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 119

The barometer of history

Every time we experience an unbearable heatwave or a furious downpour, we turn towards the department of meteorology and demand more precise and detailed forecasts concerning the type, time and place of manifestation of any weather phenomenon. Particularly extreme weather phenomena infuriate us, because we simply think that, if they could be predicted, the victims could be saved and a lot of the damages averted. Do you know how many kings and generals have had the exact same thoughts throughout the centuries? The weather has repeatedly determined the outcome of battles or campaigns.

In 1274 the Koreans and Chinese gathered their fleets with a view of disembarking in Japan. A sudden typhoon sank the fleet and put a definitive end to the campaign. The Japanese named that typhoon “divine wind” – kamikaze in their language. That was also the name given to their notorious suicide pilots during World War II.

In 1346, the English and French faced off at Crécy. The French held out their crossbows, which fired huge, devastating bolts against the mass of attackers. The English had their longbows covered. A sudden rain loosened the strings of the crossbows, rendering them useless; the English won the day. Eighty years later, at Agincourt, the same opponents met again, under torrential rain, and history repeated itself. The ironclad French knights sank in the mud and were cut down by the English men-at-arms.

In 1588, a storm in the Channel finished off King Philip II’s great Spanish Armada, which meant to invade Britain. “I can fight against men, but not against Nature,” was the king’s exclamation. The naval omnipotence of Spain was past after that disaster.

Russia managed to defeat two invaders with the help of a “general” called winter. In 1805, Napoleon invaded with 400,000 troops and returned with 15,000; the rest left their bones on the frozen steppes. Hitler fared similarly when he dismissed his meteorologists, who warned him of the harshest winter of the century. When 250,000 troops surrendered in Stalingrad, the temperature was -30°C.

The most amazing story connecting a major battle with meteorology is, without any doubt, the Normandy Landings. The Allied forces were ready, but unable to move because of the bad weather and rough sea. The German meteorologists assured Field Marshal Rommel that the weather would allow no military operation for twelve days at least, and he left for Berlin without much care. But their British and American colleagues hesitantly informed General Eisenhower that they could forecast a small lull of about five hours, around dawn on 6 July 1944. Eisenhower trusted them and dared to disembark during that small break in the weather. An absolute surprise, but also a huge risk. Imagine what would have happened if the forecast had not been correct and 6,697 craft carrying eighty-six divisions had found themselves at the mercy of a storm in the Atlantic. The outcome of the war would have been very different.

In 1980, American president Jimmy Carter sent commandos to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in order to free the hostages held by Islamic extremists in the US embassy in Tehran. The American meteorologists predicted good weather in the desert, so the special filters that protected the engines from the sand were removed from the helicopters, to make them lighter – the filters weighed sixty-eight kilos each. And then, during the operation, an unexpected local sandstorm broke out. Sand went into the engines and the helicopters went down. The deplorable outcome of the operation stabilised Khomeini’s power, irrevocably tarnished the Americans’ prestige, and led Carter to defeat in the next elections. All that because of a sudden localised storm in a corner of the Persian desert.

Historians also attribute several revolts and revolutions to the weather. In 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, the country had just experienced a brutal winter. The crops had been destroyed, the Seine had frozen over, and the prices of all goods had skyrocketed. Firewood was 90% more expensive, grain and bread 150%, rye 170%. Enraged, the famished mob attacked earlier than they would have otherwise, demolishing the Bastille and the French royalty.

Who said that the humble meteorologists we listen to every day do not play the role of small gods in critical moments of history?

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

A Drop of History 32

Guano
Pacific droppings

Around 1840, Europe discovered the beneficial effects of nitrogen on its cultivation-exhausted soil. Until then, the only way to restore the depleted fields was allowing them to go fallow for a while, but the method’s efficiency was both limited and dubious. The manure produced by European livestock breeding was not nearly enough to invigorate the farmlands, especially at a time when Malthus’ theories about the earth’s upcoming overpopulation were spreading terror among people. Europe needed a natural fertiliser, which had to be found somewhere in great quantities, to revive its vast, tired granaries.

It was found on the coasts and islets of the Pacific Ocean. It was the famous guano of Peru. What was guano? Countless flocks of seagulls and pelicans of the Pacific fed on the vast ocean’s legendary shoals of fish and deposited their droppings on the coasts and islets for millennia. Virtual mountains of solidified birds’ droppings covered those areas, where it hardly ever rains. Traders fell to, ravenously.

Within a few short years, guano became the main export of Peru and Chile. The struggle for control over its supply sparked three wars with fifty thousand casualties, killed three hundred thousand workers, who toiled under inhumanly exhausting conditions, and gave rise to twelve new urban settlements and six thousand businesses. Local literature exalted seagulls and cormorants. “They are superior to Shakespeare’s nightingale and to the dove that flew out of Noah’s Ark,” wrote ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. Still, the only thing accomplished by such inane scribblings, along with the bloodshed and wretchedness of the local population, was the exhaustion, within a decade, of what nature had been accumulating for millennia.

Guano ran low, the Peruvian and Chilean economies collapsed, the harvesting regions were abandoned; but European agriculture, over that decade, doubled its yield with that cheap natural fertiliser and bought itself the time needed to invent the chemical fertilisers that replaced it.

To understand the difference between the “civilised” Europeans and “barbarian” natives, it is enough to mention that the Mayans were perfectly aware of guano’s marvellous qualities, but they had put the harvesting regions under royal control. Collecting more than the quantity designated every season by the king himself was an offence punishable by death. Consequently, the empire’s fields were fertilised, while the deposits remained more or less stable.

If such devastation brings to mind various other instances of wanton depletion of poor countries’ natural resources in order to make rich countries even richer, that is completely incidental and beyond the historian’s intent.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2006, All Rights Reserved