by Tom Cutler
Hearing the evidence, Flood concluded that the crew had got to the alcohol and gone bananas, apparently forgetting, as everyone else knew, that drinking meths is likely to finish you off. Anyway, he was adamant that the raving boozed-up crew had slaughtered the captain, his family and the ship’s officers in a drunken craze. They had then sliced the bows to fake a collision and fled in the lifeboat.
However, analysis of the stains found on the sword and elsewhere showed that they were not blood, possibly much to the disappointment of Mr Flood.
But what had caused the cuts to Mary Celeste’s side?
Captain David Williams, a white-bearded sea captain with more than fifty years’ ocean-going experience, has come up with an interesting answer to this puzzle. He reports that underwater earthquakes are common around the Azores and that during the severe vibrations of such a seaquake long splints from the ship’s recently reconditioned hull could easily have ‘popped’ from the edges of a few bow planks along the grain, looking as if they had been cut with an unknown instrument.
But whatever the cause, common sense made it obvious that getting off a seaworthy vessel and into a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic in November was unlikely to be something experienced sailors would do without very good reason. So the question remained: what exactly had happened on the Mary Celeste?
The problem
Why had the experienced captain of the Mary Celeste abandoned a nice big seaworthy ship full of provisions, for a small, cold, food-free lifeboat miles from anywhere in such a hurry? Had there been some sort of mutiny? Were the crew in a meths-crazed frenzy? Did the ship appear to be sinking? Had it been shaken by a seaquake so terrifying that the crew had fled? Or had something else happened?
Tap here for the solution.
The story of Big Ben
The mystery
‘Big Ben’ is the nickname for the so-called ‘Great Bell’ of the clock at the top of the tower at the Palace of Westminster. Nobody knows where it came from, but it is used by everybody to mean the clock face and the tower itself too.
The clock face and the tower were designed by the architect Augustus Pugin in 1852, but were not finished until 1858, several years after he went bonkers and died. The tower is 315 feet high and has 334 limestone stairs up to the top. Big Ben is owned by the British taxpayer, so any UK citizen who wants to can arrange to be shown round – so long as he or she can make it up those stairs. There is no lift.
The man who designed the workings of the clock was George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal, whose specifications included the following: ‘The first stroke of the hour bell should register the time, correct to within one second per day …’
The clock’s movement is famously reliable, keeping excellent time by the simple arrangement of a few weights, including an old English penny, that sit on top of the pendulum, which is enclosed in a windproof box. Adding or removing the penny alters the position of the pendulum’s centre of mass by a tiny fraction. This changes its effective length and alters the rate at which it swings, and the speed of the hands, by 0.4 seconds per day. With the hour hand measuring nine feet and the minute hand running to fourteen feet, it’s a tiny effect, but there are several weights.
Clockmaker John Tricki, who looked after Big Ben on the eve of the Millennium in 1999, said that it takes about half an hour to wind the clock, with a little break to watch the quarter chime. On Millennium Eve, Big Ben was, he said, really spot on. ‘The clock went “boing” right on the millisecond of midnight. It was smashing – we were right up the top of the tower with a bottle of champagne and some sandwiches when all the fireworks went off.’
The Great Bell itself, which does the bongs, weighs about as much as a couple of elephants.
Big Ben is part of British life, even for those who live nowhere near it. Its chimes can be heard live, striking the hour before news bulletins on BBC Radio 4, and transmitted around the globe by the BBC World Service. The sound comes via a microphone permanently installed in the tower. The practice of ‘live bongs’ – if you’ll pardon the expression – began in 1923, and, despite some suggestions that a recording would be simpler, the bongs are still transmitted in real time, in good old BBC style.
The problem
How many hands does the clock on the tower of Big Ben have?
Tap here for the solution.
The Euston Road poisonings
The mystery
The Euston Road was opened in 1756 as London’s first bypass, running through the capital’s outlying fields into the north of the city. But, as London’s centre expanded, the Euston Road was absorbed, and it now forms the northern boundary of the city centre, with Regent’s Park immediately to its north and University College Hospital just to its south.
In 1954 one of the businesses on Euston Road was a wholesale chemist’s. Among its employees was a 27-year-old typist who had been with the firm since leaving school at 13. She was a pleasant, unambitious woman, who worked in the main office along with twenty or so other people. They were under the direction of a manager who sat in the same room. He was a married 44-year-old veteran of the Royal Army Service corps who had served in Singapore.
On the evening of Monday 26 May the young typist was admitted, seriously ill, to St James’s Hospital, Balham, in south London, showing the classic symptoms of severe caustic poisoning. She had eaten normally that day except for a piece of chocolate-covered coconut ice which her office manager, a long-time close friend and confidant, had generously shared around to various people, at about 2.30.
A few minutes after the sweets had been eaten, another of the typists, a 19-year-old former Margate beauty queen, had begun to have stomach pains and feel sick. Before long she was vomiting, and was taken to the first-aid room by the 27-year-old, who was, herself, now very unwell.
