Fortissimo

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the strange world of Forteana, suggesting that it was the sort of thing that would probably appeal to me. She was right in this belief – in fact, I’d come across the work of Mr Charles Fort before. I’d often passed the house in Bloomsbury where he lived in the 1920s while studying at the British Library (it’s on Marchmont Street, marked with a silver plaque, if you’re interested). I’d looked into the work of this fellow, and discovered that, unconsciously, I was already familiar with it.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by weirdness – ghosts, alien abductions, monsters in lakes, the lot. Believed in most of it, too. It was only when I got a bit older, developed the ability to think critically and learnt the difference between “true” and “things you really want to be true” that I developed that healthy level of scepticism that has prevented me from, e.g., giving heinous amounts of money to a homeopath every time I get the sniffles.

Charles H Fort is legendary in the circles that take an interest in strange phenomena – in fact, he more-or-less invented the concept of paranormal studies (or Forteana, as such studies are often called in tribute to the man). It may come as little surprise to sceptics among you to learn that he was not a scientist himself – in fact, he was a writer by profession. As anyone who’s read Dianetics can tell you, few things are more irritating than a writer who acts like he has scientific expertise without any actual academic study.

However, he did read widely. From a young age he took a great deal of interest in science. Like Yr. Humble Chronicler, he would appear to have been a science groupie rather than an actual scientist. He was born in New York in 1874 and, from a fairly young age, showed an independent streak (which I think is a polite way of saying “obstinate little bugger”).

His interest in science, combined with his rebellious tendencies,logically led him to take an interest in anomalies that science couldn’t explain. Anything weird and paranormal seems to have entered this field of interest, from spontaneous human combustion to rains of fish to UFOs. The only thing uniting his collection of oddities was the fact that science did not have a definitive explanation for them.

This, disciples of Fort are keen to emphasise, was the point of his work – that science does not have all the answers, and we shouldn’t mindlessly accept the opinion of the scientific establishment. This, I think, is a very fair point. After all, some of the greatest scientific discoveries in history have come from going against what is generally accepted as truth. It used to be accepted that the sun revolved around the earth and that ants have eight legs, but now we know better. Similarly, what we now consider to be a scientific truth may tomorrow be equally discredited.

Unfortunately, it’s here that Fort’s lack of a scientific background makes itself evident. The trouble is that, for all his impish mischief, Fort’s assembly of strange phenomena doesn’t really say anything to the scientific establishment that the scientific establishment doesn’t already know. No legitimate scientist would claim to have absolutely all the answers. Even theories that are pretty well established are constantly being refined and modified as new evidence comes in – consider the effect that the discovery of DNA had on studies of evolution, for instance.

In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the time, it’s the Forteans themselves who more closely fulfil the stereotype of the stubborn and short-sighted student of science. There is a tendency among believers in paranormal phenomena to say “If not X then Y,”  e.g. “If those lights in the sky are not any of these things, they must be alien spacecraft!” That is to say, they have no evidence specifically for their conclusions and don’t admit to the possibility that there may be yet another explanation that hasn’t been considered. This, to me, is just as narrow-minded as outright denying the existence of flying saucers, sea serpents, the Duck Beast of Wincanton &c, &c.

One wonders how seriously Fort himself intended his theories to be taken. His sources were often very dubious, he seems to have simply taken every record of weirdness at face value with no discrimination between scientific studies and anecdotal evidence. Some of his followers view him as a genius shining a light on the falsehoods of the scientific establishment, others view him as a Swiftian satirist out to troll everyone. Perhaps the final word on the matter should come from the man himself.

My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike to ever mention fraud. Accept everything. Then explain it your own way.

Make of that what you will.

Don’t take my word for it.

Do you know what really annoys me? Apart from chavs, idiots on the night bus, engineering works on the London Underground, people who can’t use a ticket barrier, over-attentive shop assistants and Slough, that is? Urban legends.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. I love urban legends. A good ghost story or conspiracy theory is generally pretty entertaining, even if it is utter hogwash. There’s a specific type of urban legend that really does make me facepalm in frustration and mutter “Christ almighty.” The type in question might broadly be defined as the “scare rumour.”

I came across an example of this on Facebook on Sunday. One of my friends, who shall remain unnamed and also doesn’t read this blog, had this as her status:

WARNING TO PEOPLE OF SOUTH LONDON…tip off by south london police…two major dog fights are being arranged…small dogs and cats are being stolen for blood baiting…please warn all areas

Terrible, right? I mean, it’s hard enough to get meat on a budget without some bastard stealing the dogs and cats. I’m not going back to fox, that’s for sure.

But if you’re remotely analytical, you’ll have spotted a few problems with this apparently well-intentioned warning. Notably, it’s very vague. “Tip-off from South London police.” Which police? Any names? Where in South London? I live in Colliers Wood, I’m often abroad in other parts of London that may be called “South” (and god damn I do not want to hear yet another person whining about where South London begins and ends, there’s an S in my postcode and that’s good enough for me), yet I have never heard about this. Maybe it’s only taking place in some part of South London that I don’t visit very often – but in that case PC Nameless is being unnecessarily vague.

