Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  He got the job. The Provincial Medical Journal reported:

  In 1888 he was appointed Consulting Surgeon to the Manchester Ship Canal, upon which great work some 20,000 workmen were employed, and in five years over 3,000 accidents demanded his supervision. Mr Robert Jones designed and placed the hospitals. He selected the staff, which consisted of 14 surgeons.

  There were three hospitals, each with a matron, house-surgeon and two nurses. During five years Robert Jones performed over 200 major operations.

  The construction of the canal occupied several years. Work was both arduous and dangerous. Accidents were frequent and critical. Along its 35 miles there was continuous warfare with chance, which resulted in casualties of every type and degree.

  I feel sure we are on the right track. Patience now, patience. I need an intermediary, a nuncio, in America, since I cannot leave Wales, to trace that crippled man who deposited a five hundred dollar bill on a Liverpool table. Surely he must be our Mr Vogel.

  I have read about the Welsh who fled poverty, rather as the Scots fled the clearances, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1850 and 1910 nearly 400,000 people left rural Wales for other parts of the United Kingdom. Others went abroad.

  I turn to our most famous living historian, John Davies, to tell you the story:

  ... it seems likely that between 1850 and 1870 at least sixty thousand people emigrated from Wales to the United States... Welsh emigrants were drawn to already existing Welsh rural communities such as Cambria in Pennsylvania, Gallia in Ohio and Oneida in the state of New York, but Welsh migrants also established new farming communities, especially in Wisconsin, where the state’s constitution was translated into Welsh for their benefit...

  As industrialisation in the United States proceeded apace, experienced workers were in great demand in places like the ironworks of Pittsburgh and the coalmines of Scranton and Wilkes Barre. Thousands of Welsh people from the industrial areas were ready to answer the call, especially in view of the declining prosperity of the Welsh ironworks...

  One of the most unusual migrations from Wales to the United States... resulted from the missionary work of the Mormon, Daniel Jones of Abergele. Jones emigrated to America in 1840 and in 1843 he became a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. He returned to Wales in 1845 and, from his headquarters in Merthyr, he gained at least five thousand converts to his faith... in 1848, 249 Welsh Mormons emigrated to Salt Lake City in Utah, and the famous Tabernacle choir has its origins among them. It was estimated in 1949 that there were 25,000 Mormons of Welsh descent in America...

  By 1872 there were 384 Welsh-language chapels in the United States and some two dozen Welsh periodicals had seen the light of day. Many of the emigrants sought to create a microcosm of Wales.

  No less than 13 signatories of the Declaration of Independence claimed Welsh descent.

  George Washington and Franklin D Roosevelt both had Welsh blood in their veins.

  The two Welsh newspapers, Ninnau and Y Drych, printed in America for y Cymry ar wasgar – the dispersed Welsh in the States – have merged so I get in touch with Ninnau’s editor and I receive a contact in Blue Earth County in Minnesota. The contact is Anwen Marek, a psychologist at the capital city, St Paul. God help me, I think, that’s the last thing I need, a bloody shrink. Still, she’s willing to help and I must take all the help I’m offered. We exchange e-mails. She’s doing a doctorate on the Sisseton band of the Sioux nation, which previously lived in this region – it’s not so far from Little Bighorn River and Wounded Knee Creek. She mails me the highlights of a book published in 1895, called History of the Welsh in Minnesota, gathered by old settlers with names like Hughes, Roberts and Edwards.

  I remember the Welsh myth, of a Welsh-speaking tribe of Indians discovered by explorers and traced back in folklore to Madog, the Welsh prince supposed to have landed in America some considerable time before Amerigo Vespucci was a gleam in his father’s mainsail. This myth was used by Elizabeth I’s astrologer, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee, to create the word Britannia and to justify British imperialism.

