Rabbit Hill posted:

Welp, add this fucker to the list of worst humans in history.

RNG posted:

Oh, nice! Lansing's Endurance was what got me interested in Shackleton, I didn't expect it to be such an epic voyage.

Wikipedia posted:

The voyage of the James Caird was a small-boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi). Undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions, its objective was to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17, stranded on Elephant Island after the loss of its ship Endurance. Polar historians regard the voyage as one of the greatest small-boat journeys ever undertaken.

Shackleton ordered Worsley to set a course due north, instead of directly for South Georgia, to get clear of the menacing ice-fields that were beginning to form. By midnight they had left the immediate ice behind, but the sea swell was rising. At dawn the next day, they were 45 nautical miles (83 km; 52 mi) from Elephant Island, sailing in heavy seas and force 9 winds. A routine was established: two three-man watches, with one man at the helm, another at the sails, and the third on bailing duty. Their clothing, designed for Antarctic sledging rather than open-boat sailing, was far from waterproof; repeated contact with the icy seawater left their skins painfully raw.[28]

Success depended on Worsley's navigation, based on sightings attempted during the very brief appearances of the sun, as the boat pitched and rolled. They were clear of the dangers of floating ice but had reached the dangerous seas of the Drake Passage, where giant waves sweep round the globe, unimpeded by any land. The movement of the ship made preparing hot food on the Primus nearly impossible.

The next observation, on 29 April, showed that they had travelled 238 nautical miles (441 km; 274 mi). Thereafter, navigation became, in Worsley's words, "a merry jest of guesswork", as they encountered the worst of the weather. The James Caird was taking on water in heavy seas and in danger of sinking, kept afloat by continuous bailing. The temperature fell sharply, and a new danger presented itself in the accumulations of frozen spray, which threatened to capsize the boat. In turns, they had to crawl out on to the pitching deck with an axe and chip away the ice from deck and rigging.

On 5 May the worst of the weather returned, and brought them close to disaster in the largest seas so far. Shackleton later wrote: "We felt our boat lifted and flung forward like a cork in breaking surf".The crew bailed frantically to keep afloat. Nevertheless they were still moving towards their goal, and a dead reckoning calculation by Worsley on the next day, 6 May, suggested that they were now 115 nautical miles (213 km; 132 mi) from the western point of South Georgia. The strains of the past two weeks were by now taking their toll on the men. Shackleton observed that Vincent had collapsed and ceased to be an active member of the crew, McCarthy was "weak, but happy", McNish was weakening but still showing "grit and spirit".

On 7 May Worsley advised Shackleton that he could not be sure of their position within ten miles.To avoid the possibility of being swept past the island by the fierce south-westerly winds, Shackleton ordered a slight change of course so that the James Caird would reach land on the uninhabited south-west coast.

As they approached the high cliffs of the coastline, heavy seas made immediate landing impossible. For more than 24 hours they were forced to stand clear, as the wind shifted to the north-west and quickly developed into "one of the worst hurricanes any of us had ever experienced". For much of this time they were in danger of being driven on to the rocky South Georgia shore, or of being wrecked on the equally menacing Annenkov Island, five miles from the coast. On 10 May, when the storm had eased slightly, Shackleton was concerned that the weaker members of his crew would not last another day, and decided that whatever the hazard they must attempt a landing. They headed for Cave Cove near the entrance to King Haakon Bay, and finally, after several attempts, made their landing there. Shackleton was later to describe the boat journey as "one of supreme strife"; historian Carol Alexander comments: "They could hardly have known—or cared—that in the carefully weighted judgement of authorities yet to come, the voyage of the James Caird would be ranked as one of the greatest boat journeys ever accomplished"

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

Thanks! It's a fascinating subject and goons are constantly posting with books on subjects/incidents I had never heard of. We're sure to get more traffic in that thread when analysis of the Franklin wreck gets published. Come join us there!

If you guys don't know about it, Shackleton's boat journey is (possibly) the single most amazing sea journey ever undertaken - something never done before and - although you get people repeating various Scott/Shackleton/Amundsen ice journeys - no-one would ever try that sea journey again because it would 99.9% suicidal.


In other words, going through the world's roughest seas with ice forming on the bow of a whaling boat using pretty much dead reckoning to hit an island 900 miles away knowing that if you missed the small island that there would be no way of turning around and you would die - that is something special. Oh, then he had to climb an unscaled mountain peak and cross a glacier with no climbing gear to reach a whaling station to save his companions. And he was starving, frozen and partly delirious.

I've seen the James Caird and that fucker is tiny. I teared up when I saw it for real.

quote:

The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1.

It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The First World War was less than five months old, and only a fool would have accused the hardened miners of Broken Hill of lacking patriotism, but on that first day of 1915 they wanted nothing more than to enjoy a rare holiday with their families and forget about their troubles—not just the war, which Australia had joined alongside Britain on the day it was declared, but also the grim economic times that were closing mines and putting miners out of work.

More than 1,200 men, women and children clambered aboard the makeshift train that would take them a few miles up the line to Silverton for the annual town picnic. But for Broken Hill that New Year’s Day, war was not 12,000 miles away; it was just over a ridge a mile or two along the track, where a couple of Afghans had raised the Turkish flag over an ice cream cart and were preparing to launch a two-man war.

The townspeople saw the men as their train pulled slowly up the hill; some even waved, thinking that the two Muslims touting rifles must be going rabbiting on their day off. But as the distance between the ice cream cart and the excursioners closed to only 30 yards, the Afghans crouched, took aim—and opened fire.