Let’s do a bit more research. Let’s Google “South London dogfights.” Nothing. Well, nothing relevant, unless you count an advert on Gumtree. Given that Gumtree has been known to advertise apartments in Mayfair for £100 a week from non-existent estate agents, I think we can safely discount them as a reliable source.

So, a policeman or the police in general have given out a tip-off. Presumably they want people to know about these dogfights. Yet they have not gone to the press about them. Now, do not tell me the local press wouldn’t be interested in a story about cute widdle pussy-cats and puppy-dogs being kidnapped by nasty men, they’d leap on a story like that. It’d fill people up with righteous fury, sell loads of papers.

Taking that line of questioning further, how do the police know these dogfights are happening? There’s been no news of any recent busts, any caches of dogs and cats, any people running to the police in horror to say what they saw. All we have is that dogs and cats are being kidnapped. How do we know that they’re being kidnapped, as opposed to merely going missing in that way that pets are wont to do? Have a larger number of small animals than usual gone missing?

Now, I responded to said friend’s status by pointing out that it sounded like an urban legend. And Oh My God you should have seen the uproar. Now, yes, I can understand the desire to defend your friend’s honour (whatever that is), but the apparent wish for this rumour to be true verged on the disturbing. One chap kept posting links, none less than two years old, saying that dogs had been kidnapped at some point in time and space, that dogfights happened at some point in time and space, that dogfighters might use small dogs and kittens for bait and that one time a dog had gone missing in South London. Another pointed out that, no, I could be wrong, because sometimes these things happen and they don’t get reported (presumably the police are hiring psychics these days).

Notably lacking was any evidence that linked all these factors together to give us the terror mishmash of the above warning. For the sake of sating this morbid desire, I have posted a picture of a kitten being mauled below.

Assuming my picture researcher has done his job (I pay him in the moonshine I brew under my desk at work), that should satisfy some of the fearmongers.

But in all seriousness, why do people come up with rumours like this? I can understand those public information films that scare the living crap out of you to warn you of a particular danger, and even those commercials that do so in order to sell you something. But how does it benefit a person to come up with a scare story such as this? These rumours won’t net them any glory or credit, for the most part the inventor won’t even see people getting freaked out by them.

Anyway, here is my simple guide to tell whether a story is true or an urban legend:

1. Is there a reliable source?

I don’t want to diss your friends, but unless they work for some sort of journalistic organisation (as it happens, several of mine do), they might not be best-placed for all the facts. So if you hear some remarkable story, check it out for yourself. If there’s some sort of terrible ongoing crimewave, it seems unlikely that it would be known to everyone except the news.

2. Details?

Every crime has a victim (except murder, in which the victim is dead). Are there names for these victims? Or for any party involved? Are there dates and times? Where did it happen? If the warning came from the police, the police where? Vague and missing details make for an unverifiable story, which makes me stroke my beard suspiciously.

3. Has this happened before?

There are such things as copycat crimes, but it makes me twirl my moustache quizzically when I hear a rumour of something dreadful, only to hear that the exact same story has played out somewhere else, a few years ago, and similarly not made the news. In the case of email forwards, the story might even have the exact same wording. It’s my experience that when you point this out to people, they say “Well, yes, it was fake there, but this time it really did happen!“

I’ve met people from three different universities who are adamant that the story about the student killing themselves with a couple of pencils up their nose definitely happened in an exam at their uni. The truth is, of course, that it happened at the uni that I went to.

I’m joking.

Holy craps, Tom, there are no reliable sources, no names and it’s happened fifteen times before!

Then, my friend, you most likely have an urban legend. Glad I could help you with your problem there. Anyway, I’ve got to run, I hear there are dwarf pirates terrorising the canals of Brentford. I heard it from a friend of mine, who got it from an email.

Further Reading

Inevitably, a link to Snopes. If you hear a stupid rumour, it’s probably on here.

Peninsula Envy

I had Tuesday off, and like most people, I decided to take advantage of this time by exploring desolate post-industrial wasteland. I invested in a shipping venture last year from Anatoly “Nickname” Chugarov (I think I mentioned that in the previous entry). Anyway, the whole thing seemed a bit dodgy to me, so I decided to pull out and asked Anatoly to give me my 5% of the venture now. I’ll admit I’m not too hot on this investment lark. Anatoly said he’d meet me on the Greenwich Peninsula with my share, so I thought I’d take advantage of this to kill two birds with one stone.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always been fascinated by industrial urban desolation. This might explain why I find Amy Winehouse strangely attractive. The Greenwich Peninsula has long been known for these qualities, as I discovered myself when I ended up here by accident some years ago (put it this way – the Dome hadn’t yet opened). I was curious to see how it had changed in the intervening time.

