Category Archives: food

by | 10 August 2025 · 6:13 am

Voyage of the Perseverence, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

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The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

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In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

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The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, economics, food, industry, migration, travel, U.S.

by | 9 August 2025 · 1:56 pm

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, food, labor, migration, slavery, U.S.

by | 10 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age….

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, disease, economics, food, Germany, migration, Netherlands, Poland

by | 5 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland’s Italian Queen

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 145-146:

Much of this spread of Western ideas, art, and architectural styles took place during the reign of the last two Jagiellonian monarchs. The first of these was Zygmunt I (1506–1548). Although not the youngest of Kazimierz Jagiellończyk’s sons (Fryderyk, the cardinal, was younger than he was), Zygmunt was the youngest sibling to ascend to the throne. It is somewhat paradoxical, thus, that he is referred to as Zygmunt the Old—a sobriquet that reflected the longevity of his rule as well as his life, not to mention the fact that his son and heir was his namesake. Whereas his predecessor (and elder brother Alexander) took as his bride the daughter of a Muscovite grand duke, Zygmunt first turned his sights southward and married a Transylvanian Zapolya. (This, after all, was the brother who had hoped to rule nearby Moldavia.) This did not mean, however, that the king was embroiled in the battle with the Ottomans. Rather, he made peace with these fearsome neighbors, thus putting an end to any sort of Jagiellonian imperial overstretch in the south. After his first wife died, the nearly fifty-year-old Zygmunt was persuaded to look westward for a bride. Bona Sforza of Milan became queen of Poland in 1518.

The Milanese princess facilitated the Poles’ embrace of major culinary as well as cultural contributions, provided by her Italian contacts and retinue—from Renaissance architectural ideas through to the introduction of Italian vegetables. Even today, the bouquet garni that goes into soup—comprised of carrots, parsnips, onions, celery root, leeks, parsley—is referred to in Polish as włoszczyzna (meaning “something Italian,” Włochy being the term for Italy). Yet she did much more than that. Brought up in the heady world of Italian politics, Bona not only bore her husband the requisite children (including a son and heir); she also proved tenacious in her efforts to strengthen both her husband’s position within his kingdom and that of the dynasty. Her perceived interference in the politics of Poland-Lithuania, naturally, was not appreciated by the rank-and-file Polish nobility, who thought her husband allied too closely with the state’s powerful magnates. An increasingly vociferous movement for the “Execution of the Laws” (by which they meant the implementation of previously enacted legislation that would benefit the lesser nobility) shows that rank-and-file nobles feared the rise of absolutism in the country.

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Filed under art, democracy, education, food, Hungary, Italy, language, migration, nationalism, Poland

by | 3 June 2025 · 4:39 pm

North Vietnam in 1955

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 797-800:

For Ho and the DRV, the economic problems at year’s end were overwhelming. Most factories in the north were shuttered, and many of the owners had left the country. In Hanoi, foreign journalists reported that scores of restaurants and shops had gone out of business, while in the port city of Haiphong only one of thirty French-owned factories remained open. Fuel for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were idle. Even more pressing, rice production continued to decline, and floods in December along the central coast raised the specter of major famine. The price of the commodity in the markets skyrocketed. And whereas Tonkin had traditionally been able to rely on the more fertile Cochin China for much of its food, now the Saigon government blocked economic exchange between the two zones. In 1955, only emergency rice imports from Burma, financed by the Soviet Union, prevented a recurrence of the disastrous famine of 1945. Nor did it help the economic recovery that many urban professionals and shopkeepers and Catholics—fearing what Communism would bring—fled to the south.

At first, the government moved cautiously as it grappled with these problems. To reassure well-to-do farmers and the urban bourgeoisie, it initially vowed to respect private property and religious freedom. To Sainteny and members of the ICC, it continued to pledge support for the Geneva Accords and a desire to maintain harmonious relations with neighboring countries. But much as in China, where an initial policy of moderation in 1949–50 was followed by much harsher measures, officials in short order adopted more radical approaches.

