A Very Historically Blind Christmas

I love Christmas: the family time, the music, the classic movies, the decorations, the aroma of evergreen trees and spice apple, the taste of gingerbread with my coffee and nutmeg in my eggnog. I am not, however, much of a churchgoer or man of faith; therefore, I have some ambivalence about this holiday which is so often and heatedly defended as a Christian tradition. We must remember the reason of the season, and we must keep Christ in Christmas, or so many remind us while lamenting a culture that does not encourage people to keep the nativity scene at the forefront of all thoughts throughout December. Recently, I saw an image being posted on social media with these statements: “Christmas is based on a pagan holiday. Jesus wasn’t born in December. Christmas trees are a Heathen tradition.” And of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d heard these claims. Being something of a know-it-all and a pedant who is only too happy to challenge preconceived notions about both history and religion, I have been known to make such statements myself. But of course, as I have learned in making this show, critical thought challenges all preconceived notions, not only the ones that you dislike and want to dispel. The claims of the agnostic, the atheist, and the anti-religious must be examined just as skeptically and fairly as any assertions made by the religious. So this holiday season, I’ve set out to explore the veracity of these claims and get to the bottom of just how pagan or Christian are Christmas’s origins and traditions.

Perhaps the first assertion we should examine is that Jesus Christ was not born on December 25th, as this is a frequent point used to undermine the entire Christian basis of the holiday.  In truth, we don’t know when Jesus was born. The two gospels that depict the nativity, Matthew and Luke, fail to record a birthdate or even to identify the month or the season of his birth. We can, however, make some judgments based on details that are included. Both gospels indicate vaguely that the story of the Nativity took place during the reign of Herod the Great, King of Judea, but there are inconsistencies. Matthew says the Christ child was born during his reign, and goes on to tell the story of Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, but Luke actually only mentions the reign of Herod as being the time when an angel foretold of the birth of John the Baptist and implies a significant passage of time between that and Mary’s angelic visitation. Rather, Luke explicitly places Christ’s birth during the Census of Quirinius, taken during the imposition of Roman rule, for which male landowners were required to return to their ancestral homes and be counted. Thus a problem arises with the timeline, as this census took place a decade after Herod’s death, which would make the two nativity narratives entirely contradictory. Moreover, it would not make sense for Joseph to take Mary on his journey while she was “great with child” if she need not be counted for the census when she could instead remain in the comfort of their home on whatever land Joseph presumably owned. And one detail stands out from Luke as evidence that whatever the month of Christ’s birth, it couldn’t be December, this being the verse that states there were shepherds watching over their flocks in the fields at night when Mary delivered the child. This would seem to place his birth during a warmer time of year. However, if these inconsistencies tell us anything, it is that we should not be looking to Matthew and Luke as accurate records of the past. The most likely explanation for all of these discrepancies is that, writing about events at a seventy to eighty year remove, the authors simply got things wrong or invented details to flesh out their stories. So why, a few hundred years later, did the church settle on December 25th as the Feast of the Nativity? Some have claimed that it was a simple matter of doing the math, that December 25th falls nine months after March 25th, when the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is observed, celebrating Christ’s immaculate conception. One might then reasonably ask how they determined March 25th to be the anniversary of the annunciation, and the answer raises the odd notion that martyrs are predestined to be martyred on the anniversary of their conceptions. But there may be a simpler explanation. Records of the first Feast of the Nativity predate the first Feast of the Annunciation by about 100 years, so if simple math determined these dates, then if anything, that math was done in reverse, counting backward nine months from December 25th to be certain the date of the Annunciation lined up with the chosen date of the Nativity. So the question remains, why choose December 25th?

Our answer may indeed lie in pagan and secular traditions in the form of midwinter feasts and festivals that were common and popular in the Roman Empire during the time when Christianity was only just establishing its own traditions. The first record we have showing December 25th as the date of Christ’s birth comes from a calendar produced in Rome in 354 CE, an era when Christianity was vying for ascendancy against various pagan traditions. There is a quotation from a supposed 4th-century scribe called Scriptus Syrus that appeared as an annotation on another work, and it clearly makes the claim that the Christian Church simply adopted pagan traditions for its own purposes: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity …Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.” This is the heart of the contention, that the Christmas we know is simply a pagan celebration appropriated by Christianity out of either convenience or for the purpose of asserting religious dominance, which of course it succeeded in doing. The quote itself is suspect, though. The annotation actually appeared on an 18th-century edition of a 12th century work, and the name Scriptus Syrus only means “a Syrian writer.” Therefore, it doesn’t appear to be a claim made in the 4th century, but rather one made some 800 years later by an unknown writer. Still we may ask whether or not it is true. What was this festival of the birthday of the sun? This can easily be recognized as dies natalis solis invicti, or the birthday of the unconquered sun, a civil holiday timed to coincide with the winter solstice to honor the symbolic rebirth of the sun as days began once more to lengthen and the light, therefore, was seen to overcome the darkness. This festival was associated with the Cult of the Unconquered Sun, or Sol Invictus, a sun god that held a place of honor as a principal deity in the Roman Empire. But it is the roots of Sol Invictus in far older Mithraic traditions that raise further questions about how pagan influences have defined Christianity.

Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s The Nativity at Night c. 1490, via Wikimedia Commons