As you can see in the photo above, it’s what we psychogeographer-types call “hostile.” Once you step out of North Greenwich Tube Station, you’ve basically got lots of roads, fences and barriers on all sides – not exactly hospitable to pedestrians. Once you finally get down to the river, you can see that this far east, London is still a working port.

On the right you can see Trinity Buoy Wharf, one of the oddities of London. Circled in purple are a couple of lightships, what they’re doing there I have no idea. Circled in green is the Bow Creek Lighthouse, the only inland lighthouse in the United Kingdom. I really wish I could have got a bit closer. Some other time, maybe.

On the left you can see a contrast between old and new Docklands. In the background, the Canary Wharf development is very visible. In the foreground, an old pier used for loading barges. This has been turned into a sort of wildlife preserve , part of a general policy to bring the area back to nature. After a century and a half of pollution, this is a motion I applaud. An interesting scheme in place elsewhere on the peninsula is to resist erosion by binding the mud with naturally-occurring plant life rather than artificial walls.

There was something unutterably surreal about the view on the right, almost post-apocalyptic. Although many industries have occupied the Peninsula, and several still do, the big one was gasworks – more gas was produced here in the mid-twentieth century than anywhere else in the world (insert fart joke if required). When North Sea gas was discovered, the gasworks were rendered obsolete. Though there are a few remnants here and there, most of the ground has been built over or – as here – cleared in anticipation of new development. This is another of those transitional things that I think is quite important to capture.

Now, this is taking psychogeographical hostility to the limit. You see that flooded road between the heaps of sand there? Yeah, that’s the footpath. I’m not joking. It was at this point that I began to get heartily sick of post-industrial wasteland. No, wait, I tell a lie…

… this was when I got heartily sick of post-industrial wasteland. Readers may note the highly unsuitable choice of trousers. Consider also that this was actually quite early on in the scramble through floodwater/over sandbanks. By the end I was considering suicide, or at least buying a decent pair of boots.

On the right is an aggregate… tower… loading… thing. I don’t know what it is, if I’m honest. It has a conveyor belt. By this stage I was starting to go a little bit mad, I think. God only knows why I took a picture here.

In fact, I think I’m going to skip the next few photos. They mostly consist of mud and concrete. I found some rails where a crane once went, that was about it.

However, I did eventually find something more interesting, for a given value of “interesting.”

And here it is. These strange steel structures are on Enderby’s Wharf, once the location of a submarine cable works. Which made cables, you see, for going underwater. It’s quite interesting. I think, anyway.

The wharf is preserved now, but was locked up when I was passing. The actual works buildings are boarded up, which is lame.

Here is a breaker’s yard for boats. Again, not sure exactly what my thinking was in taking a photo here. This is actually one of the nicer photos.

I think I might have photographed this because it was a landmark I remembered from the previous visit. I also recall a chemical plant, which seemed to have closed down since then. I remember passing under some sort of loading-pipe-rig-type thing that was no longer there.

This is another of those “observe the contrast between the old Docklands and the new” photos. On one side of the road, grotty industry. On the other, shiny new flats. It makes you think. Specifically, it makes you think, “Christ, imagine having to look at that grotty industry every morning.”

Ah, now, this is interesting. This is Greenwich Power Station, built to supply electricity to the London Underground and London County Council Tramways from 1910. Despite its antiquated nature, it is still used as a backup supply. Architecturally, I think the main body of the plant is actually quite pleasant. Certainly compared to some of the eyesores I saw earlier (“eyesores I saw”… dear me).

And here we are at historic Maritime Greenwich. Incidentally, if you wondered how I came to be on the Greenwich Peninsula back in 1999, the simple answer was that I wanted to get here, and figured that North Greenwich wouldn’t be too far away. As the crow flies, it’s not. But when it’s cold and bleak and the path is muddy and the route winds around many huge obstacles, well, let’s just say it wasn’t worth avoiding the change of trains. And here endeth the lesson.

Oh, wait, the investment thing. Well, Anatoly was as good as his word, and did indeed give me my 5% share.

Son of a bitch.

Definitely not made in Taiwan

One side-effect of globalisation is that it’s very hard to be exotic these days. There are few places in the world that can’t be reached within a few days’ travel, and Phileas Fogg’s wager to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days would, today, seem laughably slow. Check me out, I used the word “circumnavigate.”

The point I’m making is that now, it’s hard to appreciate just how ignorant people used to be about those who lived overseas. We laugh at Elizabethan engravings that confidently portrayed North America as being populated by headless monsters or one-legged men, but no one knew any different back then. Before the advent of the steamship and the long-distance railway, even travelling to another continent was a rare and exciting thing.

George Psalmanazar... or is it?

So it should come as no surprise that some folk took advantage of the general lack of worldliness for the sake of fame and fortune. Such a man was George Psalmanazar. Psalmanazar (not his original name) was born in France, most likely at some point in the early 1680s, and got into the fraud game in order to save money on travel and to beg coins from strangers. His original plan was to pose as an Irish pilgrim, using a talent for languages, a fake passport and a stolen cloak. This was far more ingenious than the method I used to save travel costs in my student days, which largely consisted of not travelling until the station staff had gone home and the ticket barriers were open. But I digress.

