Category Archives: travel

by Joel | 16 May 2026 · 7:13 pm

Riding the Kuroshio to Wrangel

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 81-82:

Most assuredly, it was time for an entirely new route. Petermann had read Silas Bent’s treatises on the Kuro Siwo and was familiar with his ideas about a “thermometric gateway.” Petermann agreed with Bent. The place to strike for the pole was the Bering Strait, just as De Long had been thinking. Not only had the route never been tried before, but the Kuro Siwo was likely to be a warm-water current powerful enough to soften up a pathway through the ice that would lead to the Open Polar Sea.

But there was another compelling reason for going by way of the Bering Strait, Petermann suggested. Lying off the coast of northeastern Siberia, not far from the Bering Strait, was a mysterious landmass marked on some maps as Wrangel Land. For centuries, it had existed as little more than a rumor, a mirage, a fog-gauzed dream. People weren’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was an island, perhaps a continent, perhaps a magical portal to the pole. Perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Before it came to be called Wrangel Land, it had gone by a succession of other names scrawled on whaling charts: Tikegan Land, Plover Island, Kellett Land.

In 1822, Chukchi natives on the northeast Siberian coast told the Russian-financed explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel about a land to the north that could sometimes be seen when atmospheric conditions were just right. The Chukchis had never been there, but once every few years, on sharp, clear days when the mists and fogs opened up, and when the vagaries of Arctic refraction were favorable, a mountainous land seemed to rise up from the sea like a dream. The Chukchis called it the Invisible Island, and they spoke of legends of a forgotten people who lived there. They had seen herds of wild reindeer clomping north from the Siberian mainland across the ice, presumably to graze on the strange land during their seasonal migration. Flocks of geese and seabirds, too, had been seen aiming in that direction. The animals seemed to know something the humans did not.

Enticed by what he heard, Baron von Wrangel sailed for the mythic land, but he was thwarted by ice and failed to snatch even a glimpse of it. Nearly thirty years later, the captain of an English vessel searching for Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition thought he spotted a large Arctic island in the distance. Later, various whaling captains insisted they’d seen it, though their claims were disputed. A German whaler, Eduard Dallmann, was even said to have briefly landed on it in 1866.

Something was there—Petermann was convinced of it. And this land, he believed (on the basis of anecdotes from Arctic whalers and ancient reports from Russian explorers), was surrounded by open water. “It is a well-known fact,” he had written, “that there exists to the north of the Siberian coast, and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons.”

Now Petermann drove home his point: Bennett and De Long should utilize that open sea and make Wrangel Land the target of their expedition. What a contribution to science it would be to finally learn what this land was about! On their way to the pole, he said, Bennett’s party should try to land on Wrangel, explore it, and claim it for the United States.

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Filed under Germany, nationalism, Russia, science, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 14 May 2026 · 6:05 am

U.S. Navy Arctic Hero to Be, 1870s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 33-34:

America’s newest Arctic hero was a young man of myriad talents and deep contradictions. Emma De Long thought there was within her husband an “incessant friction”—a contrast between impetuosity and patient striving, between a love for adventure and a compulsion to accomplish something ambitious and sustained. De Long could be a romantic, sometimes an extravagant one. He had what Emma called “a hungry heart.” But he willingly confined himself for most of his life to a straitjacket of absolute discipline. He knew what he wanted with nearly perfect clarity, and he pursued it with unswerving conviction—resistance only intensified his resolve.

De Long was a lover of opera, symphonies, and fine novels, an exacting correspondent who wrote beautiful letters in a delicate, florid hand. He doted on his baby girl, Sylvie, and hated the assignments that took him away from the daily joys of their family life. Letting Emma supervise the details of the household and most of their finances, De Long was casual about his domestic affairs. When in command of a ship, however, he could be a harsh disciplinarian with a granite disposition. One historian called his commanding style “monolithic.” Though a complete creature of the Navy, he hated nothing in the world more than naval hierarchies, naval politics, and naval rules, all of which he found an aggravation and a bore.