The centerpiece was an ambitious land reform program first implemented in liberated areas of the north in late 1953 and now expanded to cover the whole of North Vietnam. The aim was to alleviate food shortages (the 1945 famine was still fresh in the mind) and break the power of the large landowners—to bring about, as the regime put it, equality for the greatest number among the rural masses—and over the long term it achieved considerable results in this regard. But the cost was immense. Instead of offering incentives to the people to spur production, doctrinaire officials categorized people in five groups, from “landlord” to “farm worker,” then sent platoons of cadres to arraign the landlords and other “feudal elements” in what were called “agricultural reform tribunals.” In reality, however, the distinction between social categories was not always clear, and many families of modest means saw their land seized. Small landholders were classified as large ones. Panic set in. Fearful of arbitrary indictment, peasants trumped up charges against their neighbors, while others accused their rivals of imaginary crimes. Anyone suspected of having worked for the French was subject to execution as a “traitor.” Others were condemned merely for showing insufficient zeal and ardor for the Viet Minh.

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Executions became commonplace, though the scale of the killing is still unclear—estimates have run as high as 50,000 victims, but more credible assessments put the figure between 3,000 and 15,000. Thousands more were interned in forced labor camps. Most of the victims were innocent, at least of the stated charges. Ho Chi Minh, it seems, knew about the arbitrary persecution and violence but did little to prevent it. When Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nam, an important landlord and Viet Minh sympathizer, was condemned to death by a people’s tribunal and executed, Ho expressed frustration but did little more. “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower,” he reportedly declared, “and you, you allowed her to be shot!” Later, on February 8, 1955, Ho used the occasion of a conference on the land reform to condemn the use of torture and humiliation: “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric.… It is absolutely forbidden to use physical punishment.”

Some did not get the message, or did and ignored it. The brutal actions continued. In August 1956, Ho Chi Minh issued a public acknowledgment that “errors have been committed,” and he promised that “those who have been wrongly classified as landlords and rich peasants will be correctly reclassified.” Other officials dutifully echoed his admission, disclosing that even loyal Viet Minh veterans had been wrongly tried and executed. Truong Chinh, general secretary of the party and a key proponent of the program, was relieved of his post, as were other senior officials, including the minister of agriculture. The tribunals were ended. These measures helped reduce the tensions but not fully—late in the year in coastal Nghe An province, where Ho was born and raised, farmers in one district openly rioted, requiring the dispatch of government troops to restore order. In Hanoi, meanwhile, intellectuals chafed under what they saw as authoritarian state cultural policies.

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by | 23 January 2025 · 5:26 am

Long-term Effects of Pacific Crossings

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 242-244:

Among other things, the newfound transpacific connection led to a population boom in Asia, driven by the introduction of New World crops, especially sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts. Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, after only the United States; China and India are the top two producers of peanuts; and New Guineans obtain more calories per person from sweet potatoes than anyone else in the world. Corn, for example, was domesticated in the Americas at least nine thousand years ago but spread across the Pacific only in the sixteenth century. In China, this New World crop made inroads along the Yangtze and Han River valleys, where rice had been cultivated for millennia. Rice requires flooded fields of arable land, so cornfields sprang up at higher elevations and in drier conditions, where rice cultivation was marginal or impossible, thus extending China’s agricultural frontier and transforming what had once been forested hills into cornfields. Roughly speaking, corn produced the same number of calories per hectare as rice, but with far less irrigation and labor. This led to a significant population boom. Although the precise timing and magnitude of this demographic expansion varied from one Asian nation to another, all of them benefited from the incorporation of New World crops. A full accounting of this vast energy transfer from the Americas to Asia has yet to be made, but the preliminary information shows that it was enormous.

Regular transpacific contact also created the first global trading system recognizable to us even today. Economic activities in the Americas came to depend not just on colonial-metropolitan relationships across the Atlantic but on supply and demand around the world—especially in Asia. Excellent examples are the great silver mines of Peru and Mexico, which constituted a mainstay of the economy of the Americas in colonial times and structured life for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who directly or indirectly, forcibly or not, became a part of the silver economy. Traditionally, this is told as a story of European empires extracting valuable resources from their American colonies. Left unsaid is that the most important end-market customer by far was not Europe but China, where a major tax reform known as “the single lash of the whip” replaced paper money with silver in the sixteenth century. With this tax reform, China instantly became a worldwide magnet for the white metal, absorbing the silver production of neighboring Japan and then turning to the New World mines, which produced upwards of eighty percent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800. Without China’s massive and persistent demand for silver, the mines on the American continent would never have attained the scale they did, nor would their profits have spilled over into other colonial enterprises and affected so many lives throughout the hemisphere. The sixteenth century gave rise to the first truly global economy, in which Asia’s relative demographic and economic weight was significant and at times paramount. This feature of our world economy has become familiar to us, as China has continued to demand global resources such as soybeans, copper, and steel, affecting markets all around the world.