The trouble with posing as an Irishman was that even then, enough people were familiar with Ireland that the lie didn’t stand up to close scrutiny. The solution was to go for broke, and pretended to be Japanese. Unlike modern-day white people who pretend to be Japanese, his disguise was a bit more complicated than watching anime, eating Pocky and going “OMG super kawaii!!!! ^__^ desu desu” every so often. In fact, as hardly anyone knew anything about Japan, he decided to just act weird. Accordingly, he started using a fake language, sleeping upright and eating raw meat.

A triumph of Formosa over function?

By 1702, he had embellished his story further, adding a fake religion and a fake calendar. By this point, he was now claiming to be from the even more obscure nation of Formosa, or Taiwan as we now know it. To back his story up, he invented a whole Formosan culture, made up of a hotch-potch of reports from various exotic climes with some significant embellishment. For instance, although snake was the food of choice, ritual cannibalism was common. Everyone walked around naked and polygamy was practised. The religion – swiped seemingly from the Aztecs – was based around sun and moon worship and entailed an awful lot of human sacrifice.

He took the name George Psalmanazar as a result of having been “converted” to Christianity by a Scottish missionary in 1703, and moved to London. There, he became something of a sensation. He published a book entitled An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan, which became a bestseller and managed to fool even serious scholars.

Nevertheless, his disguise was not entirely foolproof. One point made was that, for an Asian man, Psalmanazar was a little bit too, well, white. Psalmanazar worked this into his narrative – all Formosans were this white, due to the fact that they lived in round houses underground.

A Formosan in his natural habitat

The more exposure Psalmanazar got, of course, the more likely it became that his claim would be challenged by someone actually familiar with Formosa. As it happened, there were a number of missionaries previously active there who pointed out that, in fact, the claims were a load of BS. But here’s the thing – they were Jesuit missionaries. Due to strong anti-Catholic feeling in Britain at the time, people were more inclined to believe Psalmanazar’s version of what Formosa was like than the story told by the Jesuits, and there was no one to corroborate either version. Indeed, Psalmanazar’s backstory included a kidnapping by French Jesuit missionaries, and he had become something of a cause célèbre among the Anglican clergy – one of his biggest fans was the Bishop of London.

There was no single event that caused Psalmanazar’s downfall. The Formosan fad grown old and, like everyone else, I think he grew tired of it. He found it increasingly hard to keep his story straight, and came clean in 1706. By this time, no one really cared – possibly those that did had already worked out that he wasn’t the real deal.

Thereafter, he led a humble life as a writer and editor until his death in 1663. Perhaps ironically for a man whose fame had been built on pretending to be a Formosan convert, he found religion and actually wrote an article on what Formosa was really like – openly damning his own account as he went. He became a respected figure in London, practically a saint. The only black mark against his name over the next half century was that he attempted to write a sequel to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. As we now know, the correct response to that novel was to spit in Richardson’s face.

Even to this day, the full truth about Psalmanazar is unknown – his posthumous confession didn’t include his real identity or anything by which his supposedly true story could be checked. Ultimately, all we really know about Psalmanazar is that he wasn’t Psalmanazar.

Eat Crow

It is very possible that, like me, you were affected today by the Tube strike. If you’re anything like me, you no doubt cursed the names of Bob Crow and RMT, maybe prayed to a God you don’t believe in in order to hasten their demise. I have heard it bandied about that this strike does not actually serve any real purpose – that it is simply Crow “flexing his muscles,” showing that he still has some sort of influence in a world with which he is increasingly out of step. I have heard it said that Crow is a “dinosaur,” a relic of a past age of trade unionism. Let us look upon the visage of Crow.

Here is Crow in his office. To the casual observer, he is every inch the Working Class Hero. See the untucked, short-sleeved shirt, the dusty canvas shoes, the casual, unpressed trousers. Note too the posture – it’s almost as if he doesn’t care that he is being filmed. “Judge me if you will, Society, for I give not a fig for your so-called norms.”

Yet there are one or two items that give us pause for thought – that bureau, for instance, would have cost a pretty penny, as would that armchair. And note once again the posture, this time in the context of its surroundings. Why is Mr Crow simply standing there? Should he not be working?

This prompted an investigation on my part. You may be shocked to learn that his “working man’s solidarity” act is just that – an act.

Robert Arbuthnot Fortescue Crowley was born in 1961 to Sir Goldsworthy Stanniforth Crowley and society beauty Fleur Amethyst Crowley on their extensive Sussex estate, seen right.

Young Robert displayed an aptitude for mechanical engineering from a young age, expressing a particular interest in railway matters. However, even at this stage, a darker undercurrent was noted to his behaviour.

Bob Crow (far left) during happier times.

