by Tom Cutler
Up in the rigging the sailors setting the foresail and topsails could have been jolted into the sea, leaving the fore-lower topsail only partly set. Some of the other rigging was left hanging loose for the same reason. Even in a breeze improperly set loose sails could have been torn away within a few days.
The men pumping out the bilge were knocked over by the terrifying seaquake, abandoning the sounding rod and bilge valve on the deck. The barrels of alcohol in the hold were savagely thrown around, spilling some 500 gallons into the bilge.
With fumes from the ruptured barrels now filling the hold, the crew, fearful of an explosion, opened the remaining hatches and skylights to ventilate the lower decks. They could not open the main hatch because the lifeboat was still lashed to its cover.
As the alarming quake continued, the Mary Celeste looked and felt as though she would be shaken to bits. The Captain gave orders to abandon ship. His wife and daughter went into the lifeboat, and the crew followed. So rushed and fearful were they that an axe was used to sever the ropes lashing the lifeboat to the main hatch.
Into the water went the boat and it began to drift away from the Mary Celeste out into the ocean just as the seaquake was subsiding.
In May of the following year the Liverpool Daily Albion reported that two rafts had been found off the coast of Spain. Tied on were five very decomposed bodies, one wrapped in an American flag. Had the Mary Celeste’s lifeboat come to pieces and been reassembled as two rafts?
Whether it was a seaquake that caused the captain and crew of the Mary Celeste to abandon ship, it must have been something as rapid and terrifying. It probably wasn’t aliens in flying saucers. In the end, exactly what happened to the unlucky ship is a question of probability, because, in the words of the old proverb, ‘The sea never gives up her secrets.’
The story of Big Ben
The number of hands on the clock of Big Ben is eight. Don’t forget, there are four faces to the clock, and each has two hands.
The Euston Road poisonings
At University College Hospital Professor Charles Rimmington had an idea. The very unusual time lag before symptoms emerged in these three patients suggested that this was an extremely rare case of cantharidin poisoning. If renal symptoms developed in these patients, then it would confirm his diagnosis.
Cantharidin, or Spanish fly, is a very powerful and dangerous irritant obtained from the iridescent crushed bodies of so-called ‘blister beetles’, which live in scrublands and woods throughout southern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. It is used today mainly in creams for removing warts, but its chief historic use was as an aphrodisiac.
Spanish fly has been used in love potions since classical times. When taken in minute amounts cantharidin irritates the genitals, resulting in increased blood flow that resembles the engorgement of sexual arousal. The sensations provoked were long ago believed to enhance a woman’s awareness of her genitalia, and arouse an urgent need for sexual intercourse. In men, Spanish fly was said to result in prolonged and prize-winning erections.
This was the chemical that Professor Rimmington suspected had poisoned the three people, and, as he had predicted, the day after their first symptoms both female patients began to suffer renal failure. Their conditions worsened rapidly and by the end of the day both had died. Post mortems confirmed corrosive poisoning. The professor’s inspired guess was correct. After further forensic work, minute amounts of cantharidin were found in both bodies.
The police, who had their chief suspect, went to University College Hospital to break the news of the typists’ deaths to the office manager. When he heard this he broke down and cried out, ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t somebody tell me?’ On the way to the police station he said, ‘I am to blame. I don’t know what made me do it.’
Under questioning, he agreed that he had taken some cantharidin from the pharmacist’s office, having heard of Spanish fly’s aphrodisiac effects when he was in the army. He put a little on the coconut ice using a pair of scissors.
His target was, he said, the older typist, with whom he had been having a long, romantic, though sexless, affair. ‘She kept saying she would let me do it next time. When the next time came I made up my mind to give her cantharidin to stimulate her desire for me.’
The man denied giving any to the younger woman and couldn’t explain how she had been poisoned. His own blistered face was apparently the result of careless contamination by his fingers.
At the Central Criminal court the office manager pleaded guilty to two charges of manslaughter and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
Kentucky blues
The Fugate family tree was traced back to 1820, when Frenchman Martin Fugate emigrated from his homeland to Kentucky. No record of the man’s skin colour existed but Cawein suspected that he had been carrying the blue gene. Fugate married Elizabeth Smith, a non-blue local woman who, against all the odds, also carried the recessive gene. They had seven children. Four of them were blue. That’s where the trouble started.
For 200 years six generations of the Blue Fugates lived in the same remote area of Kentucky, cut off from the outside world and without roads. The people of Ball Creek and the aptly named Troublesome Creek were so short of suitable marriage partners that, over the years, the isolated inhabitants started families with members of other families nearby, including the Combses and the Ritchies, and inadvertently began to have offspring with other blue-gene-carrying members of their own families, including cousins, and other blood relations.
But as the remote areas of the United States became increasingly developed, the Blue People took to Kentucky’s newly built roads for the first time. They began driving away from their communities to settle in far-flung places and marry strange new people. The blue gene soon began to be diluted among these new genetically dissimilar families, and its effects gradually died away. Benjamin Stacy (born 1975) is the last known descendent of the Blue Fugates.
Uncle Bob’s magic pipe
Uncle Bob’s method for smoking a pipe in the rain was simple. He turned it upside down. It was quite happy the wrong way up and the tobacco continued to smoulder away cheerfully without falling out because, in burning, it formed an intact lump, attaching itself lightly to the wall of the pipe. Uncle Bob said that, in the street, a pipe was a great bird-puller, as all the huddled ladies he passed would glance across at him from under their brollies and murmur, ‘Oh, what a lovely manly aroma.’