De Long blamed the Navy for some of his worst traits. He once wrote, “Ship life is a hard thing on the temper. Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad says that going to sea develops ‘all of man’s bad qualities and brings out new ones that he did not suppose himself mean enough for.’ I wonder if that accounts for all the rough edges of my character.” He admitted that he could be “hard on men,” but such was the nature of a naval officer’s life. “I can only say I never allow any argument,” De Long once wrote. “It is my office to command and theirs to obey.”

The United States in the 1870s was, De Long knew, far from being a world-class naval power. Although the U.S. Navy was slowly making advancements, many European nations viewed the tiny, antiquated American fleet as a joke. According to naval historian Peter Karsten, it was “a third-rate assemblage” of “old tubs” in “various states of disrepair … the laughingstock of the world.” Far from an adventurous existence, life in the American Navy was marked by cramped quarters, low pay, draconian discipline, and jealous competition for rank in a promotion process that could be stultifying and slow.

Most of the assignments consisted of “showing the flag” in foreign ports and performing mind-numbingly dreary tasks aboard ship. It was a life of “crushing hopelessness,” said a junior officer at the time. “The most aspiring years of our lives” were consumed by “the dullest, the most uninteresting, the most useless duties.” Like many young officers, De Long often felt that he was wasting away his brightest days. “A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”

George De Long was nothing if not a man on the make, driven by big ideas. It was no wonder, then, that the Arctic, for all its hardships and dangers, exerted such a powerful pull on him. Here was a way for him to circumvent some of the drudgeries of naval duty, to achieve fame if not fortune, and possibly to hasten his ascension in rank while also doing something consequential for science and the nation. It offered a path to glory that an ordinary Navy career—at least during peacetime—seemed incapable of offering. A risky Arctic expedition carried some of the dash and distinction of a wartime assignment without the necessity of being in a war. Most important, it provided a faster track to commanding a ship, something to which De Long, even in his youth, had always aspired.

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Filed under military, nationalism, science, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 12 May 2026 · 12:42 am

Era of Polar Obsession

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 20-21:

The “polar problem,” as it was sometimes called in the press, had taken on a quality of nagging, gnawing obsession. People had to know what was Up There—not only scientists and explorers but the general public. The North Pole was, said the London Athenaeum, the “unattainable object of our dreams.” An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like. “As a family will, of course, know all the rooms of its own house,” Behm wrote, “so man, from the very beginning, has been inspired with a desire to become acquainted with all the lands, oceans, and zones of the planet assigned to him for a dwelling-place.”

A New York Times editorial at the time echoed Behm’s sentiment: “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored, will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”

By the 1870s, no greater mystery existed on the face of the earth. (Antarctica was, of course, equally mysterious, but the South Pole was considered a less obtainable goal for the leading exploring nations, all of which happened to be located in the Northern Hemisphere.) It was hard to comprehend how profoundly the world needed to scratch the Arctic itch. Speculation about what lay at the North Pole permeated popular culture and world literature, from the books of Jules Verne to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (whose scientist-protagonist pursues his monster across the floes all the way to the North Pole). Many practical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the polar grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes discovered, colonies founded, new species described. There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.

“Within the charmed circle of the Arctic,” argued the Atlantic Monthly, “lay the goal of geographical ambition … the final solution of the polar problem. And it may be said that long years of fruitless effort and frightful suffering seem only to have whetted the appetite for discovery; and the more we know of our planet the more ardent becomes the desire of geographers to view the mysterious extremity.” An 1871 article in the journal Nature characterized the search for the pole as the paramount scientific and geographical riddle of the age: “The immense tract of hitherto unvisited land or sea which surrounds the northern end of the axis of our earth, is the largest, as it is the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”

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Filed under Britain, Canada, Germany, literature, nationalism, publishing, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 10 May 2026 · 12:04 am

Bloodhounds on His Trail, 1977

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 395-397:

BY SUNDAY MORNING, officials were fairly boiling with frustration. Although three of the prisoners had been caught, Ray remained at large. The full might of the state and the nation could not bring the prime fugitive to bay—not the planes and helicopters with their heat-sensing machines, not the National Guardsmen with their night-vision goggles, not the FBI with its topo maps and roving surveillance cameras. So the search would have to come down to the man hunter’s oldest technology, the surest technology of all. It would have to come down to the dogs.

