A Drop of History 120

A forest as old as Muhammad

In 1852, after a series of persistent reports from gold-diggers and hunters, the American Geographical Society sent author and photographer Raymond Mullin to explore the Calaveras Grove, in southern California. Mullin went deep into the uncharted forest and soon confirmed the reports. He pitched camp beneath a grove of trees so huge that a man, compared to them, had the height of a dwarf and the bulk of a mouse. No trees like those had ever been seen anywhere in the world.

Mullin, convinced that his report would be met with derision, decided to fell one of those trees. The loggers he hired worked from morning till night for twenty-two days, before they could fell it. Then they smoothed the surface of the stump and calculated the tree’s age, counting the rings in the wood (it is well known that each year adds a ring to the circumference of the tree’s trunk). Mullin’s conclusion seemed outrageous. The tree was 1250 years old, which meant that it had come out of the soil as a tiny sapling when Mauricius was reigning in Byzantium and Chosroes II in Persia, and Muhammad was just beginning his teaching career in Arabia. Mullin organised an excursion, complete with tourists and musicians, and his primitive camera immortalised sixteen couples dancing together on the stump, which was ten metres in diameter and had been converted into a dance floor.

The felled tree was eighty-six metres tall, like a twenty-floor building; the trunk was as wide as an avenue, and Mullin estimated that its weight rivalled that of a cruiser. However, since nobody seemed to believe such figures, he cut pieces of the tree’s bark and sent them to New York and London. Amazed, the scientists measured the thickness of the bark at 305mm, that is, over 30cm. That was the start of a systematic study of those trees.

Botanist Stephen Endlicher named the tree Sequoia gigantea, after a Native American who had invented an alphabet for his tribe, whose language until then had been exclusively oral. By 1931, there had been more sequoia groves discovered, in Yosemite and the northern Sierra Nevada. They were declared national parks, but not without the rabid opposition of loggers, who saw them as a source of immense wealth. An average sequoia gives as much wood as three acres of pine forest. Each tree would be enough to build twenty-five six-room houses. A large tree has 1500-2000 tons of usable wood. The felling of such wonders of nature has always been an outrage for naturalists. John Muir wrote: “Such a tree would yield great quantities of wood if it went through a sawmill, in much the same way that George Washington would yield a fine stew if he fell into the hands of a French chef.”

The rescue of sequoia trees is one of the most special pages of the western world’s environmental history. The life of those giants is an amazing thing. In their early youth, up to 200 years of age, they look like typical Christmas trees. Then the tree sheds its lowest branches, up to the height of 30 metres, and starts branching out from there. In their first maturity, up to 500-600 years, they grow thick lateral branches. In full maturity, between 800-2000 years, the trunk grows enormously thick and the branches form a vast dome. From 3000 years and up, they look like prehistoric giants, forgotten by time. The oldest tree is in Mariposa Grove, in Yosemite National Park; it is called Grizzly Giant, it is 3500 years old and 68 metres tall.

All those centuries, hundreds of fires have broken out around their roots, but sequoia wood contains a fire retardant substance. There are trees with hollows from ancient fires at their base, big enough for trucks to park in them. But the trees keep living. Their tops, which can reach ninety metres in height, are relentlessly struck by lightning. In 1950, Sierra forest wardens saw a towering sequoia struck by six bolts during a single storm. The top caught fire, which burned for four months, between August and December, until it went out by itself. The American Forestry Association estimates that they have saved only 20% of the trees from greedy logging companies, but those are saved for good.

Imagine the stupid arrogance and vanity of a twenty-five-year-old human who raises his axe mercilessly against a three-thousand-year-old giant, that has lived more centuries than his own years.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 116

Yellow fever
The disease that exterminated five million people

In 1894, renowned French developer Ferdinand de Lesseps, after some rest on the laurels of the Suez Canal construction, started the second great project of his life: the construction of another canal, this time in Panama, that would join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But the Sinai desert had nothing on the jungles of Central America. An epidemic broke out on the huge construction site, killing two-thirds of the workmen and, shortly afterwards, Lesseps himself. That was the infamous yellow fever. The project was abandoned, and was finished much later by the Americans, only after a way to fight the disease had been found.

Yellow fever was first mentioned in 1648, and is up there with the greatest and most lethal infections that humankind has known, like the plague of the Peloponnesian War, the disease that Mark Antony’s legions brought to Rome from Mesopotamia, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, the Great Plague of London. Yellow fever was considered a disease of the New World, because that is where it was first noted, but, as it was proven much later, it had existed long before in Africa.

The particular disease was awful and its symptoms horrible. It started with pain in the stomach, the joints and bones, followed by convulsions and black viscous vomit, and continued with rashes all over the body, fever, coma and death. That development unfolded within five days and its mortality rate was almost 100%. It first appeared in Guadelupe in 1648, before moving to Cuba, New York, South Carolina, Boston. Wherever it arrived, people died in droves. All the traditional defence methods – quarantines, isolations, disinfections – proved useless. For two centuries, yellow fever appeared out of the blue and killed people without anyone knowing how it was transmitted. In the tropics it was endemic. In temperate places it appeared in spring and summer. Neither the cremation of the dead nor the disinfection of houses and ships could stop it.

In 1741, yellow fever exterminated three-quarters of the English troops at the siege of Cartagena. In 1799, it killed 31,000 people around the Caribbean. In 1878, another 25,000 victims followed suit. The disease was terrifyingly contagious. In 1781, a frigate sailed from the Honduras towards Port Royal, in Jamaica; it never arrived, and, when found drifting aimlessly, some time later, it was revealed that the entire crew had died of yellow fever.