Bullets peppered the side of the train, which consisted of nothing more than flat wagons crudely converted for passenger use with temporary benches. The wagons’ low sides left the picnickers’ upper bodies and heads completely exposed, and at such short range they offered a target too big to miss. Ten passengers were hit before the train driver realized what was happening and pulled out of range; three of those were killed and seven wounded, three of whom were women. The dead were two men, William Shaw and Alf Millard, and a 17-year-old girl named Elma Cowie, who had joined the excursion with her boyfriend on a date.

As the train slowed further along the track, some passengers leaped down and ran for cover, and two headed back to Broken Hill to raise the alarm. Meanwhile, the Afghans took their rifles and and trudged off toward a quartz formation on the horizon. They had chosen it long before as the place where they would make their last stand.

To understand why what is known as the Battle of Broken Hill took place at all means understanding why such an isolated outback town had a Muslim population in the first place, and why at least some of the Afghans in Broken Hill felt utterly alienated from the people that they lived among, and loyal to a country—Turkey—that was not their own.

The answer to the first question is simple: Afghans had been coming to Australia for almost 50 years because Australia had discovered that camels, not horses, were the best form of transportation in the desert in the years before the coming of the truck. The Afghans knew all about working with camels, minded less about the discomfort and smell, and could be paid far less than white Australians to do the dirty work of shifting goods to desert towns across the outback.

This last point was, of course, a crucial one. Muslim immigrants took jobs that Australians felt were theirs by right, and the local teamsters were highly unionized and made angry by a potent cocktail of fear, racism and hatred. The racism was a product of a deep-rooted sense of white superiority, which crumbled in the face of the Afghans’ competence and toughness; the fear sprang from the way what was loudly proclaimed as “unfair” competition was costing jobs at a time when the economy was shrinking. The simple fact was that most businessmen and farmers cared only that camels could journey through the outback in less than half the time it took a teamster’s wagon, and at a lower price. To make matters worse, the teamsters could not even work alongside the Afghans; their horses were so revolted by the appearance and the odor of the camels that they would frequently bolt on sight of them.

Long before 1914, relations between the Afghans and the teamsters had deteriorated across Australia to the point where it was not uncommon for Muslims to have their camps raided and their camels crippled. Fistfights between the two groups became common on roads leading from the main rail heads and ports. Records show that there were also at least six murders committed in Australia as a result of these disputes—one by a white mob and five by one Afghan—and that as early as 1893 the people of Broken Hill had lodged a formal protest against the “unrestricted immigration” of Afghans into New South Wales. The militant socialist editor of the local Barrier Miner newspaper campaigned for years against their presence in the town, publishing a series of incendiary articles in his attempt to drive the cameleers out of the Barrier mining district.

Add to all that the Afghans’ different ethnicity and religion, and it is scarcely surprising that they soon became what the historian Christine Stevens terms “the untouchables in a white Australia,” never welcome in the outback towns in which they had to make their homes. Instead they formed their own distinct communities—settlements, known colloquially as “ghantowns,” that clung uncomfortably to the edges of white communities, rarely mixing in any way with them, and certainly not spending the little money that they had with white storekeepers. Each ghantown would have its mullah and its halal butcher, and in Broken Hill the same man performed both these functions. His name was Mullah Abdullah, and he was the leader of the two men now making their way across the desert scrub toward the safety of the quartz formation.

Mullah Abdullah had been born somewhere near the Khyber Pass in 1855. He had had at least some education—he spoke and wrote Dari, the formal language of Afghanistan—and must have received some training at a madrasa school before arriving in Australia in about 1899. “As spiritual head of a group of cameleers,” Stevens writes, “he led the daily prayers, presided at burials, and killed animals al halal for food consumption.”

It was this last part of Mullah Abdullah’s job that had caused him problems. The teamsters were not the only powerful workers’ group in heavily unionized Broken Hill; the butchers, too, had organized. In the last few weeks of 1914, the Afghan had been visited by the chief sanitary inspector and prosecuted not only for slaughtering animals illegally, but also for not belonging to the butchers’ union. It was a second offense. Fined an amount he could not afford to pay, Mullah Abullah was deeply angered and insulted.

His companion, known by the Anglicized name of Gool Mohammed [Gul Mohamed], was an Afridi tribesman who had gone to Australia as a cameleer some time after 1900. At some point early in the 1900s his religious convictions had taken him to Turkey, where he enlisted in the army of the Ottoman Empire. In doing so, he was committing to serve a sultan who—as master of the Muslim Holy Places of Arabia—also claimed to be the caliph, or spiritual leader, of all Muslims. Gool served in four campaigns with the Turks before returning to Australia, this time to work in the mines of Broken Hill. Losing his job there as the economy worsened, he had been reduced, at the age of about 40, to working as an ice cream man, hawking his wares through the town’s dusty streets.

News of the outbreak of the First World War—and of Turkey’s declaration of war on Great Britain and its empire—reached Broken Hill soon after it occurred. Gool Mohammed’s loyalty to his sultan never wavered; he wrote immediately to the Minister of War in Istanbul, offering to re-enlist, and (an impressive testimonial to the efficiency of the Ottoman war department and the laxness of Australia’s postal censors, this) actually received a reply. For a man in Gool’s position, however—impoverished, far from home and likely to be intercepted long before he could reach the Middle East—the idea of fighting in Australia must have held considerable appeal. The letter from the Ottomans encouraged him to “be a member of the Turkish Army and fight only for the Sultan,” without specifying where or how.