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Pretty much everything about Christ and Christianity is actually derived from Mithraism and its central figure, Mithra. Born to a virgin on December 25th, Mithra too was visited by shepherds. In his life he traveled and taught and performed great miracles, gathering 12 followers before he sacrificed himself and ascended to heaven. Remembered as a messiah, his followers, who were baptized and observed a Eucharistic ritual meal, worshiped him on a day set aside as sacred: Sunday. Listening to this litany of similarities and knowing that Mithraism preceded Christianity by hundreds of years, many have been led to believe that Christianity was little more than a knockoff religion repackaging the Mithra narrative. Some suggest Jesus may have been an initiate of the Mithraic mysteries, and that his death and resurrection was nothing more than a reenactment of Mithra’s rebirth. Others go further and propose without evidence that there may not have been a real Jesus, as such, that his story was merely a retelling of Mithra’s. Are you still with me? Have you shut off skipped to another Christmas podcast? If you’re still listening, the truth of matter seems to lie somewhere in between the two extremes. Certainly Mithraic traditions predated Christianity. Indeed, they predated the Roman Empire. Long before his entrance into the Western world, the figure of Mithra appeared in India and Persia as Mitra, a marshal of peoples and binder of men in covenants and contracts (Laeuchli 74). Even in these earliest of iterations, he is associated with the sun, first as a kind of intercessor, mediating between the heavens and the earth, ensuring the rising of the sun and thus the success of agricultural endeavors. As the figure made his way into Persia and became Mithra and thereafter reached the West and became Mithras, he developed more martial qualities, and indeed his cult was eventually widely spread by soldiers (Hinnells). His association with the sun also developed to the point that, while he was depicted as a man, often killing a bull, he was also depicted as the very sun itself. Aside from any similarities, there are myriad pronounced differences from Christianity, and some have even argued—with no real support—that, rather than Christianity borrowing from Mithraism during the time of their competition for devotees, it was actually Mithraism that modeled itself after Christianity. While this is not well-supported, there is at least the possibility of it being true, for most of the similarities that are cited relate to the later Roman Mithraic traditions that developed contemporary to Christianity.

The question of who plagiarized whom—if the syncretism of religious traditions can even be called plagiarism—becomes moot, however, if it turns out that the similarities themselves aren’t actually there. For example, the date December 25th, which I’ve already argued in unsupported in the birthdate of Christ, may not actually have been universally accepted as Mithra’s birthdate either, as archaeological evidence indicates Mithra and Sol Invictus may have been considered separate deities, perhaps closely connected or even a dualistic manifestation of one divine being but certainly possessing their own identities. As for the virgin birth, some versions of the Persian Mithra were born to a virgin water goddess called Anahita, conceived either by the “milky fountain of immortality” or by some kind of incestuous relationship between the two of them that simply doesn’t make sense in a purely chronological, chicken-before-the-egg way. However, the Roman Mithras was said to have sprung fully formed from a rock, witnessed by two torchbearers that have somehow been distorted into shepherds for the purpose of forcing the comparison to the nativity. And while it is true that some ancient versions of the nativity have Christ born in a cave, none have him born of stone. Moreover, Mithra was never said to be a man traveling the land and imparting his wisdom as was Christ, and while there are plenty of works of art in Mithraic temples that have been construed by scholars as depicting Mithra performing some wonder or another, there are no testimonial stories of him performing such miraculous works as we have of Christ. Some of that art also portrays Mithra surrounded by twelve other figures, but these weren’t disciples or even men; they were the signs of the Zodiac. Meanwhile, their supposed Eucharist was essentially just a ritual meal, common in religious ceremonies, comprised of more than just bread and wine, and lacking any suggestion of the consumption of Mithra’s flesh and blood, which would of course make it not Eucharistic at all. Indeed it does appear that the Mithraic mystery cult engaged in ceremonial washings and baptism, and Mithra did have Sunday, the day named for the unconquered sun, set aside for him, but as can be seen, the lion’s share of these claims are either demonstrably false or dubious.

Relief depicting Mithras slaying a bull, via Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, doubt can be cast upon the assertion that Christmas trees were a heathen tradition. Like many others, I have smugly pointed to the book of Jeremiah, Chapter 10, verse 3, to suggest that Christians were hypocrites for putting up and decorating Christmas trees. It reads, “Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.” How upsetting these lines can be to a God-fearing Christian at Christmastime. And as Jeremiah was likely composed hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, it would seem to be a clear cut case of pagan traditions incorporated into Christmas. But in fairness, with the context of the following verses, it is clear that Jeremiah is talking about the creation of idols carved from the wood of trees and then covered in precious metals. And what we know of the history of Christmas trees does not support an origin so far back in antiquity.

The tradition of decorating homes and churches with greenery in the winter has a long history, and it is closely connected to other traditions in other seasonal festivals, such as the lighting of candles, as it observes the same theme of light, warmth, and life persisting amidst the darkness, the cold, and the death present all around us in winter. In London, as early as 1444, it is recorded that a proto-Christmas tree was erected outdoors in the form of a maypole that had been adorned with ivy and sprigs of holly. So we do indeed see a secular basis for this tradition, but for true Christmas trees, we must look to Germany, where in that same century two legends grew. One told of a saint Boniface who foiled a pagan human sacrifice to Thor by felling the oak tree on which it was to take place and putting up a fir in its stead, the evergreen serving as a metaphor for eternal life through Christ. The other legend told of an apple tree miraculously blooming on Christmas Eve, a miracle that inspired others to claim they also witnessed trees inexplicably flowering on Christmas. These stories may also have been inspired by the so-called paradise plays that were popular on Christmas Eve. The plays dramatized the events of the Garden of Eden in Genesis with an evergreen tree standing in for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and apples tied to its branches to represent the forbidden fruit. Imagine that for a moment. Isn’t it the perfect precursor to the Christmas trees of today, festooned with red sparkling bulbs? The people eventually stopped putting on their paradise plays, but they kept the decorated trees, displaying them in public squares and eventually bringing them into the home. The practice became so popular that some municipalities actually passed ordinances limiting the chopping of trees and the number of trees people could have in their houses. And this tradition, in which again we might see pagan, secular, and Christian influences, spread from Germany the world over. 

