in their possession from the day they removed it from the T. Keane suitcase, along with the little yellow electrical screwdriver which they can keep for all we care.
@Pete: I sometimes find myself finding quotes and/or references to “far away places and events”: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam”. Mike Dash: “Tulipomania” ,
Randall J. Morris: “Gateway to the Vikings: L’Anse aux Meadows”.
I still have a ‘guilty conscience” of a trade I made twenty years ago: I had a bound volume of the “Ladies Home Journal Magazine”. The item for which I was trading was a very small stone spindle ‘whorl”. When I finally realized that the whorl was from the ‘dig’ at L’ans aux Meadows, I was able to contact the authorities and return the whorl. Even to this day, however, I am uncertain as to whether the whorl was returned to the the dig.
The moral to my story : Is get a signed and stamped letter from the agency involved before handing over a relic or piece of historic writing…….
bd
Milongal, that’s ok. Bids, not sure what you are getting at there. John, where will it end? @nick, I’ll carry on over there without you, re: hypocrisy, ok?
At the real risk of seeming to be pedantic or unecessarily repetetive or both, that’s exactly what I’m going to be to get this message across apropos riddle of the sands and the Somerton Beach access stairway. The famous newspaper panorama photo of the stairs and seawall taken on the day, clearly shows the stairway only partially intact and some of the better prints reveal that substantial repairs are underway. Infact the whole structure, originally of timber, seems to have been extensively damaged, most likely during a freak storm some seven months beforehand, and it had been decided to replace it substantially in more durable concrete. If one cares to analyze later pics the new stairway structure will show how it must have been laid out and consists of the original bottom level to the sand being still wooden, as is the railing just like it was on the day that SM was discovered. Now if you look carefully and perhaps with some increased magnification at the original shot, you’ll count 14 angled lateral slats leading up to street level. These are not stairs, they are in fact plywood form boards that have been recently set in place for a cement pour, thereby creating the new stairway structure. Whilst it would certainly seem to be physically possible to ascend or descend via the incomplete section, it would be fraught with the real potential for disastrous consequences in my opinion, especially if one was to be carrying a weighty cadaver down to the beach. Now what then can we glean from the evidence given to the inquest by Constable J. Moss, who had attended on the day with Detective H. Strangway. “It’s a very busy part if the beach and the stairway is in constant use”. Was he referring to the set of stairs I just described, not likely, or more to the point had he deliberately set about to deceive those learned gentlemen of the court, and if so why and at whose direction.
Pete: nice to see that you and Nick are still on the job; don’t know that anybody else is hooked up and totally enthralled by the new line of events….Just staying on point whilst the iron is hot and a related thought. Why has SM been left at the bottom of the stairway when its obviously not in use?. Well I’m thinking that my matelot mates are not the swabbies that some folks might be inclined to take them for. You see the body has to be found quickly before the induced rigor state is still present otherwise that might just give the game away and risk the real likelihood of suspicion being cast. If for instance the weather decides to play its hand, like blowing up or storming over, then chances are old Lyons and the strappers might not be inclined to venture out at dawn, thereby leaving our dear friend lying around all day at some forlorn and lonely part of the beach, undetected for hours and getting to be more supple by the minute, not to mention a little on the bugle. Is that making any sense?, hopefully to some the more adventurous and perhaps, alternate plot minded dickless traceys.
John: it’s a living.
NP & PB: Belay before + while, (6th line) that’s important…. It used to be a living Pete; that’s including shift loadings, but no overtime, though plain clothes allowance, ( 11 bucks a fortnight) informants subsidy and of course convivial company with the court SMs and shonky lawyers, post bail hearings, at the local RSL. Ask Gerry, he may or may not know anything about all that.
@JS: But I like arguing 😛
and while I’m being argumentative, I still don’t really think the stairs look broken….just lots of shadow….
Since yesterday was April Fool’s Day, I’ll forgive some of y’all’s nonsensible avoidance of the real story behind that “Somerton Man’s appearance on “Somerton Beach”. I’m going down a new path, I’ve just discovered — not that I’m thumbing my nose at you or anything like that. …….