The incredible story of Kaspar Hauser
If you think about the problem for a minute, it soon becomes apparent the kind of person the mysterious Kaspar Hauser was.
When the note in the blue bag was examined it was found to contain spelling and grammatical errors typical of Hauser’s own. It was folded with strange diagonal folds, characteristic of the unusual method habitually used by Hauser himself. This led the court of enquiry to conclude that his story about being attacked was fantasy and that he had stabbed himself.
Indeed, all of Kaspar Hauser’s tales seem very unlikely. There were never any witnesses to his misfortunes, and many of those trying to care for him found him self-obsessed and habitually untruthful. The purported razor attack must be the only case in history where the victim has been set upon while on the toilet.
His account of accidentally picking up a gun and shooting himself after being reproached for lying – a very touchy subject, you might think – beggars belief. Mrs Biberbach, in whose house this happened, remarked on Kaspar Hauser’s ‘horrid deceitfulness’ and ‘duplicity’. Others reported that he was extravagantly untruthful.
Kaspar Hauser, whoever he really was, seems to have wanted everybody to pay attention to him. Self-inflicted wounds – a classic ruse of unbalanced people who crave attention – tend to be made on the upper extremities, opposite the dominant hand. This is the position of the wounds received by Kaspar Hauser. The final knife wound was possibly just too enthusiastic.
In the end, this irresistible mystery has only probable answers. But, in t
his, it resembles almost all real-life questions.
The great Epping Jaundice mystery
Dr Kopelman visited the bedside of the five remaining Epping Jaundice patients in St Margaret’s Hospital. He asked each of them if they remembered having eaten any wholemeal bread before becoming ill. Yes – every single one of them had recently bought and eaten a specific, expensive, speciality loaf from an Epping bakery, but many people had eaten it before without harm. What about the female patient who said she had only eaten white bread? Just then a staff nurse came rushing up. The woman had suddenly remembered buying a wholemeal loaf immediately before becoming ill.
The epidemic had two definite centres, one in Epping itself and the other in Chipping Ongar. It turned out that the Epping bakery had just opened a new branch in the village. Both shops were well run and hygienic but the manager could not be interviewed as he was in hospital with jaundice.
Dr Ash learned that the fancy wholemeal bread in question was bought mainly by well-off food connoisseurs, many of whom had been eating it for a long time without ill effects. But some kind of chemical poisoning appeared to be going on, and whatever it was acted fast and was very toxic to the liver.
Ash ordered production and sale of the bread to be stopped at once, though nothing out of the ordinary could be seen in the bakery. The only unusual ingredient was the wholemeal flour, which was delivered in sacks by a reliable firm.
A new sack of this flour had been tipped into the storage bins on 1 February and the first spoonfuls taken out for baking the same day. This sack of flour now became Isidore Ash’s prime suspect, so samples were sent for analysis.
For the most part the flour seemed quite uncontaminated. However, flour from the storage bins did show a minuscule trace of an unidentifiable organic chemical, at just thirteen parts in a million, surely too small a concentration to cause jaundice.
Ash’s attention turned to the delivery van.
The boss of the haulage firm said that their van carried different products, including liquids from a commercial chemist’s. The driver remembered a plastic container tipping over on the day of delivery, and the top coming off. About a gallon of the chemical had spilled and some paper packages had been spoiled, but the sack of flour seemed to have been unaffected.
Then a telephone call was received from a lady who had heard reports of the suspect bread from the media. She had bought and tasted some of the bread and found it revoltingly bitter. She had thrown it out for the birds but they wouldn’t eat it and it was still on her lawn, if anyone was interested. Samples were collected and sent to the National Toxicology Laboratory in Carshalton.
While Carshalton analysed the bread from the lawn, the pathologist at St Margaret’s fed some to laboratory mice, who became jaundiced. He found that the chemical was present in the bread at quantities 200 times greater than the bread so far tested.
With results of the analyses coming in, the chemical company suggested a suspect substance. It seemed that the Epping Jaundice was the result of poisoning by something called 4,4'-Methylenedianiline (MDA), a chemical used in the making of polymers and as an epoxy resin hardener. MDA is now on the list of ‘substances of very high concern’ of the European Chemicals Agency.
The container being transported in the van had spilt but the liquid had been invisible against the brown sack, and on the dark brown flour. The sack had then stood in the warm bakery and was dry by the time it was tipped into the storage bins. The highly contaminated flour was at the bottom of the sack and went in last, ending up at the top of the bin. It was therefore the first to be used for baking.
And so the epidemic started, with the acute effects of poisoning showing up quickly. Five or six slices of the heavily contaminated bread were enough to produce liver damage. But by the time samples were taken for testing almost all of the poisoned flour had gone.
All the Epping Jaundice patients recovered over time.
The fastest submarine in the world
The USS Skate was travelling only two miles south of the North Pole. The distance around the world at that point is just twelve miles. That means, of course, that it managed to circumnavigate the globe while going a fair bit slower than a milk float ambling down a country lane.
Also by Tom Cutler
The First Da Capo Songbook (as Fred Plowright)
The Second Da Capo Songbook (as Fred Plowright)
Speak Well English (as Tomas Santos)
211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do
211 Things a Bright Girl Can Do (as Bunty Cutler)
A Gentleman’s Bedside Book
Found in Translation (as Tomas Santos)
The Gentleman’s Instant Genius Guide
Slap and Tickle: The Unusual History of Sex and the People Who Have It
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