So it’s not such a cut and dry affair as some loudmouth atheists might present it.  Yes, elements of Christmas may have derived from Mithraic traditions, but clearly some prominent mainstays—the nativity narrative, the Christmas tree—have decidedly Christian origins. And if the theme at the heart of the evergreen tree being displayed in the dead of winter owes something to more ancient and non-Christian traditions in the form of decorating with greenery, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The same can be said of the Mithraic celebration of dies natalis solis invicti, for neither was theirs the first midwinter celebration to mark the solstice, or solstitium, when the sun stood still. For an even more ancient forerunner, we must look to the celebration of Saturnalia in primitive Rome. Since at least the first century, and likely even longer, a festival was held by farmers to observe the conclusion of the planting season. Starting as a 2-day event honoring the god Saturn, the sower of seeds, as its popularity grew with the Roman Empire, it expanded, and like the Advent began earlier in the month and concluded in late December, near the solstice. Saturnalia appears to be the origin of the season’s merrymaking, for it was a time of great feasts, lavish banquets when social order was relaxed. In fact, the excesses of Saturnalia were so great that the notoriously extravagant and libertine Emperor Caligula even felt it needed to be reined in. So there appears to be a long and storied history to our Christmastime wassailing and inebriety. Other connections include, of course, decorating buildings with greenery, lighting candles, and even giving gifts, usually of candles, wax dolls, and caged birds. And Saturnalia is not alone as a precursor or contemporary midwinter festival with similar elements to Christmas. Other secular and pagan festivities include the Kalends, a civic celebration of the New Year during which people feasted, decorated buildings with greenery, gave gifts and even enjoyed the spectacle of parades. Then there is the decidedly Christmas Germanic celebration of Yule, an ancient name for the month of January that was synonymous with “festivities.” This celebration appears to have been related to Norse mythology, as Odin, the Yulefather, was said during this time to lead an army of the dead on a hunt, riding across the sky on an eight-legged horse. A more realistic but no less fun explanation is that Yule marked the end of harvest and therefore the beginning of the season for brewing beer, and so was a time for carousal, when in addition to feasting and burning a yule log in the hearth, many were known to “drink yule.”

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s The Wild Hunt of Odin, 1868, via Wikimedia Commons

So what we are talking about here is not plagiarism, as I so clumsily put it before, but a well-known phenomenon known as syncretism: defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.” If Christmas, the Christian Christ Mass, blended purposely or organically with religious and cultural forms that preceded it, it is nothing that all its predecessors had not already done. As the Kalends grew in prominence, they adopted the traditions of Saturnalia, and even if we do not know the means of their transmission to other regions, we certainly see their similarities in the Yule festivities as well. And of course, we see them further appropriated by the Mithraic cult of Sol Invictus, and Mithraism is a serial offender in this regard. It has been called “wildly syncretistic… a bizarre mixture of primitive and more advanced cultural elements” (Laeuchli 77-78). In fact, some suggest that Mithraism’s success in spreading so far across the ancient world is owed specifically to the fact that people of other cultures, when exposed to his myth, were easily able to conflate him with other deities, solar and otherwise. He was identified with the Babylonian Shamash and Marduk as well as the Mesopotamian Bel, and then his cult folded in nicely with that of the Roman sun god, Sol Invictus. Then we have Christianity, which shared prominent commonalities with other so-called mystery religions, including the celebration of god’s birth, death, rebirth and ascension, and an emphasis on initiation in the form of baptism and, for a long time, secrecy, using the ichthus, or Christ fish as a kind of secret password or signal. Should anyone be surprised then that in the melting pot of religion that was Rome some blending took place? And should Christians be defensive at the suggestion or deny its truth? The answer to both should be no, in my opinion. If anything, a better understanding of the robust and many-faceted history of Christmas traditions just shows that this most wonderful of holidays belongs to Christian and non-Christian alike, that all of us can see in it a history and a theme of great value: the bravery of making light in the darkest time of the year, the hope of renewal, of the return of the sunshine and life springing forth again from a cold earth, a belief in resurrection in every sense. So rather than quibble over how each tradition started, instead of mocking others for what they see and value in the holiday, let us all take what merriment we can from it and kindle a fire of fellow-feeling in every breast. Merry Christmas to all!

Further Reading

Flanders, Judith. Christmas: A Biography. St. Martin’s, 2017.

Laeuchli, Samuel. “Urban Mithraism.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 31, no. 3, 1968, pp. 73–99. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3210985.

Lincoln, Bruce. “Mitra, Mithra, Mithras: Problems of a Multiform Diety.” History of Religions, vol. 17, no. 2, 1977, pp. 200–208. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1062362.

Blind Spot: Tracking the Devil in Devon

In this final October edition, I’ll look at a puzzling event that, when considered in context, seems a complementary tale to my last. In the previous edition, I discussed the haunting specter of Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure described as having devilish qualities—beyond his preternatural abilities to leap over walls and onto rooftops, he was said to have glowing eyes, fiery breath, and sharp facial features like the Devil himself. One diabolical feature I failed to remark upon, since it only appeared in one report, had to do with the creature’s feet. For the most part, Jack was described as wearing boots—boots it was assumed contained some spring-loaded mechanism in the heels to help propel him in his leaping—but there is a report that, in 1826, a masked and cloaked figure attacked a young man by clasping the boy to his body and somehow setting him afire, and this attacker was reported by the badly burned victim to have had cloven hoofs instead of feet. And like the Devil is wont to do, Spring-Heeled Jack disappeared from the public eye for around three decades: the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s. Interestingly, though, smack in the middle of these quiet years, when the diabolical figure of Spring-Heeled Jack was absent from the scene, an incident in the county of Devon, some 254 kilometers or 158 miles southwest of London, had people believing the Devil still trod the earth. On the morning of February 9th, 1855, people all over the county woke to discover tracks in their garden paths and streets, and many believed these were not ordinary animal tracks. The incident has been called the Great Devon Mystery, and the tracks have been described as the Devil’s Hoof-marks, for many concluded that Satan himself had visited their neighborhood, creeping up near their doors in the cold darkness of the previous night.

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That winter of 1855 was unusually cold, freezing over the rivers of Devon County, the Teign and the Exe, and falling a full degree lower than anyone remembered it ever falling before. On the evening of February 8th, a heavy snowfall blanketed the region, and covered it also in a deep peaceful silence—only one report exists of a resident’s dog kicking up a row that night, which is especially curious considering the indications of widespread disturbance and activity that were discovered the next morning, after dawn brought some rain and a subsequent frost. Within a few days, reports began to circulate about what the residents of Devon villages found that morning: strange tracks that these hardy country folk, who were not unaccustomed to the sight of animal sign, found unnatural and even upsetting. They appeared not only in open areas, where an animal might be expected to venture, but also within the walls of locked gardens, and some of the trails seemed to walk purposefully up to their doors and disappear, or reappear on rooftops as though the creature that had left them had walked easily up the walls. And many agreed that these tracks looked like those that might be left by a pony or donkey: a hoof—sometimes cloven and sometimes not, but hooved, certainly. But of course, a donkey could not get inside their garden walls or onto their rooftops. Moreover, the tracks seemed too straight and purposeful, and appeared to have been made by a bipedal creature. And what cloven-hoofed creature walks about on two legs like a man? The Devil, of course, and almost immediately, this seems to be the conclusion many reached. It only took a few hours before hunting parties formed in multiple villages, setting out to track down this mystery night visitor. These tracking parties discovered some remarkable oddities, including tracks that disappeared and then reappeared in the middle of a snowy field and others that went directly up to a haystack and continued on unimpeded on the other side, with no sign of having disturbed the hay itself, as if whatever left them had merely walked right through it. And one story has a party following the tracks into a wood, where their hunting dogs came whimpering back with their tails between their legs, so terrified were they of whatever they had cornered. This last story would be easy to dismiss as folklore, were it not for its corroboration by a reverend at Marychurch.