Sammy Joe Chapman was the captain of the bloodhound team at Brushy Mountain. He was a big, pale guy with a miner’s lamp blazing from his forehead and an impressive Civil War mustache that crimped and tweezed when he smiled. People around the prison called him a “sniffer” and a “dog boy.” He’d spent his life tracking coons and hunting for ginseng root in the Cumberland woods, learning what he called “the tricks of the mountains.” He knew all the landmarks around the New River valley—Flag Pole, Chimney Top, Twin Forks, Frozen Head. He knew where the burned-out cabins were, and the abandoned mine shafts, and the naked faces of the mountains where the strip miners had done their crude scrapings.

Chapman had grown impatient with the feds and all their instruments and all their worrying. He knew that his bloodhounds would find Ray in due course. All they needed was a good drenching rainstorm. That was the funny thing about bloodhounds: their extraordinary snouts didn’t work well in dry weather. When the forest was in want of moisture, all the wild odors mingled into olfactory confusion, and the dogs couldn’t pick out a man’s clear scent.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, the weather turned. For hours and hours it rained strong and steady, flushing out the forest, driving the stale airborne smells to the ground. Chapman looked at the gray skies and smiled.

Around nightfall he put a harness to his two best hounds, a pair of fourteen-month-old bitches named Sandy and Little Red. He’d personally trained them, teaching them to hunt in perfect silence—none of the usual yelping and singing normally associated with hounds. Late that night, along the New River about eight miles north of the prison, the dogs picked up something strong. The wet ground quickened their senses, just as Chapman knew it would. Tugged by Sandy and Little Red, Chapman followed the river toward the Cumberland strip mine. After a few miles, they crossed over to the other side, then started up the steep flanks of Usher Top Mountain. An hour into the chase, the hounds remained keen.

Now Chapman radioed back to the prison: “We’ve got a hot trail!” He crossed a set of railroad tracks and a logging road and a clearing strewn with coal. In his headlamp, Chapman could see a rusty conveyor belt and other industrial machinery of the West Coal Company. It was nearly midnight, but the dogs kept leading him uphill, toward Usher Top. For two hours, he strained and struggled up the face of the ridge, his dogs never letting up. At one point he halted them and heard thrashing in the blackberry bushes, not more than fifty yards up the mountain.

In another ten minutes, Chapman and the dogs had nearly reached the mountain’s summit. Halting his dogs again, he heard silence—nothing but the crickets and a slight breeze whispering through the oaks and the rush of the river down in the moonlit valley, hundreds of feet below. It was ten minutes past two on Monday morning. Sandy and Little Red yanked Chapman a few feet farther. They snuffled and sniffed in the wet leaves. Their bodies went rigid, but still they didn’t bark or bay—they only wagged their tails.

Chapman shined his lamp at a bulge in the forest floor. From his shoulder holster, he produced a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot!”

Then, like a ghoul, a pale white man rose lurchingly from the leaves. He was wet and haggard and smeared in mud. His scratched arms were crusted with poison ivy. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt and dungarees and black track shoes. James Earl Ray’s fifty-four hours of freedom had come to an end.

Chapman slapped some cuffs over the fugitive’s wrists and frisked him. Ray had a map of East Tennessee and $290—a stash he’d apparently saved up from his $35-per-month job in the prison laundry. Aside from the map, he had nothing on his person that appeared to have come from outside the prison, nothing that indicated he’d had any help.

“Ray, how do you feel?”

“Good,” he mumbled, averting his eyes in the lamp glare.

“Had anything to eat?”

“Naw,” Ray said. “Only a little wheat germ, is all.”

Chapman got on the radio to share the good news—and in the process learned that other bloodhounds had found another fugitive down on the New River several hours earlier (the sixth and final runaway wouldn’t be caught until Tuesday). Chapman congratulated Sandy and Little Red, tugging at their slobbery dewlaps. But he had to hand it to Ray, too. “For a 49-year-old man who didn’t know the mountains,” he said later, “Ray really didn’t do bad.”

Inmate #65477 headed down the mountain, back to a prison term that would last, unbroken by any more escapes, until his death in 1998 from hepatitis C (probably contracted through use of dirty needles or by a tainted blood transfusion he would receive after several black inmates repeatedly stabbed him). Now, tromping in manacles through the soggy Cumberland woods, Ray didn’t say a word. He only thought about his mistakes and what he’d do differently next time, if he ever got another chance.

