Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard…

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Perhaps you well-informed people already knew, but recently I was surprised to discover that during WWII, these three luminary SF writers all worked at the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. Because this overlaps some of the other history I’ve been working my way through of late, I thought I’d tell this story again (but from my own angle).

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, 1944

(Image from Asimov’s 1979 autobiography “In Memory Less Green”)

“Astounding Science Fiction”

When the United States joined WWII in 1941, Robert Heinlein (who had previously served in the US Navy, but had been discharged in 1934 because of ill-health following tuberculosis) immediately asked to be re-enlisted. Though he was (eventually) turned down (because of poor eyesight), he was then asked (by Commander A. B. Scoles, his old classmate and fellow Naval Academy graduate) to write an article for Astounding magazine about the Aeronautical Materials Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia (that Scoles ran). When Scoles also asked if he would like to work there, Heinlein agreed. As an aside, one of his superior officers there was Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, who Heinlein later married (after his second divorce in 1947).

While working as a civilian employee (his military clearance took a while to come through), he recommended they hire his fellow writer L. Sprague de Camp, who had a similar background in engineering. As with Heinlein, Sprague de Camp then encountered a delay before he could attend a suitable course at the Naval Training School at Dartmouth. Hence he also initially worked as a civilian engineer there before completing his course and gaining a commission as a full Lieutenant (much to his surprise, because he had only expected to become a Lt J-G).

Heinlein’s other personal personnel recommendation to the factory was Isaac Asimov, who had a Master’s in chemistry. Yet again, it took six weeks for Asimov to get clearance, his “first experience with government red tape”. This was his first time he had lived away from his family, and quickly discovered that he “wished to live soberly and reasonably – exactly as my parents had expected me to live. It was a dreadful disappointment.” Asimov subsequently thought of his time working there as a failure – that if he had been employed to do the same work during peacetime, he would have been fired. And so he returned to writing in 1943.

All the same, that’s how come the three (now very famous) SF writers all ended up working in the same Navy Yard during WWII – not exactly coincidental, but an interesting historical adjacency nonetheless.

What did they each work on?

This is actually the part I’m most interested in, because their memories of what they did there all help cast a bit of light on the innermost workings of the US Navy’s generally secretive R&D.

According to this page, Heinlein supervised a pressure chamber for testing the high-altitude suits (e.g. for stratospheric ballooning) that would later become space suits. In a 1986 foreword he wrote for Theodore Sturgeon’s novel “Godbody”, Heinlein heavy-handedly hinted at his top secret work there, including an (unnamed) radar project plus a brainstorming job on “antikamikaze measures” for “OpNav-23” (whatever that was). Though for balance, I should add that many of the Heinlein biographical sites I’ve looked at are more than a little skeptical that he actually did much top secret stuff at all.

Similarly, de Camp ran a separate engineering section, which “perform[ed] tests on parts, materials and accessories for naval aircraft; and when called upon, to do original design and development work.” Part of his worked involved running a “Cold Room” for low-temperature equipment tests. This is described in his 1996 autobiography “Time and Chance” (available for £1.99 on the Kindle). [Did you know de Camp’s first name was “Lyon”?] The contractor’s freon cooling circuit never worked, so in the end they used dry ice cubes to brute-force the Cold Room to -96F. De Camp also worked on “trim-tab controls, windshield de-icers, oxygen regulators, low-temperature protective equipment, hydraulic valves, corrosion controls, and piezoelectric materials“. Though I should add that he poured scorn on a story about ‘three pulp writers designing a space suit’ that appeared in print: “the nearest any of us got to space suits was when I saw a suit, designed by a private contractor, being tested by Larry Meakin, one of the civilian engineers, in the Altitude Chamber“. The last noteworthy thing de Camp did while at the Naval Air Experimental Station was “to put on an Exhibition Day, with flying demonstrations“, as a piece of general public outreach. However, his memoirs give no further details of what that involved.

Asimov’s memories in his 1979 autobiography “In Memory Yet Green“ appear in Chapter IV “The War and the Army – in That Order“. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard rarely took him out the chemistry laboratory: “its purpose […] was to maintain the quality and performance of hundreds of different materials used by the naval air forces“. His work “consisted largely of testing different products intended for use on naval aircraft – soaps, cleaners, seam sealers, everything – according to specifications. […] I was testing various plastics and other substances for waterproofness by placing weighed amounts of water-absorbing calcium chloride in aluminum pans, covering them with the film to be tested, and sealing those films with wax around the edges. I then weighed them, placed them in a humidifer for twenty-four hours, took them out, dried them and weighed them again.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a scream.

Finally, “The Philadelphia Experiment”

L. Sprague de Camp was once asked by a fan about “The Philadelphia Experiment”, as described by Berlitz and Moore in their 1979 book. “Aha!“, said the fan, “Now I know what you, Heinlein and Asimov were up to in that Naval laboratory” – i.e. popping the destroyer escort USS Eldridge and its crew through some kind of crazy dimensional portal to the Norfolk Navy Yard (which was 200 miles away), and then popping it back again.

Of course, de Camp thought the entire thing was complete nonsense (“a book of marvels for the gullible”) that none of the three writers had even heard of during their time there. Having said that, he did concede that “an invisibility project would have been more fun than running endless tests on hydraulic valves“. I’m sure Asimov, at least, would have agreed.

Emanuela Orlandi: Life (& Death?) in London…

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Anyone who has seen the recent (2022) Netflix series “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi” (I watched this over Christmas, it’s actually rather good) will know that the story it tells – of how, in 1983, 15-year-old “Vatican Girl” Emanuela Orlandi disappeared – is nothing short of a full-blown mystery.

Many decades later, her family’s search for answers yielded an unexpected result. A five-page document (allegedly stolen from a Vatican safe) was passed to Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi: this itemised many expenses (totalling 483 million lira, or roughly 250,000 euros) incurred by the Holy See in supporting Emanuela Orlandi “through her life phases”. If (as seems likely) this is genuine, it would seem to imply that Orlandi’s disappearance was orchestrated, sustained, and covered up by the Vatican itself over the period from 1983 to 1997.

There are many different sides to this story, but I thought I’d take a closer look at its London connections…

London Connections

For once, there’s a helpful Reddit thread, that contains scans of the 1998 document itself (cover-pages of an as-yet unreleased 197-page dossier). This breaks the Vatican’s funding up into four distinct phases:

  • Jan 1983 to Jan 1985 (p.2)
    • This includes “Rette Vito e Alloggio 176 Chapman [actually Clapham] Road Londra
    • Also include “Secondo Trasferimento”
  • Feb 1985 to Feb 1988 (p.3)
    • This includes “6 Ellerdale Road London NW3 6NB”
  • Mar 1988 to Mar 1993 (p.4)
    • This mentioned “Clinica St Mary’s Hospital Campus Imperial College London Mint Wing South Wharf Road London W2 1NY”
    • It also mentioned “Dottoressa Leasly [actually Lesley] Regan Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology”
    • This includes “Terzo trasferimento”
  • Apr 1993 to Jul 1997 (p.5)
    • “Attività generale e trasferimento presso Stato Città del Vaticano con relativo disbrigo pratiche finali”, i.e. “General activity and transfer to the Vatican City State with related final paperwork“.

Note that in the period 1988 to 1993, Dr Lesley Regan was a recently-qualified ob/gyn specialising in recurrent miscarriages (and is now head of ob/gyn there). However, when questioned by reporter Stefano Vergine from La Repubblica (translated here), Regan claimed to have no memory of Emanuela Orlandi.

The document also mentioned two London addresses linked to the Church, both of which La Repubblica’s intrepid reporter visited (though to no avail):

  • Casa Scalabrini (Youth Hostel of the Scalabrini Fathers) in Clapham Road, Stockwell
  • The Institute of St. Marcellina, a short walk from Hampstead Station.

Without going into too much depth, I think it’s hard not to infer from this that Emanuela Orlandi was very probably in London from 1983 to 1997; and also that she may well have suffered from significant gynaecological problems (such as miscarriages). It also seems likely to me (from the “transfer to the Vatican City State” and “final paperwork” mentioned at the end) that Orlandi died in London.