Map showing locations of reported hoof-marks, from Mike Dash’s research

Indeed, much of the original source support that is available comes from churchmen and would seem, perhaps, the more reliable for it. A Reverend Ellacombe of Clyst St. George, collected numerous documents on the incident, including letters from a Reverend Musgrave of Withycombe Raleigh and some tracings of the tracks likely made on the scene. These, along with some letters from locals published in the Illustrated London News, serve as the extent of the primary source documentation of the event, which, once again, researcher Mike Dash has delved into extensively in his investigation of this phenomenon, which again I have relied on as my principal source, since his is the definitive work on the topic. As Dash points out, much of the primary source material is contradictory, and the evidence it presents is meager, but this has not limited the development of many theories to explain the tracks. One, as might be expected from paranormal researchers, is that the marks were not tracks at all, but rather the result of laser beams fired from flying saucers engaged in some kind of land surveying. Another rather interesting theory developed in later years is that the marks were made by some as yet unidentified weather phenomenon, an idea first floated by J. Allan Rennie, a Scotsman who claimed to have seen, in the wilds of Canada in 1924, similar tracks being formed before his eyes by no visible being or creature, just tracks being laid into the snow by a phantom and being blamed on a wendigo by his Native American companion. However, according to Rennie, as they drew right up to him, a splash of water hit his face and the marks continued on behind him, suggesting some strange meteorological even whereby large raindrops may fall only in one line and successively, like a trail.  A more down to earth explanation, though still up in the clouds, puts forth the idea that the tracks were laid by a balloonist out for a lunatic midnight flight on the frigid and windy night of February 8th, and that a loose rope, perhaps with a horseshoe or other grappling device at its end, had been left to drag along beneath. While all three of these explanations account for the appearance of tracks that disappear and then reappear elsewhere, as well as for tracks on rooftops and in walled gardens, there are other contemporary reports that weaken them. For example, despite the legend that evolved, saying that the tracks were one single trail in a straight line that went purposefully all over Devon, there are many reports of meandering and crisscrossing trails that would not seem to fit these theories or the idea that one evil Adversary left the hoof-marks. One hunting party out of Dawlish did track one trail as far as five miles, which is a long distance for one creature on a snowy night, but no parties tracked any trails long enough to confirm that they were all one trail. Moreover, these parties reported the tracks passing beneath low tree branches and through small holes in hedges and 6-inch drainage pipes, which would eliminate not only UFO lasers, strange rain, and balloon ropes but also any suspected creatures that were large, such as donkeys, ponies, and of course the odd escaped monkey or kangaroo that are sometimes suggested. It would also eliminate the Devil himself, unless Satan is very small indeed, with strides only ranging from eight to sixteen inches.

This leaves smaller creatures, and of them there was no shortage of suspects. At different times, badgers, otters, rabbits, birds, and rodents have been named as possible culprits of the tracks. The descriptions of the tracks themselves have been so varied—ranging not only from cloven to not cloven but also to having toe marks or claw marks or the impression of pads—and so many explanations have been offered for why an animal without hoofs might leave prints that resemble hoof-marks—rabbits and rats, for example, hop, and landing with four feet together can create a hoof-like impression, and birds like gulls, driven inland by the cold, might have ice on their feet that could take the shape of a hoof—such that it becomes difficult to rule out many of the suspects. Add to this the fact that it had rained at dawn, likely melting whatever tracks had been laid and then distorting them when they refroze. A similar explanation has been put forward to explain how bear tracks might be mistaken for yeti prints, and in the case of the Great Devon Mystery, it means an argument can be made for nearly any creature being the culprit. One reverend of Dawlish reported that a farmer had found what appeared to be hoof-marks but upon closer examination, seeing claw marks in them, realized they were just his own cat’s tracks, thawed and misshapen by the frost. This tends to make one doubt most of the reports. Could it have just been a brief panic or hysteria, causing many in Devon to mistake common animal tracks for something supernatural and sinister? If so, why did these savvy country folk suddenly act like they’d never encountered such trails, and why did such panics not recur every time similar trails were seen? They surely must have been, for snowy nights were not uncommon, nor were rodents and birds. And what of contemporary reports that the tracks of cats and other animals could clearly be made out that morning, indicating that the distortion of a thaw and a refreeze was not the explanation, or the reports that these hoof-marks were not indistinct but rather extraordinarily clear and sharp, as one witness put it, “as if cut by a diamond or branded with a hot iron”? This, of course, leads us to an alternate explanation: that of a hoax perpetrated by men.

Alleged yeti footprints at the Himalayas photographed by Frank Smythe in 1937 and printed in Popular Science, 1952, via Wikimedia Commons

But who would go to the great trouble of committing this hoax, and why? In the 1970s, one Manfri Wood revealed in his account of growing up as a Romany gypsy that the hoax had been perpetrated by seven tribes of Romany for the purposes of claiming their territory by scaring away other tribes, such as Pikies, who held deep-seated fears of the devil. They had planned it for a year and a half, he explained, and it had been accomplished using stilts made from stepladders. However, Wood’s version of the hoax suggested the prints would have been far larger than they were actually reported to be, and that the tracks would have been laid at intervals of about 9 feet, rather than every 8 inches. Add to this the idea that seven tribes of gypsy could possibly descend upon so many Devon towns in one night, tramping on stilts through gardens and atop roofs, without ever being spotted and only ever disturbing one dog, and you have a legend second only to Santa Claus’s massive Christmas Eve undertaking in its lack of feasibility. There is, however, a second possibility. As many of the reports of tracks were said to cross churchyards, it has been suggested that the signs of the devil were set down as a kind of protest, a display of dissent against recent happenings in the Anglican Church. For the last few decades, the so-called “high church” clergy had inflamed the ire of so-called “low church” parishioners who held some disdain for ritual and other trappings commonly associated with Roman Catholicism. The Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism as it had commenced with the publication of a series of tracts, had been moving the church toward an Anglo-Catholic revival, to the indignation of many. This theory posits that protesters, disliking this move away from simple Protestantism, had visited churches on the night of February 8th to make the point that the devil had returned, come home to roost in the Anglican Church.