  The conduct of the Welsh in Minnesota makes fascinating reading. Unfortunately, these particular Welshmen were the worst sort of colonialists possible. I cringed when I read:

  ... on a high bluff overlooking the river was situated the old Indian cemetery. It was formed by placing a number of crotched posts in the ground, and laying out a network of poles across from one to the other; and on top of those, wrapped in skins or blankets, the dead were deposited. This ancient burial place was cut down and destroyed as a nuisance by the early Welsh settlers. The Indian, however, was gone. For the past thirty years he has not set foot upon the land of his fathers. A mighty change has taken place; his bark villages have disappeared... his paths are obliterated... no-one can even find a trinket in the fields; it is as though oblivion has drawn its hand across the slate of their existence.

  So it appears that my own race was as ready as any to walk all over anyone in its path. I am immensely sobered by this knowledge. Look how dismissive the Welsh were when they viewed the Sioux natives (it wasn’t that long since the Welsh themselves had appeared ‘barbarian’ to English visitors):

  ... in the early days one would be quite sure to meet a troop of aborigines on the march, all walking in single file. First came the men, dressed in close-fitting pantaloons of clouted cloth or buckskin, with a wide, fancy fringe along each leg, a pair of moccasins, ornamented with beads, on the feet, and a dirty white blanket drawn over the shoulders. At the girdle hung a tomahawk, knife, and ammunition pouch, while on the arm would be carried the gun. They were a tall, stalwart looking people, straight as arrows, of a dusky red colour, with prominent features, high cheek bones, and long, straight, very coarse, black hair, often braided in two or three plaits. Behind the men came the squaws, much more haggard and squatty than their lords, because of the drudgery they had to perform. Mingled with the company would be several wolfish-looking dogs whose meat was deemed a great delicacy at their feasts.

  All labour connected with Indian life the squaws performed. Their duty it was not only to transport the baggage, but also to put up the wigwams, fetch the firewood, cook the meals, cultivate the small patch of Indian corn, tan the furs and the robes, make the clothing and the fancy bead-work, manufacture the household implements and hew the canoes.

  The Indians were very hospitable, and would spare the last morsel, and expect others to do the same. They had but a faint idea of private property, especially in the matter of food, and thought nothing of begging eatables off the early settlers. They seldom made any provision for the morrow, but would gorge themselves with what they had at the time and wait until hungry before looking for more. They were never dainty as to what they ate. All kinds of animals, and every part of the animal, afforded them nourishment. The early pioneers remember how a dead horse or dead cow would be relished by the Indians as a big feast.

  Though the braves dislike all labour, deeming it ignoble for a man, yet they are inured to the severest hardships, fatigue and bodily pains. From childhood the males were taught to despise pain, and feats of endurance were always the special feature of their feasts and dances. In a Dance to the Sun performed by a young brave named Wanotau, witnessed at Lake Traverse, the dance consisted in making three deep cuts through his skin – one on his breast and one on each of his arms. The skin was cut in the manner of a loop, so as to permit a rope to pass under the strip of skin and flesh, which was thus divided from the body. The ropes being passed through, they were secured to a tall, vertical pole. He then began to dance around this pole, at the commencement of his fast, frequently swinging himself in the air... he continued this exercise, with few intermissions, during the whole of his fast, until the fourth day at about 10am when the strip of skin from his breast gave way, notwithstanding which he interrupted not his dance, although supported merely by his arms. At noon the strip from his left arm snapped off. His uncle then thought he had suffered enough, and drew
his knife and cut the remaining strip from his right arm, upon which Wanotau fell to the ground in a swoon. The heat at the time was extreme. He was left exposed in that state until night, when his friends took him some provisions.

  I doubt if any of the Welsh settlers could have shown such incredible bravery (desperation?). Instead, they were happy to steal the Indians’ homeland, which was beautiful. The settlers described charming valleys traversed by brooks and rills with spurs of timber jutting out across the great rolling prairie, a land bespangled by many lovely lakes and pleasant groves. The Welsh settlement was a paradise on earth, and it had been gained at the expense of the native peoples, who had lived there in great happiness until the coming of the Welsh. There was something about the settlers’ description of the place, in all its lushness, which reminded me of Doctor Robert’s garden in the Vogel Papers:

  Corn, oats, barley, sorghum and potatoes are grown abundantly. Wild plums, grapes, gooseberries, currants, strawberries and raspberries are very plentiful. The timber of the country comprises oak, elm, bass-wood, maple, butternut, hickory, poplar, and in the valleys, black walnut and cottonwood.