In 2017, an anonymous tip-off to Laura Sgro (the Orlandi family’s lawyer) alleged that Emanuela’s body had been interred in an old grave in the Vatican’s Teutonic graveyard. Once this grave had been opened, it was reported in the press (a) that the remains of a roughly 30-year-old woman had been found, and later (b) that this was not Emanuela Orlandi. So the mystery continues.

Might Her Body Have Been Repatriated?

If Orlandi had died in London in June/July 1997 (as seems likely to me) but had been buried in a Vatican cemetery, I was a bit surprised that the question of how her body had been taken from A to B (or, rather, from L to V) hadn’t been raised. So I had a brief look at what administrative steps would needed to have been taken to allow this, in case these left any kind of archival paper-trail that could be followed today.

In England and Wales, any request to repatriate a body has to be made by completing a Form 104 and submitting it to the Coroner. The Coroner then decides whether the requested repatriation should be allowed, and (if it should) returns a Form 103 back to the Funeral Director to release the body.

Though the document mentions no address in the period 1993 to July 1997, it would seem reasonable to guess that she hadn’t travelled far from London. Hence it sounds as though we’re looking for any Form 104s that were submitted to a Coroner’s Office in London in June/July 1997 for repatriating a body of a roughly 29-year-old woman to Europe (probably but not definitely Italy or the Vatican). Surely we could call all the Coroner’s Offices in London (there aren’t actually that many) and just ask them, right?

Well… as always with anything to do with archives, I suspect the answer is a mix of yes and no.

Firstly, what happened in 1997 would have been covered by the 1988 Coroners Act, which was then superseded by the 2009 Coroners and Criminal Justice Act: the change most relevant to our search is that Coroner Districts were replaced by (larger) Coroner Areas (presumably to shut down a load of Coroner’s Courts to save money, right?) So since 1997 a great deal of administrative turbulence has happened, which isn’t a great starting point.

Secondly, Coroner’s records are only supposed to be retained for a maximum of fifteen years, after which 10% of those records are randomly sampled and passed on to the archives (which, as I understand it for London, would be the London Metropolitan Archives). So there’s a 90% data-loss at the archiving stage, which (for a historian) is a bit mad. But really, the point of archiving these records was to enable broader secondary studies, rather than for solving individual cold cases: keeping everything is expensive.

Thirdly, my understanding is that the main bulk of Coronial records relate to inquests: and if Emanuala Orlandi died in London, there’s no guarantee that she even had an inquest. Specifically, if she had (say) died in a hospital, she could very well have been given an MCCD (a “medical certificate of cause of death”) by a doctor without ever even being seen by a Coroner. So the June/July 1997 administrative interactions with whichever Coroner’s Office might well have been fleeting (if not indeed minimal).

All in all, there seems to be no shortage of reasons why we should be pessimistic about finding anything. And did I mention anything about confidentiality or data privacy? *sigh*

At the same time, Form 104 (also known as a “Removal Notice”, or sometimes the “Out of England” form) submissions must surely be a relative rarity: and these must surely be recorded by the Coroner’s Office, perhaps in a database (or maybe even a handwritten ledger back in 1998). So there has to be a good chance that this database or ledger is still being actively filled and can be checked, right? However, without specifically asking all the Coroner’s Offices how the handle this, I suspect there’s no obvious way of finding out.

However, what is also interesting (and this is the bit that I think may prove to be of most relevance here) is that part of Form 104 gets detached and sent to the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages, where the information on it is presumably recorded somewhere.

In the UK, freebmd is trying to input the BDM index data and make it freely available to everyone, but it’s a huge task, and they haven’t got anywhere near 1997 yet:

However, the raw GRO index data that freebmd’s heroic transcribers are inputting looks like this (I just entered DRAGONETTI as a random surname, and picked 1991 as a post-1988 example):

From the database field guide listed at the top of this page, each entry includes a reference to the associated District Registrar’s district (e.g. “Isle of Wight”), and the register / volume / page reference to look up there. Importantly, there’s no mention here of anything to do with Form 104, so presumably that’s an extra layer of information that would (I guess) be added to the register itself (or perhaps to a separate register entirely?) by that District Registrar.

Which points to the even more annoying insight that if we were looking for Form 104 submissions for June/July 1997, I’m guessing we would have to look through the London death registers directly (i.e. not by trawling through the GRO index). Well, unless the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages in that District just happened to maintain some kind of separate searchable index of Form 104 submissions. Which I guess is possible, but you’d again have to ask them directly if such a pixie-dust index exists.

Which is what I plan to do next (while crossing my fingers hard). Unless anyone here has a better idea?

Why a Hoopoe’s Heart?

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Everyone knows Macbeth’s witch’s ingredient list:

Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake;   
Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,   
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing, […]

While real medieval recipes were hardly averse to a bit of mystification, I think it’s fair to say that – by and large – most seem to have been intended to be achievable. But… why do so many of them include a hoopoe’s heart?

It’s a vague question that I’ve had lurking at the back of my mind for ages, that lurched abruptly forward yesterday when I saw a news story about how a hoopoe had been sighted in York for the first time in forty years. Here’s Jon Noble’s nice photograph of the York hoopoe:

So I went on a short journey into the archives to try to answer the historical question: why a hoopoe’s heart?

Hoopoe History

Perhaps the best source on everything to do with the hoopoe is John Gotthold Kunstmann’s (1938) University of Chicago dissertation “The Hoopoe : A Study in European Folklore“. Kunstmann traces the pictorial history of the hoopoe all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Crete; notes references to it in Ovid, Pliny, Pausanias, Isidore (via Hrabanus Maurus), and even Rabelais; and discusses folk tales about ‘how the hoopoe got its crest‘ (though e.g. it seems a tad unlikely that Solomon gave the hoopoe its crest because of its hatred of women, etc).

Kunstmann’s chapter II is where things start to get more meaty. The (originally African) hoopoe appears in “Egyptian (Demotic), Coptic, Graeco-Egyptian medical prescriptions, in Pliny […]” etc, all the way up to R. James’ (1752) Pharmacopeia Universalis (2nd edition).

Pretty much every part of the hoopoe was considered to have magical properties, along with its eggs, its ashes, and even a magical stone called “lapis quirinis” (or quiritia, cinreis, withopfenstain) fabled to be found in its nest.

Hoopoe Hearts

The heart of the hoopoe is said (in Konrad von Megenburg’s Buch der Natur, which we’ve seen here a number of times of late) to be used “by magicians and by people who perform evil deeds secretly”. Kunstmann goes on:

Hans Vintler in Pluemen der tugent informs us that the hoopoe’s heart, placed upon a sleeper at night, will cause him to reveal hidden things. According to a MS from Stendal, the hoopoe’s or the treefrog’s heart, if carried on one’s person, will cause everybody to love one. The same MS advises drying and pulverizing the heart of the hoopoe and placing it under one’s head at night, in order to dream about the location of hidden treasure. Johannes Ravisius Textor mentions the heart of the hoopoe as good for stitches in the side.

(Note that Textor was just reprising Pliny)

Voynich Manuscript researcher Marco Ponzi also recently mentioned a hoopoe heart in a post on magic rings:

Laura Mitchell (Cultural Uses of Magic in Fifteenth-Century England) quotes a spell in MS Ashmole 1435 in which the heart of a hoopoe grants prophetic dreams (Cor ypapa supponatur sub capite dormientis et sompniabit futuram).

Eating a Hoopoe Heart

The Papyri Graecae Magicae talks about eating the honeyed heart of a hoopoe at full moon. So the idea of eating a hoopoe heart has a very long pedigree indeed.

Václav Havel’s (1984) “Thriller” begins (and, if you read it all, ends) with:

BEFORE ME LIES the famous Occult Philosophy of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, where I read that the ingestion of the living (and if possible still beating) heart of a hoopoe, a swallow, a weasel, or a mole will bestow upon one the gift of prophecy.

Agrippa’s ultimate source might be the one mentioned by Richard Kieckhefer in his “Magic in the Middle Ages” (p.142):

[…] to learn all that happens on earth, the secrets of everyone’s mind, and even heavenly things, one manuscript [British Library Ms Sloane 3132 fol. 56v] recommends beheading a hoopoe at sunrise, under a new moon, and swallowing its heart while it is still palpitating.