The fact is, this would not have been the first time even that year that hoof-marks were laid around places thought to be corrupt as a statement. A month earlier and 150 miles or 240 kilometers northeast of Devon, several pubs around Wolverhampton had hoof-marks on their walls and roofs, and these seem to have been left by teetotalers hoping out to indicate that alcohol was the devil’s drink. So this appears to be a well-established ideological stunt designed to imply the presence of evil at a place. The problem in the case of the Great Devon Mystery, however, is that the hoof-marks were not only found on church grounds, but all over, in private gardens and atop the roofs of homes owned by simple citizens. And what would have been the point of laying the tracks all the way out of town, as far as five miles out into the wilderness? And these tracks appeared in towns all over the county in one night. Not only is it unlikely that the vast conspiracy required to perpetrate such a stunt could have long stayed hidden, but it would also have been quite the ill-conceived failure, since by failing to place the hoof-marks only on churches, its hypothetical message had been very poorly conveyed. But if, in this instance, the notion that mere men could have been behind the phenomenon seems rather more a stretch than a reasonable explanation, we might still find a sensible solution, as we have before, by suggesting that it may have been a combination of several proposed explanations. Could not some tracks, when out in the open, have been made by donkeys and ponies, while others were made by birds with icy feet alighting on roofs and in fields, and still others by rats who had climbed into walled gardens? But then one encounters another problem… that of the seemingly honest and earnest residents of Devon County themselves. Why would so many sensible people who were quite familiar with their home and the common wildlife thereabout suddenly take to the snowy morning searching out mundane animal tracks and ascribing supernatural significance to them? Did it just take one person to suggest that the marks in the snow were unusual and represented something uncanny to set off the hysteria? And if so, what are the chances that one such person made the suggestion in more than thirty places across Devon County? If doubting the strangeness of the tracks requires us to make this leap in logic, would it actually be more reasonable to believe these simple country folk, these farmers and reverends, that something strange stalked all over their county that winter’s night? As Mike Dash asserts, with so little evidence and so many puzzling aspects, this mystery may forever remain a blind spot in the past. 

An example of the tracks as shown by the Illustrated London News, 1855, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Dash, Mike. “The Devil's Hoofmarks: Investigating the Great Devon Mystery of 1855.” Fortean Studies, vol. 1, 1994, pp.71-150. mikedash.com, www.mikedash.com/research.

The Diabolical Features of Spring-Heeled Jack

As we make our way through the dark nights of October, let us consider the disturbing and intriguing story of a Victorian-era bogeyman who has been portrayed variously as a mischievous spirit, a violent creature, a nefarious prankster, and an extraterrestrial being. Some commonalities with that far better known Victorian villain, Jack the Ripper, include that he was responsible for numerous violent assaults against women and that he was popularly given the same appellation, Jack, but this was certainly a different beast, as it were, entirely. From 1837 to the 1870s and on into the 20th century, London and its surrounding environs—as well as other English cities—were periodically haunted by an unsettlingly tall and dark figure who ambushed his victims in the dark of the night and was said to display various preternatural and even, perhaps, supernatural, abilities. Legends of this Jack were lost to history and not popularly known until the 1960s, when an editorial call for stories of extraterrestrial encounters prior to Kevin Arnold’s 1947 sightings were answered by one J. Vyner in an article called “The Mystery of Springheel Jack.” Vyner’s article focused on the various inconsistently reported details that indicated there was something weird about this figure, presenting a picture of a being with pointed ears and claws who could leap to great heights. In Vyner’s depiction, he wore a sparkling metallic helmet and tight-fitting suit, reminiscent of a spaceman, with a light affixed to his chest, as if it were Iron Man armor—and indeed it proved to be bulletproof! Moreover, his eyes glowed, and he fired a futuristic gas gun that sent his victims swooning. This is the image of the so-called “Spring-Heeled Jack” that became popular in modern times: that of an alien creature, likely stranded after a UFO crash, searching for refuge in 19th century England. But as researchers return to the original newspaper sources and other contemporaneous documents upon which all understanding of this figure must rest, they find that elements of Vyner’s depiction cannot be corroborated and likely were embellished to please his particular audience. One researcher, Mike Dash—whose work I relied on heavily in my episode on the disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers and whose thorough investigation into the Spring-Heeled Jack mystery will serve as my principal source in this episode—found no confirmation in contemporary sources for the cropped, animal-like ears or the sci-fi gas gun, and shows that the idea of a light attached to his chest was a simple misrepresentation of a report that he held a lantern up in front of his chest. Dash tracks all the different unnatural aspects attributed to this figure: superhuman leaping ability, slashing talons, a hide or suit of armor that proved impervious to bullets, and—far more disturbing than a gas gun—the reports that he spat fire! These attributes were not reported consistently in all of Spring-Heeled Jack’s appearances, but they appear consistently enough to warrant the consideration that this was no common attacker. So what was Spring-Heeled Jack? Is his a story of hoaxes in newsprint, as we have seen before, or of mass hysteria, as is a useful explanation of so many other phenomena? Or was he real? And if real, was he a creature out of nightmare or just a uniquely equipped human criminal? And if a mere man, who was this steampunk villain?