By the end of the eighteenth century, British and especially American merchants began building on these earlier transpacific linkages to launch their own ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships came to replace the old Spanish galleons. The story of the United States’ expansion through the Pacific is well known, as the nation took control of Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, opened direct trade with Japan and China, and forged a vast network of transpacific interests. As we live in a world increasingly centered on the Pacific, it is imperative that we understand how we got here. The voyages of Urdaneta and of Lope Martín, the Black pilot who now takes his place in world history, were at the dawn of this transformation.

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Filed under Britain, China, economics, food, Mexico, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Spain, U.S.

by | 19 January 2025 · 6:00 am

Spanish Shipboard Life, 1564

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 103-105:

Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”

These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.

Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.

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by | 21 December 2024 · 6:50 am

The Price of Rescue at Sea, 1944

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle p. 132:

Despite the absence of the enemy fleet, land-based planes from Palau and nearby islands remained to menace the US carrier task force. By 8 p.m. on March 29 Japanese torpedo bombers were massing at the edges of the Moo’s radar screens. Two divisions of Hellcats led by Al Morton were flying the last CAP [= Combat Air Patrol] of the day; faced with encroaching darkness and imminent enemy attack, Captain McConnell ordered Morton to bring his planes home. Seven of the eight got aboard, but the last man in the formation, Ens. Anderson Bowers, ran into trouble when the plane in front of him went into the crash barrier. By the time the plane handlers cleared the wreck out, McConnell had put the Moo into its evasive maneuvers to throw off enemy attacks, which put her out of the wind and unable to land planes.

Admiral Reeves ordered Bowers to ditch his plane alongside a destroyer, and Bowers, who had little experience in night operations, took the order literally. He made a perfect water landing near one of Cowpens’ escorts, but did not remember that standard procedure was to land one thousand yards ahead of a rescue ship—and the destroyer steamed off ahead looking for him. Bowers floated in his Mae West life vest for fifty-five minutes in the bath-warm Palauan waters before finally attracting the attention of another ship with gunfire from his pistol. Bowers did not keep his gun for long, however; the destroyermen extracted a ransom for every carrier pilot they recovered. Usually they stripped the pilot of every possible souvenir—flight jackets, silk survival maps, knives, and pistol—and then demanded in trade from his home ship a GI can full of ice cream, perhaps thirty-five to forty gallons in all. While grateful for the rescue, one pilot observed that “you don’t come out with a thing except your life.”

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Filed under food, Japan, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 29 October 2024 · 8:42 pm

Down the Danube: Hungary

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

We flew from NY JFK to Paris CDG, then to Budapest, where Viking lodged us in the luxurious Corinthia Hotel on Erzsebet korut in Pest. We had warned longtime favorite blogger Dumneazu that we were coming. He lives in the old Jewish quarter just a few blocks away so we had a nice long visit with him at a little coffee and pastry shop. He recommended two restaurants on Pozsonyi ut near the Danube for the best authentic Hungarian food. (When we were last in Budapest 40 years ago on a holiday trip from grim Romania, we had eaten at the more famous Gundel and Cafe New York.) So, on our second evening in Pest, we walked to Kiskakukk (Little Cuckoo) and ate their specialty platter for two: crispy goose leg, fried duck leg, foie gras on roast, duck breast fillet, onion mashed potatoes, homemade potato doughnuts, fried apple, steamed cabbage, washed down with a nice Hungarian pinot noir.

We ate and drank very well on this cruise, but we also walked a lot at each stop, often 10,000 steps a day. Our group excursion in Budapest was a walking tour of Buda Castle Hill, which started with a ride to the starting point on the excellent city trams (which operate 24/7/365). Our tour guide was originally from Hong Kong and, like all the Viking excursion guides, was well-versed in local history and culture.

The hotel lounge one night featured a string quartet with cimbalom, which drew us in. When I asked the very energetic waitress there for a dry Tokaji wine, she brought me a nice dry one, and later offered a much richer variety as a nightcap. She was of Romanian Szekler origin, whose family immigrated to Hungary during her school years, so I was able to practice a bit of Romanian with her.