A note carried by Gool suggests that it was he who inflamed Mullah Abdullah with his zeal to strike back against the Australians. But it was certainly Mullah Abdullah who hand-wrote the suicide notes the two composed before they set out to ambush the picnic train. “I hold the Sultan’s order,” Gool’s note read, “duly signed and sealed by him. It is in my waist belt now, and if it is not destroyed by cannon shot or rifle bullets, you will find it on me. I must kill your men and give my life for my faith by order of the Sultan [but] I have no enmity against anyone, nor have I consulted with anyone, nor informed anyone.” Mullah Abdullah’s letter explained his grievance against the chief sanitary inspector and said it was his “intention to kill him first.” (The inspector was on the picnic train but survived the attack.) Other than that, though, he repeated his companion’s sentiments: “There is no enmity against anybody,” he insisted.

After the initial attack, it took the best part of an hour for the authorities in Broken Hill to respond. The police were mustered and armed, and a small force from a nearby army base was summoned. The locals, inflamed by the attack and greatly angered by the Afghans’ firing on women and children, seized whatever weapons they could find in the local rifle club. “There was,” the Barrier Miner wrote, “a desperate determination to leave no work for the hangman, or to run the risk of the murderers of peaceful citizens being allowed to escape.”

All three groups—police, army and impromptu militia—converged on the rocks where the two Muslims had taken cover. Writer Patsy Smith describes the police response as

"as close a parallel to the Keystone Cops of silent comedy days as this country is ever likely to see. One of their two cars broke down and they crowded into the other. They thundered off, standing on running boards, crouched in the seats and approached two men and asked for directions to the enemy lines. When bullets came for answers, they knew that they were close."

Gool Mohammed and Mullah Abdullah each wore a homemade bandolier with pockets for 48 cartridges, and each had discharged only half his rounds into the picnic train. Between them they had managed to shoot dead a fourth Australian—Jim Craig, who had been chopping wood in his back yard—as they headed for cover. The two men were also armed with a pistol and knives, and none of the men who formed up to attack them were anxious to close against adversaries who had all the advantages of cover. Instead, a steady harassing fire was started from a distance and kept up for some hours; the Battle of Broken Hill, as it is known, opened at 10:10 a.m. with the attack on the picnic train, and only ended shortly after 1 p.m.

The indications are that Mullah Abdullah was hit in the head and killed early on, leaving his friend to fight on alone. None of the attackers were killed, and it was not until all fire from the rocks had ceased that Gool Mohammed was found lying badly injured alongside his dead companion. He had been wounded 16 times.

Gool was carried back to Broken Hill, where he died in hospital. By then the public mood was turning ugly, and the local authorities posted guards to prevent attacks on the other Afghans in the ghantown. Few of the men there seem to have shown much sympathy for Mullah Abdullah or Gool Mohammed; at least one earned the thanks of the town for carrying water to the men attacking them. Denied the opportunity to wreak vengeance on Broken Hill’s few Muslims, though, the mob instead turned to the town’s German Club. It stood empty—every German in Australia had been rounded up and interned when the war broke out—and it was swiftly burned to the ground.

As for the bodies of Gool Mohammed and Mullah Abdullah, two men who had died so very far from home, they were denied to the mob and buried hastily and in secret beneath an explosives store. The Battle of Broken Hill was over, but the war in which the two Afghans had played such a tiny part was still only just beginning.

Wikipedia posted:

Lincoln Hall was left for dead while descending from the summit of Mount Everest on 25 May 2006. He had fallen ill from a form of altitude sickness, probably cerebral edema, that caused him to hallucinate and become confused. According to reports, Hall's Sherpa guides attempted to rescue him for hours...

Wikipedia posted:

...as night began to fall, their oxygen supplies diminished and snow blindness set in. Expedition leader Alexander Abramov eventually ordered the guides to leave the apparently dead Hall on the mountain and return to camp. A statement was later released announcing his death to his friends and family.

However, the next morning, 12 hours later, Hall was found still alive by a team making a summit attempt. The team consisted of Daniel Mazur Team Leader (US), Andrew Brash (Canada), Myles Osborne (UK) and Jangbu Sherpa (Nepal). Osborne described the scene just below the Second Step:

"Sitting to our left, about two feet from a 10,000 foot drop, was a man. Not dead, not sleeping, but sitting cross legged, in the process of changing his shirt. He had his down suit unzipped to the waist, his arms out of the sleeves, was wearing no hat, no gloves, no sunglasses, had no oxygen mask, regulator, ice axe, oxygen, no sleeping bag, no mattress, no food nor water bottle. 'I imagine you're surprised to see me here', he said. Now, this was a moment of total disbelief to us all. Here was a gentleman, apparently lucid, who had spent the night without oxygen at 8600m, without proper equipment and barely clothed. And ALIVE."

Wikipedia posted:

A rescue effort that mountain observers described as "unprecedented in scale" then swung into action. Mazur and his team abandoned their summit attempt to stay with Hall, who was badly frostbitten and delusional from the effects of severe cerebral edema. At the same time, Abramov dispatched a rescue team of 12 Sherpas guides from the base camp. The rescue team comprised Nima Wangde Sherpa, Passang Sherpa, Furba Rushakj Sherpa, Dawa Tenzing Sherpa, Dorjee Sherpa, Mingma Sherpa, Mingma Dorjee Sherpa, Pemba Sherpa, Pemba Nuru Sherpa, Passang Gaylgen Sherpa, and Lakcha Sherpa.

Hall was brought down the mountain, walking the last part of the way to Everest's North Col where he was treated by a Russian doctor. Hall arrived at Advanced Base Camp the next day in reasonably good health although suffering from frostbite and the lingering effects of cerebral edema. Hall lost the tips of his fingers and a toe to frostbite.