(Though it might be less fuss to just get a Twitter account.)

In the same footnote, Kieckhefer mentions Bodleian MS e Mus. 210 fol. 186v: “to learn the language of the birds, take the heart of a hoopoe or the tongue of a kite and put it in honey for three days and nights, then place it under your tongue“.

Dirty Hoopoes

Yet the hoopoe was also considered a filthy bird, and was included in the list of “birds of abomination” in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Kunstmann p.44) “whose flesh must not be eaten”. Even Aristotle passed forward various explanations for the hoopoe’s bad smell (which is genuinely the case, it’s sadly not a very hygienic bird).

Even though Kunstmann doesn’t say so, I suspect this makes the idea of consuming a (dirty) hoopoe’s heart as part of a magical recipe also (because it was a a “bird of abomination”) transgressive.

And yet because of the hoopoe’s magical associations and powers, people were clearly happy to do that. Even if they didn’t first store it (as per Havel’s “Thriller”) in a Thermos flask. 🙂

The Theorica Planetarum hypothesis and research landscape…

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Back in 2006, I argued (in ‘Curse’, pp.58-61) that a series of seven consecutive circular diagrams in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q9 (‘Quire 9’) and Q10 probably represented the seven ‘planets’ of traditional astrology / astronomy.

(Note that the wide Q9 bifolio had been incorrectly rebound at some point in the manuscript’s history, making this sequence far from visually obvious). My argument relied on these observations:

  • The page immediately preceding the set contains a rotated / inverted T-O map (representing the Earth) surrounded by a wolkenband (representing the heavens). Note: we now also know that this strongly parallels a drawing in a high-quality presentation manuscript by Nicolas Oresme.
  • The pages immediately following the set contain a series of zodiac roundels (that we now know seem to have been copied from a 1420s Alsace calendar).
  • The zodiac roundels also seem to be related to Vat Gr 1291, a copy of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, which I blogged about here.
  • One of the pages in the set contains a sun roundel (f68v1)
  • Another of the pages contains a large moon roundel (f67r1)
  • One of the pages has a 46-way radial symmetry, which eerily coincides with Mercury’s Babylonian 46-year goal year period. (Saturn has a 59-year period, Jupiter a 71-year period, Mars a 79-year period, while the octaeteris was where 8 Earth years correspond to 13 Venus years). It’s not proof that the roundel on f69r is linked to Mercury, but it’s a good start.

But now it’s 2020, and I’m wondering if I can now take this argument up to the next level. This is because some medieval / early modern astronomical manuscripts also contain a series of large circular diagrams corresponding to the seven classical planets. These are known as Theorica Planetarum manuscripts, and their circular diagrams are paper machines – that is, they are rotating volvelles duplicating the Ptolemaic epicycles long used by astronomers and astrologers to approximate the movements of the planets.

Hence the Theorica Planetarum Voynich Manuscript hypothesis is simply the suggestions that the set of seven consecutive circular diagrams in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q9 and Q10 might actually be (in some way) standing in for the circular paper machines in Theorica Planetarum manuscripts.

But to follow this research thread through to its logical end, we will need to know a lot more not only about Theorica Planetarum manuscripts (and their diffusion through Europe), but also about Ptolemaic epicycles, which is what the Theorica Planetarum models were trying to emulate.

Epicycles

In the pre-Copernican time period we’re interested in, the dominant belief (because all the rest was heresy) was that the celestial spheres rotated around the Earth in a perfectly circular manner. Bede’s De Natura Rerum depicted it thus:

Unfortunately, if you were an astronomer and tried to use this model to predict the movements of the wandering ‘planets’ (which back then included the sun and the moon), you’d be quickly disappointed. Because it doesn’t work. Not even close.

The most obvious thing that goes wrong is that planets often appear to be travelling backwards relative to how you would expect to see them move if they were rotating around simply (this is known as ‘retrograde motion’).

To fix this, the Greeks (specifically Hipparchus and Ptolemy) came up with a mathematical trick that instead modelled a planet’s movement as a smaller circle (an “epicycle”) attached to (i.e. offsetting from) a larger circle (a “deferent”). While not perfect, this was a step in the right direction.

Mathematically, you can think of epicycles as a kind of two-term Fourier approximation of a more complex function. And this trick was what astronomers and astrologers were still using more than a millennium later.

Oh, and there was a further trick: even if your epicycles are able to account for retrograde motion, the velocities of the planetary motion were still variable. And so Ptolemy added the idea of the equant, based on observations made by Theon (probably Theon of Smyrna), which offset the (virtual) place of observation to account for variable velocities.

Mathematically, this was a secondary kludge with no basis in anything anyone could point to as an actual reason. In fact, the whole idea of the equant annoyed Copernicus so much that it has been argued he came up with his whole heliocentric system simply to throw equants away.

All the same, the combination of Ptolemy’s equant and a deferent/epicycle per-planet pair proved to be a practical enough solution to the problem of predicting planetary motion, regardless of what Copernicus thought. 😉

Note that some (old-fashioned) astronomy historians asserted that more and more epicycles were added over the centuries to try to make the models better approximate the reality, but this is a myth. It’s true that Copernicus added an extra epicycle per planet, but this was because he was trying to get rid of that pesky equant. The two were essentially the same.

Clockwork Cosmoses

Putting the equant to one side, the epicycle/deferent values reduce to a discussion of ratios:

  • What is the ratio between the deferent period and the solar year?
  • What is the ratio between the deferent period and the epicycle period?
  • What is the ratio between the deferent radius and the epicycle radius?

If you know these values, not only can you calculate tables of planetary positions, but you can also build physical models – both volvelles and clockwork mechanisms.

Famously, the (pre-Ptolemy) Antikythera Mechanism used tricky gearing to model the moon’s anomalous movements. Incidentally, Freeth and Jones (2012) proposed an interesting reconstruction of the rest of the planetary movements in the AK by ‘scaling up’ its tricky lunar gearing.

However, because all other Greco-Roman models are lost to history (despite mentions in Cicero, no extant artefacts are known), we now have to fast-forward to the 14th century, and the Ptolemaic clockwork cosmos of Giovanni Dondi. His astrarium was much seen, described and admired, and in 1381 he gave it to Gian Galeazzo Visconti: it stayed in Pavia till at least 1485. (It seems likely that Leonardo da Vinci saw it). There are a number of modern reconstructions, such as this one which I once saw in Milan:

Helpfully, Giovanni Dondi described his astrarium’s inner workings in his Tractatus astrarii (Padova, Biblioteca Capitolare, Ms. D.39 and one other were by Dondi, but at least ten other manuscript copies exist). There’s a critical edition: Giovanni Dondi dall’ Orologio, Emmanuel Poulle (ed., trans.) (1987–1988) Johannis de Dondis Padovani Civis Astrarium. 2 vols. Opera omnia Jacobi et Johannis de Dondis. [Padova]: Ed. 1+1; Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Giovanni Dondi’s dial of Venus (fol. 12v)

From this, we know that Dondi designed his astrarium to function according to the 13th century Theorica planetarum of Campanus of Novara (more on him later) and the Alfonsine tables (circa 1272).

Might the Voynich Manuscript’s seven planet pages be not astronomical but simply a copy of the relevant pages of Dondi’s Tractatus astrarii? It’s very possible, but let’s not sink into the murky world of theories just yet. 😉

Theorica Planetarum Gerardi

Olaf Pedersen’s 1981 paper “The Origins of the ‘Theorica Planetarum” notes that the Theorica Planetarum specifically described the motions of the planets: and was much copied because other texts like the Sphaera of Sacrobosco were quite lacking in that respect.

The incipit was “Circulus eccentricus vel egresse cuspidis vel egredientis centri dicitur qui non habet centum suum cum centro mundi“: and Pedersen reports (in 1981) having more than 210 entries on his checklist of copies, which makes it almost as widely circulated as Sacrobosco’s Sphaera.

As to its author, it was widely believed to have been written by Gerard of Cremona (hence you’ll often see it referred to as Theorica Planetarum Gerardi). Regiomontanus called it by this name, though he was aware there was no proof that Gerard had written it – and by Regiomontanus’ time, it had become known as Theorica Planetarum Antiqua.