After an overnight cruise, we stopped at a tiny pier at Kalocsa, where we visited the spectacular Assumption Cathedral for an impressive pipe organ concert. The former monastery there had been turned into a Paprika Museum. Then we took busses to a horse farm for an amusing display of Hungarian horsemanship before returning to the ship.

The Viking ships have both European-style and American-style outlets, so we were able to keep our phones, laptops, and camera charged, but the Corinthia Hotel had only round, European-style outlets, so we had to use our small Europlug roundpin adapters. Our larger squarish multitype adapters would not fit in the round recesses of the outlets.

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by | 31 August 2024 · 6:07 am

Capt. Cook’s Tasmanians Unimpressed

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 100-101, 103-104:

This was probably the first time these particular people had encountered Europeans, or, for that matter, members of any other race. The Palawa, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, had been separated from the mainland of Australia for at least ten thousand years—with the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge that occurred at the end of the last ice age. And all Indigenous people of Australia, in turn, had been isolated from the rest of the world for at least fifty thousand years, reaching back to the fogs of the Dreamtime and the primordial days of their earliest myths. Yet, judging by the stolid expressions on the faces of these tribesmen, their first encounter with a people so dramatically different from them appeared to be a nonevent. In his published account, Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, evenhanded and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride:

They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, with the greatest confidence imaginable. None of them had weapons except one who held in his hand a stick about 2 feet long and pointed at one end. They were naked and wore no ornaments except some large punctures or ridges raised on different parts of their bodies, some in straight, and others in curved lines. They were of common stature and rather slender. Their skin was black and also their hair. Most of them had their hair and beards smeared with a red ointment and some of their faces were painted with the same composition. They received every present we made without the least appearance of satisfaction. They seemed to set no value on iron or iron tools. When some bread was given, as soon as they understood that it was to be eaten, they either returned it or threw it away without even tasting it. They also refused some fish, both raw and dressed, which we offered them. But upon giving some birds to them they did not return these and easily made us comprehend that they were fond of such foods.

…

THE NEXT MORNING, Cook took heart: A group of about twenty inhabitants were seen congregating on the beach, clearly hoping to interact again with the white-skinned visitors. The Natives seemed to have recovered from Mai’s ballistics display the day before. “They were convinced that we intended them no mischief,” thought Cook, “and were desirous of renewing the intercourse.”

Cook promptly went out to meet and mingle again with the Palawa, this time much more freely than the previous day. Though he was outnumbered, he seemed to have no fear and took no precautions; he walked unarmed among them and engaged in the cryptic, often awkward, and sometimes comical effort of trying to understand an utterly unfamiliar people—bartering and gesturing, smiling and pointing, occasionally making grunts and other strange sounds. The cerebral Cook was far from being a gregarious or voluble man, but he had a knack for these sorts of rough-and-tumble interactions.

This forthright curiosity was an admirable trait, one he’d shown during his previous voyages. Many navigators during the Age of Exploration were content to exploit whatever resources they could quickly locate and move on. Far too many first encounters between Europeans and isolated tribes transpired without the feeblest attempt at cultural understanding—and, sadly, they too often ended in bloodshed.

But Cook’s inquisitiveness was genuine. He wanted to know who the Palawa were, what they ate, how they thought and talked and dressed, how they worshipped their gods. One senses that of all the different roles his voyages required him to carry out, Cook derived the most pleasure and satisfaction from playing the part of anthropological observer.

It was strange to Cook how little acquainted the Palawa appeared to be with the sea. Unlike Polynesians, they didn’t seem to like to swim, and Cook noted that he did not see a single “canoe or any vessel in which they could go upon the water.” They ate mussels and other mollusks but showed no interest in other kinds of seafood; they ran away in seeming horror several times when Cook’s men presented fish as a gift. When shown a fishhook, they appeared to have no idea what it was. They seemed curious about, but also fearful of, Cook’s small boats moored beside the beach, and though some of the Englishmen tried to coax the Natives out for a short ride in the bay, the Palawa couldn’t be persuaded to come aboard. “With all our dumb oratory we could not prevail [upon] any of them to accompany us,” wrote Samwell, “though it was easily perceived that one of them was very desirous of going and had a long struggle between his fears and his inclinations.”

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