Centripetal Horse posted:

Thread is currently delivering. More psychopathic island castaways, please.

DumbparameciuM posted:

Nckdictator posted:

"non-linear Schrödinger effect,"

HelloIAmYourHeart posted:

But some guys did recreate it in 2013, in a replica ship called the Alexandra Shackleton. They made a documentary about it called Chasing Shackleton which is currently available on Netflix.

Edit: the whole thing seems even more implausible when you see that tiny boat actually on the water, and how miserable the guys in it are.

Felix_Cat posted:

I'd be pretty pissed if I was one of the two guys on the greatest sea voyage ever that got denied for a medal. That's rough.

Centripetal Horse posted:

Thread is currently delivering. More psychopathic island castaways, please.

quote:

The crew were able to get ashore and managed to salvage food, tools, navigation equipment, Raynal's gun, powder and shot and canvas as well as other material from the wreck. Despite only being provisioned for two months they survived for a year and a half on seal meat, birds, fish and water. They originally made a tent from portions of the spars and sails of the wreck before building a permanent cabin from wreck timber and stone. Raynal had experience in building huts from his time in the goldfields and guided the crew[3] in building a solid cabin with a stone chimney. However it took some time to build as the only available tools were an axe, an adze, a hammer and a gimlet.[4] ...

The men manufactured clothes from sealskin and hunted and fished for food. For entertainment Captain Musgrave started reading classes[5] and Mr Raynal manufactured a chess set, dominoes and a pack of cards. However he found Musgrave to be such a bad loser that he judged it best to destroy the cards.[6]

quote:

Captain Musgrave and Raynal had both been hopeful that a ship would be sent by their business partners to investigate what had happened to the Grafton but after 12 months without sighting a single ship the decision was made to use the timbers from the wreck to "make something that will carry us to New Zealand".[7] The crew used the tools they had salvaged from the wreck and Mr Raynal created a pair of blacksmith's bellows from metal from the wreck, wood and sealskin.[8] He used the bellows to forge more tools from metal from the wreck. The castaways had made progress on sections of the proposed vessel but were unable to complete it as Mr Raynal found it impossible to manufacture an auger despite a number of attempts

quote:

The crew had enough timber to build a rough hut and, as one of the crew had matches, a fire was able to be lit. After four days of inactivity there were no remaining provisions and three men climbed the cliffs in search of food. The climb was very difficult as the cliffs were at least 200 ft high and rocky under foot. Eventually the entire group of survivors, save one ill man and a caretaker, climbed the cliffs. The original group of three had caught a pig, which they brought back to the group. The smell of the roasting pig, called to the caretaker, who left the gravely ill man to die alone on the beach.

quote:

On 20 May 1865, the Portuguese ship Julian entered the harbour. The ship had sprung a leak and sent a boat to shore in the hopes of obtaining repairs. The three survivors were taken aboard the Julian and safely transported to Callao. The Julian didn't search for other castaways – possibly because the ship was taking on water and needed to get to harbor for repairs

quote:

When the Flying Scud visited Erebus Cove the crew found the body of a man lying beside the ruins of a house. The man had been dead for some time. The house was one of the Enderby Settlement buildings and the corpse was the 2nd mate of the Invercauld, James Mahoney. One foot was bound with woollen rags. Mahoney, who had an injured leg, had starved after being abandoned by the captain.

HelloIAmYourHeart posted:

On the north end of the island, a ship called the Grafton wrecks. Her crew of five men are stranded with two months of supplies.

DumbparameciuM posted:

Lincoln Hall should've have survived. The day of his summit bid, another climber named David Sharp in somewhat similar circumstances died next to the "landmark" everest corpse known as Green Boots

quote:

To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today. In London, for example, the combination of low wages, appalling housing, a fast-rising population and miserable health care resulted in the sharp division of one city into two. An affluent minority of aristocrats and professionals lived comfortably in the good parts of town, cossetted by servants and conveyed about in carriages, while the great majority struggled desperately for existence in stinking slums where no gentleman or lady ever trod, and which most of the privileged had no idea even existed. It was a situation accurately and memorably skewered by Dickens, who in Oliver Twist introduced his horrified readers to Bill Sikes’s lair in the very real and noisome Jacob’s Island, and who has Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, insist: “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago, describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

Mayhew called them “sewer hunters” or “toshers,” and the latter term has come to define the breed, though it actually had a rather wider application in Victorian times–the toshers sometimes worked the shoreline of the Thames rather than the sewers, and also waited at rubbish dumps when the contents of damaged houses were being burned and then sifted through the ashes for any items of value. They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today. It was sufficient to rank them among the aristocracy of the working class–and, as the astonished writer noted, “at this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 [today $3.3 million] per annum.”

The toshers’ work was dangerous, however, and–after 1840, when it was made illegal to enter the sewer network without express permission, and a £5 reward was offered to anyone who informed on them–it was also secretive, done mostly at night by lantern light. “They won’t let us in to work the shores,” one sewer-hunter complained, “as there’s a little danger. They fears as how we’ll get suffocated, but they don’t care if we get starved!”

Quite how the members of the profession kept their work a secret is something of a puzzle, for Mayhew makes it clear that their dress was highly distinctive. “These toshers,” he wrote,

" may be seen, especially on the Surrey side of the Thames, habited in long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity, and their nether limbs encased in dirty canvas trousers, and any old slops of shoes… [They] provide themselves, in addition, with a canvas apron, which they tie round them, and a dark lantern similar to a policeman’s; this they strap before them on the right breast, in such a manner that on removing the shade, the bull’s eye throws the light straight forward when they are in an erect position… but when they stoop, it throws the light directly under them so that they can distinctly see any object at their feet. They carry a bag on their back, and in their left hand a pole about seven or eight feet long, one one end of which there is a large iron hoe."