The younger woman was given some bicarbonate of soda but complained that this made her feel worse. She had developed a severe burning sensation in her mouth and throat, she could not swallow, and her mouth was blistering so badly that she found it hard to speak.
The older typist was also in trouble. She had severe abdominal pains and had begun vomiting. She too was developing a burning sensation like the younger woman.
The office manager, who had been complaining of a headache, now collapsed at his desk. He was not responding, and, like the typists, his cheeks and lips had begun to blister, and his face was becoming discoloured in patches.
An ambulance was called to take the workers to the nearby University College Hospital but the older of the two women decided to go home, so a taxi was ordered. By the time she arrived, at around 6 p.m., she was very pale, and retching uncontrollably. She had to be carried up two flights of stairs where she began vomiting blood.
Her doctor arrived at about 7.30 and was startled by her condition. Finally, now very sick indeed, she agreed to go to hospital, and it was at 9.30, seven hours after first becoming ill, that she was admitted to St James’s in a state of collapse, with a rapid pulse, severe pallor and low blood pressure.
This condition, known as ‘circulatory shock’, or just ‘shock’, is a life-threatening medical emergency not to be confused with the ‘shock’ people talk about when they’ve been surprised by a loud explosion or learnt that they are adopted.
A few miles away, in University College Hospital, the younger typist was in an equally serious condition. Her tongue and mouth were so swollen that doctors were unable to wash out her stomach. Both women were given morphine.
It was by now clear that they had swallowed some severely corrosive poison that was eating away everything from their mouths down to their stomachs.
Mercifully, the office manager had rallied, and was the only one of the victims capable of speaking. Despite his condition, the police, who had been called because of the unexplained nature of the incident, decided to interview him.
He was distressed but suggested that the coconut ice must be to blame. It was certainly suggestive that three of the people wh
o had eaten it had become ill shortly afterwards, although others were showing no signs of poisoning.
The manager was able to describe the sweet shop in Hampstead Road where he had bought the coconut ice. The police visited the shop and confiscated the remaining stock. They also had the paper bag it had come in, along with some uneaten cubes, and had brushed flakes of it from the desks of those who had eaten it. Forensic examination of the uneaten pieces revealed nothing unusual, however.
At University College Hospital there was confusion about what it was that had poisoned these three unhappy people. Acute corrosive poisoning is very uncommon, partly because the immediate burning sensation on contact with the mouth prevents people from swallowing the destructive substance. Such chemicals are, anyway, tightly controlled. Furthermore, the symptoms of corrosive poisoning are immediately apparent, and are not delayed for many minutes, as they had been in this case. Yet here were three victims all succumbing to corrosive poisoning in a wholesale chemist’s, where the dangers of such chemicals ought to have been well known.
Thankfully, the office manager, who had been in hospital for three days, had been more fortunate than the women, and his symptoms were improving. Others who had eaten some of the suspicious coconut ice were also feeling all right, and were counting their lucky stars.
The whole sad affair seemed inexplicable. Who would want to poison these two pleasant young ladies and their good friend the office manager? Perhaps it was not deliberate poisoning. Maybe one of the company’s chemicals had somehow contaminated the coconut ice. Under analysis, dust from the office manager’s desk showed crystals of a poisonous chemical called cantharidin, and in his drawer the police found a pair of scissors with a smear of coconut ice on the blade.
A pharmacist employed by the firm told the police that they did indeed keep a bottle of the deadly chemical in a glass cupboard in his own office. He said that a small amount seemed to have gone missing and that a person – whom he identified – had come in on the day or the poisoning to ask if he could have some to kill some rabbits. This person had later been seen alone in the pharmacist’s room.
The problem
Who had poisoned the three victims at the Euston Road wholesale chemists? Was this a case of murder? Or, if it was an accident, what on earth had happened?
Tap here for the solution.
Kentucky blues
The mystery
In 1960 Madison Cawein III, a young haematologist at the University of Kentucky’s Lexington medical clinic, began to hear incredible stories about something funny going on in a remote part of the state.
A woman had come in for a blood test and she was blue from head to toe. When it was pointed out to her that her face and fingernails were ‘almost indigo’ she blithely announced that she was one of the ‘Blue Combses’ of Ball Creek.
It turned out that Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek and Ball Creek had for a long time been home to many people with blue skin. Madison Cawein made it his mission to track down these people and identify, if he could, what was making them this strange colour.
Then one day, two blue people, Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, arrived at Cawein’s clinic. After the formalities, the haemotologist delicately asked them whether they had any other blue relations – possibly the oddest question any doctor has ever put to a patient.
Cawein was told that the Blue People of Kentucky belonged to just a few local families, notably the Fugates, and that for 200 years members of the Blue Fugates had lived in the same remote area of the state, in a settlement so isolated that it lacked even roads.
Apart from their blue colouring, the health of the Blue People was otherwise robust, many of them living into great old age. Cawein suspected that they had a condition known as methaemoglobinemia, caused by raised levels of methaemoglobin, a blue form of haemoglobin, which accounts for the blue tinge of the veins on the back of a pink person’s hand.