We’ll begin on a dark winter’s night in February 1838, east of London in the village of Old Ford, where what would become Spring-Heeled Jack’s most famous attack is about to occur outside the little cottage of the Alsop family. The hour approached 9 p.m. when 18-year-old Jane Alsop heard the bell at their gate ringing forcefully. She went to the door and looked out across the dooryard, seeing the figure of a man standing in the darkness at the gate. What’s the matter, she inquired and asked him to stop ringing the bell so violently. The figure identified himself as a policeman and said, “For God’s sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-Heeled Jack here in the lane!” Jane rushed to fetch a lighted candle and hurried across the dooryard with it. When she handed the candle to the shadowy figure, she saw that he wore a long cloak, and instantly, he threw aside the cloak, revealing the garments beneath: a tight-fitting white suit of a material that appeared to be something like oilskin. He held the candle to his chest, illuminating himself for Jane to see: a hideous face, with diabolical features. He wore a helmet of some sort, his eyes shone like red fire, and he vomited blue-white flames from his mouth. Springing at her, he seized Jane by her dress and gripped the back of her neck. His fingers seemed to terminate in metal claws, and forcing her head under his arm, he proceeded to slash at her clothing. Jane shrieked and wrenched herself out of his grasp, dashing back toward the front door of her house. Just as she reached the front steps, though, Jack was on her again, ripping out her hair and slashing her arms, shoulders, and neck. Just then, her sister rushed out and pulled her from his clutches, and the alarm was raised in the house. The family rushed upstairs to shout for help from the police, and there they claimed to see the attacker fleeing across a field. Afterward, Jane’s father, having heard his daughter’s story, went out to his gate, expecting to find the cloak that the villain had thrown off still lying on the ground, but there was nothing there, leading him to suspect the attacker had not been alone.

Spring-Heeled Jack, depicted making off with a young lady victim, via Wikimedia Commons

Hearing this tale, what stands out, aside from the terrifying aspect of the attack, is the fact that this attacker lured Jane out by saying he was a policeman and that he had caught Spring-Heeled Jack. Therefore, he must have assumed that the name was familiar to the Alsop girl. So where did this character make his first appearance and what legend had already grown up around him by the time of the Alsop attack? First mention of the attacker appears in London newspapers in December of 1837, and strangely, his first appearances bear little resemblance to the specter as he later became known. It was said that in September the previous year, he had appeared in the village of Barnes as a white bull, although it was believed he was a ghost or devil merely assuming that form. Over the course of a few months, when he appeared to attack people, both men and women, he was variously described as, once again, an animal, such as a bear, or as a ghost or devil. It is unclear whether these latter terms were used rather more figuratively than literally. Yet in some of these early appearances, elements of his eventual depiction emerge: He is described in some instances as wearing mail or armor, and in others as wielding iron claws. Even his ability to leap, which we don’t really see evidenced in the Alsop testimony, was well established by then, with accounts of the figure scaling the walls of Kensington Palace to dance on its lawns. His preternatural leaping ability was attributed to his having springs in his boots, leading the newspapers to dub him Spring Jack, a nickname that had evolved quickly to Spring-Heeled Jack. And Alsop was not even the first to associate a blue fire with this attacker, as one young woman of Dulwich had been accosted by a ghost in a white sheet enveloped in blue flame. With these reports multiplying in newspapers over the course of those several months, it is safe to say that by the time the shadowy figure approached the Alsops’ gate that February night, the idea of a devilish attacker named Spring-Heeled Jack lurking about in darkness to pounce on innocent young women was widespread and causing a veritable panic.

After the Alsop attack, Lambeth-street police office undertook an investigation headed by one James Lea, a renowned detective. Lea had found some fame ten years earlier while investigating the sensational Red Barn Murder. This case revolved around a young couple, William Corder and Maria Marten, who were much disgraced in their community—he for his philandering and swindlery, and she for her promiscuity and bearing of bastard children. They made plans to meet at a red barn and elope, but Maria’s family grew suspicious when she never wrote to them, despite the excuses William made in his letters. Then, perhaps on the basis of a dream his wife had, Maria’s father searched the red barn and found his daughter’s corpse. Detective James Lea had done the police work of tracking down Corder in London, confronting him with the charges, and searching his new residence, where he discovered some pistols that may have been the murder weapons and turned up some letters Corder had written claiming Maria was living with him and happy, evidence that helped to condemn William Corder to the gallows. Ten years later, and Lea found himself working another sensational case.

The Red Barn, scene of the crime, via Wikimedia Commons

Upon interviewing the residents of Old Ford, Lea found that this figure, or someone matching his description, had been haunting the area for a month, wearing a cloak and springing out at passersby in the lanes to frighten them, and some reports do indeed remark upon his agility in fleeing from those who had pursued him. Over the course of Lea’s investigation, he would come to the conclusion that this assailant need not necessarily have been a demon out of hell, as he inquired at the London Hospital and observed experiments that showed a man could reproduce the fire vomiting effects that Jane Alsop had described by blowing alcohol and perhaps other ingredients, such as Sulphur, into a flame, which of course the Alsop girl provided for her attacker. Moreover, he had suspects. When the Alsops cried for help from their windows, a trio of men from a nearby pub answered their call and reported encountering a cloaked man who told them a policeman was needed at the Alsop’s cottage. Another witness, James Smith, a wheelwright who at the time of the Alsops’ cries for help had been carrying a wheel up the lane, said he ran into two local men, Payne, a bricklayer, and Millbank, a carpenter. Smith described Millbank as being dressed all in white, white hat and shooting jacket, which could have been mistaken by Jane for the tight white oilskin and helmet she believed she had seen. What’s more, Smith asserted that, later that night, recognizing him as the man they had passed in the lane, Millbank asked him, “What have you to say to Spring Jack?” Then a shoemaker, Richardson, who had been on the same street and confirmed seeing Millbank and Payne there, claimed he had also seen two others, young men, one in a cloak, joking about Spring-Heeled Jack being in the lane.