This hoe was the vital tool of the sewer hunters’ trade. On the river, it sometimes saved their lives, for “should they, as often happens, even to the most experienced, sink in some quagmire, they immediately throw out the long pole armed with the hoe, and with it seizing hold of any object within reach, are thereby enabled to draw themselves out.” In the sewers, the hoe was invaluable for digging into the accumulated muck in search of the buried scraps that could be cleaned and sold.

Knowing where to find the most valuable pieces of detritus was vital, and most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by a veteran who was frequently somewhere between 60 and 80 years old. These men knew the secret locations of the cracks that lay submerged beneath the surface of the sewer-waters, and it was there that cash frequently lodged. “Sometimes,” Mayhew wrote, “they dive their arm down to the elbow in the mud and filth and bring up shillings, sixpences, half-crowns, and occasionally half-sovereigns and sovereigns. They always find these the coins standing edge uppermost between the bricks in the bottom, where the mortar has been worn away.”

Life beneath London’s streets might have been surprisingly lucrative for the experienced sewer-hunter, but the city authorities had a point: It was also tough, and survival required detailed knowledge of its many hazards. There were, for example, sluices that were raised at low tide, releasing a tidal wave of effluent-filled water into the lower sewers, enough to drown or dash to pieces the unwary. Conversely, toshers who wandered too far into the endless maze of passages risked being trapped by a rising tide, which poured in through outlets along the shoreline and filled the main sewers to the roof twice daily.

Yet the work was not was unhealthy, or so the sewer-hunters themselves believed. The men that Mayhew met were strong, robust and even florid in complexion, often surprisingly long-lived–thanks, perhaps, to immune systems that grew used to working flat out–and adamantly convinced that the stench that they encountered in the tunnels “contributes in a variety of ways to their general health.” They were more likely, the writer thought, to catch some disease in the slums they lived in, the largest and most overcrowded of which was off Rosemary Lane, on the poorer south side of the river.

"Access is gained to this court through a dark narrow entrance, scarcely wider than a doorway, running beneath the first floor of one of the houses in the adjoining street. The court itself is about 50 yards long, and not more than three yards wide, surrounded by lofty wooden houses, with jutting abutments in many upper storeys that almost exclude the light, and give them the appearance of being about to tumble down upon the heads of the intruder. The court is densely inhabited…. My informant, when the noise had ceased, explained the matter as follows: “You see, sir, there’s more than thirty houses in this here court, and there’s no less than eight rooms in every house; now there’s nine or ten people in some of the rooms, I knows, but just say four in every room and calculate what that there comes to.” I did, and found it, to my surprise, to be 960. “Well,” continued my informant, chuckling and rubbing his hands in evident delight at the result, “you may as well just tack a couple of hundred on to the tail o’ them for makeweight, as we’re not werry pertikler about a hundred or two one way or the other in these here places.”

No trace has yet been found of the sewer-hunters prior to Mayhew’s encounter with them, but there is no reason to suppose that the profession was not an ancient one. London had possessed a sewage system since Roman times, and some chaotic medieval construction work was regulated by Henry VIII’s Bill of Sewers, issued in 1531. The Bill established eight different groups of commissioners and charged them with keeping the tunnels in their district in good repair, though since each remained responsible for only one part of the city, the arrangement guaranteed that the proliferating sewer network would be built to no uniform standard and recorded on no single map.

Thus it was never possible to state with any certainty exactly how extensive the labrynth under London was. Contemporary estimates ran as high as 13,000 miles; most of these tunnels, of course, were far too small for the toshers to entert, but there were at least 360 major sewers, bricked in the 17th century. Mayhew noted that these tunnels averaged a height of 3 feet 9 inches, and since 540 miles of the network was formally surveyed in the 1870s it does not seem too much to suggest that perhaps a thousand miles of tunnel was actually navigable to a determined man. The network was certainly sufficient to ensure that hundreds of miles of uncharted tunnel remained unknown to even the most experienced among the toshers.

It is hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that legends proliferated among the men who made a living in the tunnels. Mayhew recorded one of the most remarkable bits of folklore common among the toshers: that a “race of wild hogs” inhabited the sewers under Hampstead, in the far north of the city. This story­–a precursor of the tales of “alligators in the sewers” heard in New York a century later–suggested that a pregnant sow

"by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain; feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continually. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous."

Thankfully, the same legend explained, the black swine that proliferated under Hampstead were incapable of traversing the tunnels to emerge by the Thames; the construction of the sewer network obliged them to cross Fleet Ditch–a bricked-over river–“and as it is the obstinate nature of a pig to swim against the stream, the wild hogs of the sewers invariably work their way back to their original quarters, and are thus never to be seen.”

A second myth, far more eagerly believed, told of the existence (Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood record) “of a mysterious, luck-bringing Queen Rat”:

"This was a supernatural creature whose true appearance was that of a rat; she would follow the toshers about, invisibly, as they worked, and when she saw one that she fancied she would turn into a sexy-looking woman and accost him. If he gave her a night to remember, she would give him luck in his work; he would be sure to find plenty of money and valuables. He would not necessarily guess who she was, for though the Queen Rat did have certain peculiarities in her human form (her eyes reflected light like an animal’s, and she had claws on her toes), he probably would not notice them while making love in some dark corner. But if he did suspect, and talked about her, his luck would change at once; he might well drown, or meet with some horrible accident."