Pedersen himself came to no conclusion about who actually wrote this, but considered that he knew of nothing that “[invalidated] the assumption that it originated from the hand of a thirteenth-century author”. (p.122)

Campanus of Novara’s Theorica Planetarum

The next Theorica Planetarum to take the medieval stage was by Campanus of Novara (c.1220-1296), and was composed (1261-1264) at broadly the same time as the Theorica Planetarum Gerardi.

This was a very much more solid affair (without a number of the erroneous simplications the other Theorica had included), and included a description of how to make an equatorium. This is essentially a single mater (an astrolabe-like back disk), into which other disk-sets are inserted, one disk-set per planet. This would be cumbersome and impractical, though the equatorium article linked here says: “[I]t is however likely that Campanus envisaged an instrument of gigantic dimensions.”

There’s a critical edition of Campanus’ Theorica Planetarum by Benjamin and Toomer, which I’ve ordered a copy of from America (though I don’t expect it to come anytime soon).

There was also a tidied-up version of Campanus’ work from circa 1320, called “Abbreviatio instrumenti Campani, sive aequatorium” by Johannes de Lineriis (Jean de Linières or Lignières). I’m guessing that Benjamin and Toomer’s book covers this (but I’ll find out when it arrives).

Georg von Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum

In many ways, Georg von Peurbach’s much-updated Theoricae Novae Planetarum (1454) was the last hurrah of the Theorica Planetarum genre. Regiomontanus (von Peurbach’s student) even went to immense expense to print his late teacher/mentor’s work in 1472.

Michela Malpangotto’s (2012) article “The Early Manuscripts of Georg von Peuerbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum” lists five very interesting early copies of the manuscript, dating from 1454 to the early 1460s:

  • “A” = Vienne, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 5203
  • “B” = Vienne, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 5245
  • “C” = Heiligenkreuz, Stiftbibliothek, Codex Sancrucensis 302
  • “D” = Cracovie, Bibliothèque Jagellonne, B. J. 599
  • “R” = Rimini, Biblioteca Civica Gambalunga, Sc-MS. 27

Here, there are particularly strong relationships between the A/B/C copies, that make it look as though all three were created in 1454 in Vienna.

What About Gotha Chart. A 472?

I discussed this manuscript in my previous post, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t as yet know how this – and by implication the whole Profatius Judaeus thing – fits into the Theorica Planetarum landscape.

Volvelles or Equatorium Inserts?

So here’s one of the many problems to clear up. Campanus’ Theorica Planetarum describes an equatorium, i.e. a series of multi-layer circular inserts that slot into an astrolabe-like mater… not volvelles.

Moreover, even though Georg von Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum was printed as volvelles in the 16th century (e.g. the LJS 64 copy I showed the video of before), I’m entirely unsure whether the transition to volvelles there was by Regiomontanus (Regiomontanus certainly had volvelles in his 1474 Calendar) or a later thing.

So, without reading a ton more stuff, I’m entirely unsure whether volvelles (as volvelles, not as equatorium inserts) were found in the Theorica Planetarum genre at all pre-1500.

But these are early days. I’ll blog more as things become clearer. 🙂

BBC Dyatlov Pass post…

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Here’s a nice post from the BBC covering the Dyatlov Pass mystery, a topic I know a good number of Cipher Mysteries readers have an interest in.

Lots of people – including the Mansi, which was particularly good to see – were interviewed, and the article includes lots of excellent photographs.

Was the incident an alien incursion, or some kind of Soviet radioactive weapon experiment that went wrong? The surrounding area was subsequently quarantined for four years, and all sorts of pressure were brought to bear on people involves; it should hence be no surprise that the cogs and gears have kept turning in the conspiratorial mill for 60 years.

Igor Dyatlov post-mortem
https://dyatlovpass.com/death

As any fule kno, the three atomic building blocks of history are conspiracy, cock-up, and cover-up: and historical topics are most interesting where these three Venn diagram circles intersect. It’s appallingly easy to read the Dyatlov Pass incident as a Soviet cover-up of a cocked-up conspiracy. In a country where conspiracy theories and outright distrust of government are the norm, this is almost the default reading (unless you’re an alien buff).

So the BBC’s big news is that a new investigation is now being opened up. Perhaps some of the tissues that were analyzed and stored away will turn up, and a modern forensic analysis will reveal the truth of what happened.

But then again, in the whole sports drug cheating scandal (that is still very much ongoing), Russian labs haven’t exactly managed to cover themselves with Svetlana Khorkina-style glory. So… perhaps The Truth Isn’t Going To Be Out There Just Yet, eh Mulder? We shall see, I guess.

As for me… I think we can rule out three bears murderously angry about a group of students eating their porridge, OK?

Idea: publishing Voynich research via preprint servers…

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As I’ve said on Cipher Mysteries numerous times, I’ve been finding that my Voynich research is getting harder and harder to publish as blog posts. There’s a long stream of reasons: for example, research into the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels drawings…

  • …often overlaps existing research literature
  • …often relies on a literature fragmented across different languages
  • …often needs to include a literature review
  • …often refers to a cluster of related previous posts
  • …tends to be long form rather than short form
  • …is rarely complete in and of itself

Despite all these, I’ve continued trying to publish my research in blog form: but it’s not getting easier. Yet I very often find myself held to account over details in posts as if I had published a lead article in Nature. Really, it sometimes feels as though I’ve managed to get the worst of both worlds.

And so, going forward, my plan is to trial a quite different approach. Please bear with me, as I’m still trying to work out how to make this work in practice. This post is to try to describe my basic plan, and to provide a forum for your thoughts, comments and suggestions (if you’ll be so kind).

The World of Preprint Servers

There is a large number of preprint servers out there: the most famous one by far is the arXiv.org e-Print archive, which since 1991 has specialised in making preprints of scientific papers easily available on the web. (It now has more than 1.5 million papers, just so you know.)

What is not so well known is that there is also a small (but growing) set of humanities-focused preprint servers out there. These offer a route for preprint (and, increasingly, nonprint) articles to see the light of day.

If you have at all tracked the Voynich-themed brouhaha kicked up by Gerard Cheshire and his somewhat overoptimistic polywhatever linguistic papers, then you’ll probably have noticed that he published them on LingBuzz. Unsurprisingly, this is a linguistics-focused preprint server offering linguistics researchers the opportunity to post up pretty much whatever they like.

For historical code-breaking, the Cryptology ePrint Archive (courtesy of the IACR) seems to be a splendidly super preprint server (though I don’t know much about it). And for general research preprints that perhaps don’t fit big categories comfortably, CERN’s Zenodo seems full of promise (though, again, I know very little about it).

All in all, there now seems to be a preprint server suitable for whatever research you have in mind. So, as a general thing, this route seems to be becoming an effective way of getting articles-in-progress out there.

Openly Published Staged Preprints

You might ask “…but isn’t this just the whole Cheshire thing all over again?” Actually, what I’m doing here is advocating a completely different way of using preprint servers to publish research.

What I’m suggesting here is not to pretend that an article is complete (or even destined for full print publication in a non-existent journal, because that would be just plain stupid), but rather to openly embrace and accentuate the article’s ongoing lack of completion by publishing it via preprint servers in a staged manner, and flagging it as such.

Think of this as a way of serializing publication: or even of celebrating reaching research milestones within a research microproject by publishing a state of play update that anyone can read and comment on, or even possibly collaborate with and help develop further.

For example, a reasonable initial draft on a specific Voynich zodiac roundel topic might include a lightly annotated list of handschriften (including links to those few that are available online), an outline of a literature review, together with a first draft of a research hypothesis.

Similarly, a second pre-draft might include an attempt at extracting the relevant aspects of the literature, summarizing it, including some key images, and then trying to put it all into the outlines of an argument lined to an updated (and finessed) version of the research hypothesis. And so forth.

As for me, I don’t – as long as the stages are described honestly, and the process is made transparent (e.g. by including links to earlier drafts inside the draft) – see any downside to this for the research I do. In many ways, it would be a blessed relief to be able to publish along the way, rather than – tada! – with an ornate flourish at the end, like Arnold Rimmer saluting.

At the same time, I fully understand that some researchers (particularly historical cipher researchers, it has to be said) feel very protective and closed about the research they do, as if they expect to uncover a Pearl of Great Price any day now, and that this will inevitably trigger the start of an Immense Redemption Arc for them. But I can’t speak for those people.