So we have contradictory testimony from three sources--and indeed, because of this uncertainty, no one was ever charged with the crime—but all of these witnesses would seem to agree that the Spring-Heeled Jack in Old Ford that night was nothing more than a man or boy who thought the violent assault on Jane Alsop little more than a jest. This agrees well with Detective Lea’s assessment that this was a local criminal, for he had been reported in the area and apparently, as Lea pointed out, the perpetrator knew the family, as he seems to have called out to Mr. Alsop at some point, perhaps while at the gate. If this Spring-Heeled Jack were a resident of Old Ford, could he possibly have been the same assailant troubling so many villages in the previous months, ranging all over Isleworth, St. John’s Wood, Brixton, Stockwell, Vauxhall, Camberwell, and elsewhere? And was he the same Spring-Heeled Jack who, only five days after appearing at Jane Alsop’s gate, knocked on a door in Whitechapel and dropped his cloak to scare the wits out of a servant boy? And three days after that, could it have been the same man who waylaid the Scales sisters in an alley in Limehouse, once again wearing a cloak and some kind of headgear—described as a bonnet here rather than a helmet—throwing off his outer garment, lifting a lantern before him and spitting blue fire from his mouth into Lucy Scales’s face? Perhaps… perhaps it was simple recklessness to perpetrate his crimes not only in surrounding villages but also in his own neighborhood. But it may be impossible to tell, for already there were confirmed reports of copycats, so all of these must be considered dubious. In March, a man attacked the proprietress of a public house with a club, announcing he was Spring-Heeled Jack; a cloaked man assaulted a woman in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, slapping her face; and two cloaked men, who had blackened their faces, frightened a child. A young man in Kentish Town was let off with a warning after running around with a mask and blue paper in his mouth to approximate the fire of other reports, and another man was fined for going about in a mask and sheet. Meanwhile, a blacksmith in Islington saw in this panic a perfect opportunity for sexual assault and was charged with crimes against several women. And though most of these have little or nothing in common with the previous attacks, newspapers did not hesitate to print headlines announcing that Spring-Heeled Jack was out and about in their neck of the woods. So the name became a catch-all for any person going about in costume to scare pedestrians and grope young women.

Spring-Heeled Jack, leaping a gate, via Wikimedia Commons

After 1838, the specter of Spring-Heeled Jack disappeared for more than thirty years. Therefore, it is surpassingly unexpected that the figure would reappear over the course of multiple flaps in the 1870s and beyond. In early October 1872, the so-called “Peckham ghost” made his first appearance in that village. The term likely used in the metaphorical sense of a phantom figure, but perhaps also in reference to the ghostly appearance of this white-clad figure, this “ghost” made a habit of jumping out at women in roadways and rising up menacingly from behind fences to startle unsuspecting passersby. This figure’s costume was decidedly less sophisticated, a dark cloak lined in white so that he need only throw his cloak open for the desired effect. But still, some reports suggested the presence of fire around his face and the ability to leap high fences in a single bound, leading to the old speculation that his boots were rigged with springs or perhaps had soles of India rubber, which I suppose in English imaginations of the time had properties akin to flubber. A man was accused and held on charges of being the Peckham ghost, but appearances continued while he was in custody, so again, no one suspect proved a believable culprit for all the incidences. Then at the end of that year, another “ghost” scare has been subsequently linked with the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, this time in Sheffield, the farthest flap from London at the time at some 227 kilometers to the northwest. This appears to have been a tall man in a classic ghost costume: a simple white sheet. But the fact that he is described as being swifter and more agile than a normal man and was reported to have jumped over walls and gates has led to his being linked with old Jack. It seems to be, however, that he, and perhaps many others tenuously identified as Spring-Heeled Jack, may have only been an early practitioner of free-running, the sport now called Parkour.

Perhaps the boldest iteration of Spring-Heeled Jack sprang up in 1877 at a British Army camp at Aldershot to bound around sentry boxes and powder magazines, dodging bullets and slapping guards. It’s said that this Jack made no answer when the sentries saw him approaching and demanded he identify himself. With astonishing speed, he came close enough to slap some of the sentries’ faces with a hand that felt cold, like that of a corpse, and then hopped off toward a nearby cemetery. The guards in more than one instance gave chase and fired their weapons after him, to no avail. This has added to the legend that Jack was bulletproof, though the original reports could actually just be indicating that the guards missed their mark. That same year, Spring-Heeled Jack was reported by certain publications to have appeared numerous times, once climbing the Newport Arch, an ancient Roman landmark, with bullets fired by locals bouncing off the strange hides he wore. But ’77 was not his last hurrah, for 11 years later, during the Ripper murders, he showed up in Everton, in Liverpool some 288 kilometers from London, crouching in church steeples. Then into the 20th century he ventured, showing up again in Everton in 1904, leaping over rooftops in front of hundreds of witnesses. This last appearance, however, came with something of an explanation. It seemed that this scare actually originated with a supposed haunted house known to have poltergeist activity. The place was so famous in those parts that crowds of Liverpudlians used to gather outside in fearful expectation of seeing the ghost within. Add to this the presence of a local man who suffered from some mental imbalance who used to run around rooftops shouting about his wife being a devil, knocking bricks and mortar down on baffled onlookers, and you had a perfect recipe for a leaping ghost scare. With such an explanation in this flap, one wonders whether all the previous flaps might be similarly explained.

Spring-Heeled Jack among the headstones in a cemetery, via Wikimedia Commons

Certainly there appears to have been some hysteria involved in many of the reports. Newspaper reporters themselves were skeptical at first, back in 1837, suggesting these were just the kinds of chilling tall tales passed around by servant girls, and in the few instances in which they did any real investigation, there seemed a dearth of first-hand witnesses. On some occasions, the ghostly beasts that had been reported lurking on the streets were simple cases of misidentification: a pale-faced cow or a white police horse became a ghastly demonic bull or bear or a hoary devil. Even the report of Jack dancing on the lawns of Kensington Palace was actually a re-imagining of something far less nefarious that happened 15 years earlier. And during the thick of the panic in January 1838, The Morning Herald’s investigation turned up plenty of people repeating the stories of Spring-Heeled Jack, but no one who had actually seen him firsthand. The reporter found himself chasing after empty leads, tracking down people who were said to have been injured by the phantom attacker only to have them say it hadn’t happened to them personally and send him on looking for someone else to whom it had happened. As Mike Dash has pointed out, this is a textbook example of an urban legend.