One such tradition was handed down in the family of a tosher named Jerry Sweetly, who died in 1890, and finally published more than a century later. According to this family legend, Sweetly had encountered the Queen Rat in a pub. They drank until midnight, went to a dance, “and then the girl led him to a rag warehouse to make love.” Bitten deeply on the neck (the Queen Rat often did this to her lovers, marking them so no other rat would harm them), Sweetly lashed out, causing the girl to vanish and reappear as a gigantic rat up in the rafters. From this vantage point, she told the boy: “You’ll get your luck, tosher, but you haven’t done paying me for it yet!”

Offending the Queen Rat had serious consequences for Sweetly, the same tradition ran. His first wife died in childbirth, his second on the river, crushed between a barge and the wharf. But, as promised by legend, the tosher’s children were all lucky, and once in every generation in the Sweetly family a female child was born with mismatched eyes–one blue, the other grey, the color of the river.

Queen Rats and mythical sewer-pigs were not the only dangers confronting the toshers, of course. Many of the tunnels they worked in were crumbling and dilapidated–“the bricks of the Mayfair sewer,” Peter Ackroyd says, “were said to be as rotten as gingerbread; you could have scooped them out with a spoon”–and they sometimes collapsed, entombing the unwary sewer hunters who disturbed them. Pockets of suffocating and explosive gases such as “sulphurated hydrogen” were also common, and no tosher could avoid frequent contact with all manner of human waste. The endlessly inquisitive Mayhew recorded that the “deposit” found in the sewers

"has been found to comprise all the ingredients from the gas works, and several chemical and mineral manufactories; dead dogs, cats, kittens, and rats; offal from the slaughter houses, sometimes even including the entrails of the animals; street pavement dirt of every variety; vegetable refuse, stable-dung; the refuse of pig-styes; night-soil; ashes; rotten mortar and rubbish of different kinds."

That the sewers of mid-19th-century London were foul is beyond question; it was widely agreed, Michelle Allen says, that the tunnels were “volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they failed to smother.” Yet this, the toshers themselves insisted, did not mean that working conditions under London were entirely intolerable. The sewers, in fact, had worked fairly efficiently for many years–not least because, until 1815, they were required to do little more than carry off the rains that fell in the streets. Before that date, the city’s latrines discharged into cesspits, not the sewer network, and even when the laws were changed, it took some years for the excrement to build up.

By the late 1840s, though, London’s sewers were deteriorating sharply, and the Thames itself, which received their untreated discharges, was effectively dead. By then it was the dumping-ground for 150 million tons of waste each year, and in hot weather the stench became intolerable; the city owes its present sewage network to the “Great Stink of London,” the infamous product of a lengthy summer spell of hot, still weather in 1858 that produced a miasma so oppressive that Parliament had to be evacuated. The need for a solution became so obvious that the engineer Joseph Bazalgette–soon to be Sir Joseph, a grateful nation’s thanks for his ingenious solution to the problem–was employed to modernize the sewers. Bazalgette’s idea was to build a whole new system of super-sewers that ran along the edge of the river, intercepted the existing network before it could discharge its contents, and carried them out past the eastern edge of the city to be processed in new treatment plants.

Even after the tunnels deteriorated and they became increasingly dangerous, though, what a tosher feared more than anything else was not death by suffocation or explosion, but attacks by rats. The bite of a sewer rat was a serious business, as another of Mayhew’s informants, Jack Black–the “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty”–explained.”When the bite is a bad one,” Black said, “it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which throbs very much indeed. This core is as big as a boiled fish’s eye, and as hard as stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet and squeezes…. I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir.”

There were many stories, Henry Mayhew concluded, of toshers’ encounters with such rats, and of them “slaying thousands… in their struggle for life,” but most ended badly. Unless he was in company, so that the rats dared not attack, the sewer-hunter was doomed. He would fight on, using his hoe, “till at last the swarms of the savage things overpowered him.” Then he would go down fighting, his body torn to pieces and the tattered remains submerged in untreated sewage, until, a few days later, it became just another example of the detritus of the tunnels, drifting toward the Thames and its inevitable discovery by another gang of toshers–who would find the remains of their late colleague “picked to the very bones.”

HelloIAmYourHeart posted:

Island of the Lost (Amazon link to book)

Auckland Island, 1864. 285 miles south of New Zealand, year-round freezing rain, limited vegetation, limited animals to hunt, pretty desolate overall.

On the north end of the island, a ship called the Grafton wrecks. Her crew of five men are stranded with two months of supplies.


These guys worked together so well that they were able to teach the illiterate members of their crew to read while they waited for the rescue that wasn't coming, and when they decided they'd have to build their own ship to leave, they built a forge to make tools.


Three crew members spent five days at sea in their tiny improvised boat, and after they reached their destination they got a ship, the Flying Scud, to go back to Auckland Island to pick up the remaining two, and all were rescued.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Auckland Island, four moths into the Grafton's crew's stay on the island, another ship wrecked. The Invercauld had a crew of 25 and 19 survived the wreck. Unlike the Grafton's crew, they did not work together and adopted an "every man for himself" strategy, often splitting up into small groups that came to a bad end.


Several months of bad decisions, bad weather, and bad hunting pass. The survivors dwindle to 3, but finally they are rescued.