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by Joel | 3 May 2026 · 6:34 am

Finding the Assassin’s Car, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 294-296:

AT EXACTLY THE same hour that Galt’s passport photos were ripening in a darkroom vat [in Canada], FBI agents in Atlanta were about to enjoy the week’s greatest breakthrough. At four minutes past four o’clock that afternoon, a convoy of bureau sedans converged on the Capitol Homes project. In a ruckus of slamming doors and squawking radios, a dozen FBI agents crawled from the cars and swarmed around the abandoned vehicle.

It was no mistake—this was without a doubt Eric S. Galt’s car: a white two-door V-8 1966 Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires and a red interior, VIN 6TO7C190647, bearing Alabama license plate number 1-38993.

While some agents inspected the vehicle, taking measurements, notes, and photographs, others soon fanned out and began interviewing Capitol Homes tenants. Did you see the individual who parked this car? Can you give a physical description? Had you ever seen the man before? Kids teetered on bicycles, spellbound by all the commotion, but it was more excitement than most of the tenants had bargained for. “There must have been a billion of ’em out here,” one lady said. Complained another: “I had to go to bed. It made me sick, so many of them asking me the same thing over and over and over.”

Soon a tow truck appeared in the parking lot. Guarded by a police escort, the wrecker hauled the Mustang off to a federal building at the corner of Peachtree and Baker streets. There, deep inside a large locked garage, a detail of agents in latex gloves worked the car over, systematically emptying all its contents and dusting its surfaces for fingerprints.

Every inch of the impounded car was examined. Agents took soil samples from the tire wells, fluid samples from the engine, sweepings from the carpets, seats, and trunk. Fibers, hairs, and several high-quality latent palm prints were teased from the Mustang’s recesses and contours. From the glove compartment, inspectors found a pair of sunglasses and a case. From the trunk, they retrieved, among other objects, a pair of men’s shorts, a pillow, a fitted sheet, various tools, a container for a Polaroid camera, and a small contraption that appeared to be an air-release cable for a camera shutter. On the right window, a prominent sticker said, “Dirección General de Registro Federal de Automóviles, 1967 Octubre Turista, Aduana de Nuevo Laredo, Tam.”

All these contents and samplings were inventoried, wrapped in plastic, and boxed up to be personally sent by air courier to the crime lab in Washington. But one item found on the Mustang urgently spoke for itself and required not a second of lab analysis. Affixed to the inside of its left door, a small sticker showed that Eric Galt had had the oil changed in his Mustang at 34,289 miles. The sticker said, “Cort Fox Ford, 4531 Hollywood Boulevard.”

WITHIN AN HOUR of the Mustang’s discovery in Atlanta, Special Agent Theodore A’Hearn of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office arrived at the service desk of the Cort Fox Ford dealership in Hollywood, California, and met a man named Budd Cook Jr. One of the garage’s service specialists, Cook dug into his records and soon found the work order, which he himself had taken down only a month and a half earlier. The paperwork was made out to Eric S. Galt and dated February 22, 1968.

He brought the car in at 8:00 that morning, Cook noted. It was a 1966 Mustang.

Do you remember what Galt looked like? A’Hearn asked.

Cook searched his memory and came up short. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers had passed through this garage over the previous months. Regrettably, he could not furnish a description of any sort.

“But,” Cook said, “Galt’s address is right here on the work order.”

THE NEXT MORNING, April 12, Agent Thomas Mansfield made his way to the large and slightly down-at-the-heels St. Francis Hotel at 5533 Hollywood Boulevard. He asked to speak with the proprietor, and presently a man named Allan Thompson appeared at the front desk. As the resident manager, Thompson had lived at the St. Francis for nearly two years and knew the history of the place, all its various denizens and comings and goings.

Yes, Thompson said. He recalled a man named Eric Galt. Thompson found a registration card that showed Galt had lived at the St. Francis for about two months, checking out on March 17. He resided in room 403 and paid eighty-five dollars a month in rent. “He had dark hair, combed back,” Thompson remembered. “Slender to medium build. Quiet, wore conservative business suits. Kept irregular hours. Far as I could tell, he was not employed.” Thompson said another tenant now occupied 403, and that Galt had not left any belongings in the room.