My own position is simply that I’d rather publish stuff as I go (which is basically why I blog). However, I don’t like updating posts endlessly: even though some bloggers do this (some even edit comments to try to make every discussion seem to favour them after the fact), I find this practice both shoddy and indicative of a disgraceful lack of online netiquette. Still, each to their own, eh?

Stuck In The Middle (With You)…

As a researcher, it’s easy to flag how different aspects of blogs, journals, social media, print media, preprint servers etc don’t quite suit your purposes, or your style of research. But at the same time, it can be devilishly difficult to steer a path between them that does gives you what you want.

Perhaps I like the idea of openly publishing staged preprints because I’m at the stage in my personal research journey where I don’t feel concerned or threatened by the notion that someone may possibly waltz in and somehow ‘steal’ my entire research from under my nose. Alternatively, perhaps it’s because I like living life in the open. I don’t know: they’re all true.

An entirely parallel benefit is that someone might well look at a staged preprint and want to pick up the baton in some way: perhaps they already have expertise in or experience of a particular aspect of the field being covered, and would be happy to help hone the argument or whatever.

It may even be that some researchers prove better (Problematique-style) at constructing effective research hypotheses than in answering or resolving them. Further, it might be that openly published staged preprints open up ways of collaborating entirely different from the ones we are used to.

For example, if you were to approach an academic with a specific question about a particular literature they know about, surely it would be a huge assistance if your email to them included a link to a staged online preprint of where your research has managed to reach without their help. Surely this level of transparency and openness would be an entirely good thing?

But what do you think?

The linguistic diffusion of Cisiojanus mnemonics…

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Even though (academic opinion has it that) the idea of a Cisiojanus feast-name mnemonic first appeared in Germany in the 12th Century and largely diffused there, there is no such thing as a single universal Cisiojanus. That is, most examples of Cisiojanus have local tweaks – local saints, local memorials, local feasts.

Bear in mind that Christianity in the Middle Ages was a much less centralized affair than it became in the sixteenth Century and beyond: medieval Rome was a dump (the Vatican’s fabulous Renaissance buildings had yet to be erected), and papal behaviour was often more political than pontifical.

And so it was that Christian practice was more of a patchwork, where feasts (major ones excepted) were determined locally by bishops, towns, councils, and even guilds. The various examples I posted here before meshed syllables from local saints’ names into the Cisiojanus meta-framework: there is a lot more work for historians to do in terms of mapping the “adaptation trees”.

Interestingly, though, the basic Cisiojanus template was sufficiently flexible that it was able to be adapted not just to different German-speaking regions, but also to completely different languages.

Given that I haven’t found any review article on this “linguistic diffusion” of Cisiojanus, all I can do us offer up a brief set of research notes on all the different language Cisiojanus variants I’ve run across, in the hope that these might offer a starting point in that direction.

German Cisiojanus literature

Just as an aside, the root of the modern Cisiojanus literature is, without doubt:

“Cisiojanus : Studien zur mnemonischen Literatur anhand des spätmittelalterlichen Kalendergedichts” (1974) by Rolf Max Kully, which appeared in “Zeitschrift: Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde”, Band (Jahr): 70 (1974), Heft 3-4.

Before Kully, one of the most influential papers was by P. Diels (1937), Der älteste polnische Cisiojanus.

This year, there was a paper “All Days Are Equal, but Some Days Are More Equal than Others: Late Medieval German Cisiojani and Their Structure of Time” by Silvan Wagner at IMC 2018, as part of the “Memorising Time: The Cisiojanus as a Complex Storage of Pre-Modern Memory” session.

English Cisiojanus literature

“A Unique English Cisioianus” (2005), by William H. Smith, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 18:2, pp.10-16. This covers Chapel Hill MS 522.

Scottish Cisiojanus literature

A Scoto-Irish Cisiojanus (1980), by Alexander Boyle, in Analecta Bollandiana, Volume 98, Issue 1-2, pp. 39-47. Boyle is discussing MS Laing III 21, folios 1-9: and refers back to a 1959 paper “Cisiojani Latini” by Oloph Edenius, which divides Cisiojanus manuscripts into two types – syllable-based (usually Latin) and word-based (usually vernacular).

Boyle has another article (with David McRoberts) called “A Hebridean Cisiojanus“, The Innes Review, Volume 21 Issue 2, Page 108-123.

Irish Cisiojanus literature

An Irish cisiojanus by William O’Sullivan, in Collectanea Hibernica No. 29 (1988), pp.7-13. I haven’t seen this fully, but fragments on Google make it seem as though O’Sullivan thinks Boyle and McRoberts got their Hebridean Cisiojanus wrong.

Italian Cisiojanus literature

Nicola De Nisco, a PhD student at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, uploaded Un inedito esemplare italiano di Cisioianus to academia.edu. This paper describes an Italian Cisiojanus that appears on the final page of “manoscritto ambrosiano + 93 sup.”, from the second half of the fifteenth century: it has a good bibliography.

De Nisco transcribes January as:

Sci.si.da.ia.nus.e.pi.si.bi.uen.pau.lim.fe.li.mar.an
Pri.sca.fab.ag.vim.cen.ti.pau.lus.cri.so.sto.mi.que.

For July (which has long been an interest of mine), the transcription runs:

Oc.pro.ces.no.dor.oc.ui.chi.li.fra.be.er.ma.co.di.post.al.
Ar.ga.mar.prax.mag.ab.crist.ia.an.na.pan.ta.le.on

Interestingly, De Nisco gave a presentation on “The Memory of Saints and His Stratifications: A Philological Approach to the Study of Italian Cisiojani” in IMC 2018, in the same session described above.

Hungarian Cisiojanus literature

There’s a Hungarian Cisiojanus described here, which goes far beyond the paltry limits of my tourist Hungarian.

Westjiddischer Cisiojanus literature

A fairly slim literature here, it has to be said, but Simon Neuberg (1999) “Aschkenasisches Latein. Ein westjiddischer Cisiojanus“, in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, pp. 111–132.

French Cisiojanus literature

Here’s a webpage discussing a French Cisiojanus from circa 1500, courtesy of prolific Cisiojanus commentator Erik Drigsdahl. January looks like this:

En ian vier que les Roys ve nus sont
Glau me dit fre min mor font
An thoin boit le iour vin cent fois
Pol us en sont tous ses dois

A version of the same French rhyme was found in a 1514 pastedown (courtesy of a crowdsearch project!), according to this 2014 page.

Dutch Cisiojanus literature

There’s a mention (I believe) of a Dutch Cisiojanus in KB Brussel 15.659-61 by Theo Meder’s “Sprookspreker in Holland“.

Icelandic Cisiojanus literature

A 16th century Icelandic Cisiojanus is mentioned on footnote 18 of page 35 of the Saga book here: it says that the syllable ‘bla’ for St Blaise got inserted into the Cisiojanus in Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s (1576) “Bænabok med morgum godvm og nytsamligum bænum”. As a side note, I’ve been to plenty of presentations that would seem to celebrate St Blaise three times over. 😉

Is it time for the Secret History of the First World War to emerge?

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I recently went to a very enjoyable evening of history lectures at Kingston Grammar School’s swanky Performing Arts Centre / Theatre, a local celebration of this year’s (2018) centenary of the end (or, at least, one of the ends) of the First World War. Inevitably, the urge to write a blog post in response was almost impossible to contain…

WW1 War Poetry

The first talk, given by Dr Jane Potter (Reader in Arts at Oxford Brookes University) was on war poetry: though very interesting, it became quickly apparent to me that even though war poetry as a phenomenon emerged in the military heat of WW1, it was forged as an academic study target in the ideological heat of 1960s anti-war protest.

Many aspects of war poetry that strongly engage its academic audience – its inclusivity, its naivety, and its perceived ‘genuineness’ – reflect the kind of ‘bottom-up’ social history that was emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. From that point of view, it is (I think) hard not to see that these were precisely the things that 1960s anti-war academics seized upon as giving it ideological value to them. Hence it is a field that seems to me to have been selected more for its low-impact liberal resistance values than for intrinsic artistic, stylistic, or technical value.