When the crew of the Grafton returned to Auckland Island to pick up the two who had stayed behind, they took a lap around the island looking for other possible castaways. They found a camp left by the crew of the Invercauld:


It's a pretty interesting case study on best case/worst case scenarios.

quote:

At least one man from the Invercauld resorted to cannibalism. Robert Holding, one of only three survivors, reported that two men (Fred "Fritz" Hansen and William Horrey, known as "Harvey) got into an altercation late one night. Harvey admitted to throwing Fritz out of their primitive stick shelter, because he was being a "nuisance". Fritz hit the ground face first, and was found dead in that position the next morning. Several days later Holding discovered "Harvey had been eating some of Fritz." Sixty years later Holding wrote that this horrible episode was still burned into his memory. Pg 153, "Wake of the Invercauld".[4]

Nckdictator posted:

Toshers.

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

I've seen the James Caird and that fucker is tiny. I teared up when I saw it for real.

atomicthumbs posted:

Centripetal Horse posted:

Stories of grand voyages on tiny vessels always hit me in a primal spot. Thor Heyerdahl gets poo poo on a lot, but sailing across anything wider than a bathtub on the Kon-Tiki takes brass balls.

quote:

Few great preachers in American history have been well served by their biographers. Authors tend to smother princes of the pulpit like Charles Grandison Finney, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in tones so erudite and deferential that they end up understating just how controversial these men once were — and fail to explain their remarkable, if somewhat capricious, hold over the hearts and minds of millions of followers. In recent years, only Martin Luther King Jr. has received the dramatic, critical treatment he deserves — from Taylor Branch in particular. But that is due more to King's leading role in a world-changing social movement than because of any talent he had for saving souls.


Henry Ward Beecher is a splendid subject for any writer who aims to break the tradition of literary mediocrity. From the 1840's to the 1870's, he enthralled audiences at home and in Britain with an emotional "gospel of love" that challenged the sober Calvinism on which he and most other American Protestants had been raised. Beecher's fame on the lecture circuit won him the editorship of several religious magazines, as well as large advances for a novel and a biography of Jesus. He also lent his matchless eloquence and prestige to the causes of abolition and woman suffrage — while finding time to campaign for the presidential nominees of the new Republican Party.

Along with thousands of ordinary worshipers, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln crowded into Beecher's huge Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to witness his energetic performances. In Lincoln's view, no one in history had "so productive a mind." Twain, a lifelong skeptic, marveled at the pastor "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point." In an era that included Lincoln, Grant and Lee, Beecher was probably not "the most famous man in America." But, in his prime, he did seem to embody the promise of Christian happiness better than anyone in the nation. As Debby Applegate writes in this excellent biography, "what Beecher brought to American culture in an era of bewildering change and fratricidal war was unconditional love so deep and so wide that the entire country could feel his warmth, like it or not."

Soon after his 60th birthday, Beecher became a celebrity of a far less exalted kind. Theodore Tilton, his longtime friend and sometime journalistic collaborator, accused the preacher of committing adultery with his wife, Elizabeth. One could be sued for that in Victorian America; "criminal conversation" it was called, in one of law's more elegant euphemisms. The six-month trial in 1874 stirred up the sort of obsessive reporting endured in the next century only by defendants named Scopes, Hauptmann and Simpson. Several times, Elizabeth Tilton confessed everything and then retracted her confession, which only helped stoke the melodrama, as did the steadfast loyalty of Beecher's unloved wife, Eunice, the mother of his 10 children. In the end, the jury was too confused and divided to render a verdict. Beecher kept up a full schedule of preaching and writing until his death in 1887. During these years he championed the theory of evolution, helping persuade liberal Christians that one could believe both in Darwinism and the Bible. But the Tilton scandal had branded him forever.

In "The Most Famous Man in America," Applegate, a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, tells this grand story with aplomb, intelligence and a sure feel for historical context. The contradictions of Beecher's crowded and prosperous life, she explains, stemmed directly from his desire to straddle the warring enthusiasms of his family and his time. Henry was the son of the famous evangelist Lyman Beecher — whose updated Calvinist theology combined the old belief that "human fate was preordained by God's plan" with a faith in the capacity of rational men and women to purge society of its sinful ways. As a stern patriarch, Lyman forbade his 12 children to celebrate either Christmas or their own birthdays; as an aggressive reformer, he encouraged them to fight against intemperance, prostitution and slavery.

Born in 1813, Henry came of age during the Second Great Awakening and quickly earned a reputation as a militant abolitionist; at one point, he publicly shipped guns to antislavery settlers in Kansas. Yet, breaking with his father, he also preached a buoyant Protestantism that banished the concept of hell and made the process of redemption seem as simple as asking for it. For Beecher, sinfulness was a temporary malady, which the love of God could burn away as a fierce noonday sun dries up a noxious mold. "Man was made for enjoyment," he assured parishioners. If he sought his own pleasure in the arms of one or more members of his flock, it should not have been too surprising.

Besides her deep knowledge of 19th-century culture and politics, Applegate adeptly gets to the core of her subject's character, often with telling quotations. I doubt one could find a more succinct statement of Beecher's youthful rebellion against his father's severe theology than his recollection that "I supposed myself to be a sinner in the very fact that I did not feel sinful." And with a single anecdote, Applegate captures the pastor's embrace of the new culture of mass consumption: "He developed a passion for jewels, which he carried, unset, in his pockets, taking them out for comfort when he was tired or in low spirits."

At times, however, her narrative loses its force in a thicket of personal details. This is especially true when she writes about Beecher's erotic adventuring — or at least the multiple accusations of same. The muscular, long-haired Beecher grew close to a series of attractive young women, and Applegate is not always good at distinguishing each of his female intimates from the others. She also rushes through the story of the notoriously complex adultery trial, leeching it of the theatrical qualities that captivated newspaper readers at the time. Perhaps Applegate was wary of imitating Richard Wightman Fox's brilliant study of the event, "Trials of Intimacy," published in 1999.