“Did he give any indication where he was going next?” Agent Mansfield asked.

“Well, yes,” Thompson said, producing a change-of-address card that said, “General Delivery, Main Post Office, Atlanta, Georgia.” The card was dated March 17, 1968, and signed “Eric S. Galt.”

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Filed under Canada, migration, nationalism, science, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 9 March 2026 · 6:49 am

Forsaking Poland for Africa

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 119-120:

The expedition to Congo is a crucial element in the formation of Kapuściński’s world outlook, his view of the Cold War conflict and of the dilemmas and dramas of the times from the perspective of the Third World countries attempting to gain their liberty.

In an entry in his Political Diaries dated 23 June 1961, Polityka’s editor-in-chief, Mieczysław Rakowski notes: ‘Rysiek has finished a series entitled ‘‘Congo Close Up’’. We published twelve reports. Rysiek is a fantastic reporter. This is no ordinary journalism. This is political literature produced by a devilishly talented writer. We collected 2,687,138 zloty for the Lumumba Fund.’

A year later, in a popularity contest for Polityka’s writers, Kapuściński comes first. His reports from Ghana and Congo play their role in gaining him fame and public recognition, but this is not the only way he displays his talents. In less than two years of working at Polityka, Kapuściński has created his own language, a new literary style, with a poetic rhythm to his sentences and an original way of depicting things – free of the wooden, propagandistic phraseology of his early years as a journalist at Sztandar Młodych. It is this new language and new tone that make the then cub reporter Małgorzata Szejnert (later co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza and head of its reportage department for fifteen years) think on reading one of his reports: ‘He writes as he wants to.’

‘He flourished at Polityka,’ says Daniel Passent. ‘He wrote articles that showed what was really happening in Poland, warts and all.’

Between the African trips, Kapuściński travels to the Polish provinces, but he is not yet aware that his current visits will be his farewell – as a reporter – to Poland. A curious farewell, because he had just begun to shine as an incisive observer of the Poles during the ‘minor stabilization’ when he went off on a completely different path.

‘He deserted,’ some people would say.

Kapuściński refutes the charges: ‘Africa and the Third World were a continuation of the heroic period of reportage in Poland.’

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Filed under Africa, language, philosophy, Poland, publishing, travel

by Joel | 3 March 2026 · 8:42 am

Pole Useless in China, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage, 2009), Kindle pp. 61-62, 71-72:

With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage.

…

I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too, that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

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Filed under China, education, language, philosophy, Poland, travel

by Joel | 2 March 2026 · 6:51 pm

Polish Culture Shock, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage, 2009), Kindle pp. 12-13:

The confrontation between East and West took place not only in the military realm but in all other spheres of life as well. If the West dressed lightly, then the East, according to the law of opposites, dressed heavily; if the West wore closely fitting clothes, then the East did the reverse—everything had to stick out by a mile. One did not have to carry one’s passport around:—one could see at a distance who was from which side of the Iron Curtain.

We started making rounds of the shops, accompanied by Mario’s wife. For me, these were expeditions of discovery. Three things dazzled me the most. First, that the stores were full of merchandise, were actually brimming with it, the goods weighing down shelves and counters, spilling out in towering, colorful streams onto sidewalks, streets, and squares. Second, that the salesladies did not sit, but stood, looking at the entrance doors. It was strange that they stood in silence, rather than sitting and talking to one another. Women, after all, have so many subjects in common. Troubles with their husbands, problems with the children. What to wear, one’s health, whether something burned on the stove yesterday. And here I had the impression that they did not know each other at all and had no desire to converse. The third shock was that the salesclerks answered the questions posed to them. They responded in complete sentences and then at the end added “Grazie!” Mario’s wife would ask about something and they would listen to her with sympathy and attention, so focused and inclined forward that they looked as if they were about to start in a race. And then one heard that oft-repeated, sacramental grazie!

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Filed under economics, Italy, Poland, travel

by Joel | 1 March 2026 · 8:39 am

Herodotus Awaits Stalin

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage, 2009), Kindle pp. 5-6:

Before those future prophets proclaiming the clash of civilizations, the collision was taking place long ago, twice a week, in the lecture hall where I learned that there once lived a Greek named Herodotus.