But even so, the academic genre itself projects back a modern dialogue about what (capital W) War is about / for (and let’s not forget it took until 1970 for Edwin Starr’s answer to emerge, famously rhyming “heartbreaker” with “undertaker”), and about what relation War has with the ‘common man’ (or indeed ‘common woman’), a dialogue only marginally in place in 1914. I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of academic contradictions in play here.

For me, WW1 war poetry ranges all the way from the most moving and affecting to muddy drivel: but neither the best nor the worst makes me want to value it as more than just an interesting cultural phenomenon. So unfortunately I have to say that, though Jane Potter’s talk was both engaging and well-presented within its limits, I still don’t buy into the whole academic study of war poetry as something which continued study of can keep on eliciting genuine value: circa 2018 it seems more like a long-running Humanities cult, a Kodakian “gift that keeps giving” but with ever-diminishing returns, sorry. 🙁

The Moral Endeavour Driving WW1

The second speaker of the evening was Dr Edward Madigan (a Lecturer in Public History at the University of London’s Royal Holloway), and his talk was on altogether more solid ground. His starting point was that even though people in the UK now generally grasp that the Second World War was a genuine moral fight against the fascistic inhumanities of Nazism, few genuinely seem to understand what the equivalent British moral angle was in the First World War – A.K.A. ‘errrrm, what was that whole WW1 thing about, again? Franz Ferdinand or something?‘

What clearly came out from his slides and description was how British moral indignation at the 1914 German atrocities in Belgium (in particular in Louvain / Leuven) grew and grew, a sense of outrage that increased courtesy of the sinking of the Lusitania (yes, I do know about the various histories there, *sigh*), the Zeppelin raids, the raider attacks on Scarborough, and the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell. These moral flames were religiously fanned by such peopls as Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of Westminster, whose 1915 anti-German diatribes were extraordinarily inflammatory, to the point of being somewhat hard for modern ears to take in. (Even Herbert Asquith called it “jingoism of the shallowest kind”.)

And so Madigan’s overall argument – though he never quite framed in this precise way – seemed to be that moral outrage against the Germans grew in Britain like a kind of out-of-control viral meme, taking over the thinking of all bar the most doggedly pacifistic. And this from a country that was, right up until the start of WW1, a close partner with Germany, both culturally, fraternally, commercially, and even historically. (It is no coincidence that the British Royal Family is basically German.)

But… was that the whole story? I think not, and the evening’s final speaker helped illuminate a different side of the same history.

WW1 Propaganda

Professor Jo Fox is the Director of the IHR: the topic of her talk was “Propaganda and the First World War”. We’re now familiar with the idea of agitprop (a portmanteau of “agitatsiia” and “propaganda”, as per the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, set up in 1920): but Jo Fox showed a series of images of British First World War propaganda, courtesy of the various enlisting committees and even the graphic journals of the day – intentional propaganda and unintentional propaganda, broadly speaking (echoing Marc Bloch).

One curious thing she noted was that German historians (though she didn’t say who), looking back at the First World War, pointed to the power of British propaganda as being one of the key things that swayed not only national opinion but also international opinion against Germany: and that this was one of the key mechanisms that served to isolate Germany and, ultimately, to lose it the war. Was propaganda really that powerful? Fox clearly thinks so, and indeed argued her case persuasively.

Perhaps the interesting follow-on question here is whether the Soviets ultimately stole agitprop from the Brits’ culturally weaponised WW1 propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the case, though Fox didn’t suggest an answer: maybe she’s saving this for her next book. 😉

Towards A Secret History of WW1?

From my own historical viewpoint, the problem with all three accounts presented during the evening wasn’t what they included but what they excluded. By which I mean: the act of trying to capture the vast vista of war though such narrow lenses as poetry (or even social history), viral moral outrage, or even pro-war propaganda is doomed to failure, for these are all surface symptoms. Instead, the single (but never really mentioned) driving force behind War is neither military, social, nor even moral, but political. Even Edwin Starr got it wrong: the one thing that war is good for is politics, plain and simple.

In my opinion, the thing pervasively missing from the evening was a single secret history question: how did the British Government manage to bring the Church, the State, the Establishment, the Media, and indeed just about everyone else (including writers, artists and mainstream poets) on-message with its political programme, culminating in the deaths of approximately 37 million people? Just about everyone played their part in disseminating pro-war propaganda: if there is a categoric difference from the kind of Soviet agitprop that followed not long after, it’s not one that I can easily detect.

So why, even a century on, are historians still apparently unable to peer behind the political curtain of WW1, to bring the machinations that made the propaganda possible into the light? What made the British Government’s (proto-)agitprop so effective, so far-reaching, so total? It seems to me that – unless, dear reader, you know better – the definitive secret political history of WW1 has not yet been written: or, rather, the awareness of the political framing of the war seems to be missing in action. Our historians seem to lack access to the definitive accounts of the scheming, manipulation, and political stage management that would give their own accounts context and genuine meaning: and so we seem to have fragmented histories that, for all their depth of research and technical professionalism, remain politically shallow.

Or is it the case that, even now, nobody wants to talk about how countries manipulate their peoples into going to war? Might it be that, in an age where politically unjustifiable wars continue to happen on a regular basis, this is all still too close for comfort? Might a hundred years be too soon for the real history of something so politically sensitive to emerge?

John Fanning Watson on Philadelphia’s pirate treasure…

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Before revealing the precise modern equivalent of the location near Cherry Garden where the Society Hill treasure was allegedly buried 😉 , I think we need to take a brief detour into the world of Philadelphia’s pirate treasure lore.

Our guide is the ever-detailed (and not infrequently skeptical) (1830) “Annals of Philadelphia, being a collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of the city and its inhabitants, from the days of the Pilgrim founders” compiled by John Fanning Watson. For all its flaws, Watson’s book is surely the first (wary) port of call for anyone sailing the murky depths of Philly’s early history: and remains a comfortable lapdog of a read (though the reader’s eye inevitably tires after each few chapters).

In short, think of Watson’s Annals as a Philly equivalent of Captain Charles Johnson’s “A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates”, and you shouldn’t go too far wrong. 🙂

Captain Kidd

Watson, having done much research on the subject, seems in no doubt of Captain Kidd’s connection to Philadelphia, or at least to Kidd’s crew:

A writer at Albany, in modern times, says they had the tradition that [Captain] Kid once visited Coeymans and Albany; and at a place two miles from the latter it was said he deposited money and treasure in the earth. […]

In 1699, Isaac Norris, sen. writes, saying, “We have four men in prison, taken up as pirates, supposed to be Kid’s men. Shelly, of New York, has brought to these parts some scores of them, and there is sharp looking out to take them. We have various reports of their riches, and money hid between this and the capes. There was landed about twenty men, as we understand, at each cape, and several are gone to York. A sloop has been seen cruising off the capes for a considerable time, but has not meddled with any vessel as yet, though she has spoken with several.”

The above quoted letter, in the Logan MS. collection, goes to countenance the prevalent idea of hidden money. The time concurs with the period Captain Kid was known to have returned to the West Indies. It may have been the very sloop in which Kid himself was seeking means of conveying home his treasure, and with which he finally went into Long Island sound to endeavour to make his peace. Four of the men landed at Lewistown, were apprehended and taken to Philadelphia; I saw the bill of their expense,” but heard no more of them, save that I saw that Colonel Quarry, at Philadelphia, was reproached by William Penn for permitting the bailing of the pirates; some were also bailed at Burlington. — Vide Penn’s letter of 1701.

Blackbeard

Watson is even more taken with the much-claimed connection between Blackbeard and Philadelphia:

Mrs. Bulah Coates, (once Jacquet,) the grandmother of Samuel Coates, Esq. now an aged citizen, told him that she had seen and sold goods to the celebrated Blackbeard, she then keeping a store in High street, No. 77, where Beninghove now owns and dwells a little west of Second street. He bought freely and paid well. She then knew it was him, and so did some others. But they were afraid to arrest him lest his crew, when they should hear of it, should avenge his cause, by some midnight assault. He was too politick to bring his vessel or crew within immediate reach; and at the same time was careful to give no direct offence in any of the settlements where they wished to be regarded as visiters and purchasers, &c.