  I am minded to take you on another tangent; please bear with me – we will reach our goal eventually, I promise. Really, this is only a titchy little diversion.

  In 1943 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attended a meeting in Swansea, when an academic discussed the growth of iron and coal mining in the region, saying that although the process had scarred the environment and the people, it had led to new methods and gradual progress.

  Wittgenstein said that in one light it could be seen as progress, in another as decline. There was no method of weighing one against the other to justify a theory of overall ‘progression’.

  The academic said something like: ‘Despite all the ugly sides to our civilization I am sure I would rather live as we do now than have to live as the caveman did.’

  Wittgenstein answered: ‘Yes of course you would. But would the caveman?’

  This encapsulates the whole issue of colonisation. Native people, minorities, are best left alone. But it’s too late – the last two centuries have probably seen the greatest human migrations in the entire history of mankind, and the soup is now so thick that we will never again be able to reclaim the individual constituents. Should we want to? Everything is ruled by economics; accountants are the new oppressors. Across the world, people will do just about anything to learn English, because it is the language of the web and world commerce. Just to show you how desperate things have become, there are parents in Korea who have begun taking their children to plastic surgeons for a frenectomy – an operation which snips a membrane and makes the tongue longer, so that the kids can say right and wrong instead of light and long, and so ‘get on’ in the world. These Korean kids spend hours every day watching video lessons in English. Chinese DJ Li Yang claims to have taught English to 20 million of his countrymen by assembling them in football stadia and getting massive crowds to shout out phrases such as No pain no gain and I’ve heard so much about you. Newly-independent East Timor, freed at last from Indonesia’s terrifying occupation, plans to adopt English as a vital component of the country’s future. Malaysian teenagers – in their droves – buy a magazine called Junior which teaches them how to speak English: a recent issue featured Christmas carols and Stonehenge.

  I began to understand the underlying tone of the Vogel Papers, with their emphasis on incomers who deprived an ancient tribe of its land and its health – in some North American areas two-thirds of the Indians were wiped out by smallpox and other ‘gifts’ from the immigrants. The Welsh, too, had suffered in the same way: the Roman Julius Agricola virtually exterminated one of the main tribes, the troublesome Ordovices, in an act of ethnic cleansing. The Irish colonised large swathes of the western seaboard, and the Vikings left their bloody tracks everywhere, having the temerity to name most of our offshore islands in their own tongue: Anglesey, Grassholm, Skokholme, Steep Holme, Flat Holme...

  The Normans beat us into submission and the English swallowed us up in waves. At the end of such a thorough mauling I think it’s quite natural for us to feel a little vulnerable. It’s a wonder we’re here at all.

  I send the Vogel Papers to Anwen Marek and a précis of the story so far. She is intrigued – her own son was born with a dislocated hip, quite common, the boy’s fine now. Abnormality is the norm, really.

  She sounds level-headed, straightforward, sensible. She chips in with a couple of references. Have I read D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, which has a Vogel and a pagoda?

  No I haven’t.

  What about Márquez? Love in the Time of Cholera has a parrot, a cripple, a violinist and a one-eyed man behind the bar.

  Would that be the Márquez of Anglesey? I quip.

  But she ignores me and continues.

  Do I know anything about Freud, who had a seminal dream (no pun intended) about his mother involving birds? The German word vögeln is also a (naughty) slang word for to screw.

  No I don’t know anything about Freud, but I’ve dreamt about him.

  Ha ha she says.

  Have I heard of the Sons of Mil?

  Funny you should mention the Sons of Mil, I say. No.