;-*
Nick, I recently happenstansed upon a blog post by Sean Owen who is apparently a director of data science at Cloudera in London. Sean has searched for text containing the initialism MLIABOAIAQC, which is the fourth line of the Tamam Shud “code”. Sean searched the Project Gutenberg text corpus and the top four matches were:
1. Getting Gold, by J. C. F. Johnson*
2. The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 17, by Michel de Montaigne
3. Mr. Gladstone and Genesis, by Thomas Henry Huxley
4. The Imaginary Invalid, by Moliére
Sean commented on these matches: “There’s no obvious theme to these books. It’s also possible that, with a relatively short sample, most of these top results have high p-values due to chance. Unfortunately, there’s no “smoking gun” here.” However I almost fell off my chair when I saw the first match, I knew the book and had owned a copy. “Getting Gold” by J.C.F. Johnson was in 1948, and still is to some extent, a popular book with gold prospectors, at least in Australia. And why is that significant? Consider the following: Somerton Man’s hair contains highly anomalous concentrations of lead (probably at least at the level of sub-clinical lead poisoning, and maybe at the level of frank lead poisoning) and an unusual cluster of anomalous concentrations of various other elements. I have previously presented reasons why I think this group of elements strongly suggests that SM was an ore buyer or an assayer, or possibly a primary or secondary metallurgist. Or maybe just a prospector.
I feel that Sean’s work has possibly identified the source of the fourth line of the “Tamam Shud” code and I wonder if the other lines are similarly derived from “Getting Gold”? Maybe the other lines are derived from similar prospecting/metallurgy/geology oriented books? I note that J.C.F. Johnson also wrote “Practical Mining” and “The Genesiology of Gold” so it might pay to check these two books for the other lines of the code.
OK. But some of you might be wondering just what text in “Getting Gold”corresponds with the initialism MLIABOAIAQC and does this text have any possible significance in isolation? And you are probably thinking “that would be a simple test, if the text is just a random piece of text without any obvious significance then this would strongly suggest that the match with “Getting Gold” is down to pure chance.” However, I beg to differ. There is one situation where a short piece of random text is used – as a key for enciphering messages. From memory the Rote Kapelle spy ring used text from books as a part of their cipher key.
http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2016/09/solving-real-life-mysteries-with-big-data-and-apache-spark/
Solving Real-Life Mysteries With Big Data and Apache Spark
“Can using simple statistical techniques in combination with big data help solve the Tamam Shud mystery?” by Justin Kestelyn, Big Data Zone.
https://dzone.com/articles/solving-real-life-mysteries-with-big-data-and-apac?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed:%20dzone
* “Getting Gold: A practical treatise for prospectors, miners and students” By J. C. F. Johnson, F. G. S., Member of the Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers; Author of “Practical Mining,” “The Genesiology of Gold,” etc. First published 1896.
Byron: a very interesting article, thanks for mentioning it. That the MLIABOAIAQC initials matched (albeit fuzzily) a sequence in “Getting Gold” is of course eye-popping, but you can’t expect me not to ask you which phrase it fuzzily matches. And the answer is…?
All the same, Barry Traish’s comment at the end is right on the money (I would expect nothing less of him), in that he has already done a lot of matching on such texts. The difference is that Justin Kestelyn considered statistically much looser matches: which, given that we are very likely looking at a SAPOL interpretation of letter indentations, is probably a much sounder approach.
holy moley, I read that as E C Johnson to begin with….
Going through that (gradually) I’m wondering whether QC is “Quartz Crystal”
Actually…..do I remember reading somewhere a theory that if SM came in on the Overland it wasn’t from Melbourne but some other stop on the way? Ballarat (about 100KM? Adelaide side of Melbourne) is probably Australia’s most famous Gold Mining site. By 1948, I think the Gold Rush had long eased, however that wouldn’t necessarily stop people looking….and if people there happened to chat they might have discussed that Gold was still actively (industrially, if you like) being mined for in the Gawler Region (North of Adelaide)…..