He attended Eton, like many young men of his social class. Here, he was consistently noted to be academically excellent, invariably coming top of the class in every subject. Yet he was also noted to be willful and disobedient, often seemingly for the sake of it rather than for any particular purpose. In his final year he was expelled when one of his more elaborate pranks went tragically wrong and a first-year was killed. Crowley’s parents went to great lengths and some considerable expense to ensure the scandal was kept out of the papers, but the best guess is that Crowley and friends had performed the time-honoured prank known as “slipping shofty,” i.e. sneaking into the Council’s planning office and altering building plans so a hated cohort gets a housing estate erected on top of them. A common enough jape in those days, but the first year in question, Algernon Hislop, had a father on the Board of Governors.

Despite this, Crowley attended St Sethyn’s College in Oxford, where it was hoped he might mature into a sensible young man. Alas, as per Eton, while his academic abilities were highly praised, he fell into a bad crowd – the Mephisto Society was known to be highly active at that time, and for a rebellious lad such as Crowley, it seemed to be the very thing. Crowley quickly became a central part of the Society, participating and often instigating its licentious symposia. He would commonly be returned to the College by the local constabulary. Whispers around town said that he was active in Satanism during this period, being seen in various churchyards around Oxford performing blasphemous parodies of Christian services (Philip Pullman is believed to have also been a member around this time, incidentally).

It was after publishing the notorious pamphlet On the Necessity of Sin that Crowley found himself once again expelled. His mother, who had always had something of a delicate constitution, passed away a mere fortnight later – his father blamed him for putting such a strain on her nerves. Robert, enraged, stormed out of the family home, never to return.

At this point, the records become hazy – what little we know about Crowley is pieced together from various documents. At some point, possibly while working as a stage hypnotist in Paris during the early 1980s, he adopted the snappier name of “Bob Crow.” Under this name, he was arrested for opium smuggling in Kabul in 1985 and for running a brothel in Kowloon in 1988. We can be reasonably certain that he was in London in 1991, as at this time he was blackballed from the premises of all reputable tailors except Gieves and Hawkes (reasons unknown). He was working as a deckhand aboard the cargo vessel SS Robardia in 1994 and is believed to have been Mayor of Slough in 1996.

The next definite reference comes in 2002, when he became leader of the RMT union. How and why is not known, though former classmate Sir Giles Herrynge-Worsthroppe suggested it was because, as a disgraced son of the gentry, Crow came to loathe those who could not afford to drive to work. This would certainly fit in with today’s strike.

Now, some will tell you that this is all nonsense – it doesn’t match with what Wikipedia says and was probably made up by me. You may believe them if you wish, but I ask you this – why would I lie? What would I have to gain from it?

Would you buy a second-hand country from this man?

I’m always astonished by the things people believe, seemingly purely because they want to. Scientologists, for instance, will never admit that their religion is anything other than perfect, despite the fact that everyone except the Church of Scientology thinks it’s nutty at best and psychotically criminal at worst. Young Earth Creationists will come up with all sorts of bizarre and convoluted rebuttals to the incontrovertible amount of evidence against a 6000-year-old Earth, none of which serve any purpose but to highlight their own ignorance of anything remotely scientific. There are people who fall for those scam emails over and over again, bankrupting themselves with no return, still convinced even years later that a much bigger return is just around the corner if they just make one more payment…

Such a case, in the early 19th century, was that of Gregor MacGregor. The unimaginatively-named MacGregor was born in Scotland enjoyed a distinguished military career fighting in South America in the wars of independence, capturing San Fernandina, off the coast of Florida, in 1817. This remarkable conquest was carried out with only one shot being fired, and that was an accidental discharge. In 1820 he returned to Britain covered in glory, and was well received in society. The Lord Mayor even held a reception in MacGregor’s honour.

And what was more, MacGregor had an unbeatable investment opportunity. You see, he said, he had been declared Cacique of the small Central American country of Poyais. Poyais was a country of great mineral wealth and excellent farmland with an established British settlement and no hostile natives or tropical diseases. The Spanish had been keeping it all to themselves, but thanks to MacGregor, it was open for British business.

The following year, the Cacique opened the Office for the Legation of the Territory of Poyais in the City and spent a great deal of time and money schmoozing with the rich and powerful. On the business side, he began selling land in this new world for a mere four shillings an acre, as well as in the form of loans.

For anyone who had their doubts, Captain Thomas Strangeways published a guide to the territory in 1822, which described a Paradise on Earth. The Spanish, he said, had left the country in perfect working order and, for some reason, everyone there simply loved the British. It would be like the Home Counties, except with everyone incredibly rich and as many native skivvies as you could fit in the coal cellar.

These opportunities were snapped up. Two ships, one from Leith (where the police releaseth us) and one from London, sailed for Poyais with 240 settlers. Now, as you’ve probably already worked out, it transpired that MacGregor had lied. Poyais was pretty much exactly the opposite of what MacGregor had promised. It was, in fact, a disease-ridden untamed jungle hellhole, worse than Slough. There were no British settlers or Man Friday-style natives – the only civilisation they encountered consisted of a couple of nutty American hermits. Thomas Strangeways had never existed. The ships abandoned the settlers, and here their troubles began.

