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 112

Fabergé eggs
The stunning creations of the world’s greatest jeweller

In September 1918, an old man fled from Russia, where the communist revolution had just prevailed, disguised as a diplomatic messenger. Disillusioned, he died two years later in Lausanne. His name was Peter Carl Fabergé, and he is considered the greatest jeweller mankind ever produced.

The communist regime closed his shops and workshops, unable to tolerate the work of the czars’ official jeweller, whose creations were cherished by kings, princes and moguls the world over. He had a large boutique in Moscow and later added more, in Odessa, Kiev and London, where only royalty and business multimillionaires had access. Fabergé’s creations were masterpieces, using all sorts of metals and gems. Several thousand amazing artifacts came out of his workshops, and all of them were unique. None of them was ever made twice.

Beyond conventional jewellery, Fabergé’s imagination and skill were constantly at work, devising all sorts of objects. Miniatures, statues, goblets, ashtrays, umbrella handles, figurines, timepieces, flowers. Among his endless creations, some particularly famous items were the enamel, gold and diamond music box he created for Prince Felix Yussupov’s wedding anniversary; a brooch for ballerina Tamara Karsavina, made of the biggest single amethyst ever found; a basket of pearl flowers with golden stamens for Czarina Alexandra; a silver cauldron standing on four eagle claws for Emperor Menelek II of Ethiopia; a goblet of black glass decorated with pink enamel, gold and diamonds for King Rama VI of Siam. There was also a famous 15-centimetre green jade Buddha with ruby eyes, pink diamond tongue and a sash of white enamel, and finally, a 7.5-centimetre miniature carriage with enamel seats, gold detailing, crystal windows and pearl interior.

Still, Fabergé’s greatest masterpieces were the famous Easter eggs of the czars. In 1881, Fabergé gave Czar Alexander III a gold and white enamel egg. When the czar opened it, he found inside a golden yolk, which also opened to reveal a chick wearing a crown with a ruby egg on it. The czar was so delighted that he commissioned Fabergé to create an egg every Easter, a custom that his descendants continued. Fabergé, over half a century, created a total of fifty-seven stunning eggs, each one of which became famous. Some of the best known were:

- The 1897 egg: Made of green gold, emblazoned with the twin Russian eagles made out of black enamel and pink diamonds. It contained a miniature of the imperial carriage with crisscrossing gold bands and the coachman’s seat made of orange enamel.

- The 1900 egg: Decorated with a map of Russia and a platinum Trans-Siberian railway miniature with a huge ruby on the engine, two golden passenger cars, a silver smokers car and a crystal chapel car.

- The 1906 egg: Made of matte purple enamel, decorated with crisscrossing diamond bands and a golden swan in an aquamarine pond. Around the pond there were aquatic plants in four shades of gold and at the push of a button the swan would stand on its golden feet and hop to sit on a golden tree.

The creation of those eggs stopped in 1917, with the victory of the Bolsheviks, and nobody knows exactly how many have survived. There are only three in the Kremlin Museum, four in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and three more are owned by a London jeweller. Those are on public display, but there are more in private collections. An American cooper, Armand Hammer, went to Russia with a mobile clinic in 1921, ostensibly to help the struggle against typhus. The revolutionary government welcomed him with open arms, believing he was motivated by internationalist solidarity, and facilitated his itinerary through Russia. When Hammer returned to the US, he had in his luggage thirteen such Easter eggs, bought for a piece of bread from ragged, illiterate revolutionaries who had pocketed them when they stormed the imperial palace. Hammer sold them to private collections in the US, in exchange for staggering sums, but at least the eggs were saved.

The rest of the fifty-seven eggs were lost, probably cut to pieces and sold as gold and gems to fund the living of those who had seized them. Fabergé left Russia ruined and died destitute and miserable. Sir Sacheverell Sitwell said of him: “It is unlikely that the world will ever again see a jeweller like Carl Fabergé. The wonders of imagination he created will never be made again.”

In the end, that is the fate of all revolutions. They destroy the symbols and baubles of the old regime, as products of corruption and ignorance, but soon afterwards they replace them with their own symbols and baubles, which usually are sillier and cheaper than the ones they levelled…

© 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