Years went by, the fever claimed more and more victims, but medicine could not find a cure. The English and French sugarcane plantation owners, to save themselves, abandoned Jamaica and Martinique and returned to their cooler countries, leaving their properties and slaves in the hands of their halfbreed overseers. Medicine, wrapped in a cocoon of conservatism, refused for decades to adopt new ideas in order to find the cause of the disease. Yellow fever had been classified as a contagious miasma, an incurable disease of the New World, and was persistently ignored, despite its lethality. Two of its worst outbreaks occurred in New Orleans in 1853 and in the American Southwest in 1878, with 25,000 victims.

On 14 August 1881, a pioneer doctor named Carlos Finlay overcame traditional beliefs and, in a speech before the Royal Academy of Havana, expressed for the first time the view that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes Aegypti. The Academy doctors laughed and rejected Finley’s theories, branding them ridiculous. Twenty more years passed, and the disease kept killing. An eminent bacteriologist, Giuseppe Sanarelli, based on the old views, claimed that the fever was caused by a bacillus that he called “icteroid”. His theory was immediately accepted and acclaimed, while the unknown doctor’s view had been ridiculed.

Three decades later, the Americans who occupied Cuba, seeing that the disease would not abate, remembered Carlos Finlay, who was old by that time. Finlay helped, despite his bitterness, and the appointed committee concluded that the fever was spread by the mosquitoes. So, in order to fight it, they had to disinfect the standing waters in the marshes and cisterns and destroy the mosquitoes’ eggs. The American military accomplished that by putting fish in the cisterns, that ate the floating eggs. Yellow fever receded from Cuba.

In the rest of America, however, civilian doctors refused to accept the conclusions of their military colleagues; the usual medical rivalries. So, while the problem was solved in Cuba, there was a new outbreak in the mainland, which was not treated, as yellow fever was still considered an incurable disease. Only when the epidemic crossed over to Cuba again and was repelled once more did they deign to check the new method and adopt it. After 1910, yellow fever was practically eradicated, after exterminating an estimated five million people in two centuries.

I am left with the impression that, in the end, history allows medicine to cure a grave disease only when the conditions are ripe for the surfacing of another, much more lethal, one which will also be considered incurable for a long time.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 109

The Cardiff Giant
A hoax that fooled America wholesale

An itinerant preacher’s sermon in a small rural town of the USA in 1868 was the starting cause of one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. The sermon mentioned a quote from the Old Testament which refers to giants who used to live on our earth long ago, and it was overheard by a tobacconist who happened to be passing through. George Hull, a man of wealth and wit, a fan of practical jokes and rather sceptical about religion, was surprised to see the gullible audience believe unquestioningly in the tale of giants, whose height the preacher set arbitrarily at three metres and thirty centimetres. Then he had an idea.

He took a cart to a quarry, bought a lump of gypsum, took it to a warehouse, brought in a trainee sculptor and a stonecutter and ordered them to carve a naked giant for him. The giant was ready in four months’ time. He was 3.16m tall, weighed 1350kg, and was black, as he had been worked on with sulphuric acid. Hull packed him in a crate and took him, first by train and then by coach, to the farm of a cousin of his, William Newell, near the hamlet of Cardiff, in Onondaga County. He was buried there, six feet deep, and clover was planted on top. Six months later, Newell hired two men to dig a well on the particular spot. The gypsum giant was promptly discovered beneath the clover.

The news spread like wildfire. People started to flock to the farm in order to see the “Cardiff Giant”, as he was named. Newell set up a sign that read: “See the petrified giant for just half a dollar.” Soon four ministers arrived, were admitted on discount, and assured the crowd that the giant was really the remains of one of the Old Testament giants. After the church’s verdict, the press all over the States turned its attention to the finding, and the petrified giant became famous. There were special stagecoach routes and train itineraries to include Cardiff. Newell received great sums from the entrance fees. He kept 10% and sent the remaining 90% to his cousin, Hull. He, in turn, paid the sculptor and the stonecutter a further 20% in exchange for their silence.

Soon the giant was moved to an exhibition hall in Syracuse, where people kept flocking from all over the country, willing to pay to see him. George Hull, from Chicago, mocked the finding. His friends, however, convinced him to go to Cardiff, and once there, he gave his cousin a couple of tips: Firstly, never say he is a genuine petrified man but repeat what others say; secondly, double the entry fee.

When scientists came to examine the giant, Hull believed the joke was over. But the people’s conviction that the giant hailed from biblical times was so great that even eminent Yale professors, including paleontologist Othniel Marsh, declared that it was a genuine fossilised giant. There were heated debates, university professors came close to fisticuffs, but in the meantime Newell kept receiving money.

Showman P.T. Barnum offered Newell $10,000 to buy the giant. When Newell, after consulting with Hull, refused, Barnum had a replica made and put it on display. Hull, on the other hand, sold his giant to a syndicate that took him from Syracuse and exhibited him on Broadway. The syndicate and Barnum went through a lawsuit about the original, but the only result was that even more people streamed to see it.

All this time, only a humble doctor, Andrew White, insisted that the giant was simply a modern gypsum statue and that the people were being suckered, but nobody paid him any heed. Until the moment when Hull unexpectedly called the press and revealed the whole story, decorated with acerbic comments on the gullibility of people and the idiocy of scientists and clergymen. He ended remarking that, with that hoax, he had effectively doubled his fortune. The revelation received very wide publicity, there were lawsuit threats for fraud, but Hull pointed out that he had broken no laws.

Still, people continued to go see the giant, some because they believed that the scientists and Hull had woven a conspiracy against Scripture, and others because they considered the giant an heirloom of American history. Even today, the giant is on display in the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, and people pay a dollar to see him. Immortal America!

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved