The Myth and Mystery of Christopher Columbus

October 02, 2018 by Nathaniel Lloyd

Ahead of the now controversial holiday Columbus Day, it is worthwhile to examine the myths and mysteries surrounding that much vaunted explorer who in fourteen hundred and ninety-two went and sailed the ocean blue: Christopher Columbus. As with many of you listeners, I’m sure, I vividly remember the legend of Columbus as it was taught to me by teachers and illustrated children’s books. As the legend went, Columbus was a man of conviction; he believed the world was round and thus that he could sail west to reach the Indies in the east. But he had trouble obtaining financial backing for his journey, for the advisers to Queen Isabella scoffed at his ignorance. Finally, Queen Isabella, who believed in Columbus, pawned her crown jewels to pay for his endeavor, and after a long and perilous crossing, Columbus’s ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria landed in the New World, for rather than reaching the East Indies, Columbus had discovered America. This is a story that many children have heard, and some embellished particulars might be forgiven as necessities in making history palatable to youngsters, such as the fact that Queen Isabella never pawned her jewels for Columbus—she had done this before, to provision her armies, but in the case of Columbus, she had only expressed a willingness to do it. But in the early 1990s, as the quincentennial, or 500th anniversary, of Columbus’s landing at the Bahamas approached, far more central aspects of the legend than this were challenged. And in the years since, Columbus has become a villain in the eyes of many who see him as a figure representative of terrible colonial atrocities against native inhabitants. Native American activists have disrupted numerous Columbus Day parades, and today many cities have chosen to replace the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day, and just as there has been a continual push to remove or relocate confederate monuments, so have activists petitioned to do away with Columbus’s statues. As with the controversy over Confederate statues, which I discussed in my episode Jubal Early’s Lost Cause, there are still many who vociferously oppose this trend, which they see as historical revisionism of the worst sort, meant only to libel and demonize. And it is not at all clear which of these contending sides will win out in this historiographical conflict. While it may seem that the majority of professional historians ascribe to a less than idealized version of Columbus, this may mean nothing when it comes to whether the legend will continue to be disseminated as it always has been. In fact, Christina M. Desai, in a 2014 article in Children’s Literature in Education called “The Columbus Myth: Power and Ideology in Picturebooks about Christopher Columbus,” showed that children’s literature continues to promote the same ideas about Columbus, regardless of how modern views of the man have changed. What is this myth? What revelations about Columbus do modern historians offer? What do we know and what do we not know about the so-called Great Discoverer? Thank you for listening to Episode 26: The Myth and Mystery of Christopher Columbus.

One might ask, what are these conceptions of Columbus that children’s literature teaches? What are these myths propagated by schoolbooks? First and foremost would be the myth of discovery. To children in the United States, we teach that Columbus discovered America, but of course, in his 1492 voyage, he landed at the Bahamas, and his various subsequent journeys likewise saw him land at other islands in the Caribbean, such as that which today we call Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but which Columbus called Hispaniola. He can hardly be said to have discovered our country, which is essentially what children are allowed to believe. Now, one might cry “semantics!” Clearly he landed in the New World, so one can accurately say he discovered the Americas. But Native Americans have a deeper misgiving here, for how can it be said that Columbus discovered a land that was already inhabited with a native Arawak population numbering somewhere around 8 million? Books and traditions that assert Columbus discovered this land thereby transmit to future generations an age-old colonialist ideology that is intrinsically Euro-centric. Yes, some dark-skinned Other was already present, it tells children, but their existence was incidental, as they were inferior to the Western European explorers who made their way to those lands. Thus the inherent right of colonial powers to claim lands for themselves is tacitly asserted. The ridiculousness of this idea being in any way approved of today, regardless of how commonly held it was in that era, was illustrated dramatically by Adam “Fortunate Eagle” Nordwall, a Native American Chippewa activist who in 1973 flew to Italy and emerged from his plane resplendent in his tribal regalia to proclaim that he had discovered Italy and would claim possession of it on behalf of Native Americans, despite the little detail that it was teeming with Italian inhabitants.

Adam “Fortunate Eagle” Nordwall meeting the Pope, via The Bemidgi Pioneer

Some would argue this may be misconstruing the meaning of the word discovery as it’s used in this context, for surely it is a worthwhile accomplishment to be the first explorer to “discover,” as in find out, that other continents existed in this world, regardless of whether they were inhabited, just as a Native American sailing across the Atlantic and landing in France could be said to have “discovered” that Europe existed. But can Columbus even claim this honor for himself? There are many theories and indications that Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact occurred, some of course dubious, and others intriguing. It has been suggested that an Irish monk, Saint Brendan the Navigator, who is said to have made a great voyage across the sea to a legendary Isle of the Blessed, may have actually landed in North America as long ago as the sixth century. Then, of course, there were the Norse voyages to the mysterious, fertile shores of Vinland west of Greenland detailed in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which if believed would place the first European explorers on North American shores somewhere around 1000 C.E. and give credit to Leif Eriksson, or perhaps to a lesser known Norseman named Bjarni Herjólfsson around 14 years earlier. And if the Norse claim is soured by some of the doubtful claims over inscribed rune stones that proponents tout as proof, then there’s always the Welsh claim that in 1170 an illegitimate prince by the name of Madoc ab Gwynedd, son of a Welsh prince and the daughter of a Viking lord, set sail with his brother and 200 Welshmen. Declared missing the next year, a legend transmitted by Cherokee tribes would have us believe that these resolute Welshmen made their way to the shores of what is today Mobile, Alabama, and thenceforth, harried by native attacks, sailed up a series of rivers until they settled in Georgia and intermarried with the indigenous peoples there. Then again, perhaps this story strains your credulity even more than that of the Viking voyages to Vinland, due not only to its folkloric roots but to the suspicious fact that it gained prominence in Elizabethan England as a means of countering Spanish claims to the New World. As an example of its questionable veracity, one of its biggest promoters was the colorful character of John Dee, whom I’ve mentioned before in my episode on the Voynich Manuscript and to whom I still plan to devote at least one full episode in the future. Dr. Dee not only asserted that Madoc’s voyage strengthened Elizabeth’s claim on the New World; he further insisted that King Arthur had discovered it long before that!

And so, with such outlandish contentions as these, perhaps you give no credence to any theories of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. But still, can Christopher Columbus be credited even with being the first European to “discover” that a hitherto unknown continent existed if he never realized it himself? Columbus sailed west searching for a new route to the Indies, those East Asian lands rich in gold and spices. When he landed on what today are the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, he believed that he was visiting the distant shores of China and Japan, a conviction most evidence shows he held throughout his subsequent voyages and maintained to his death. This, of course, is why the Americas are named for the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, who was first to realize the significance of what Columbus found. However, this is disputed as well, with some pointing to another Welshman, Richard ap Meryk, who anglicized his name to Amerike when he moved to Bristol and founded a Society of Merchant Adventurers. Some say America was named for him, as he was a principal financier of John Cabot’s 1497 expedition to Newfoundland, and others take it further, asserting that Bristol fisherman landed at Newfoundland in 1480 and named it for Richard Amerike. So the claims do not cease, and indeed are not limited to Europe. Some have claimed Chinese voyager Zheng He found the New World in the 15th century and point to an 18th century map of the world clearly showing the Americas as proof, for a dubious notation on it claims it was a copy of a 1418 map. And even more recently, Turkish president Erdoğan, a despot and known propagandist, suggested that Muslims had preceded Columbus to Cuba. His evidence? In Columbus’s writings, there is mention of finding a mosque on a hill, but historians agree this was a metaphor. Nevertheless, this gives a clear indication of just how muddled is the history of the New World’s “discovery.”

Columbus landing on Hispaniola, quite unsure of where he was, via Wikimedia Commons

Another persistent myth about Columbus is that he was in the minority, or even alone, in believing that the earth was round. This is not merely a simplification used to embellish his story in children’s books; even scholars have been known to repeat this myth, suggesting that Columbus’s venture was so adamantly opposed at first because ignorant and narrow-minded officials in the Spanish court scoffed at him for suggesting one could reach the East by sailing westward, reminding Columbus that his ships would fall off the edge of the world. This part of the story helps to build the legend of Columbus as a brilliant and inspired genius, a hero opposed by small-minded men. In truth, however, it was commonly held at the time that the earth was round, and had been since antiquity. Aristotle himself worked out what he believed was the circumference of the planet some two hundred or more years before the Common Era, as did librarians at Alexandria, and their measurements differ only about 5% from current day calculations! It had been common knowledge among the educated for centuries, and for everyone else, the curved shadow of the Earth on the Moon during eclipses made it obvious enough. Moreover, anyone who observed ships on the ocean was able to confirm it, for as they sailed away over the curvature of the Earth, they dropped slowly out of sight, their hulls long before their masts. In fact, the oldest surviving globe, the Erdapfel or “earth apple,” was made the same year as Columbus’s first voyage, 1492; though it shows no indication of the existence of the Americas, it is quite spherical, and it was likely not the first of its kind. Columbus cannot even be credited with being the first man to realize the world’s globular shape would make it possible to sail west to reach the East, as Greek historian and geographer Strabo suggested back in 63 BCE that India could be reached by such a westward route. In truth, Spanish resistance to Columbus’s venture derived from the very fact that knowledge of the Earth’s shape and size was far greater than the received myth would have us believe. Court officials scoffed at Columbus’s specious projections, insisting sailing westward to reach the Indies would take far longer than Columbus claimed. And, of course, they were right. Indeed, one cannot even credit Columbus with proving what everyone previously had only reasoned about the Earth’s shape because he never actually circumnavigated it. Recognition for that must go to Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition 30 years later.

This myth that Columbus set out to disprove the theory of Earth’s flatness began in the work of America’s great mythmaker, Washington Irving, perhaps best known for his iconic fiction stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” Having gone to Madrid to help translate some documents on Columbus, Irving decided to write the man’s history for American audiences. Along the way, though, he relied more and more on his tendencies as a writer of fiction, filling in the blind spots by reasoning what must have happened or what may indeed have occurred and weaving those imagined scenes into the narrative, resulting in The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, an 1828 work presented to the reading public as scrupulous historiography when it was really something closer to historical fiction. And when it came time to write about Columbus’s meeting with the Council at Salamanca, he embellished the scene to create the drama he assumed the true encounter must have had. In fairness to Irving, Columbus himself had a tendency to portray himself as persecuted and unfairly treated in his own writings, so Irving may have thought his sources justified his elaboration, but the result was a fictional passage in which Columbus faces the derision of closed-minded men in power. This is the origin of the myth that objections were raised over Columbus’s notion of a round Earth, but actually, Irving does have some council members concede the roundness of the planet, and the principal reservation that Irving has his the councilmen raise against Columbus’s reasoning is doctrinal, having to do with the idea of the antipodes, an idea rejected by the church because it meant the existence of people on the other side of the planet who must not have been descended from Adam. Still others in the council Irving depicted as more concerned that the distance around the earth was far greater than Columbus anticipated, which of course is accurate. Nevertheless, it was the idea that the council members were all Flat Earthers that caught on and soon found itself included in other books. And this notion of enlightened scientific thinking being suppressed by dogmatic reactionaries became an especially popular trope used by Darwinists in the later 19th century to defend the theory of evolution, equating Columbus’s struggle against ignorant Flat Earthers with Copernicus’s struggle against the 16th century church in an effort to depict their religious detractors as brassbound and standpat. As true as this may have been in Copernicus’s case and in the case of the dogmatists opposing Darwinian thought, it was not the case when Columbus went seeking support for his venture. And just as today reactionaries parade outlier examples to suggest there is not scientific consensus when it comes to climate change, so then the champions of science in the 19th century held up obscure claims of Flat Earthers in antiquity as representative of common belief, suggesting that 15th century science owed its backward notions to the ideas of Cosmas Indicopleustes in the 6th century or Lactantius in the 3rd century, even though few in the 1400s likely even knew about these thinkers and their religious opposition to the idea of the Earth’s roundness and probably even fewer gave weight to their opinions.

Washington Irving, looking rather proud of his mythologizing, via Wikimedia Commons

A final facet of the Columbus myth as it continues to be conveyed to generations of youth has to do with Columbus’s motivation. Many treatments of Columbus emphasize his devoutness, portraying him like a saint. In this view of Columbus, he had no other purpose for crossing the Atlantic than to spread the word of God to those benighted souls across the water whom he considered to be heathens. This mythical portrayal of him has Columbus finding inspiration, even as a child, in his namesake, Saint Christopher, who according to a decidedly folkloric tradition once carried the Christ child across a river. In just the same way, so the myth goes, Columbus had been chosen to carry Christ across the dark waters metaphorically in carrying His Word to the godless, and most depictions of his arrival in the New World show him kneeling in prayer upon stepping foot on shore. This element of the Columbus myth also seems to have been derived from Columbus’s own self-aggrandizing writings. In his efforts to acquire backing for his voyage, he presented himself as a heavenly-anointed character, divinely chosen to spread not only Christendom but also Spanish influence abroad. In fact, later in his career, when he had lost his position in his colony and no longer held favor in the court, he spent time searching the scriptures for indications that his voyages had been foretold in prophecy and compiled them in a manuscript never published in his life. Around this time he also began to sign his name as Christo Ferens, or Christ Bearer, an indication that he actively publicized himself as a figure analogous to St. Christopher. But to accept and promulgate this image of Columbus is to allow the man to make his own myth, and it means turning a blind eye to more clearly supported motivations, such as the gathering of wealth for the Spanish crown and, of course, self-enrichment. Columbus did not sell his voyage on the basis of the opportunity it would afford for evangelizing natives. The Spanish court expected returns on their investment, and Columbus’s actions after his “discovery” indicate that the gathering of gold and other riches was paramount. Now there may have been some overlap with these two motivations attributed to him, as some recent scholarship has suggested that Columbus hoped through his venture to finance a new crusade in order to take Jerusalem from Muslims. Among the prophecies compiled by Columbus, alongside those foretelling the conversion of all peoples to Christianity, were those prophesying the final reclamation of the Holy Land from Muslim control. But an accurate evaluation of what drove Columbus cannot be taken directly from the man’s own words alone. Rather, we must consider his actions in the New World to gain a more perfect understanding of his enterprise.

And it is here where we sail into the deepest and darkest waters of the Columbus myth. Since the quincentennial, a clear revisionist effort has been made to rewrite his character in memory and history. Rather than a saintly hero or harbinger of enlightenment, he was the father of slavery and a perpetrator of genocide. Traditionalists decry this trend as libel, arguing that Columbus’s villainy has been exaggerated and his actions judged out of context according to the moral sensibilities of modern society. Further, they insist that he cannot be held accountable for events he only set in motion, especially when he did so inadvertently. So it becomes incumbent on us to examine these two allegations. First, was Columbus responsible for the New World slave trade? We know he was no stranger to the slave trade, as the earliest records we have of him indicate he was sailing around the west coast of Africa on a Portuguese slaving vessel. And on his 1492 voyage, he appears to have personally planted the first sugar plant in the Caribbean, a crop which would flourish in that climate and would eventually require a massive labor force for its cultivation, leading directly to the establishment of a slave trade between Africa and Hispaniola. But if that is too unwitting an act for us to lay blame on Columbus, then let us look to his second voyage, when he returned to Hispaniola with 17 ships. This was his voyage of conquest, and when he took control of the island, he quickly discovered that the gold and riches he believed would be so plentiful were actually not so forthcoming. Therefore, in an effort to boost the disappointing return, he began to see the native population as another resource he could exploit, and he established the institution of slavery. Not only did he enslave natives in the New World for the purposes of gathering wealth for the crown, but he also shipped the natives back across the Atlantic. Although many died during the crossing, he took comfort in the fact that, as he wrote, “this will not always be the case, for the Negroes and Canary Islanders reacted in the same way at first” (Fernández-Armesto 6). Traditionalists may insist that Columbus cannot be judged a villain even for these actions, as the world’s understanding of the evils of slavery was not then prevalent. But the surprising fact is that the Spanish had laws against slavery even in that era. Slavery was only to be condoned with prisoners of war and criminals who had violated natural law, and even then must be approved by a royal court. This is not to say that the Spanish disapproved of all slavery in the New World. In fact, they did approve of the enslavement of certain Carib natives of the Lesser Antilles who it was said practiced cannibalism, as such acts broke natural law. The problem was that Columbus traded mostly in Arawak natives, and specifically the Taino population, whom he had often stated were responsive to evangelization, making their enslavement unlawful. Columbus actually received warnings from Spanish royal courts, which ordered these illegally enslaved natives to be emancipated. So, the fact that he appears to have had far fewer reservations about human bondage even than those he served would seem to justify the revisionist perception of Columbus as the man who brought slavery and its concomitant evils to the Americas.

A depiction of Spanish atrocities in the work of Las Casas, via Wikimedia Commons

So we come to the worst of the crimes laid at Columbus’s feet in modern times: that of genocide or the deliberate murder of an entire people. Apologists rightly point out that it would have been foolish for Columbus to deliberately stamp out the population of Taino natives on Hispaniola, as he relied on them to gather wealth from the island, and he could hardly be said to have redeemed them in Christ if he simply killed them all. Moreover, there was the matter of rebellion to consider. Wholesale slaughter would have made the Taino ungovernable, and Columbus even said as much, exhorting the Spanish to “take much care of the Indians, that no ill nor harm may be done them…so [they] should have no cause to rebel” (Fernández-Armesto 7). And yet, over the course of the first three years of his governorship, the Arawak population plummeted by some 5 million! Of the remaining 3 million, only about 22,000 remained 18 years later. 30 years after that, they were all but extinct. And a similar pattern prevailed across the Caribbean basin. To account for these numbers without laying blame on Columbus and his governorship, apologists point to disease, and certainly contact with Europeans meant the spread of disease. In fact, disease took many Spanish lives as well, but one of the worst diseases to spread in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion was syphilis, and it spread because of Spaniards routinely raping native women. And Columbus’s programs and policies would prove just as brutal and deadly as any illness. Many among the indigenous population, in addition to being enslaved, had their valuable cultivated lands seized by the invaders, and for many, this meant starvation. As for those who escaped enslavement, there remained an unrealistic tribute program. Upon their arrival, the Spanish had delighted many natives with gifts, including baubles such as hawk’s bells, the little brass bells that falconers customarily affixed to their birds’ talons. During Columbus’s subsequent rule, however, these gifts became a curse, as around 1495, Columbus ordered that every native over 14 years old had to bring him enough gold to fill his or her hawk’s bell every three months. This proved to be an impossible task for many, as gold was not as plentiful there as had been imagined, and as a consequence for failing to meet one’s tribute, the Spanish chopped off the natives’ hands and let them bleed to death. Historians estimate more than 10,000 natives were murdered in this way. And the atrocities do not cease there, with reports of Spaniards wagering on who could behead a native or hack him in half with one fell strike and of Spaniards taking infants from their mothers’ breasts and throwing them against rocks or cutting them into pieces with their swords and feeding them to their dogs. They hanged the natives, burned them at the stake, and cooked them on spits just to teach them respect, or rather, fear, and they even engaged in wholesale massacre, putting men, women, and children—whole villages—to the sword until the streets ran with blood like the floor of an abattoir. All this was reported by Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who arrived at Hispaniola in 1502 (Churchill 8). Again, apologists argue with a straight face that Columbus cannot be blamed for atrocities that occurred when he was no longer governor of Hispaniola, but these outrages were made possible not only by the atmosphere first established under his rule, but also by his policies, which remained in effect and, after 1509, were enforced by Columbus’s own son.

For many Italians and Italian-Americans, these facts do not sit well, for despite the fact that Columbus sailed and claimed land for Spain, it is said Columbus was born in Genoa and was therefore ethnically Italian. And he has become a symbol in Italy just as much as he has in the United States. During the quincentennial in 1992, a ceremony was held in Las Vegas to marry the Statue of Liberty to a statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona. But to illustrate just how many blind spots remain in our understanding of who Columbus was and what he stood for and did, it should be pointed out that we know shockingly little about him. In portraits, he is always depicted differently because we don’t really know what he looked like and can’t even guess about his appearance based on race or culture because we don’t even know for a certainty where he came from. The Italians make the strongest case, but the fact remains that there exists no record of his birth, even though birth records were kept at the time in Genoa. Moreover, Columbus never wrote himself about his youth, leaving the place of his birth and upbringing a mystery, and he wrote and apparently spoke not in any dialect of Genoa but in Castilian with a smattering of Latin and Portuguese. Of course, the fact that he sailed for Portugal, had some knowledge of the language, and took a Portuguese wife led to claims he was Portuguese as well as theories that he ran a map shop in Lisbon. Then his Castilian fluency and his service to Spain, along with the fact that he kept a Spanish mistress, led to claims he was Spanish; perhaps you’ve heard the Hispanic version of his name, Cristóbal Colón. In the 1920s, some historical documents surfaced purporting to prove his Spanish heritage, but these turned out to be forgeries. Nevertheless, the claims did not cease there. In 1913, a theory arose that he was Jewish, or more specifically that he was a Spanish Jew, either a converso who had converted to Christianity, or that he had been forced to hide his Jewish identity because of King Ferdinand of Aragon’s 1492 order expelling Jews from Spain. There is little concrete evidence for this theory, however, and some who have promoted it relied on awful anti-Semitic stereotypes, suggesting Columbus’s Jewishness explained his excessive greed for gold (Churchill 11). While the notion of a Jewish Columbus may add new dimension to the theory that Columbus’s central motivation was to reclaim Jerusalem, and has even led to other theories about his motivation, such as that he was really interested in tracking down the lost tribes of Israel in the New World, there is virtually no evidence for it beyond some linguistic analysis that suggests he occasionally dropped a Hebrew word into his compositions. It would seem to me, though, that this proves nothing, since foreign words are frequently adopted by other languages, and Columbus specifically was known to use a mix of several languages and dialects, as already noted.

Various portraits of Columbus showing no resemblance to each other, via vanderkrogt.net

Mystery follows Columbus from his origins to the end of his life and beyond. More than 30 years after his death in 1509, his remains, along with his son’s, were transported to Santo Domingo to be laid to rest in the New World according to his wishes. With the end of Spanish power in Hispaniola in 1795, the remains were sent to Havana, but in 1877, a lead box was discovered back at Santo Domingo containing bones and clearly marked as the casket of Cristóbal Colón. Thus there were two sets of remains, those in Cuba—which, with the outbreak of war with the U.S. in 1898, were shipped again back to Spain and are still there—and those in the present day Dominican Republic, where their keepers claim they never left, the Spanish having taken the wrong bones, whether by accident or because someone loyal to Columbus’s memory switched the remains since Columbus had wished to stay in Santo Domingo. They point to the evidence of arthritis in their bones as proof, as it is known Columbus suffered from that condition. The Spanish have somewhat weightier proof for the authenticity of the remains in their possession in the form of DNA analysis confirming their bones share DNA with those of Columbus’s brother, but the Dominicans refuse to accept these results and at the same time have declined to allow similar testing on the bones in their possession. So even in death, Columbus remains a man between worlds, claimed by many but belonging to none. The apologists who would reclaim his identity as a hero cry that modern revision indulges in the so-called “Black Legend,” the trend in historiography to tear down and demonize persons and cultures that in the past may have been idealized, and to ignore or minimize their positive contributions. But if the scholarship is sound, if the facts that have caused revisionists to reexamine previous portrayals are accurate, then what other response can there be but to recoil from such deeds? Some argue for more balance in our consideration of Columbus, such as the Smithsonian and other museums, which in recent years have altered their discourse to stress not Columbus’s “discovery” but Spanish “contact,” and use the antiseptic term “exchange” to encompass all that transpired during the clash of these cultures. This historiographical trend warns us to strive for balance and fairness, and above all not to engage in reductive archetypes like heroes and villains (Bigelow, “Two Myths”). This may be a worthwhile and even admirable endeavor, in theory, but one wonders if such evenhandedness is always warranted. In the future, for example, will we be censured for suggesting that some villainy was at work in orchestrating the holocaust?

Blind Spot: Charles Dellschau and His Extraordinary Sonora Aero Club

September 18, 2018 by Nathaniel Lloyd

In the last edition, I surveyed the history of innovation in ballooning before telling the tale of the mysterious sightings that occurred in 1896 and ’97, but is it possible that there is a further history of aviation pioneering that didn’t make it into the historical record? Could some inventors have made great strides in the design and building of airships? If fleets of flying machines really were seen in 1896 and 1897, then it would seem someone must have. And there does exist a body of work that claims to answer these questions. In all, it comprises some 2000 pages, with watercolor paintings and handmade collages as well as handwritten passages that purport to reveal the existence of an organization of airship inventors who made great advances in aviation in the 1850s, but did so entirely in secret. But is this a work of history or a work of art? Does it impart fact or simply weave an intriguing fiction?

The work began around the turn of the 20th century. The artist was then a man of around 70 years, a Prussian immigrant by the name of Charles Albert August Dellschau who had arrived at Galveston in 1849 at the age of 19. He lived much of his life in Texas, working in Richmond as a butcher, as had been his father’s trade. In 1861, he married a widow with a 5 year old girl. Decades later, after losing his wife and most of the children he had fathered with her, he moved from Richmond to Houston to work as a clerk for his step-daughter’s husband, a saddler maker. In the mid-1890s, his son-in-law also passed away, and Dellschau moved in with his widowed step-daughter and her several children. He retired right around when the airship flaps began. Not long after these incredible sightings of flying ships, Charles Dellschau, who seems to have spent most of his time in his step-daughter’s attic, began to write his illustrated memoirs. This undertaking thereafter turned into a seemingly endless series of drawings, paintings, and collages on butcher paper. It seems he produced one new intricate work of art of this sort about every two days, working by candle light up in his attic studio, until he died in 1923 at the age of 93. He never tried to publish his writings or sell his artwork in life, and after he was gone, his family left it moldering up in that attic until the 1960s, when a house fire prompted a fire inspector to clean out the attic. Thinking all the old papers a fire hazard, he dumped them all on the curb. Somehow, the artwork thereafter came into the possession of the owner of a local store, where for even longer it remained hidden under various other items—tarps and carpets—until its rediscovery and sale to various art galleries and museums, and to a researcher named P. J. Navarro, whose interest lay principally in the mystery airship sightings of the late 1890s. From there, the work of Charles Dellschau entered history and the public consciousness.

A manuscript of Charles Dellschau’s work, via Wikimedia Commons

You see, rather than the simple autobiography of a butcher, as one might have expected from him, his writings and his illustrations and collages depicted in vivid detail his involvement with a society of airship makers in California. If Dellschau’s work is to be believed, then sometime in the early to mid-1850s, not long after he first arrived in Texas, he traveled to California, to the gold rush country west of Yosemite, where in a small town called Sonora, he served as the draftsman for a secret society of airship builders. This group, the Sonora Aero Club, was composed of men with Germanic names, likely immigrants to America just like Dellschau, and they met among miners in the saloon at Sonora, talking not of gold but of flight. One man in particular stands out in Dellschau’s works as the leader or principal innovator in the Sonora Aero Club: one Peter Mennis. A German miner and rough sort, he is described as a drunk and a genius, tinkering with airships for the sole purpose of astonishing friends and maybe making enough money to keep himself in drink. It is he who engineers or discovers the miraculous “Lifting Fluid” that eventually allows all the Sonora Aero Club’s ships to float and fly. Mennis calls this material “Supe.” Essentially, it replaced hydrogen in their designs, as drops of it, released onto rotating metal plates called an “Electrande,” resulted in a gas that filled the airships’ envelopes to provide lift. So you might say they were driving around souped-up hot-air balloons. From his memoirs, one gets the impression that the club is a group of jovial aviation enthusiasts, keenly interested in the mechanics of flight, yes, but perhaps even more interested in telling a good tale and having a raucous good time at the local tavern.

Example of Dellschau’s work, via Wikimedia Commons

But there is mystery and intrigue in Dellschau’s club as well, for theirs was a secret society, and their undertakings performed under a strict code of silence. In one margin, among the many tales told in scrawled annotations on his paintings, he tells of an airship pilot that the club suspected was taking payment for transporting cargo, and how the club orchestrated the crash of his vessel in retaliation. There is mention of members being forbidden to build the ships they had designed because they had been sharing too much information with people outside the club, and of a nosy boardinghouse owner who tried to eavesdrop on their meetings and got stranded on a cliff for her snooping. When ships were built, they had to be disguised as wagons so that no one who saw them would think anything of them. Indeed, even a half a century later, Dellschau didn’t seem entirely comfortable writing about the secrets of the Aero Club, so some of his work is written in code, which of course is very odd for a memoir or a history. Some details that we have come from the researcher P. J. Navarro, who claims to have cracked Dellschau’s code after years of studying his work. Acccording to Navarro, one prominent coded phrase, seemingly in Greek characters, ĐM = XØ (delta mu = chi phi) represents the name of a mysterious organization that financed or somehow otherwise supported or made possible the innovations of the Sonora Aero Club. Navarro says this phrase decodes to NYMZA, although no one really knows what that acronym might stand for. Other researchers suggest that these coded portions were only responses to the Great War in Europe that Dellschau introduced after 1914, as though he had to keep things secret in a time of war, and judging from context, they seem to just be a code for the name of the club itself. But that hasn’t stopped the shadowy NYMZA from becoming a dark and looming entity that casts its shadow over the entire legend, a development we will explore shortly.

An example of Dellschau’s work, via Wikimedia Commons

As Dellschau tells it, this was a golden era of aviation in the deep gold country of California. Members of the club held forth about their designs in their secret meetings behind their boardinghouse. They traveled the roads in airships disguised as covered wagons waiting until no one was around so they could take flight and go on extended voyages through the skies, sleeping and eating their meals high up in the clouds. But as with all good things, the club eventually came to an end. Crashes are not uncommon in his stories about the club, a fact which really lends his tales authenticity or verisimilitude. For example, one story tells of an aero being commandeered by a pilot who was not up to the task and drove the ship right into a redwood and broke his neck. For the most part, though, the club easily recovered from such accidents. But when, in the 1860s, Peter Mennis himself died in a fiery crash, the secret of his Lifting Fluid died with him. Apparently the Club floundered for some time, trying to recreate Mennis’s miraculous substance, but in the end, club members went their separate ways, like Dellschau, who ended up back in Texas, if you believe his stories, content to marry and work for 26 years as a butcher after all the profound adventures he had experienced. Now some would argue that this was not the end of the Aero Club, and would suggest that after thirty to forty years of experimentation, former members must have finally perfected the Supe, resulting in the appearance of all those many airships in the 1890s. And these believers will likely point to some recognizable names in Dellschau’s work, suggesting that a Smith that Dellschau mentions must be the same Smith that patented an airship design in 1896, or that a Wilson he refers to is likely the same Wilson mentioned in a series of Texas airship sightings, but these are common names being linked to persons decades and many miles apart. There is only one concrete piece of evidence remaining that the Aero Club existed, and it is the artwork of Charles A. A. Dellschau, which cannot be taken as definitive proof.

Of course, this has not kept conspiracy theorists and fringe thinkers from doing what they do best, and now the Sonora Aero Club is all tied up in a variety of outlandish ideas with little basis in fact. Take the books and articles of Walter Bosley for an example. Bosley claims that, not only was the Aero Club real, but that the reason why their technology never went mainstream, so to speak, and simply disappeared after the airship sightings, was that this represented the beginning of a breakaway civilization. If you are unfamiliar with idea of breakaway civilizations, think about bad sci-fi in which Nazis developed advanced technology and then withdrew from the world to start their own society in Antarctica, or within the hollow earth, or on the moon. It’s wild stuff, and Bosley doesn’t hesitate to draw connections between the Aero Club and its financiers, NYMZA, and the Nazis with their rumored experimental aircraft, the Nazi Bell. In fact, drawing connecting lines is what Bosley does, even when there are no dots to connect. He suggests that in 1903, when the Wright Brothers were struggling to get their plane off the ground, a rumored airship flight to Mars actually did take place using technology from Nicola Tesla, and that this represents the beginning of another breakaway group. What’s more than that, he even manages to bring Donald Trump into the conspiracy, pointing out that one Dellschau painting has the name Homer Trump below a particular ship, suggesting that maybe one of Donald’s Trump’s relatives was part of the Aero Club, and further pointing out that Trump’s uncle, John G. Trump, was one of the FBI agents who went through Tesla’s documents after he died, hinting at some kind of cloak and dagger intrigue between these two rival breakaway civilizations. But even Walter Bosley himself seems to have embraced his critics’ biggest complaint against his theories and freely admits that he engages in “wild ass speculation.”

The fact is, though, that elements of Dellschau’s story invite speculation as to its authenticity. It has been observed that the machinery he drew was very precise, and that he used the same mechanisms over and over again, which would likely be the case if inventors were building their designs on previous iterations. Does this just represent a lack of imagination on Dellschau’s part or is it a stroke of realism? It can hardly be said, when looking at his work, that he lacked imagination, and this may actually be a mark against the veracity of his stories, for many of the stories in his early memoirs are ridiculous, featuring a very fictive protagonist-antagonist relationship between Peter Mennis and an obese foil named Christian Axel von Roemeling who crashes his airship and thereafter becomes the butt of various pranks. Indeed, the simple fact that Dellschau purports to remember verbatim the words spoken so many years ago is itself suspect, like when he goes into some of Mennis’s speeches, such as when Mennis tells of a dream he has and it becomes a narrative about rescuing the corpulent Roemeling from the moon. And yet, when one wants to confirm that Dellschau wasn’t in Sonora in the 1850s, one finds a blind spot in his past. No one seems able to confirm his whereabouts between his arrival at Galveston in 1849 and his marriage in Richmond in 1861. But likewise, no one has been able to dig up any historical evidence of any of the principal characters ever having lived around Sonora at the time either. And even if this evidence were ever discovered, wouldn’t it be easier to believe that these were just some pranksters spouting off at a saloon, maybe something akin to the The Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus, that drinking club and parody of a fraternal organization called the Clampers, which was active in Sonora at the time and is known for its pranks and false mythology. And in the same way, isn’t it easier to believe that after the airship sighting hysteria, and during the decades of genuine aviation breakthroughs afterward, this old man undertook an ingenious art project, rather than that at twenty years of age, fresh in the country and with no experience doing anything other than carving meat, this young man was spirited away to California to serve as the draftsman for a secret society of balloonists with near-magical technology? Then again, I suppose, just because something is easier to believe doesn’t always make it true.

The Phantom Airships of 1890s America

September 04, 2018 by Nathaniel Lloyd

Mystery_airship_SFCall_Nov_22_1896 (1).jpg

In this edition, we return to the rich topic of historical UFO sightings. As I showed way back in my Brief History of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, sightings of unusual lights and what appeared to be craft in the skies stretch all the way back to the beginning of recorded history. In that edition, I chose to conclude my enumeration of strange sights in the sky without covering the 19th century, but these marvels did not cease in the 19th century only to resume when Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting set off the modern era of UFO reports. There is, however, good reason to draw a boundary between the celestial wonders of bygone epochs and sightings that occurred squarely within the era of aviation. Now, many would point to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s invention of and first successful flight in an airplane as the beginning of this age, but mankind had devised ways to fly more than a century before this, at the dawn of the age of ballooning, and a great many men had been working on improving the technology, moving from captive and free balloons to lighter-than-air aircraft that made use of buoyant gas for lift but also had some means of propulsion and control. However, the engineers of these aerostats, more commonly known today as dirigibles, or blimps or zeppelins, depending on the rigidity of their structure, and back then usually just called airships, never quite mastered the trick of powered, steerable flight before the Wright Brothers launched their heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk in 1903. It is therefore exceedingly strange that, a full seven years before Kitty Hawk, people all over the United States started to see advanced aircraft plying the skies overhead.

After numerous demonstrations of hot-air balloon flight, the first manned flight ever recorded occurred in France in 1783 in the Montgolfier brothers’ globe aérostatique. A decade later, in America, Jean P. Blanchard ascended to nearly one mile above the earth and crossed the Delaware in a balloon of his own, and thus the age of ballooning commenced. It continued through much of the 19th century, with few developments in the way of powered and steerable craft. These were hot-air balloons of the classic sort, although they varied in design, with buoyancy controlled by the release of hydrogen gas and the jettisoning of ballast, usually in the form of sand bags. Powered flight was not achieved until 1852, when Henri Giffard’s airship used a 3-horsepower steam engine to turn a propeller with three blades and drive his dirigible 17 miles or 27 kilometers from Paris to Élancourt. Such designs became more common, and improvements were made; for example, in 1884 Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs managed to return to their place of departure in their powered airship, La France. And dirigibles weren’t the only design being experimented with: Clément Ader designed more of a glider in the form of a go-kart with bat-like wings and a steam engine that never accomplished much more than sustained hops off the ground, and Otto Lilienthal is credited with several successful flights with what was essentially a hang glider modeled after the physical frame of a bird. Clearly, innovations in aviation were becoming more and more common, but most ended in failure, and some in catastrophe. Ader’s glider crashed over and over, and Lilienthal, buffeted by a stiff wind, actually broke his back and died. And perhaps some of the worst airship disasters happened in 1897. In that year, Swedish balloonist Saloman Andrée’s balloon expedition to the north pole ended with three men crashing onto the ice, where they remained stranded for months before dying. That same year in Berlin, Friedrich Hermann Wölfert demonstrated an airship powered by a Daimler motor, but sparks ignited the hydrogen, and he and his mechanic died in the resulting blaze.

You may have noticed that all of these flights were European attempts. The odd truth is that, after Jean Blanchard’s 1793 flight, which first ascended at Philadelphia, there are few reports of American aviation attempts. We have John Wise, who in 1835 made his first ascent in Philadelphia as well and would later use his balloon for postal delivery purposes, and then we have some instances of captive balloons being used for military reconnaissance during the Civil War. Then there was Charles Ritchel, the inventor of the funhouse mirror, who managed, in 1876, to fly a little one-man airship with a hand-cranked propeller at the Centennial Exposition, again in Philadelphia, and in the 1880s John Joseph Montgomery in California had some luck with gliders. But in the heyday of 1890s, no American stands out until Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institute, who in 1896 flew several unmanned Aerodromes, or steam-powered gliders. Langley’s drones, which he launched with a catapult, made some successful flights that year, and Langley would go on to be a significant rival to the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. But if, in 1896, Langley’s gliders were the only aircraft flying American skies, as history would lead us to believe, it is unaccountable that, from late fall 1896 to spring 1897, hundreds of reports describing sightings of powered, steerable airships zipping through the skies appeared in newspapers across the country.

The San Francisco Call, 19 Nov. 1896, via Chronicling America — The San Francisco *Call*, 19 Nov. 1896, via Chronicling America

It began on a cold and gloomy evening in Sacramento, the capital of California, located east of San Francisco in the middle of the state’s fertile Central Valley. On November 17, after a gray and squally day, hundreds of witnesses saw an erratic light flying over the city, like an arc lamp, according to the newspaper reports. It made no noise, this light, and it appeared to be suspended beneath a dark shape that many would liken to a cigar. Beyond this, reports varied: it either had a rudder and propellers, or it did not, and some said pilots could be seen operating its workings, turning something by working bicycle pedals. More than that, they could be heard! When they descended to near the buildings below, witnesses heard them shouting to “Lift her up quick!” and some streetcar workers heard music and a voice that said, "Well, we ought to get to San Francisco by tomorrow noon" as the craft flew away to the southwest, against the prevailing wind. For the next few days, hubbub circulated in the Sacramento Evening Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Call, but there was little sign of the airship until passengers on an Oakland cable car claimed to have seen an airship with a searchlight on November 21st. That’s when it went from isolated incidents to a full-blown flap, with thousands of sightings in one day across multiple cities: Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco, where it floated over landmark buildings and the bay and scared off seals with its arc light. This of course would mean an impossibly fast ship, numerous ships, or false reports. And at least some hoax or mistaken sightings seem likely, since after that day, appearances of the airship or ships seem to spread in many directions. On the 25th of November, it was seen in eleven different places, again around Sacramento and the Bay Area, but also north of the Bay Area in Napa and Petaluma, where some ingenious entrepreneurs charged admission to view the airship through their telescope, and even as far as Chico, 81 miles north of Sacramento. By the end of November, sightings became intermittent. On November 29th, a Bakersfield paper reported a sighting, but also included the opinion of an astronomy professor that it had only been a sighting of Mars or Venus, and on November 30th, residents of Los Angeles saw three lights overhead, but a local expert on bicycles assured the newspaper it was likely just university students pranking the city by attaching reflectors to a balloon. On the first of December, another airship appeared over Oakland, a hundred-foot-long cigar-shaped object with a triangular fishtail rudder, its surface aluminum that appeared darkened by weathering, zooming off at high speed toward San Francisco but seen again later the same day making the same maneuver in the same direction. On December 3rd, an airship was seen in no fewer than 6 locations, in San Francisco, in Vallejo, where it had been reported that residents had been searching the skies, disappointed at not seeing an airship, and in a scattering of smaller towns to the east: Davis, Dixon, Brown’s Valley and North Bloomfield, all indicating an easterly flight path, except that later in December, on the 17th, a ship was seen farther west, in Biggs, and then the last of the sightings in California, after the New Year, happened away south of there in Lodi. Still, if one were inclined to believe in a real airship or airships flying around California that autumn, one might discern a vague course from Sacramento to the Bay Area, and back and forth and around for a few jaunts before setting off eastward, toward the interior of the country.

The first indication that the airship sightings were not over and done with came in February 1897, when an airship was reported skulking around Hastings, Nebraska, some 1,200 miles from where one had last been seen. Some assumed this was the same airship as had been seen in California, and that it had made a miraculous flight over the Rocky Mountains, even though the original report seems to indicate that the airship had been seen around Hastings during the previous fall as well and just hadn’t been reported on by the paper. Meanwhile, another reporter around a hundred miles north in Norfolk remarked that “[i]t would be interesting to know just what brand of liquor the Hastings correspondent drinks, that enables him to see airships carrying powerful lights gyrating about through the atmosphere. It must be a remarkable brand of goods, and…we would be glad to try a few gallons of it.” https://history.nebraska.gov/sites/history.nebraska.gov/files/doc/publications/NH1979UFOs.pdf But despite aspersions cast by snarky newspapermen, sightings continued. On February 6th, south of Hastings in Inavale, six folks leaving a prayer meeting heard voices overhead and spied a 30 to 40-foot airship with a bright headlamp and six smaller running lights. In fact, during this flap, reported sightings spider webbed out in all directions from Hastings, appearing, clockwise, in York, McCool Junction, Lincoln, McCook, Big Springs, and North Platte, where some trouble reportedly caused the ship to descend in a shower of sparks. By the 16th of that month, a ship arrived over Omaha, where a girl saw it and ran into a party being held at 26th and H, encouraging everyone to come out and have a look at the “funny thing in the sky,” leading to a few dozen more witnesses seeing the object aloft around 400 to 500 feet in the air. These airships, if real, seem to have been grounded for a while after that, but in April they returned in force, it seemed, with reports in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and all the way East to New York and way down south in Texas. Researchers have tracked down more than 150 sightings in around 20 states, far more than I could possibly survey in this podcast episode without it becoming repetitive and boring. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at a few of these encounters in April. The Chicago Tribune started their coverage by claiming that hundreds had seen a ship in Omaha on the 6th of April and continued by reporting on the 10th that hundreds had spotted a winged airship above their own windy city. The Chicago Herald thereafter printed the claims of one William McCann, who along with three others said he had seen and photographed an airship over Rogers Park. The Herald printed an illustration from a wood carving of McCann’s photo, which we still have today for examination. It is unfortunate that newspapers could not at the time print photographs, otherwise we might actually have a blurry pic of a phantom airship. As it turned out, however, the photograph itself has been lost, if it ever actually existed. We do, though, have reports that the plates of the photo were given an acid test and determined to be genuine before the Herald printed its illustration. But the Tribune, on the other hand, pronounced the photo to be a fraud on April 12th, citing the cryptic proof that it displayed “too much scope of lens,” whatever that means.

The Chicago Times-Herald of 12 April 1897 with the illustration of McCann's photo, via University of Florida

And while Chicago newspapermen squabbled, the airships seemed to float inexorably onward, appearing in both Jefferson, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, on April 15th, although these two couldn’t possibly be the same airships, even disregarding the fact that an aircraft travelling 450 miles in a day at that time would have been ludicrous, because the airship in Jefferson reportedly crashed into the earth. Town residents gathered at the huge smoking crater it had left and even sent someone down to investigate. The same issue of the Jefferson Bee that reported this reported multiple other airship crashes in Greene County. Curiously, just as the airship mania was reaching its highest elevation in the Midwest and reports of airships falling to the earth were becoming more popular, a spate of sightings took off in Texas, many of these reporting landings and crashes as well. On April 20th, the Galveston Daily News gave a highly detailed report of a ship seen in Uvalde, Texas, by Sheriff H. W. Baylor. A bright light and the sound of voices drew him out to an alley behind his house, where he found an airship with wings and fins. A crew of three men greeted him, asking for water and explaining they were on a trial run with their airship. One man called himself Wilson, claiming to be from Goshen, New York, and discovering that Baylor was a sheriff, asked after a Captain C. C. Akers, who used to be the sheriff of Zavalla County. Wilson claimed to have met Akers in Ft. Worth in 1877. Baylor told him Akers was then at Eagle Pass working for the customs service, and Wilson asked him to say hello from him. He and the other pilots then took water from Baylor's yard and flew away north. This uncommonly detailed story even had a corroborating witness in county clerk Henry J. Bowles, who apparently saw the ship leave Baylor's alley, and other articles appear to have confirmed with C. C. Akers that he had indeed made the acquaintance of someone named Wilson, although that is a common name. But the seeming credibility of the witnesses—a sheriff and a county clerk—has led many to give these reports credence.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent reliability of witnesses in these matters, it should be remembered that the true source of these accounts are the newspapers that reported them. If you are curious about just how scrupulous newspaper editors were when it came to publishing fraudulent stories to entertain their readers and sell more papers, just go and listen to my 10th episode, Joseph Mulhatton, the Liar Laureate of the World. Hoaxes appeared frequently in papers during these years, and often the reliable witnesses they named had come right out of the imaginations of the fraudsters who wrote them. And this was the dawn of Yellow Journalism as well, when sensationalist rhetoric often only loosely connected to facts dominated newsprint. Much Yellow Journalism centered specifically on the question of Cuba, which at the time was still a colony of Spain but had seen a revolutionary struggle for some years. As many Americans wanted to see the Spanish ousted, big newspapermen like Pulitzer and Hearst published a lot of stories depicting the Spanish colonial powers as villains and the revolutionaries as heroes, and they didn’t let a little thing like accuracy or truth get in the way of a good story. And to cement the very real connection between the airship flaps and the age of Yellow Journalism, not long after the sightings in California began, a well-known attorney named W. H. H. Hart was quoted in a paper as claiming that he represented the phantom airship’s inventor, and that the vessel had been built for the sole purpose of flying to Cuba and bombing the Spanish in Havana. Similarly, the San Francisco Examiner claimed to have it on strong authority that the airship was called the Thunderbird and was bound for Cuba with the mission of bombarding General Weyler, the island’s Spanish governor, with eggs.

The San Francisco Call, 29 Nov. 1896, clearly engaging in Yellow Journalism, via Chronicling America — The San Francisco *Call*, 29 Nov. 1896, clearly engaging in Yellow Journalism, via Chronicling America

With the question of the reliability of newspaper reports hanging over this entire affair, we now turn to one of the most fanciful explanations of these phantom airship sightings: that they were really extra-terrestrial spacecraft! There are in fact some newspaper reports that indicate the object in the sky may have come from away across the ocean, which would make it extremely unlikely that these were the maiden flights of experimental aircraft. On September 20th, 1896, a Professor Swift spied a light of the magnitude of Venus over the Pacific Ocean and sent a telegram to a Professor Perrins at Lick Observatory, wondering if he had discovered a new comet. And on October 22nd, none other than the mayor of San Francisco, Adolph Sutro, reported that several people had seen a light flying eastward about 500 feet above the surface of the Pacific, and that it emitted an electrical glow. But these reports do little more than indicate that Mars and Venus and meteors and comets might have been frequently mistaken for flying lights. Some reports of crashed airships in Iowa certainly added to this hysteria. In fact, the aforementioned man who climbed down into the crater in Jefferson carried a Volapük dictionary with him. Volapük, meaning “world language,” was a constructed international language, like the subsequently more common Esperanto. One can only imagine who the intrepid investigator thought he might encounter at the bottom of that crater to bring that with him. And of course, one does not need to wonder, as newspaper reports of other crash sites in Iowa, such as one at Churdan, described encounters with extra-terrestrial creatures! And on an empty road outside Springfield, Missouri, one W. M. Hopkins, a travelling salesman, saw a landed airship while driving his wagon, and outside of it, two nude aliens that he found beautiful indeed. He kissed their hands and boarded their craft when invited, and when it began to ascend, he escaped abduction only by leaping off! And late in April, we get a story out of LeRoy, Kansas, from a farmer named Alexander Hamilton, who with his son and a farmhand saw a 300-foot ship with a carriage-like construct beneath it, crewed by an odd looking family—man, woman and children. This airship actually lowered a rope and carried away a struggling calf. Hamilton and the others gave chase, but lost the ship. Later, another farmer named Lank Thomas found the calf’s remains, which consisted only of skin, legs, and a head. This would appear to be an early report of cattle mutilation, complete with reliable officials swearing to its veracity, as eleven men, including the postmaster, the sheriff, and the justice of the peace swore an affidavit. But then, all of these purported facts were reported in a newspaper, and if that isn’t already suspect enough for you, there’s the fact that the farmer Hamilton who reported the event and provided the affidavit was a known member of a local liar’s club.

Perhaps the longest-lived of these reports came out of Texas. In the Dallas Morning News of April 19th, 1897, a column attributed to a correspondent named Haydon with the headline “A Windmill Demolishes It” told a wild tale of an airship with some mechanical malfunction flying low over Aurora, Texas. It struck a windmill on the land of one Judge Proctor and exploded, spreading debris over acres of land. Those first on the scene, found only one pilot, horribly injured from the explosion, but still apparently whole enough for everyone to plainly see he was not of this earth. In fact, according to Haydon, a signal corpsman named T. J. Weems, given as an authority on astronomy, expressed the opinion that the pilot must have been a Martian. And to further excite speculation, Haydon reported that the pilot had some papers on his person, miraculously intact after the explosion that had so disfigured his body, and that they were inscribed with strange hieroglyphics. Finally, he claimed the ship was composed of some unknown metal, though he cites no expert opinion on this detail. Oddly, the piece ends with the tidbit that they would be giving this otherworldly creature a standard, Christian funeral. The simple fact that this news did not make many waves at the time tells us that those who read it probably thought it was one of the tall tales or hoaxes common in newspapers back then, which most people could easily discern were not meant to be taken seriously. Not until UFOlogists in the early 1970s looked into it did it really become a legend. MUFON investigators descended on Aurora and walked the land with metal detectors, hoping to turn up some of that alien metal. Some iron alloy that seemed to not display the magnetic properties one might expect actually was found, but this ended up being an iron-zinc roofing shingle. Undeterred, they scoured the local cemetery for the unmarked grave of the alien and, indeed, found a site with a marker that looked like it depicted an airship. Authorities, however, refused to let them go digging up graves, and when the marker ended up stolen, likely by one of the UFOlogists themselves, they cried conspiracy! But perhaps the real conspiracy had taken place back in 1897, for recent historical research indicates that Haydon, the author of the article, had an agenda. It seems that the town of Aurora had recently been devastated by agricultural problems, fires, a failed railroad, and so-called “spotted fever,” or cerebro-spinal meningitis, which had taken Haydon’s wife and sons. It has been suggested that Haydon may have penned the hoax in an effort to promote his dying town.

San Francisco Call article of 23 Nov. 1896 mentioning the inventor and his attorney, Collins, via Chronicling America — San Francisco *Call* article of 23 Nov. 1896 mentioning the inventor and his attorney, Collins, via Chronicling America

Even if one wanted to believe that the flying objects were real, isn’t there a simpler and far more believable explanation than that little green men were flying them? Why not normal, earthling men? After all, as I discussed earlier, it’s not like no one was working on creating flying machines. So the question then becomes, who were the inventors of these aircraft? Right from the very start of the California flap, there are plenty of candidates offered up by the newspapers covering the story. In the first article to report an airship, the Sacramento Evening Bee, by way of explanation for the outlandish sighting, claimed a New York man had built an airship and would be flying to California in it, though they offered no further details. And the LA Times, almost in the same breath as it insisted that the ships were all mistaken sightings of Mars and Venus then claimed that the ship’s inventor was a man from Los Angeles. And, well before the attorney Hart had made his claims about the ship’s mission to Cuba, another prominent lawyer, George D. Collins, claimed to represent the inventor of the ship that had been seen. The inventor’s name was E. H. Benjamin, Collins said, and after 7 years of work, bankrolled by a mysterious company and using parts manufactured on the east coast, he had been successful and had already made several flights. According to a New York Herald article that appeared during the April flap the following year, the ship described by Collins was 150 feet long, with two wings, and would fly eastward next, which would tend to explain the path of the sightings. On April 10th, the Herald claimed one Max Harrhar, secretary of the Chicago Aeronautical Association, claimed to be expecting a powered, steerable airship with a crew of three out of San Francsico, on its way to D. C. For full info, Harrhar directed inquirers to Octave Chanute, the well-known President of his association, who he indicated was the wealthy bankroller of the venture. Then on the 13th, the same paper reported on the authority of one Oscar R. Booth, an airship inventor from Chicago, that the famous airship making the rounds belonged to one Charles Clinton of Dodd City, Kansas. The Dallas Morning News of April 6th named a G. M. Padgitt of Springfield, Missouri, as an inventor engaged in balloon flights, and the Chicago Tribune of April 12th had the inventor’s name as A. C. Clinton of Omaha. Later that month, though, they revealed that A. C. Clinton was just a pseudonym of Clinton A. Case; this they had from one Wakefield, the Secretary of the Omaha Exposition, where Case had requested 87,000 Square feet for a landing place. Another suspect out of Omaha was one Alva J. Grover, who had reportedly shown people plans for a powered, steerable airship, and yet another was a country tinkerer named John O. Preast, who it was said had covered the walls of his home with drawings of his ships. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015679/1897-04-01/ed-1/seq-7/ The list goes on… the St. Louis Post Dispatch on April 25th reported an airship like a headless, tailless fish, with propellers and wings and a 9-foot-long passenger car. It landed for repairs, and its pilot, a Professor Charles Davidson, claimed to have left Sacramento a month earlier. And on May 7th, the Chicago Tribune gave a similarly detailed description of an airship that, according to a New York Times article describing the same craft, was 40 feet long, with propellers, attached to a bicycle for take-off. Its inventor was reported as Professor Arthur W. Barnard of Nashville, and he claimed he had demonstrated his airship at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition to general amazement but apparently little news coverage.

Not all candidates for inventing the airship were named by newspapers during the flap. For example, researcher Micah Hanks dug up a patent filed in April 1896 by one Charles Abbott Smith of San Francisco, an inventor of some repute who had previously sold some patents for tools useful to shoemakers farmers, and builders. In a San Francisco Call article some 9 months before the California flap, Smith talks about his proposed airship, and mention is made that the U. S. government may have been offering a $100,000 for the invention of working airship. This may be relevant to the story of another popular contender for our airship inventor. John Worrell Keely was a Philadelphian who, inspired by the vibrations of a tuning fork, began experimentation to determine how vibrations might allow him to tap into the power of luminiferous ether, the medium by which light was propagated and the stuff that many believed filled all empty space. By 1872, he claimed a breakthrough and convinced some wealthy capitalists to bankroll his motor company, for soon he would build an engine using his proprietary technology. In 1874, he demonstrated his etheric generator, a device that ran on the vapor produced by ordinary tap water, and yet produced enough energy to break iron bars and drive bullets into wood. Whenever his investors wanted progress, he always had a new device to demonstrate in a dramatic fashion, showing how musical tones he played on his flute or harmonica could through vibration activate etheric energy and thereby operate the machines he showed them, such as the “hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo-engine.” Some, however, suggested the music was only a signal to hidden accomplices, indicating when to operate the machinery. Nevertheless, his career was a long one. In 1884, he demonstrated a “vaporic gun” for the government at Sandy Hook, impressing some and not impressing others, who complained that a “healthy donkey could kick harder than the projectile struck.” Then in 1896, perhaps trying to win that hundred grand offered by the government, he gave a demonstration that showed revolving copper spheres and claimed it showed his manipulation of “polar-depolar force,” further explaining that “[g]ravity is nothing more than a concordant attractive sympathetic stream flowing towards the neutral center of the earth,” all of which to say that he would soon be able to control gravity and therefore raise heavy airships into the sky. While many would like to believe that it was his astounding science that raised the airships of that year, the truth is there is no evidence that he ever accomplished this or any of his other plans. After his death, skeptics raided his lab, and no one could ever make his devices work as he had in demonstrations. So he is remembered today as one of history’s greatest frauds.

John Worrell Keely, via Lock Haven University

While it is tempting to believe some inventor really made these airships, considering all the many inventors and true balloonists diligently working in those years to perfect a powered, steerable airship capable of the kind of flights reported in 1896 and ’97, the simple fact that these ships were not demonstrated to great fanfare in public exhibitions, as nearly every major flight before them had been, tends to cast doubt on the idea of them being real at all. The mysterious Wilson who supposedly piloted a ship around Texas claimed this was because no patent had been filed yet, so they didn’t want their invention stolen, but this strains credulity as well. What inventor would wait until well after the successful completion and flight test of their airship to file a patent? And even if one were to accept this explanation, there remains the final question of why, after the April 1897 flap, the airships were never seen again. Surely they had proven viable! Why would no one patent them and go public at that point? So then we are left with the theory that these sightings were artifacts of Yellow Journalism, a media hoax. Some have pointed out that the Midwest sightings clearly travel eastward along the path of the telegraph lines, suggesting that as one newspaper perpetrated its hoax, the next received word of it by telegraph and perpetuated it. But there are problems with this theory as well. Even in the era of Yellow Journalism, a newspaper’s reputation could be damaged by engaging in outright fraud, especially in such an extended way. These were legitimate news sources, not supermarket tabloids like we have today, and they were often in direct competition with other papers that would jump at the chance to prove their rivals were spreading falsehoods. Moreover, when these papers did print outrageous hoaxes, like those written by Mulhatton, they were usually standalone stories, often so absurd that their readers could easily determine what was news and what was satire meant only for entertainment. These sightings, however, were reported on over and over again, like real news, and in between eyewitness reports, the correspondents often injected their vocal skepticism, such as in the San Francisco Examiner of December 5th, 1896: “Fake Journalism has a good deal to answer for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure myth.”

Perhaps it is impossible now to make heads or tails of this mess. It seems like people must have seen something, at least in Sacramento, at the beginning of things. If there truly were no ships in the sky and never had been, how did this hysteria ever get started? It’s possible that some combination of all the various theories offers the best explanation. Maybe there were real sightings at first, and maybe some or all of those had been mistakes, confusing Venus, which was bright that year, or a big box kite, as has been put forth as an explanation for the airship sightings. Then perhaps, as newspapers wanting to boost sales wrote up these reports, they embellished them, added details or increased the number of witnesses. After that, it was spread by telegraph to other locales, which then caused people there to look for airships in the skies and to make further mistaken sightings or even to perpetrate hoax sightings. Some newspaper articles even seem to playfully toe the line between professional skepticism and engagement in the hysteria. For example, in the April 14th 1897 New York Herald, a reporter expresses frustration over the unreliability of airship news but then goes on to report that a steam-powered ship called the Pegasus had been flying around for the last month. And in May, just at the tail end of the final flap, the Houston Daily Post published a piece about a reporter at a train station being told by a train official to ask a certain stranger about airships, for the official had heard that the man had something to do with them. Upon inquiring into it, the stranger, a Mr. Dodson from Texas, scoffed, “My, my, has that old stale April fool story ever received any serious consideration here? ...Why, that was a clean-cut fake from the start…a fake pure and simple, started by some enterprising reporter like yourself, and rolled along by all other scribes.” So there we have it, yes? An epic April fool’s joke. That could account at least for the massive spate of sightings that April, and it recasts some details as decidedly humorous, such as the Herald's April 10th article citing a Max Harrhar, which in retrospect sounds like it's quoting someone named "Utmost Laughter." But this Mr. Dodson of the Houston Daily Post article wasn’t quite finished. “I have the only airship which has ever been successfully invented,” he claimed mildly and went on to explain that he compressed air was the trick, for the eagle, he expounded, flies without flapping its wings simply by holding its breath. It was as easy as that. In order to float, he said, one only has to be full of hot air.

A contemporary cartoon and poem makes of the airship sightings a metaphor, via Chronicling America

The Memorable Arrest of Martin Guerre

August 21, 2018 by Nathaniel Lloyd

Return+of+Martin+Guerre+from+Dumas+Joanne+of+Naples cover.jpg

In this edition, in an effort to cite precedent supporting my pet theory about the Campden Wonder case—namely that the William Harrison who returned to his wife after an absence of two years may not have actually been the real Steward of Lady Campden—I share the story of the most famous case of imposture ever recorded. And it is a true precedent, for it did precede the events of the Campden Wonder by nearly a hundred years. For its true beginning, however, we must look back more than a century and off across the Channel, more than 600 miles, or 1000 kilometers south of Chipping Campden, to a little peasant village in the very south of France, among the foothills of the Pyrenees. The village of Artigat, 32 miles or 51 kilometers south of that larger burg of the Languedoc, Toulouse, was situated on the Lèze River, which to an American ear sounds delightfully like a lazy river. As this might suggest, it was a sleepy village in the mid-16th century, with some 60 to 70 families in the surrounding area, and none paid manorial dues to a seigneur, for no feudal lords held lands in the area. Thus, the peasants of Artigat owned their own lands, holding their titles in allodium by occupying and defending them and, of course, cultivating them. They grew millet, oats, wheat, and grapes, raised sheep, cows, and goats, and forged a modest legacy from the land, such that successful peasant families passed their estates on to heirs much like their far wealthier seigneurial counterparts. And this facet of the culture would have great bearing on the famous case we shall be focusing on, as would their popular conception of marriage, which, with the rise of Protestantism dividing the community, was then much debated in that corner of France, where the idea of “clandestine,” or secret and common law marriage, had been common but was then being challenged. And in this quiet Languedoc hamlet, where the biggest quarrels were over matters of Catholic orthodoxy and doctrinal dispute, a scandal would emerge from family discord, involving accusations of desertion, betrayal, and imposture. But more than any of this, it would cause some to call into question prevailing assumptions about guilt and innocence and the very nature of identity.

The Deguerre family were peasant Basques with ancestral lands at Hendaye, near the Bay of Biscay, one branch of which family ended up settling 162 miles or 260 kilometers away to the east in Artigat and assimilating, learning to express themselves in the Occitan language of the Languedoc and changing their name to the more French Guerre. Two brothers, Sanxi and Pierre, headed the Guerre family in Artigat, and in 1538, in an effort not only to further the family’s assimilation but also to make a fruitful bond with another affluent peasant family, the de Rols, Sanxi Guerre arranged a marriage between his son Martin and their daughter, Bertrande. Martin was 14 at the time, and Bertrande may have been as young as nine or ten. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two children failed to immediately consummate their marriage, despite their families’ encouragement. Nor did they succeed, it seems, for years afterward, even after they reached ages of sexual maturity, which caused the families to believe that young Martin Guerre, despite his apparent vigor in playing at swords and acrobatics with the other village boys, was impotent, perhaps because a spell had been cast on him. And to undo the charms of whatever jealous sorceress had cursed them, it would take the charms of a very different kind of sorceress, a wise woman versed in the ways of magic but who remained true to god and church. They sought the aid of several such women, and eventually, eight years into their failed marriage, one mysterious old enchantress told them how to defeat the spell they were under. They had village priests say several masses for them and administer the eucharist, and then they ate special cakes that the wise woman said would stoke their passions. One wonders just what was in those cakes, for sure enough, the couple thereafter consummated their union, and Bertrande soon became with child. She bore Martin a son, another heir to the Guerre family lands, named Sanxi after Martin’s father. For a time, Martin must have had the approval of his father, but in 1548, at 24 years old, Martin lost any goodwill he might have earned with the birth of his child when he allegedly stole some grain from the family. Rather than face the wrath of his father, he left Artigat, abandoning not only his heritage but his wife and infant son as well.

Bertrande’s position in the family and the village was much reduced in the absence of her husband. There was a place in the village society for a wife and a place for a widow, but she found herself suddenly neither, and her life remained in a limbo. After some years, Martin’s parents passed away, but not before they forgave their absent son and named him heir to the family lands in both Artigat and Hendaye. But in Martin’s absence, the uncle, Pierre, took control of the family lands and guardianship of Martin’s sisters. Himself a widower, Pierre Guerre remarried to none other than Bertrande’s widowed mother, and so she found herself living again with her mother, but now also with her missing husband’s family. She had gone from being the wife of the family’s heir with a household all her own, to little more than a houseguest and a burden, a deserted woman much whispered about in the village. And this was her life during the eight years that her husband was gone. Then one day in 1556, news reached Artigat that a man claiming to be Martin Guerre had checked in to a hostel in a neighboring village. When the hosteller brought up the wife and child he had left behind, this Martin Guerre, it was said, had wept. Martin’s sisters were the first to go see him at the hostel, and they came back with their verdict, telling Bertrande that it was indeed their brother Martin. So Bertrande also made haste to see him, but she shrank from this bearded stranger who seemed heavier than her Martin. When he spoke to her with love, however, and proved himself with knowledge of their shared experiences and conversations and other specifics, she relented and embraced him. He had been away in Spain fighting in King Henri II’s war against the Habsburgs, but he had come back for her and their son, and to reclaim his birthright. Bertrande took him home to Artigat, and while some whispered that he was not Martin Guerre, he further proved himself by recognizing villagers he had known long ago, calling to them by name, and reminding them of things they had done together a decade earlier. Certainly his appearance had changed, but there was enough of a likeness that any differences could be ascribed to his eight-year absence and the hard years he had spent at war. While some harbored their suspicions, Martin convinced the only people who mattered: his sisters, his uncle and the administrator of his family’s property, Pierre, and his wife, Bertrande, who took him eventually into her bed. And this was the greatest of proofs, for most believed that no wife could be so deceived that she did not recognize the touch of her true husband.

And happy marriage seemed to come easily with the returned Martin Guerre. Within a few years, Bertrande had borne Martin two more children, daughters. Sadly, only one survived, little Bernarde, but it did go to prove that whatever marital difficulties they’d had a decade earlier were gone. And Martin threw himself not only into the role of husband and father but also into that of heir and head of the family, taking his father’s house for himself and taking back guardianship of his sisters from his uncle, Pierre. Moreover, he moved to make his family’s business more mercantile, selling the grains they grew, the wool they harvested, and the wine they made. Beyond this, he looked to capitalize on the family’s substantial property holdings, and it is this that eventually brought him to loggerheads with his uncle, who stood aghast at his nephew’s attempts to sell their ancestral lands. Eventually, suspecting that Pierre was not being entirely forthcoming with the profits and holdings of the family, Martin sued his uncle. It was then, in the first months of 1559, that Pierre began to suspect this Martin Guerre to be an impostor. He looked at Martin, and the difference in his physical frame from the boy he remembered stood out. He looked at Martin’s boy, Sanxi, and saw little resemblance there. How is it, he asked, that this pseudo-Martin no longer remembered certain phrases in the Basque language of his youth? He persuaded his wife, Bertrande’s mother, of the imposture, and soon all of Bertrande’s family was convinced that she shared her bed with a stranger. From them, the scandal spread, and the village became divided as to the identity of Martin Guerre. The shoemaker said Martin’s feet had shrunk, and others in the village suggested he had become shorter, stockier, his complexion lighter. They said that the real Martin’s nose had been flat and his bottom lip protruding, unlike this new Martin, and where, they asked, was the scar they remembered on Martin’s eyebrow? In response, Bertrande insisted, “He is Martin Guerre my husband or else some devil in his skin. I know him well. If anyone is so mad as to say the contrary, I’ll make him die.” And she is not alone in resorting to violence, for Pierre spoke with friends about helping him pay a cutthroat to murder his supposed nephew, and when that failed, he and Bertrande’s own brothers accosted him and beat him with a truncheon. Seeing her family thus assaulting her husband, Bertrande forced herself between them, shielding her Martin with her own body, so that if her brothers and Pierre wanted to club Martin, they would have to strike her as well.

A depiction of criminal proceedings in which, as with Guerre's trial, the public was very involved, via Kommersant

In the autumn of that year, as their quarrel raged on, a soldier passed through Artigat and after hearing of the scandal and seeing Martin Guerre, he announced that the man in question was a fraud, for he knew the real Martin Guerre, had met him in Flanders after the Siege of Saint-Quentin, where the real Martin Guerre had lost his leg and had it replaced by a wooden peg. As this Martin Guerre clearly had both legs, the soldier reasoned, he must be an impostor! Close on the heels of this pronouncement, Martin Guerre was arrested on arson charges, accused of having burned down a building on a farm west of the village, a charge likely orchestrated by Pierre himself as the complaint included allegations that he was engaging in adultery by sharing Bertrande’s marriage bed. The charges were eventually dropped, but during his imprisonment in Toulouse, Bertrande was forced to move back under the roof of her mother and Pierre Guerre, where they began to coerce her to bring charges of her own against Martin. At first she refused, traveling to Toulouse to visit Martin and complaining about the family’s bullying of her, but eventually, she had no choice. Martin came home from the jail at Toulouse, enjoyed one peaceful evening with Bertrande, and in the morning faced Pierre and his brothers-in-law, all of them bearing weapons. They took him away to stand trial at Rieux on charges Pierre had made in Bertrande’s name. Without Martin, she and the children must live in Pierre’s house, and if she refused to press these charges against Martin, Pierre told her he would throw her out into the street.

So long as Bertrande would endorse the charges, Pierre Guerre was confident in the case he had built, for in addition to the various villagers willing to testify to the differences they perceived in Martin, he now had a suspect. While Martin had languished in Toulouse under the trumped-up arson charges, he had learned some things of interest. Apparently, during the course of some travels Martin had made in some villages to the northwest, an innkeeper had recognized him as one Arnaud du Tilh, and Martin had hushed him and asked him to keep his silence, explaining that Martin Guerre was dead and had given him his goods. Likewise another man had recognized him during the course of his travels, calling him Pansette, which was an alias of the same man, Arnaud du Tilh, and Martin had even given this man some handkerchiefs to pass on as a gift to Arnaud du Tilh’s brother. Arnaud du Tilh was a young man from Sajas, 27 miles or 43 kilometers northwest of Artigat. He had the nickname Pansette, meaning “the belly,” perhaps for his thickset physique or perhaps for his appetites, for he was known to be an enthusiastic drinker and philanderer. A foulmouthed youth, he was known to gamble and to steal, and he was so quick-witted and cunning that he gained the unusual reputation of wielding some kind of sorcery in his underhanded dealings. This Arnaud du Tilh, alias Pansette, had disappeared from village life to serve in the war, just as Martin Guerre said he had done. Was it possible that this rogue had assumed Martin Guerre’s identity? He certainly had good reason to do so. Du Tilh was heir to his own family properties in Sajas, but the Guerre inheritance would have dwarfed it. And the draw of taking the by all accounts beautiful Bertrande to wife should not be overlooked. But how had he managed to learn so much about Artigat and Martin’s life there? Had he met the true Martin Guerre during the course of his travels in service of France? Had he been coached by accomplices? Or were the resurgent rumors about him true? Was he some sort of warlock, a dark sorcerer leveraging the powers of the devil to usurp another man’s life?

Martin Guerre’s very identity stood trial in Rieux, 15 miles or 24 kilometers northwest of Artigat. The court called on one hundred and fifty witnesses to testify, and about 60 of them refused to indicate one way or the other whether they believed the defendant was the true Martin Guerre. The rest were relatively evenly split. Some who had known Martin before his departure and some who had known Arnaud du Tilh, including Pansette’s own uncle, testified that the defendant was not Guerre or that he was du Tilh. But for every witness to swear to his differences from Martin, there was a witness to swear to their likenesses: Martin had warts on one hand and a scar on his forehead, as did the defendant, and Martin had extra teeth like those that could be seen in the defendant’s mouth. Just as Arnaud du Tilh’s uncle swore the defendant was his nephew, Martin Guerre’s sisters swore he was their brother. And perhaps the most important witness, Bertrande, refused to swear that the defendant was not her husband. Indeed, so confident was the defendant that his wife was being suborned into bringing false charges against him that he told the judge he would gladly accept death if his wife were to say he was not who he said he was. Considering her silence, the judges agreed to remove her from Pierre’s house in order to prevent any further coercion. Indeed, it seemed that the defendant had the court on his side. He confidently confronted each of the witnesses against him with convincing rebuttals, and he proved himself time and time again by calling up specific details from Martin’s life that matched perfectly with testimony taken separately from other witnesses, even validating intimate goings on that Bertrande had shared with the court in confidence. However, there was still much to doubt. Despite the defendant’s brilliant performance, evidence seemed equal on both sides. No handwriting could be compared, for apparently neither Guerre nor du Tilh could write before their departures and so had left behind no samples of their writing. Likewise, familial likeness offered little confirmation, for while the defendant did indeed resemble Martin Guerre’s sisters, he bore little resemblance to Guerre’s son, Sanxi. In the end, perhaps to play it safe or simply to pass the problem on to the court at Toulouse where the defendant would certainly appeal, they found him guilty.

And appeal he did. His second trial began with the defendant confronting his accusers, Bertrande and Pierre Guerre. So convincing were the defendant’s claims that his wife had been coerced by his uncle to bring the charges against him that the court had all three of them imprisoned until they sorted the matter out, for if the defendant really was Martin Guerre, then Pierre and Bertrande could be found guilty of calumny, and if he were not, then Bertrande might be found guilty of fraud as well if she were the man’s accomplice. Neither boded well for the woman at the center of the trial, so Bertrande chose every word carefully, threading the needle between being the innocent wife defrauded by an impostor husband and being the innocent wife compelled to perjury by the villainous uncle. So the trial proceeded much as before, with confident testimonies on both sides, but this time the judges were far more moved by the defendant’s memory of his former life. After questioning Bertrande and others, they attempted time and again to catch him out with any inconsistency, but they failed. According to Jean de Coras, the reporter at the court who would go on to make the case famous with his popular pamphlet about the case, Arrest Memorable, “His remarks sustained at length and containing so many true signs, gave great occasion to the judges to be persuaded of [his] innocence.” But as they prepared to deliver their verdict, a mysterious man came limping up to the courthouse, his wooden peg leg knocking the floor with every step. The proceedings of the trial must be halted, he declared, for he had a vital revelation pertaining to the hearing. The defendant could not possibly be who he said he was, for this peg-legged man was himself the real Martin Guerre.

The first depiction of the case, from Alle de Wercken by Jacob Cats, incorrectly portraying the couple as being far wealthier than peasants, via Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 87 — The first depiction of the case, from *Alle de Wercken* by Jacob Cats, incorrectly portraying the couple as being far wealthier than peasants, via Natalie Zemon Davis's *The Return of Martin Guerre*, p. 87

The defendant confronted this last-minute witness with a vengeance, calling him a rascal, a newcomer, an evildoer, insisting he was a ringer on Pierre Guerre’s payroll. And indeed, when questioned about his early life as the court had questioned the defendant, this peg-legged stranger could not remember nearly as many details. When it was time to haul Pierre out of his cell to identify this new claimant to Martin’s identity, they arranged a line-up, with several others dressed the same. Pierre easily picked the peg-legged man out of the line-up, but this may not have been much of a feat unless all the others had wooden legs as well, for remember that the travelling soldier had already claimed the real Martin Guerre had lost his leg. What was harder to dismiss were the sisters’ reactions to the man, for each of them, individually, considering the two men side by side, changed their minds and exclaimed that surely this new man with the peg leg was their real brother and the other had deceived them. So it was, as well, for Bertrande, who trembled and wept upon seeing this new arrival and immediately embraced him, pleading innocence for being duped by the impostor, blaming his sisters who had accepted his impersonator and convinced her to do the same. With the tide so clearly turning against the defendant, the judges confronted him, asking how he had summoned the devil that had taught him so much about Martin’s life and about the people of Artigat. He only blanched, for once at a loss for words. For a time he continued to insist he was Martin, but eventually, he confessed to being Arnaud du Tilh, aka Pansette. He had used no sorcery in his imposture, and despite rumors, he had never met Martin in the war, for Martin Guerre had ended up in the Castilian city of Burgos after his departure from Artigat, serving as a lackey in a bishop’s palace, and during the war he had served in an opposing army. Rather, Arnaud had been mistaken in Picardy for Martin Guerre by men who became his accomplices in the imposture, and with their coaching, he had prepared for years to play the part of Martin Guerre. Du Tilh’s crime was considered all the more serious for involving not only adultery but also the theft of an inheritance. The judges sentenced him to death, but not before he made a public apology. In white shirtsleeves, with no hat, he carried a torch through the village of Artigat barefoot, from the church to Martin Guerre’s house, where he would be executed. Among his final words was an entreaty to Martin Guerre himself, for the returned man had dealt most harshly with Bertrande in court, treating her like a disloyal harlot and not taking any measure of responsibility for the situation, even though it was he who had made the entire affair possible by abandoning her in the first place. The self-confessed Arnaud du Tilh begged the newly returned Martin Guerre to treat his wife with kindness and love, for none of this, he said, was her fault, and she was a virtuous, honorable, loyal woman. Then he was hanged in front of them, and in order to more thoroughly erase the memory of this man the village deemed to be so contemptible, his corpse was burned.

So, you may think, where is the mystery here? Mystery there may have been at the time, but surely all of this was neatly resolved with Arnaud du Tilh’s confession. Yet as we have seen time and time again, nagging questions remain, the first being the enigma of Bertrande de Rols. Was this woman a victim of imposture or a willing accomplice? Surely this Arnaud du Tilh could not have fooled her when it came to matters of the utmost intimacy. And certainly he could not have amassed such a great wealth of knowledge based on the coaching he claims to have received from a couple of village acquaintances and must have been further coached by Bertrande herself. But there is a further ambiguity here: namely the question of whether or not the judges in Toulouse made the right verdict, whether justice was served, whether or not the defendant really was Arnaud du Tilh or whether he was whom he had all along claimed to be. As already mentioned, testimony and proofs were about equal for and against him, and he proved himself far better at recalling the details of his life than did the peg-legged man. While his likeness to Martin’s sisters could not be denied, there was the fact that the son, Sanxi, did not resemble him, but recall Martin Guerre’s marital difficulties, their conspicuous childlessness and rumors of his impotence. To a modern observer, the superstitious remedy of masses and special cakes seems like it would have been entirely ineffective, so the fact that Bertrande immediately became pregnant might suggest that the boy Sanxi wasn’t even Martin’s after all, which would clearly explain his lack of resemblance. Why, then, would Martin’s sisters suddenly decide the peg-legged man was the real Martin? On the other side of that same coin, one might just as well ask why they thought Arnaud du Tilh was Martin. But Bertrande had good reason to suddenly change her loyalties. She was in a very precarious position, after all, and she would have had to think not only about herself, but her children as well. When the sisters began to change their story and agree with Pierre that the peg-legged man was the real Martin, she may have seen the writing on the wall. Believing her husband’s cause to be lost, she may have made a hard decision to save herself. Likewise, the defendant had already stated that if his wife were to swear that he was not her husband, he would welcome death. His confession may have only been proof of this. And he had his children to think of as well, for even if Sanxi was not his, his daughter, Bernarde, was. In freely confessing his alleged imposture, he managed to obtain from the court the promise that his daughter would not become a bastard. While she would be disinherited by the Guerre family, the court would allow her to inherit Arnaud du Tilh’s family properties. Even if he wasn’t Arnaud du Tilh, this may have seemed the only possible way to provide for his little girl.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this story is that the man accused of imposture seems to have been a kind and decent man. According to witnesses at trial, even those who believed him a fraud, he acquitted himself with honor in his daily life in Artigat and in his business dealings, and he proved himself a loving husband to Bertrande. The same could not be said about the young Martin who had failed his wife and abandoned her, and the behavior of the man hauled before the judges at Rieux and Toulouse was nothing like that of the young Pansette, with his drunkenness, his petty crime, and his promiscuity. So in the end, whether he was this Arnaud du Tilh or whether he really was Martin Guerre, they killed a good man for the sake of the memory of a lesser man. And what caused even his staunchest supporters to turn on him in the end? Was it certainty, after seeing the face of the other supposed Martin, or was it just doubt? In a time before photographs, in a peasant world where no one had portraits of themselves and few even owned mirrors by which to regard themselves, how closely was physical appearance observed and how accurately could likeness be recalled? It would seem, after such an absence of years, that it would have to be only vaguely. And just as one man might be indistinguishable from another, so the truth can sometimes be indistinguishable from falsehood. As Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne states in an essay that makes mention of the strange case of Martin Guerre, “Falsehood is so neere Neighbour to trueth, that a wiseman should not put himselfe upon a slipperie downefal. Truth and falsehood have both alike countenances…. Wee beholde them with one same eye….”

The Return of the True Martin Guerre by Jacques Wagrez, from Alexandre Dumas's Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 1, p. 272 — *The Return of the True Martin Guerre* by Jacques Wagrez, from Alexandre Dumas's *Celebrated Crimes*, Vol. 1, p. 272

The Campden Wonder; or, The Supposed Murder of William Harrison

August 07, 2018 by Nathaniel Lloyd

Thomas_Rowlandson_-_Crowd_by_a_Gibbet_-_Google_Art_Project (1) (1).jpg

Chipping Campden is a quaint little town comprised of rustic, flaxen structures built of stone from the Cotswald Hills. Its most storied property is Campden House, a big country manor complete with proper English gardens. This estate, impressive as it was, did not survive the English Civil War intact. In 1645, the manor was occupied and fortified by Cavaliers, or royalist troops, for five months, and when they left their makeshift garrison, they set it on fire to prevent Roundheads, their Parliamentarian foes, from occupying it themselves. At this time, and afterward, the manor belonged to Lady Juliana Noel, Viscountess Campden. While she mostly resided in another family estate in Rutland, some of the outbuildings that still stood after the fire—stables and banquet halls—she had converted into residences, not only for herself but for the steward of her estate in Chipping Campden, one William Harrison, who still had to remain there after the fire in order to make his rounds and collect rents for the Viscountess. It is with this man that our story begins, in the year of 1660, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, when William Harrison still remained living with his wife in their home among the burned-out ruins of the Manor of Campden. A man of seventy years old, he nevertheless still made his rounds on foot to collect his lady’s rents, and one day, he did not return. His vanishing began one of the most intriguing historical mysteries in English history, remembered even today as an unparalleled wonder.

On Thursday the 16th of August, William Harrison walked the two miles to nearby Charringworth to begin his collections. His wife expected him home before dark, so when the sun fell low, she started to worry that he had not yet returned. And she had good reason to worry, it seems. As idyllic a place as Chipping Campden may have been, there does appear to have been some crime in the village recently, and much of it centered on her home amidst the razed remains of Campden House. First, a year earlier, after attending a Puritan lecture at the church, she and her husband returned home to the ruinous estate to find a ladder leaning against their banquet hall residence, next to a second-story window, the bars of which had been wrenched away from the wall. Inside, they had found the blade of a plough, which they reasoned must have been used to pry the bars off. £140 had been stolen from the house, and they never had caught the burglars. And then, only a matter of weeks earlier, their servant, a simple boy in his twenties named John Perry who had served them for much of his life, had been attacked in their own garden by two ruffians dressed all in white. These assailants had brandished swords, and poor young Perry had been forced to parry their blades with the only weapon at hand, a pitchfork which afterward showed definite proof of having been hacked and cut. Fearing now that her husband might have been waylaid by the very same highwaymen, she called on John Perry and instructed him to go out and search for his employer. And so she waited, as the light of the sun faded from the sky entirely, and she put a light in the window, that her husband might find his way home, but neither William Harrison nor the servant boy John Perry returned that day.

Campden House at Kensington, likely similar to the manor that burned down at Chipping Campden, via Chipping Campden History Society

The next day, William Harrison’s son set out to search for them, and on the road to Charringworth, he encountered John Perry alone. His father was not at Charringworth, Perry told him, so off they went to look for Harrison at Ebrington and then Paxford, questioning everyone they encountered. In this way, they heard that a woman, on her way to work in a field that morning, had found a comb, a collar, and a hat on the road between Ebrington and Chipping Campden. When Perry and his master’s son found the woman and asked to see what she’d found, they recognized that, indeed, they were William Harrison’s items, and were troubled to see that they appeared to be cut in some places and the collar bore a distinct spot of blood. The woman took them to where she had found the articles, but a search of the roadside shrubbery yielded no sign of the vanished steward of Campden House, and the two men returned crestfallen.

It took no time at all—perhaps only the length of their return journey, if Harrison’s son did not already suspect him—for blame to be laid on young John Perry’s shoulders, for had he not been out all night with nothing to show for his search? Surely Perry had found his master alone on the road outside of Ebrington and, finding the seventy-year-old vulnerable there in the dark, his purse full of the rents he had collected, the servant seized this opportunity to rob his master and blame it on highwaymen. After all, he came from a poor family; his mother Joan had been widowed for years and never remarried, and what was worse were the rumors that she may have been a witch. When his master’s residence had been burgled the year before, some of course had whispered that John Perry likely knew where the money was kept in the house and when his master would be away, and his family certainly would benefit from such a windfall, but nothing had come of those rumors. And his recent claims to have been assaulted in the garden had likewise been met with skepticism, seeing as how, despite all the cuts on his pitchfork, John Perry himself had not received a single nick. In short, he seemed the likeliest of suspects, especially given the fact that Mrs. Harrison, so worried for her husband’s welfare on the road alone at night with all that money, had essentially pointed out the opportunity to their servant boy and sent him on his way to take it.

Within a day, John Perry stood examination before a Justice of the Peace. By his account, which he seemed to piece together in direct response to specific challenges to his story, he claimed to have walked some way toward Charringworth before turning back because of the growing darkness. He testified to having encountered one William Reed, who walked with him back to Campden House before taking his leave. It is not clear then why Perry did not announce his return to Mrs. Harrison nor try to get his master’s horse and go out searching again, as had been his stated intention. Thereafter, he saw a man named John Pearce, and walked with him in a field, although why he did so is also unclear, since it certainly had not been to search for his master. After Pearce left him at the Campden House gate, again, he did not return to his mistress or fetch the horse from the stable but rather lay in the hen-house for an hour. Afterward, when he heard church bell strike midnight, he rose and went out onto the road again to resume his search. When challenged about his behavior, he explained that while it had been dark previously, after his rest in the hen-roost, a bright moon had risen, giving him the courage to continue his endeavor. This was not long to last, however, for he soon became lost in a dense mist and chose to sleep the night under a roadside hedge. At first light, he rose and continued on to Charringworth, where he discovered that his master had collected only £23 from one tenant before setting out for home. It was after this, John Perry testified, that he himself had set out for home and thereafter encountered his master’s son on the path, whence they continued their search.

As much as the Justice may have wanted to disbelieve John Perry, everyone who thereafter gave evidence—William Reed, John Pearce, the tenants he visited in the morning—all corroborated his version of events. Still, it was the gaps that troubled one. What had Perry been doing when he tarried back at the Campden House gates and during that time when he claimed to have lain in the henhouse? And upon resuming his search, had he really, a native of the area, lost his way in a mist and slept beneath a bush? With these remaining doubts in mind, the Justice ordered Perry to be kept prisoner and further questioned, and for a week, young John Perry was interrogated under such circumstances as we cannot know. Was he treated kindly or brutalized? Were his statements taken in good faith, or did his captors torture him until they received an account that accorded well with their own suppositions? Whatever the nature of his week-long incarceration, we do know that John Perry changed his story, and more than once. He suggested, variously, that the servant of some other gentleman had robbed and killed William Harrison, or that some itinerant repairman had perhaps done him in. Then he told his captors that they’d find the old man’s body in a certain bean pile, but no sign of his remains were uncovered there when authorities dug around in it. Finally, Perry said he would confess to the Justice of the Peace, and brought again before him, the servant boy said that he did indeed have knowledge of his master’s murder, and that it was his brother, Richard, and their mother, Joan, who had done the deed.

A depiction of English law in practice, with the swearing in of one witness and another pleading his case, by William Hogarth, 1747, via The Met

The picture John Perry now painted was one of a desperate and poverty-stricken family. His brother had been the head of the family since their father had died, and had children of his own as well to provide for. According to John, Richard and his mother troubled him greatly to help them rob William Harrison. A year earlier, while John had been at church with his master, Richard had burgled the Harrisons and afterward buried the money. Unfortunately, he could not thereafter find where he had buried it, and so the family continued to harass poor John, demanding that he tell them when his master went out to make his collections. Young John refused, but eventually, he gave in. Thinking ahead, he built a narrative complete with two bogus suspects by staging the assault by white-clad swordsmen in the garden. Then, on the morning of the 16th of August, he told his family that his master would be leaving to collect rents that day. Then, by sheer coincidence it would seem, Mr. Harrison was late in returning and Mrs. Harrison sent John Perry to look for him. Thereupon, John met with his brother Richard, and the two of them went out searching for his master with ill intent. Having seen someone enter a plot of land called the Conygree owned by Lady Campden by a gate to which his master had a key, and knowing this to be a shortcut back to the Harrison residence, John Perry pointed his brother after the figure but stayed behind himself, not wanting to be seen by his master. After walking in the fields for a time, he eventually went himself into the Conygree and found his brother and his mother standing over the prostrate form of his master, who cowered in fear for his life. By John Perry’s telling, his brother Richard called the old steward a fool and strangled him to death. Then he took the man’s purse and tossed it onto his mother’s lap. Wondering what to do with the body, John Perry suggested they drag it off to a pit that lay near a mill back of the garden, while he himself went to the gate to act the lookout. It was then he would encounter John Pearce, he said, and afterward, having taken his master’s hat, comb, and collar band, he cut them and planted them out on the highway to create a false trail.

Now besides the first problem, being the oddness that Perry and his brother waited until after Harrison was already apparently missing to go out looking to rob him, there were some other issues with his testimony. The first is that the corroborative testimony of William Reed seems to contradict Perry’s confession. While the story accords well with John Pearce’s testimony that he ran into John Perry at the gate and they walked into the fields for a time, and even gives a sufficient explanation for this excursion, since it would seem now that Perry, as a lookout, was just trying lead Pearce away from the scene of the crime, Reed’s testimony confirmed that Perry had met him a furlong away from Campden House on the highway to Charringworth. According to both of them, before Perry’s subsequent confession, they had walked back together, and John’s brother Richard Perry does not appear to have been in their company. Certainly when Richard and their mother Joan were thereafter arrested, they denied John’s claims as outright villainous lies, and when authorities dragged the pit behind the garden and searched the rest of the grounds thereabout, they found no body. So it would seem there was no concrete evidence whatsoever to prove John Perry’s new version of events. Nevertheless, as John Perry insisted that it was the truth, all three of them were kept in custody, and while being marched from the examination by the Justice back to their places of confinement, a balled up wad of what’s called inkle fell from Richard’s pocket. Inkle is a narrow woven band, like colored linen tape, and Richard claimed it was just a bit of lace that his wife used in her hair. His brother and accuser, however, begged to differ, for John Perry said he recognized it and the slipknot on one end of it: it was the very garrote Richard had used to strangle William Harrison. And the next day, as the prisoners were again led from their cells to attend a church service, they happened to pass by Richard’s house, where his children ran out to him as he passed. It is said that upon entering his embrace, both of his children suffered sudden nosebleeds. This was a certain sign, the townsfolk asserted, that Mother Joan Perry had bewitched her whole family into doing her evil bidding.

Importantly, before their case came to trial, Parliament passed “An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion,” which issued a general pardon for any crime committed during the Civil War and the subsequent Interregnum prior to the Glorious Restoration, barring such crimes as buggery, rape, murder, piracy, and witchcraft. When it came time in September to face their charges, their judge refused to hear the charge of murder while still there remained no corpse and therefore no corpus delicti, but they still faced the charge of burglary. However, as the crime had occurred the previous year, it fell under the pardon of the Act of Oblivion, so the Perrys were urged to spare themselves and the court the time and expense of trying them since if they would just plead guilty, they could be pardoned. This they did, but remained incarcerated, during which time John Perry not only continued to insist on his family’s guilt but also to accuse his mother and brother of trying to murder him by poison while he was in custody! The following spring, a new judge decided that they could be tried for William Harrison’s murder, since presumably if Harrison were indeed alive, he would have returned by then, but being now charged in the murder himself, as a clear accomplice to the crime, John Perry suddenly recanted his confession, saying he had been suffering a bout of madness when he had accused his brother and mother. This judge, however, viewed the Perrys as manifest criminals who had already confessed to burglarizing the supposed murder victim. It didn’t matter to him that they had only pleaded guilty to that crime on the court’s advice and had always maintained their innocence in the matter. And after all, how could any plea of innocence or any recantation be believed when it was popularly held that their witch mother was controlling them like puppets? He found the three of them guilty, and within days, the Perrys were marched up a hill outside Chipping Campden to a hastily erected gibbet. Joan Perry climbed the ladder first, for many believed that as soon as she was executed, her enchantment of her sons would cease and they would confess all. With their mother dangling, though, they only reasserted their innocence. Next they hanged Richard, who went to the noose pleading for his brother to make some confession that might exonerate him. John told the crowd angrily that he held no obligation to offer them any satisfaction, and he watched his brother hang. As he climbed the gibbet himself, he provoked the bloodthirsty, screaming crowd, shouting that, although he knew nothing about his master’s fate, they might in the future discover something about it. John Perry’s body remained there, hanging in chains from the gibbet on the hill until it had putrefied and decayed entirely.

A Gibbet by Thomas Rowlandson, via Wikimedia Commons

Two years later, and John Perry’s final words rang true, for at the old age of seventy-two, William Harrison returned to Campden with an astounding, if not entirely incredible, story to explain his absence. As three people had been publicly executed for his murder, it is no surprise that some official account was demanded of him, and thus we have the particulars of his adventure put down in a letter for all posterity. William Harrison claimed to have been walking late on the highway near Ebrington after his trip to Charringworth collecting for his Lady Campden, when a horseman rode near and accosted him so closely that he felt obliged to punch the horse in its nose! The rider then struck him with a sword—the implication being that this was when his hat and collar had been cut off him—and though he tried to defend himself with his cane, the scoundrel stabbed him in the side. Then another man appeared behind him, stabbed him in the thigh, and dragged him into the bushes. In all, there were three men whom he expected to simply rob him of the meager £23 he carried, but instead they put a cloak on him, sat him on a horse behind one of the riders, manacled his hands around the man’s waist, and rode away with him. They stopped at a haystack, finally taking his money off of him and tossing him into a nearby stone pit. An hour later, they called him out, stuffed his pockets full of an even greater quantity of money than they had taken from him, and handcuffed him on the horse as before. After a long ride, the old man was nearly dead, he says, from having to carry all their money, although one would think the sword wounds in his side and thigh would be bothering him far more than some bruising from heavy coinage. They stopped at a lonely house, where a woman commented that he was at death’s door, but after one night on cushions, with the application of some hot broth, he apparently proved healthy enough to resume their journey. So his story went. His abductors spirited him from one vaguely described house to another until they reached Deal, on the Kentish coast, some 160 miles or 260 kilometers from Chipping Campden. There, Harrison claims to have heard them talk to a man named Wrenshaw about a matter of seven pounds, and he heard Wrenshaw express anxiety that Harrison would die before he could manage to get him on board a boat, which presently they set about accomplishing. Harrison remained aboard this ship for six weeks among others “who were in the same condition,” meaning, we must assume, others who had been abducted and sold into shipboard labor, it would seem. One wonders if all these were also grievously wounded seventy-year-old men, and if so, how poorly crewed this vessel must have been.

When two Turkish ships approached their boat, Harrison and the other captives, oddly enough, were eager to fight for their captors, but in the end were simply given to them. In the dark hold of a Turkish ship, they endured an interminable voyage, and after disembarking, were led on a two-day journey to a prison in which they passed four days before some prospective buyers came to scrutinize them. He and the other prisoners told of their skills, and based on some knowledge Harrison professed to have, a physician some 17 years his senior took him to his home near Smirna to tend his distillery. The old doctor had apparently lived in England for a time, and notwithstanding some infrequent abuse, he took a shine to old Harrison, gifting him a gilded silver bowl to drink from. Upon his master’s death, Harrison appears to have been set free, though when he went to seek passage aboard a ship, all seemed fearful of the “searchers” who might find this old slave aboard their vessel and for this reason take not only their goods but their lives as well. Nevertheless, when they caught sight of his gilded silver bowl, the sailors of one ship agreed to hide him, and so he found his way to Spain, whereupon he encountered some kind countrymen who generously brought him back to the shores of Dover and merry old England. From thence, homeward William Harrison made his way.

A depiction of slavery in Turkey, by Pieter van der Aa, 1725, via Wikimedia Commons

Or so his story goes…. But can it be credited? Why, upon finding that the seventy-year-old codger they had just waylaid only had £23 on him, would these highwaymen then think they could get any money for him as a slave? Were highwaymen in rural England even in the business of enslaving their victims? If so, surely they’d seek out the young and able-bodied to fetch a higher price. And certainly they’d not keep running him through with their swords if they intended to sell him as slave labor! And even if these rogues were daft enough to think this a sound money-making scheme, why on earth would the buyer in Deal think the dying old man was worth anything? Likewise the Turkish pirates who took him thereafter, and the even older doctor after that. Why was this 70-year-old Englishman in such high demand? If one begins to doubt his tale, there’s not much to go on in trying to disprove it. His description of every stop on his journey is sorely lacking in detail. He mentions one name, a Wrenshaw in Deal who seems to be involved in the slave labor market, but nothing beyond that, not even a name for the old physician in Smirna with whom he lived nearly two years. His account, plainly speaking, is far more ridiculous than any lie told by John Perry in his absence. In this way, many have pondered the details of what has come to be known, since it was first set down more than a decade later in a pamphlet written by the Justice of the Peace who had first examined John Perry, as the Campden Wonder. Was there truth to any of the allegations against the Perrys? If they hadn’t murdered Harrison, had they burgled him? If he had been lying, why had he falsely accused his own family? Was he coerced or did he suffer from a mental illness that caused him to crave the attention a confession would bring him? And what of the white-clad men who accosted him in the garden? If it had been a lie that he had lied about them, then were they real? Could they have been the highwaymen who abducted William Harrison? Or, if you cannot believe Harrison’s wild story, perhaps every person involved was lying. If so, what was Harrison really doing in those two years? Had he merely abandoned his family and then returned with a ridiculous cover story? Or had he been away on some clandestine business for Lady Campden? Unlikely, as those would seem to be the kinds of adventures a young man would seek, not a septuagenarian. Had his wife known of his doings? Some locals claimed that after her death, they found a letter in her possession that had been sent to her by her missing husband before the Perrys’ hanging. This would certainly tend to discredit Harrison’s tale of abduction and enslavement and may have even hinted at his true activities, which must have been sensitive indeed for Mrs. Harrison to let three innocents go to the gallows in order to keep them secret, but the letter has never been produced.

An explanation appealing to me is that perhaps the Perrys or the mystery men in the garden had killed the old man out on the highway at night, and the man who returned two years later was not William Harrison at all, but rather an impostor taking advantage of the situation. People, after all, tend to forget a face after years of its absence, especially in a time before photographs, and any change in his appearance could easily have been dismissed as being due to the extreme circumstances he had endured. One could argue that his family would certainly know Harrison, but it has been suggested that his son may have conspired to do away with the old man in order to take the stewardship of Lady Campden’s lands for himself. Perhaps he and this returned Harrison had an arrangement. But what about his wife, you might protest. Well, there have been other examples in history of widows accepting impostors as their returned husbands for the simple reason that women relied on their husbands to provide for them. Going along with the idea that your husband had returned was a simple escape from widowhood. Some historians point to signatures left by Harrison both before and after his return as proof that it was the same man. I’m no handwriting expert, and I do see the distinct similarities, of course, but to me, there does appear to be a marked difference in the “s” after his return, which before his disappearance was looped into the subsequent “O” but afterward appears to have been formed with two strokes and not looped into the next letter at all. What is further troubling and intriguing are the reports that after William Harrison returned, Mrs. Harrison hanged herself. Could this be an indication that her husband was an impostor who kept her silent by threatening her, such that her only escape was death? Or perhaps that she felt such guilt for her complicity in the fraud of her husband’s survival that she could no longer take it? Like most analysis of the case of the Campden Wonder, this is pure conjecture. Maybe her guilt was over the demise of the Perrys. Maybe she suffered from some illness and sought relief from pain in death. Or maybe she endured some pronounced melancholy with no discernible cause. Perhaps she did not commit suicide at all, and this was just a vile rumor. We simply don’t know. Like many blind spots in history, trying to make coherent sense of this story is like attempting to assemble a single puzzle using a pile of pieces from two different puzzles. Some parts may fit together nicely and encourage you to keep sifting through and searching, but you will never piece together a clear picture.

Signatures of William Harrison (from top to bottom: April 1657, April 1660, and October 1663), from Linda Stratmann's Gloucestershire Murders — Signatures of William Harrison (from top to bottom: April 1657, April 1660, and October 1663), from Linda Stratmann's *Gloucestershire Murders*