The party included some labourers, who tried to make the best of a bad situation, but the majority were simply not prepared for the wilderness in which they found themselves. Why would they be? They had been promised five-star accommodation in a bustling town. That would probably have been the end of them, were it not for the chance arrival of a diplomatic ship, the Mexican Eagle, from British Honduras. The Chief Magistrate was surprised to meet the citizens of Poyais, explaining to them that there was no such country and they had in fact been severely bilked.

The settlers were rescued, and by the time the Chief Magistrate’s warning had reached London, only sixty survivors remained. The British Navy chased after the rest of the ships that had headed out and the story was exposed in the press. It transpired that King George Fredric of the Mosquito Shore and Nation actually had given MacGregor the territory, but had taken it back as soon as MacGregor started acting like, well, a monarch. Making things worse was that, of the other ships, only fifty survivors returned to Britain.

MacGregor fled to Paris and enlisted the help of a friend, Gustavus Hippisley, who wrote to the London press telling them that they were a bunch of rotters and how dare they besmirch the good name of this man who had conned hundreds of people out of everything they owned as well as killing hundreds of would-be settlers. MacGregor lost no time in starting up the same scheme again, and came very close to once again succeeding. Fortunately, the Parisians were a little less gullible. Most obviously, the fact that the diplomatic service of France, one of the most powerful countries in the world at the time, had never heard of this amazing country. The settlers, too, smelt a rat and the first ship was seized before it could leave France. Unfortunately, the rat himself had fled once more. He was eventually captured, put on trial and – thanks to some pretty top-flight legal representation – acquitted.

In 1826 he returned to London and again convinced people to invest in Poyais, which had apparently become a republic in the meantime. There were even rival Poyaisian investment schemes set up by other conmen. Fortunately, there were those who remembered MacGregor and his magical country, and word spread that this might, just possibly, be a bit of a swindle. When angry investors demanded their interest payments, he managed to pay them off… with Poyaisian stocks. He kept scamming people with various schemes through the 1830s, and though none of them were as successful as the first, people kept investing.

While I’d love to say that MacGregor got what he deserved in the end, he didn’t. He retired to Caracas in Venezuela on a military pension and died in 1845.

How did MacGregor do it? No matter what he did, people kept coming back for more. He never received any kind of justice for his actions, winning people over through a combination of personal charm and outright lies and getting away with everything. There were even survivors of the first colony who maintained that he was blameless for the terrible misfortunes they had suffered. And these weren’t yokels. In many cases these were lawyers, doctors, military men and civil servants.

In part, we might blame the fact that media and communication were not what they are today, so word spread much more slowly. But at the same time, as I said at the start of this entry, similar cons exist even today. It seems that sometimes, when people have made a massive emotional and financial investment in something, they want it to be true so badly that they’re willing to suspend all common sense. And, quite frankly, sometimes people are blinded by greed.

They've clearly just photoshopped part of Italy into Eastern Europe.

I suppose the message is, be careful out there. Failing that, check that a country actually exists before you invest in it. Do you know, the other day someone tried to convince me to invest in somewhere called “Moldova?” They must take me for a fool.

Seen in Fulham

It is good to see that Geri Halliwell is still working.

Last with the news

I cannot believe I missed this story. Now, as regular readers of this web-log will be aware, I’m a fairly decadent sort. I was seated in my armchair at home in a mood of ennui just a short while ago, attended by my butler, Stives.

“Stives,” I said, “it is Saturday night, I am at home alone but for your faithful company, and I have nothing to do.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, it is my experience from working with you that such boredom is generally the precursor of a deep and dark melancholy.”

“Ah, Stives, you have worked for me too long. The usual, then?”

“Indeed, sir. I shall fetch a revolver and discreetly leave the room, while you hold the barrel to your head with your finger on the trigger for up to two hours. Then, in a mood of some embarassment, you will also leave the room, I shall collect the revolver and we will both pretend that nothing has happened.”

“Capital. Wait a second, Stives, what’s this?”

“It is a newspaper, I believe, sir. The Daily Telegraph.”

“A what paper? A news-paper? Does one use it to wipe up news?”

“No, sir. News is printed upon it, and you may read the news.”

“Hmm, isn’t that awfully wasteful?”

“Indeed, sir. The technology was superseded some years ago by the Internet. However, this particular newspaper has an article that may be of some interest.”

“Oh, really? Sum it up for me, do.”

“Well, Ms Jane Goldman, wife of popular entertainer Mr Jonathan Ross, purchased a two-headed skeleton last week from an antique shop in Hackney.”

“Antique shop? Hackney? Two-headed skeleton? Why do I sense the sinister hand of the Last Tuesday Society in all this?”

“Most likely because it was bought from their establishment, sir. Perhaps you would care to read the article?”

“Hmm, sounds like an awful lot of effort. How about if you tell me where I might find that article online?”

“
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7519249/Jonathan-Ross-wife-buys-two-headed-skeleton.html
“

“Thank you, Stives. I shall blog this for certain.”