This of course gives me an excuse to put in the famous picture of Blackbeard that everyone loves so much:

Watson adds:

There is a traditionary story, that Blackbeard and his crew used to visit and revel at Marcushook, at the house of a Swedish woman, whom he was accustomed to call Marcus, as an abbreviation of Margaret.

(Incidentally, there’s a 1735 plank-built house in Marcus Hook that the owners like to try to associate with Blackbeard and his friend Margaret, just so you know.)

All of which helps to support stories telling of buried pirate treasure in Philadelphia, though the spookier the better (obviously):

An idea was once very prevalent, especially near to the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, that the pirates of Black Beard’s day had deposited treasure in the earth. The conceit was, that sometimes they killed a prisoner, and interred him with it, to make his ghost keep his vigils there as a guard “walking his weary round.”

Treasure Hunter Tales

Watson counted treasure hunters among his friends, though again with a spooky edge:

Several persons, whose names I suppress, used to go and dig for hidden treasures of nights. On such occasions if any one “spoke” while digging, or ran from terror without “the magic ring,” previously made with incantation round the place, the whole influence of the spell was lost.

And treasure hunters back then were apparently just about as gullible as their modern versions:

There was a prevailing belief that the pirates had hidden many sums of money and much of treasure about the banks of the Delaware. Forrest got an old parchment, on which he wrote the dying testimony of one John Hendricks, executed at Tyburn for piracy, in which he stated that he had deposited a chest and a pot of money at Cooper’s Point in the Jerseys. This parchment he smoked, and gave to it the appearance of antiquity; calling on his German taylor, told him he had found it among his father’s papers, who got it in England from the prisoner whom he visited in prison. This he showed to the taylor as a precious paper which he could by no means lend out of his hands. This operated the desired effect.

Soon after the taylor called on Forrest with one Ambruster, a printer, who he introduced as capable of “printing any spirit out of hell,” by his knowledge of the black art. He asked to show him the parchment; he was delighted with it, and confidently said he could conjure Hendricks to give up the money. A time was appointed to meet in an upper room of a public house in Philadelphia, by night, and the inn-keeper was let into the secret by Forrest. By the night appointed, they had prepared by a closet a communication with a room above their sitting room, so as to lower down by a pulley the invoked ghost, who was represented by a young man entirely sewed up in a close white dress on which were painted black eyed-sockets, mouth, and bare ribs with dashes of black between them, the outside and inside of the legs and thighs blacked, so as to make white bones conspicuous there. About twelve persons met in all, seated around a table. Ambruster shuffled and read out cards, on which were inscribed the names of the New Testament saints, telling them he should bring Hendricks to encompass the table, visible or invisible he could not tell. At the words John Hendricks “duverfluchter cum heraus,” the pulley was heard to reel, the closet door to fly open, and John Hendricks with gastly appearance to stand forth. The whole were dismayed and fled, save Forrest the brave. After this, Ambruster, on whom they all depended, declared that he had by spells got permission to take up the money. A day was therefore appointed to visit the Jersey shore and to dig there by night. The parchment said it lay between two great stones. Forrest, therefore, prepared two black men to be entirely naked except white petticoat-breeches; and these were to jump each on the stone whenever they came to the pot, which had been previously put there. These frightened of the company for a little. When they next essayed they were assailed by cats tied two and two, to whose tails were spiral papers of gunpowder, which illuminated and whizzed, while the cats whawled. The pot was at length got up, and brought in great triumph to Philadelphia wharf; but oh, sad disaster! while helping it out of the boat. Forrest, who managed it, and was handing it up to the taylor, trod upon the gunnel and filled the boat, and holding on to the pot dragged the taylor into the river — it was lost!

For years afterwards they reproached Forrest for that loss, and declared he had got the chest by himself and was enriched thereby. He favoured the conceit, until at last they actually sued him on a writ of treasure trove; but their lawyer was persuaded to give it up as idle.

And other pirate treasure hunter stories float in the Philly ether:

As late as the year 1792, the shipcarpenters formed a party to dig for pirates’ money on the Cohocksinc creek, northwest of the causeway, under a large tree. £ frightened off. And it came out afterwards that a waggish neighbour had enacted diabulus to their discomfiture.

Pirate Treasure

Some claim to have found Blackbeard’s pirate treasure in Philadelphia, but without anything to support them:

Colonel A. J. Morris, now in his 90th year, has told me that in his early days very much was said of Blackbeard and the pirates, both by young and old. Tales were frequently current that this and that person had heard of some of his disgovered treasure. Persons in the city were named as having profitted by his depredations. But he thought those things were not true.

South Front Street, not far from the Delaware (“as you are well aware”), was specifically named as a place where treasure was dug up:

T. Matlack, Esq. told me he was once shown an oak tree, at the south end of Front street, which was marked KLP, at the foot of which was found a large sum of money. The stone which covered the treasure he saw at the door of the alleged finder, who said his ancestor was directed to it by a sailor in the Hospital in England. He told me too, that when his grandfather Burr died they opened a chest which had been left by four sailors “for a day or two,” full twenty years before, which was found full of decayed silk goods.

(As an aside, Cipher Mysteries readers may perhaps remember the meta-story of treasure locations being divulged by dying sailors which Ron Justron’s “Great Lost Treasure” claims revolved around: here’s an early-ish example.)

Philadelphia pirate treasure, previously hidden underground, tended to turn up when people dug cellars, such as at the Cock inn in Spruce Street:

Samuel Richards and B. Graves confirmed to me what I had heard elsewhere, that at the sign of the Cock in Spruce street, about 35 years ago, there was found in a pot in the cellar a sum of money of about 5000 dollars. The Cock inn was an old two story frame house which stood on the site of the present easternmost house of B. Graves’ row. A Mrs. Green owned and lived in the Cock inn 40 to 50 years ago, and had sold it to Pegan, who found the money in attempting to deepen the cellar. It became a question to whom the money belonged, which it seems was readily settled between Mrs. Green and Pegan, on the pretext that Mrs. Green’s husband had put it there! But it must appear sufficiently improbable that Mrs. Green should have left such a treasure on the premises if she really knew of it when she sold the house. The greater probability is that neither of them had any conception how it got there, and they mutually agreed to support the story, so as to hush any other or more imposing inquiries. They admitted they found 5000 dollars. It is quite as probable a story that the pirates had deposited it there before the location of the city.” It was of course on the margin of the natural harbour once formed there for vessels. In digging the cellar of the old house at the north east corner of Second street and Gray’s alley they discovered a pot of money there; also some lately at Frankford creek.

Certainly it was once much the expectation and the talk of the times — for instance, the very old two-story house at the north east corner of Second street and Gray’s alley, (i.e. Morris’ alley) originally built for Stephen Anthony, in digging its cellar they found there a pot of money, supposed to have been buried by the pirates. This story I heard from several very aged persons.

Treasure Maps

Finally, Watson sees no reason why there should not also be treasure maps or “hints”, and sees the idea as “natural”, though it does not sound as though he himself has seen one (for he would surely have gleefully included it in his Annals):

When we thus consider “their friends” thus “lodged among us every where,” it presents additional reasons for the ideas of buried treasure of the pirates once so very prevalent among the people, of which I have presented several facts of digging for it under the head of Superstitions. They believing that Blackbeard and his accomplices buried money and plate in numerous obscure places near the rivers; and sometimes, if the value was great, they killed a prisoner near it, so that his ghost might keep his vigils there and terrify those who might approach. Those immediately connected with pirates might keep their own secrets, but as they might have children and connections about, it might be expected to become the talk of their posterity in future years that their fathers had certain concealed means of extravagant living; they may have heard them talk mysteriously among their accomplices of going to retired places for concealed things, &c. In short, if given men had participation in the piracies, it was but natural that their proper posterity should get some hints, under reserved and mysterious circumstances of hidden treasure, if it existed.

A saunter through Philadelphia’s Society Hill to Cherry Garden…

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Following on from the 1716 treasure map letter I posted about a few days ago, it’s now time for a Cipher Mysteries historical saunter through Philadelphia. And why not?