Methaemoglobinemia is the result of an inherited recessive gene – one that is present in the body but not visible. To display the symptoms a person must inherit a methaemoglobinemia gene from both Mum and Dad. Somebody with just one gene would not display the symptoms, but could pass on the gene to his or her own children.
The haemotologist tested the Ritchies for haemoglobin abnormalities, but drew a blank. Then a new report by E.M. Scott came to his notice. It suggested that the red blood cells of people with methaemoglobinemia were lacking the protective enzyme diaphorase, which in healthy people turns blue methaemoglobin into red haemoglobin.
He tested Zach Fugate, the 76-year-old head of the family, and his blue Aunt Bessie, and found that their blood did indeed lack diaphorase. The Blue People of Kentucky had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it had overwhelmed their haemoglobin.
The doctor initiated a surprising treatment. He injected them with 100 milligrams of methylene blue, a very blue liquid normally used to treat malaria. Within minutes the blue faded from the Ritchies’ skin and for the first time in their lives they were a normal colour, like everybody else around them. Because the effect would be temporary, the doctor prescribed them methylene blue pills to take every day for the rest of their lives. But he warned them to watch out for a weird side effect: their urine would turn blue.
The Blue People of Kentucky went away happy, with the bonus that they now had the ability to perform the most astonishing party trick anyone has ever seen.
The problem
The cause of the proliferation of blue skin in the people of this very remote part of Kentucky was avoidable. It was connected with their isolation and the way in which they therefore went about their daily lives. It would not have occurred had they lived in a more populated area, and was the result of what you might call a ‘lifestyle’ factor, though one pressed upon them by their circumstances.
Why were there so many blue people in this remote corner of the state? Exactly what was it about the way the Blue People lived that turned, and kept, generations of them this unusual colour?
Tap here for the solution.
Uncle Bob’s magic pipe
The mystery
An old policeman once told me he had never arrested a pipe smoker, and that makes sense, because pipe smokers are peaceable people. As the Algonquin spirit the Great Manitou wisely announced, ‘If discord has broken out between two beings, let them smoke together. United by this bond, they will live in peace and friendship thereafter.’
Back in the seventies my uncle Bob used to smoke a pipe wherever he went. He favoured a tobacco called Ogden’s Walnut Plug, which came in a juicy black lump that he cut with a penknife before rubbing. It always left a liquorice stain on his thumbs and was, he told me, 90 per cent nicotine.
Another blend Uncle Bob enjoyed was Balkan Sobranie Original Smoking Mixture, which came in a beautiful black and white tin and incorporated Macedonian Yenidje leaves.
Anyway, you always knew when Uncle Bob was in the house even if you couldn’t see him. When he was out, striding through Bloomsbury in a stiff rain, hat on and pipe in, he always had a tin of Dunhill’s Early Morning Pipe safely aboard. This is a sweet Oriental mixture, pressed into a sky-blue tin decorated with a golden sunburst and crowing cockerel.
Even without a hat, Uncle Bob always smoked in the rain, including in downpours that would have put out a large bonfire.
The problem
My Uncle Bob’s pipe had no lid and was in every way an ordinary pipe. He could cross an open field in the pouring rain with it gripped between his teeth, without it going out. He didn’t cover it with anything, including a lid, an umbrella, his hat, a roof or his hand. How did he manage this?
Tap here for the solution.
The incredible story of Kaspar Hauser
The mystery
On 26 May 1828, people going about their business in Nuremberg, Bavaria, noticed a disoriented and anxious teenage boy wandering the streets. He could barely walk and kept repeating that he wanted to be a cavalryman, but was otherwise not much help to mystifi
ed onlookers.
The boy had with him an anonymous letter addressed to a Captain von Wessenig, explaining that the author had taken the boy in as a foundling sixteen years previously and had brought him up, teaching him to read and write but never letting him out of his house. The letter went on to say that the boy wished to become a cavalryman, ‘as his father was’.
Along with the first letter was another, supposedly written by the boy’s mother, years before, when he was an infant. It was addressed to the writer of the first and explained that the baby was named Kaspar, that his date of birth was 30 April 1812, and that his father was dead. The trouble was that, as anyone could see, the two letters were written in the same handwriting.
Young Kaspar was taken to Captain von Wessenig’s house. The captain was asked either to take the boy under his wing, or have him hanged – the 1828 equivalent, presumably, of an ASBO.
When Kaspar was asked what on earth was going on he would only say that he didn’t know, or burst into tears. He kept repeating, ‘I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was,’ or ‘Horse. Horse.’ There was an equine theme going on.
Kaspar was in good physical shape and otherwise normal, but he would eat nothing but bread and water. It was suggested that he had been raised as a wolf-child in the forest.
His own account of his history went this way. For as long as he could recall, he said, he had been kept alone in a dark cell containing only a straw bed and a wooden horse. He woke each day to find bread and water beside him, which sometimes tasted bitter. After drinking the bitter water, he would fall into a deep sleep and he would awake with his hair and fingernails cut.