I knew nothing as yet of his life, or about the fact that he left us a famous book. We would in any event have been unable to read The Histories, because at that moment its Polish translation was locked away in a closet. In the mid-1940s The Histories had been translated by Professor Seweryn Hammer, who deposited his manuscript in the Czytelnik publishing house. I was unable to ascertain the details because all the documentation disappeared, but it happens that Hammer’s text was sent by the publisher to the typesetter in the fall of 1951. Barring any complications, the book should have appeared in 1952, in time to find its way into our hands while we were still studying ancient history. But that’s not what happened, because the printing was suddenly halted. Who gave the order? Probably the censor, but it’s impossible to know for certain. Suffice it to say that the book finally did not go to press until three years later, at the end of 1954, arriving in the bookstores in 1955.

One can speculate about the delay in the publication of The Histories. It coincides with the period preceding the death of Stalin and the time immediately following it. The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out. The atmosphere was tense. The censors redoubled their vigilance.

But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous—from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?

And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there! The Histories consists of nine books, and each one is allusions heaped upon allusions. Let us say he opens, quite by accident, Book Five. He opens it, reads, and learns that in Corinth, after thirty years of bloodthirsty rule, the tyrant called Cypselus died and was succeeded by his son, Periander, who would in time turn out to be even more bloodthirsty than his father. This Periander, when he was still a dictator-in-training, wanted to learn how to stay in power, and so sent a messenger to the dictator of Miletus, old Thrasybulus, asking him for advice on how best to keep a people in slavish fear and subjugation.

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Filed under education, literature, Poland, travel, USSR

by Joel | 6 February 2026 · 6:53 am

After we settled into our window seats in our 1st class compartment, headed for a weekend in Wrocław on our way to a conference in Szczecin, two men in their 50s settled into their seats at the other end of the 6-seat compartment, by the door to the aisle. They were roofing contractors returning home to Oława after a builders convention in Kielce. (Oława is also the name of a river that flows into the Odra at Wrocław.)

We quickly established that we spoke English but not much Polish, while they spoke Polish but not much English. But they soon proved to know quite a lot of English words, and I had also been exposed to a good bit of Polish vocabulary, even if neither of us could form many coherent sentences in our weaker languages. But we were able to explain why we were living in Kielce for a year, and they explained why they had come to Kielce and were headed home.

They had brought beers on board to enjoy 3 happy hours on their way home. They laughed and raised their beers every time they heard the announcements about the lack of a bar car on that train. We conveyed our regrets that we couldn’t join them. I was still under doctor’s orders. The owner was on my side of the compartment and his top assistant sat opposite him. The owner initiated most of the conversation topics, including that his son was good at math but a slacker at schoolwork and language-learning, and really needed a good English tutor.

Without cell phones, it would have been a quieter ride. But we all resorted to Google translate a good bit, and as the evening wore on, we shared photos of our families and our many travels. The boss was particularly excited when I showed him the photos my father had taken in Gdansk in 1945 (on my Flickr site). He asked for copies and we sent him links to download them. When I showed him a photo of my paternal grandparents holding me as a newborn (in 1949), he got quite wistful, regretting the scarcity of family photographs among Poles of his and earlier generations, apart from rare ceremonial events.

His coworker was an avid fisherman (in lakes, not the Odra or Oława rivers) and showed us photos of a huge pike (szczupak) he had caught and a huge carp (karp) his son had caught. (He couldn’t remember the English word for ‘lake’, but I recognized jezioro.) He never initiated English, but recognized a lot of English words. It turned out that he had worked several years in the U.K. (in London, Manchester, and Bristol). Whenever the boss’s wife would call about plans for their coming-home dinner, the boss would stand up to talk to her, and his coworker and I would smile and exchange military salutes. The coworker had to use the toaleta several times to empty his beers and he explained that his boss had stronger kidneys (nerki). (Cashew nuts are called nerkowiec in Polish.)

Despite our language hurdles, it was a warm and friendly conversation between strangers of a kind that is reputed to be rare in Poland. We all shook hands and hugged and exchanged contact information before they got off at Oława.

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Filed under labor, language, Poland, travel, U.K., U.S.