“You do seem to blog about the Last Tuesday Society quite a lot, sir.”

“Perhaps so. Still, it’s all publicity, is it not?”

“Indeed.”

“I ask nothing in return for this.”

“Most magnanimous, sir.”

“Nothing, that is, except for first crack at the buffet.”

The buffet

“I resign, sir.”

Like Avatar, only without aliens

You know you’re bored when you find yourself on YouTube watching old cartoons. One I came across was this clip from Disney’s Pocahontas:

Pocahontas was quite entertaining as kids’ films go. A bit bland on the story front, but some nice musical numbers and some superb animation. Also, the young-looking red-headed chap in the above clip? Voiced by none other than a pre-fame Christian Bale. All in all, a fine piece from the period after Disney had had its so-called Renaissance (which began with The Little Mermaid) but before they ruined it all by trying to be ironic and self-aware.

The thing is, it’s based on historical events. Of course, that’s Hollywood “based on,” which means “loosely inspired by, and we reserve the right to completely change.” And knowing how history went, the happy “Why, English settlers and Native Americans can now live in peace thanks to John Smith and his hot girlfriend!” ending is a little uncomfortable. It’s true that there was a period of peace in Jamestown following the initial unrest, but that was more because the wealthy investors of the Virginia Company didn’t want to lose their money (which was a heinous amount) and told the settlers to chill the fuck out. Seven settlements had already gone down the pan, and Jamestown was short of food and surrounded by hostile Powhatan. The Powhatan were hostile because the English were in the habit of setting fire to their stuff, and the English were short of food because they relied on trade with the Powhatan for their supplies. Slow handclap, everyone. In fact, the peace was largely brought about by the British capture of Pocahontas in 1613 and a series of blackmail-style demands, followed by Pocahontas’ marriage to tobacco farmer John Rolfe.

Chief Wahunsenacawh of the Powhatan, father of Pocahontas

Unfortunately, this didn’t last. In 1624 the Powhatan, under Chief Opechancanough, massacred a quarter of the population of Jamestown. The English retaliated with a series of attacks against the Powhatan. Opechancanough attempted to sue for peace, and the English invited them to a banquet. Where they poisoned their booze, killing 200. And so it went on, with both sides generally being dicks to each other.

The big exciting climax of the film, in which John Smith is about to be executed and Pocahontas throws herself in front of him, would appear to have been entirely made up by Smith. The only account of this event is from Smith himself, and he only mentioned it nine years after it supposedly happened, when Pocahontas was presented to Queen Anne. It’s also suspiciously similar to a tale he would tell in 1630 in which he had been captured by Turks, but fortunately the daughter of their leader…

Also worth noting is that not even Smith claimed to have had any sort of romantic relationship with Pocahontas (who was ten years old at the time, and whose real name was Matoaka). Nor is there anything to suggest that Smith raped Pocahontas, which seems to be the popular alternative suggestion.

Anyway, here’s Disney’s account of the First Anglo-Powhatan War.

That’s all very well, I hear you cry (metaphorically), but what does all this have to do with London? Other than that clip up at the top there? Calm down, I’m getting to that.

As you may have gathered, the Virginia Company was based in London. One of the things the Disney movie got right was that the Company hoped that the settlement would result in the discovery of insane amounts of gold, as the Spanish had found further South.

Unfortunately, they found nothing. The Jamestown settlement didn’t start to turn a profit until John Rolfe started growing tobacco there. Oddly enough, the strains growing native did not lend themselves to mass cultivation, but plants imported from the Caribbean did a whole lot better, and the shareholders of the Virginia Company hoped to finally be able to achieve their ambition of swimming through money like Scrooge McDuck.

But still, the colony wasn’t doing as well as expected. As a publicity stunt, Rolfe was asked to bring Pocahontas to London in 1616, showing her off as a sort of “tame savage” in order to encourage more people to go over. Pocahontas by this time had been baptised in accordance with her pious hubby’s wishes and taken the name Rebecca. This, by the way, was when Smith’s account of her saving his life first appeared. This was also when Pocahontas discovered that Smith was alive, having been told in 1609 that he was dead. She was not, by all accounts, too pleased to learn the truth. She also didn’t realise when she had been introduced to King James I, as he was utterly wet and a weed.

Brentford

Thereafter, she lived with Rolfe in Norfolk and – of all places – Brentford. Yr. Humble Chronicler heard about this some years ago in one of Robert Rankin’s books, but assumed it to be a throwaway joke (given that the other books by Rankin feature Brentford as the original site of the Garden of Eden and the Great Pyramid being teleported into Brentford FC’s grounds). It was a little weird to discover that, in fact, this one was the real deal.

Pocahontas died the following year in Gravesend of an unknown illness while returning to Virginia . Her last words, supposedly, were “All must die, but ’tis enough that my child liveth.” That child, Thomas Rolfe, had been born before she left Virginia. He would go on to have children of his own, and so on, and so on, until eventually Nancy Reagan was born. I’m not even joking – Nancy Reagan was straight-up a descendent of Pocahontas. Sadly, Disney missed that part out.