Yet by illuminating Beecher's position in history, Applegate has produced a biography worthy of its subject. She both evokes and explains how Beecher took advantage of an opportunity no longer available to men — or women — of the cloth. His career took place during what one scholar has called the Protestant Century, when an eloquent preacher could be a sexy celebrity, the leader of one or more reform movements and a popular philosopher — all at the same time. The famous scandal decisively dimmed Beecher's star power, but it would soon be impossible for any cleric to claim a similar spot in the culture, admired by most Americans, fascinating to them all.

Today, Henry Ward Beecher is best known as the younger brother of Harriet, the author of the most important "message" novel in American history. But, as Applegate observes, that auxiliary status is a measure of his success. "Mainstream Christianity is so deeply infused with the rhetoric of Christ's love," she writes, "that most Americans can imagine nothing else, and have no appreciation or memory of the revolution wrought by Beecher and his peers." Whenever you hear a sentimental sermon — whatever the preacher's denomination, race or political leanings — echoes from Beecher's Plymouth Church are actually ringing in your ears.

Nckdictator posted:

Don't worry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_%28whaleship%29

Alain Perdrix posted:

According to this, he survived the wreck and was eventually recovered from the island, later working as a missionary. I guess that period where he was marooned counts as comeuppance, but he certainly made out better than most of his companions.

Danger posted:

There was a (tad schlocky) reality show on the Discovery network that captured audio of a climber descending the summit and coming across a still living David Sharpe and being forced to leave him there. Pretty sure it is also on Netflix.

<snip>

wikipedia posted:

Linda Sharp, David's mother, however, does not blame other climbers. She has said to The Sunday Times, "David had been noticed in a shelter. People had seen him but thought he was dead. One of Russell's [Brice's] Sherpas checked on him and there was still life there. He tried to give him oxygen but it was too late. Your responsibility is to save yourself – not to try to save anybody else.

Nckdictator posted:

He does, why?

DumbparameciuM posted:

Yeah, I believe that was an episode of I Shouldn't Be Alive. Heaps of people copped flak for "allowing" Sharpe to be alone for that long, with as many as 44 climbers moving past him while he was dying over the course of two days. I've seen a few other doccos/reality TV shows where mountaineers have expressed two different arguments about it:

1. Each climber is ultimately responsible for their own safety, and getting themselves back down the mountain. Sharp was alone, with no support - he wasn't on Everest as part of an expedition. His place of rest in Green Boots Cave - he was on his back, with his knees elevated. Many of the climbers who walked past, simply didn't see he was there. With a hood, goggles, O2 mask, plus the fatigue...it adds up. People who did find him found him unconscious, unresponsive, and badly frostbitten. And he was so high up the mountain. They would've had to have manually lowered the guy down multiple sheer drops. Keep in mind, you're well into the Death Zone as well, so everything is 8 times harder than it is at sea level.

2. The fact that nobody made a concerted attempt is lovely, climbers these days are pure ambition and they couldn't care less if you were dying right next to them. This is the stance Hillary took.

In my own mind, as you can probably tell, I'm a supporter of view point numero uno. I'll turn to a quote from Sharps mother:


You can see a member of Brices team discovering Sharp in an episode of Everest:
Beyond the Limit (It's on Youtube, I believe it happens in Season 1)

EDIT:

Everest: Beyond the Limit (Wiki)
David Sharp (Wiki)

DemonDarkhorse posted:

Read these two if you're at all interested in people surviving after getting hosed by a mountain

The aforementioned Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: http://www.amazon.com/Left-Dead-Journey-Home-Everest/dp/0440237084
Touching the Void: http://www.amazon.com/Touching-Void-Story-Miraculous-Survival/dp/0060730552

Leon Einstein posted:

These people are always dying in the dead zone. It isn't sociopathic to leave someone. Everybody knows the risks.

Inevitable posted:

They should rename the Death Zone to the "Go Ahead and Try to Save Some People" Zone.

Kugyou no Tenshi posted:

Fairly soon followed by the "Impassable wall of entangled corpses Zone".

Kugyou no Tenshi posted:

Fairly soon followed by the "Impassable wall of entangled corpses Zone".

Leon Einstein posted:

These people are always dying in the dead zone. It isn't sociopathic to leave someone. Everybody knows the risks.

quote:

Two officers from the 83,155 dwt Bahamas-registered oil/bulk ore carrier Searose G have been selected to receive the inaugural 2007 IMO Award for Exceptional Bravery at Sea, in recognition of their part in a dramatic rescue in severe weather.

The Bahamas-registered Searose G was on passage through the Mediterranean, bound for the Suez Canal, when it responded to a distress call from the Maltese-flagged Teklivka, which was sinking 50 miles south in gale force winds. The Teklivka had sunk when the Searose G reached the scene but a dramatic rescue ensued, with Searose G rescuing nine crew and another vessel picking up three crew members. Tragically, three crew members of the Teklivka were lost.

The assessment and judging panels considered that Second Officer Topiwala and Captain Ostric placed their own lives in jeopardy, even though they were not trained professional rescuers, by undertaking acts that went well beyond the scope of their normal duties. They left the comparative safety of their ship, descending to a liferaft filled with oil and water. Second Officer Topiwala then entered the sea, in extremely hazardous weather conditions, during the rescue.

duckmaster posted:

...With no training.