  Ancestors of the Irish, she says. According to Irish mythology the Sons of Mil journeyed through Egypt, Crete and Sicily, and when they reached Spain one of their company, Bregon, built a tower. His son, Ith, climbed to the top of this tower and saw Ireland across the sea, so they set sail to investigate it.

  Sounds intriguing, I say – a view of the promised land from a tower; the pagoda could be a version of this.

  I tell her that the author of the Vogel Papers was an ingénue, and that these common factors were almost certainly coincidental. She hangs fire on that.

  I say I need a list of all American instrument-makers to see if we can follow the scent.

  Was Vogel his real name, or are we looking for a Welsh surname? she asks.

  Don’t know, I say – we’re working with clues at the moment, and the clues are Anglesey, Vogel and Manchester.

  She contacts the American Federation of Violin and Bowmakers. Its members have names like Weisshaar, Metzler, Croen, Grugaugh, Shrapreau, Parshenov, DaCunha and Yang.

  She phones round but gets nowhere. Then she spots an ad in her regional newspaper, and e-mails me.

  Hi Di [she thinks this is funny, calling me Diogynes because she says that walking around Wales is just as daft as living in a tub and wandering the streets with a lamp, seeking an honest man]. I may have something for you. Man called David Roberts is giving a demo to the county’s fiddle freaks tonite. For your info, the ad says it’s a varnishing demonstration, if that means anything to you. Apparently this Roberts has a substantial quantity of varnish-making materials including seedlac, button lac, elemi, sandalwood and oil of rosemary. So there. I’ll try to phone him, if I can contain my excitement, he may want to rub something on me. By the way, can you send a photo – sending news to a faceless computer is disconcerting, I’d like to know who I’m taking to. Ben [her son] is also interested. He wants to know why I’m spending so much time looking for a bird from Germany. He keeps pointing to the sparrows and saying ‘Is that him?!’ Bye – A.

  The computer goes as quite as a sibyl and I go off for a few days with my small rucksack and lightweight sleeping bag. I travel very light. I take a map and warm clothing, also two candles and a lighter. I learnt a trick from a homeless man. The nights can be long and cold. If I can’t sleep I light a candle and look at the flame, which is good viewing in a crazy sort of way with its oranges, blues and whites, and trees loom and waver around my igloo of light. But there’s a better reason – although the flame doesn’t give much heat it makes me feel warmer in an illusory way. A candle is good company when earthlings are dumbed by the universe and the stars shimmer coldly and distantly. The first night I sleep in a church porch at Tallarn Green. I enjoy a full nocturnal extravaganza; a pair of barn owls come and go alon
g the yews, noisy and assertive; bats zing through the night like toy stealth bombers and there’s a faraway fireworks display by a silent shower of shooting stars. The church is open, amazingly, but I stay in the porch, half out of respect, half from wanting to see the entertainment. I find Polaris and watch satellites arc past it. The Plough is my next port of call; of its seven main stars two are moving in a different direction to the rest, so the shape will change eventually. Up in Gemini the heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux, wink at me.

  Castor and Pollux were the brothers of Helen of Troy, and they rescued her when she was carried off by Theseus. Castor was famous for his power over horses, Pollux was handy with his fists. They were joined at the hip, so to speak. Both of them went with Jason on his fabled quest for the golden fleece; subsequently, Castor and Pollux became the deities of seamen and voyagers. Years later Castor was killed during a war, and Pollux was so cut up he asked Jupiter if he could swap places with his brother so that Castor could live again. Jupiter gave them both a dual life, half of it below the earth and the other half in the heavenly abodes; he also rewarded their attachment to each other by placing them among the stars as Gemini the Twins.

  I mull over this legend as I stretch out on a bristly doormat and sleep fitfully. Away in the fields a cow lows and the sound resonates and echoes into silence again along the frosty fields. Dogs on a hillside farm sound the alarm suddenly and answering dogs, far away, create a mystique of echoing sound effects, arriving like sonar echoes, from the blackness outside, into my submarine porch. This is the witching hour, and I share its separation from the day. It’s the other side of the earth’s story, told to you by an estranged friend in a candlelit room many years later.