Coming soon: Tom ruins The Lion King by revealing that lions can’t talk.

Further Reading

 James I was not a fan of tobacco, and here is his 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco. This presumably caused the executives of the Virginia Company to hiss “Shut up!” at him.

And if you want to hear about some other Disney sources, try this blog for size.

An Unfashionable Opinion

I must apologise in advance if this entry is a little below the usual standard. I’m afraid I was out celebrating my birthday last night, and most enjoyable it was too. Kudos to all in attendance. Those not in attendance will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Anyway, the end result has been a hangover that feels as if someone is trying to pull my brain out of its skull cavity, and no attempts at a cure have so far worked. I’ve tried greasy food, caffeine, sugar, a long walk, going back to sleep and eating painkillers by the handful, and nothing has made more than a dent. The best cure, in my experience, is coconut milk, but I can’t find that for love nor money around here. I tried offering money first, then love, but it turns out my pallid and necrotic countenance is not as sensual as I had first thought.

So I’m going to go over a book I’ve been reading recently. It’s a little difficult to define a “London novel.” There must be thousands of books set at least in part in London. James Bond’s HQ is in London, but you’d hardly call his books “London books.” The Time Machine is set in London’s suburbia (and the ruins thereof), but again, you couldn’t say it’s a London novel.

I suppose my definition would be: could you set it anywhere else? In the case of, say, Oliver Twist, the setting is absolutely integral. You need the slums of Jacob’s Island, the respectable streets of Islington, the crossover-point that is the City, the roads and junctions. Their proximity and interrelationships are essential to the story. Oliver Twist is, therefore, a London novel.

The novel in question is London Fields by Martin Amis. Now, I know this is a very popular London novel, so when I say how much I didn’t like it, I’ll no doubt be accused of fashionably Amis-bashing, which seems to be the standard accusation levelled against those who dislike his work. But, well, I didn’t like it.

The story is told from four points of view. We have Keith Talent, a cheat (Amis’ term for a conman, italicised throughout the book), wannabe professional darts player and generally horrible individual. His reality is defined by the media – television programmes, tabloid newspapers and pornography – and so he can’t quite relate to society other than on those terms. Then you have Guy Clinch, a successful banker in a boring marriage with an out-of-control toddler. Then there’s Samson Young, a crap writer with an inferiority complex. Linking them all is the femme fatale, Nicola Six, who has decided that she wants to die. She manipulates the other three central characters with the aim of bringing about her own murder. Meanwhile, the city is in the grip of unspecified upcoming apocalypse, which is a Metaphor. Or the murder is the Metaphor for the upcoming apocalypse.

Now, I’ll admit that Amis isn’t all bad. There was, for instance, a joke I laughed at. But the characters are so broadly caricatured, and so obviously designed to serve a purpose, that I just couldn’t give a toss about them. And yes, I know the characters aren’t supposed to be likeable, but even an unlikeable character should have enough depth to allow you to identify. The most irritating of all, I think, is Clinch’s toddler, Marmaduke, whose havoc starts out as entertaining, then surprising, then finally tiresome and predictable.

The get-out-of-jail-free card is that Amis is writing about writing. Samson Young is a writer adapting Six’ life into a novel in an effort to prop up his career. He’s in a rivalry with the more successful Mark Asprey, whose supposedly real-life exploits are as real as his fiction, and by the same token we can never be sure which version of events is the one actually taking place.

I’m not a fan of writing about writing. I mean, yes, the unreliable narrator device is an interesting one, but too often writers-who-write-about-writers disappear up their own literary arses. Your book was remaindered? Baaaaaawww!

Then there’s the device of the self-insertion. If I was a publisher, the moment an author inserted themselves into a story I’d reject the manuscript. Amis is more blatant in Money, in which a version of the actual Martin Amis plays a significant role. In London Fields, you may have noticed some similarities between the names Martin Amis and Mark Asprey, the latter of whom signs his name as “MA.” What I hate about self-insertion is that ultimately, it carries the message, “Why, look at old Amis making fun of himself! What a jolly good chap he is!” Self-deprecation is all very well, but ultimately it’s still on your terms.

So, back to my earlier question. Is this a London novel? Well, it’s set in London. It’s not, as the title would suggest, an East London book, the title simply referring to Young’s unattainable desire to revisit childhood memories. The book, in fact, is set largely in and around Ladbroke Grove and Kensington, in a version of London that doesn’t really exist. The London of this book is a purely symbolic presence, having little to do with the real city (Amis’ version of Great Ormond Street Hospital, for instance, differs significantly from the one in our universe). The setting doesn’t reflect London so much as it does human society as a whole. Therefore, I don’t think it can justifiably be called a London novel – the grimy streets and upmarket residential districts are called London seemingly for convenience.

On that bad-tempered note, I’m back off to bed. In conclusion, Amis is annoying.