However, there do appear to be verifiable reports of some attacks, such as in the Alsop case, where we also have some very human suspects, and years later at Aldershot, where again it seems a human man may have perpetrated the attacks on sentries as a prank. It was reported that an unknown individual had earlier been stopped entering the camp carrying a carpet bag that could have contained a costume but that he was allowed to enter when he claimed to be a soldier. And there is some indication that the Aldershot Jack may have indeed been a soldier, for after being shot at, he ceased his nocturnal games until such time as the soldiers had been ordered not to waste any more ammunition firing at him, at which time he resumed his escapades. Only a soldier stationed there would have been aware that there was no further risk of being gunned down. And while of course the Alsop attack was a serious act of violence, as were all the sexual attacks associated with Spring-Heeled Jack, there is plenty of precedent for the notion that many attacks may have just been undertaken as pranks, as in Aldershot. All the way back in 1803, a ghost was said to be haunting the lanes of Hammersmith. His clothing, if nothing else, was described in terms quite similar to Jack’s, as white like a sheet and sometimes similar to an animal’s hide. Eventually a man encountered him, shot him, and was tried for his murder when beneath his costume he turned out to be a respected member of the community just out scaring people for a laugh. And the idea that Spring-Heeled Jack may just be a prankster, or several pranksters, was considered even in early 1838, as several newspapers reported on rumors that a group of bored noblemen were behind the attacks, performing them as part of a wager. One particular young nobleman, The Marquess of Waterford, Henry Beresford, known to drink heavily and enjoy a practical joke, was among those suspected of being involved in the wager, but there is no concrete evidence to support this speculation.

Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, via Wikimedia Commons

Hard evidence, however, is not something that 19th century newspapers always require before putting a story into print, as we have seen before, most recently in our examination of the phantom airships in America. London newspapers helped spread this panic by printing second hand accounts of the attacks, by calling him a ghost and a devil, and by dubbing him with the catchy name Spring-Heeled Jack. And some less scrupulous newspapers, such as the Illustrated Police News, which reported a number of sensational encounters with Spring-Heeled Jack in 1877 that no other sources corroborate, may have been fabricating incidents out of whole cloth. And the secondary literature also is rife with embellishment and falsification. Mike Dash has done the hard work of fact checking other writers who had researched the topic before him, and one of them, Peter Haining, seems to have manufactured stories for the specific purpose of confirming the theory that the Marquess of Waterford was behind the crimes. He tells of an attack on a servant girl named Polly Adams and has her describe her attacker as a laughing nobleman with protruding eyes like those of Henry Beresford, when no contemporary source has been turned up to confirm that such an attack ever occurred. Likewise, to one appearance of Jack that does appear in newspaper reports, he added the specific detail that a witness had identified a crest with a gold filigree “W” stitched into Spring-Heeled Jack’s cloak. This report is often repeated today as support for the notion that Waterford was behind the crimes, but there is no indication that it ever happened beyond Haining’s claim. And Dash has proven that Haining lacks all credibility, as he completely invented one encounter: the murder of a prostitute named Maria Davis that he attributes to Spring-Heeled Jack. Haining provided a woodcut illustration that he claims shows the recovery of Davis’s body from a ditch, but Mike Dash tracked down this woodcut to discover that it only depicts someone gathering water, not recovering a corpse. With distortions as shameless as these obscuring the truth here, it’s hard to tell what can be trusted.

The picture Haining misused, via Morgue of Intrigue

Nevertheless, while some of the attacks may have been contrived, and some may have been mere imitations, there must have been some original. A legend does not spring up from nothing, does it? And despite all the different variations on his appearance, the different modus operandi, far-flung settings and disparate time spans, one still sees similarities, a pattern that is hard to dismiss. Even outside of the UK, there have been other, similar encounters, and it is hard to imagine that the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack would have spread so far, especially since the newspapers there never made such a link. In Georgia, in 1841, a man dressed as the devil attacked and robbed a woman, and when confronted, he swelled and emitted smoke, pronouncing himself the Prince of Darkness before being shot to death. In Cape Cod, more than thirty years after his final appearance in England, a phantom called the Black Flash skulked around Provincetown with flaming eyes, spitting fire into his victims’ faces, laughing when shot at, and springing easily over 8-foot fences. In those same years, during World War Two, a “Spring Man” was known to hop down the darkened streets of Prague after the German-imposed curfew. Then the fifties saw a similar figure appear in Baltimore, clad in a black cloak and leaping onto rooftops. In fact, to a modern audience he might sound like a proto-Batman, and indeed, despite the terror he struck in many, he also appeared as a heroic figure in Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, terrifying villains with his preternatural leaps and acting the part of the outlaw hero, an anti-hero like Robin Hood. So one could certainly see Batman, the vigilante with acrobatic skills and a frightening persona, as being part of the same tradition as Spring-Heeled Jack. Is this then something universal, an archetype, a folkloric tradition like others we see appearing independently in different cultures? Or is it just testament to the eternal appeal of dressing up and leaping out to scare people? At this time of year, I lean toward the latter. Happy Halloween!

*

Further Reading

Dash, Mike. “Spring-Heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost.” Fortean Studies, vol. 3, 1996, pp. 7-125. mikedash.com, docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7bb090_e0f718375aa54f789586c062f29dd204.pdf.

The Myth and Mystery of Christopher Columbus

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?

*

Further Reading

Bigelow, Bill. "Once upon a genocide: Christopher Columbus in children's literature." Social Justice, vol. 19, no. 2, 1992, p. 106+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A13850074/AONE?u=cclc_merced&sid=AONE&xid=3057a024. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

---. "Two myths are not better than one." Monthly Review, July-Aug. 1992, p. 28+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A12478791/AONE?u=cclc_merced&sid=AONE. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

Churchill, Ward. “Deconstructing the Columbus Myth: Was the ‘Great Discoverer’ Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?” Social Justice, vol. 19, no. 2 (48), 1992, pp. 39–55. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29766673.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. “Columbus--Hero or Villain?” History Today, vol. 42, no. 5, May 1992, p. 4-9. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=9205183670&site=ehost-live.

Paul, Heike. “Christopher Columbus and the Myth of ‘Discovery.’” The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2014, pp. 43–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxsdq.5.

Koning, Hans. Columbus: His Enterprise. Monthly Review Press, 1991.

Singham, Mano. “Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth.” Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 88, no. 8, Apr. 2007, p. 590-92. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=brb&AN=504303125&site=ehost-live.

Vizenor, Gerald. "Christopher Columbus: Lost Havens in the Ruins of Representation." American Indian Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, Fall92, pp. 521-32. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=9305145094&site=ehost-live.

Blind Spot: Charles Dellschau and His Extraordinary Sonora Aero Club

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.

An example of Dellschau’s work, via Wikimedia Commons

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.”

An example of Dellschau’s work, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Further Reading

Charles A. A. Dellschau (monograph), edited by Stephen Romero, Marquand Books, 2013.