The Blue Anchor Inn

“…at the South End of the town of Philadelphia is a Gutt of water with a few Planks Layd over it which the Inhabitants call a drau Bridge:…”

The history of Philadelphia begins with William Penn landing at the Blue Anchor Inn in 1682/1683: liking the dock and the creek beside it, he decided that this was where a “Greene Countrie Towne” should be built, between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Here’s an old newspaper reconstruction of what the Inn originally looked like:

Before very long (1691 is claimed), a drawbridge was erected across Dock Creek to allow boat access to the little harbour and foot access to the quickly growing city. Here’s a 1908 illustration by James Moore Preston (courtesy of blog page Early Philadelphia Inns and Taverns: Part 2:

Though far less colourful, Frank Hamilton Taylor’s (1922) drawing tells much the same story:

Dock Creek

Philly H20: The History of Philadelphia’s Watersheds and Sewers notes that “For many years after the creek was covered over the neighborhood was known as the “Drawbridge,” and as late as 1834 we read that the Drawbridge lot rented for $600 per year.”

Dock Creek was subsequently covered over for the simple reason that everyone put their sewage into it (and so it stank to high heaven). In the last few years, however, it has been (virtually) reclaimed by artists and historians, in the form of a walk along its former course being set out as an Art Installation by Winifred Lutz. The following nice map also shows the breweries and tanneries set up beside the creek, tipping their noxious wastes away:

Society Hill

“…a little to ye Southward of that is a Rising Ground called Society Hill…”

As noted in The Pennsylvania magazine of history and biography, Vol. XLVII (1923), this area was first settled in the early 1680s by The Free Society of Traders…

[…] which in 1682 was granted a charter by William Penn, and soon set up a warehouse and office in the infant city, on the west side of Front Street, near the south side of Dock Creek. It was located at the foot of the hill known as Society Hill and thence its city tract of about one hundred acres extended westerly in a tier of lots from Front Street on the Delaware to Front Street on the Schuylkill River. A map of the surveyor Thomas Holme made about 1683 shows its location.

Thomas Holme was William Penn’s surveyor general, and his map (which I found here) looked like this:

Hence Society Hill sat right at the heart of Philadelphia’s early history, though the Society it was named after closed in March 1723. Robert Morris Skaler’s (2005) “Society Hill and Old City” seems to be a pretty definitive reference on this subject (the first 33 pages are on Google Books), but I’m waiting for my copy to arrive in the post. 😉

All the same, Society Hill completely lost its shine during the nineteenth century, as fashion moved the City’s Centre ever westwards: many of the neighbourhoods turned into appalling slums, with W.E.B.Dubois’s famous (1899) sociological study “The Philadelphia Negro” focused on the City’s Seventh Ward, the long thin rectangle running West of the lower half of Society Hill all the way to the Shuylkill River. By the 1940s, the Hill was in almost complete disrepair.

And yet since then, the modern history of Society Hill is a rather strange thing. The area was consciously refashioned into Colonial-era kitsch, where rich owners with salvageable homes were given low-interest loans to make them nice again, poor owners were kicked out and their houses sold on to rich owners to salvage, and everything else was flattened and turned into Colonial retro townhouses. Brick pavements and faux-old streetlights added to the overall Disneyfication: the newly fictionalized Society Hill became a film set, populated by the genteel. (The 1770-era [but internally modernized] townhouse at 232 Spruce Street went on sale in 2017 for $899,000.) And now, while Philadelphia’s demographics are getting younger, Society Hill’s demographics are getting older, richer and whiter: so as neighbourhoods go, it’s a curious socio-economic and real-estate bubble that the City consciously inflated.

Just so you don’t get too taken in by it all if you happen to go on a walking tour. 🙂

Cherry Garden

“…upon which hill is a pretty good Brick house with one apple Orchard: But called Cherry Garden…”

According to an entry in the online Philadelphia Encyclopaedia, William Penn’s intention for the town was for each plot to comprise at least half an acre, with the house placed right in the middle, so that “there may be ground on each side for Gardens or Orchards, or fields”. The entry continues:

A number of wealthy Philadelphians did create gardens in their large city lots, as well as at their country estates outside the original city limits, and many Philadelphians visited these gardens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. […] The first early gardens fully accessible to the (paying) public in the city, however, were associated with entertainment and refreshment rather than science and education. These included the “Cherry Garden” in the area that later became known as Society Hill […]

John Fanning Watson’s (1830) “Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in Olden Time” mentions this explicitly:

“Society Hill”, a name once so prevalent for all the region south of Pine street, even down to the Swedes’ church, has been discontinued for the last sixty-eight or seventy-eight years. In olden time we used to read of “Cherry Garden on Society Hill”, the “Friends’ Meeting on Society Hill”, the “Theatre (in 1759) on Society Hill”, “George Wells’ place on Society Hill, near the Swedes’ church”, &c. The name, we take for granted, was derived from the “Free Society of Traders”, who originally owned all the land “from river to river, lying between Spruce and Pine streets”.

A History of The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (1929) tells us a little more about the Cherry Garden:

“Cherry Garden” down on Society Hill (all the section south of Pine Street) was famous in its day as a place of recreation. It had large grounds, facing on Front Street opposite Shippen Street, occupied half the square and extended down to the river. There was a small one-story house where refreshments were sold. In 1756, it was advertised for sale as the property of Harrison. When it was at its height it was said to have had “an abundance of every shrubbery and greenhouse plant.”

The quote at the end was from Martin I. J. Griffin’s (1907) “Catholics and the American Revolution Vol.1” (p.330):

The Clifton family owned also “The Cherry Garden” on Society Hill described in Watson’s Annals [p. 494].”

However, the Clifton family ownership is from around the time of the American Revolution. Before that, the sale is listed in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 23rd September 1756 and 7th October 1756:

To be sold by the subscribers, living in Gloucester county, New Jersey, the following lots of land, situate at Cherry – garden, in Society Hill, in the city of Philadelphia, viz, one bank lot, fronting Water – street, thirty feet, and extending back to Front street ; and one water lot, fronting the said bank lot on the lower side of Water street, and extending into the river Delaware two hundred and fifty feet. For title, and terms of sales enquire of Samuel Harrison, and John Hinchman.

So it would seem that Cherry Garden was a substantial plot at the time of the letter, though with but a single-storey house selling refreshments to treasure hunters 😉 . Clearly this house was the place to which the letter refers. But where in Cherry Garden was it?

The House in Cherry Garden

In fact, John Fanning Watson’s account (p.494) tells us reasonably clearly where the house was:

“Cherry Garden,” down on Society Hill, in the parlance of its day, was a place of much fame as a place of recreation. It was a large garden fronting on Front street vis-a-vis to Shippen street, occupying half the square and extending down to the river. The small house of one story brick, in which the refreshments were sold, is now standing with its dead wall on the line of Front street. In 1756, it was advertised for sale as the property of Harrison, who advertised to sell off some of it in lots “on Front and Water streets to the river in Cherry Garden.” Colonel Morris spoke of it as he remembered it in the time of Clifton as its owner — said it had abundance of every shrubbery and green-house plant. See a picture of the house in my MS. Annals in the City Library, p. 282.

Furthermore, Watson adds elsewhere that:

There was once “the hill” near the “Cherry Garden,” inclining from the southeast corner of South and Front streets towards the river. The houses still standing along Front street in that neighbourhood have their yards one story higher than Front street.

Note that the original (and rather ‘raw’-feeling) 1830 edition of Watson’s book has very different illustrations, and many curiosities and oddities that seem to be absent from the later edition. But that doesn’t contain a copy of the drawing of the house in Front Street in Watson’s Annals, “p.282”.

So, it would seem that the trail leading to the drawing of the one-storey brick house in Front Street in Cherry Garden ends in Watson’s MS Annals in the Historical Society at the City Library. My best guess is that this contained the original full-length version of his Annals prepared for the Philadelphia Historical Society, that was subsequently printed in 1830 (though with fewer illustrations and some less important sections removed, etc). However, I don’t seem to be able to find that anywhere online. So this is where I’m blocked for the moment. 🙁

Therefore… could I please put out a request for some researcher better versed than me in Philadelphia research minutiae to please help out here? Are John Fanning Watson’s “MS Annals” (the ones in the Historical Society in the City Library, and to which he repeatedly refers to in his 1830 book) scanned and/or online anywhere? Thanks!