by Lewis, Dan
To accomplish this goal, the government employed a pretty straightforward strategy—institute a bounty. If a person killed a cobra, the government would reward him or her with some money. The more cobras you killed, the more money you got, so people sharpened their knives and broke out their clubs.
The problem? Catching and killing a wild cobra is hard, as it should be, in order to justify the bounty system in the first place. But capturing a few cobras and starting your own breed of the snakes is not much harder—and then, you’re left with a perpetually self-replenishing supply of cobras that you don’t have to chase down. An enterprising would-be cobra killer can simply grow his own cobra clan, kill some, collect the reward, rinse, repeat.
When news of the scheme hit the government, as Mehrotra’s story goes, they did the only thing they could and ended the bounty program. Unfortunately, the cobra farmers now had piles of venomous, worthless cobras and no incentive to kill them (and risk being bitten). So they didn’t. Instead, the cobra farmers released their hordes of contraband creatures into the streets, redoubling the problem.
Today, the term “Cobra Effect” is used to describe such an unintended outcome of an otherwise straightforward plan.
BONUS FACT
Mehotra’s story may be apocryphal, but we know that the Cobra Effect is real. Michael Vann, a professor of history at Sacramento State University, published a paper in 2003 titled “Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre” in the academic journal French Colonial History. In the late 1800s, France controlled Vietnam and built out Hanoi’s sewer system—a by-product of which was the explosion of the rat population. When the problem became too large for exterminators to handle, the French administrators of the city offered a bounty for catching and killing the rats, with payment to be made upon the presentation of the rats’ tails. The bounties ended when authorities realized that a new cottage industry had developed just outside the city limits—rat farming, designed for the easy harvest of rat tails.
THE APTLY NAMED SNAKE ISLAND
WHERE DEATH IS JUST A FEW METERS AWAY
On the coast of Sao Paolo, Brazil sits Ilha de Queimada Grande, or as it is known colloquially in English, Snake Island. The island, roughly 110 acres of trees, is uninhabited, with only one building—a lighthouse—abandoned for years. Despite the tropical nature of the Queimada Grande, travel to the island is expressly forbidden by the Brazilian navy. Why? Because Queimada Grande is home to hundreds of thousands of golden lanceheads, a snake you probably don’t want to get too close to.
Golden lanceheads are unique to Queimada Grande. The snake typically grows to be about two feet long but can at extremes grow to nearly double that length. And it is venomous—very, very venomous.
Generally lanceheads (that is, the more common cousins of the golden lancehead) are responsible for 90 percent of snake bite-related fatalities in Brazil. The mortality rate from a lancehead bite is 7 percent if the wound goes untreated, and even treatment doesn’t guarantee survival. Roughly 3 percent of those who are bitten by lanceheads and treated with antivenom still end up dying from the bite. The venom causes a grab bag of symptoms, including kidney failure, necrosis of muscular tissue, brain hemorrhaging, and intestinal bleeding. Scary stuff, to be sure.
No official records tell of a person being bitten by a snake, let alone a golden lancehead-caused fatality, because the de facto quarantine on the island has successfully kept humans separated from these deadly beasts. In fact, there is reason to believe that snakes of the golden variety are much more dangerous than their continental cousins. A chemical analysis of golden lancehead venom suggests that it is faster acting and more powerful—perhaps five times more powerful. Surviving a golden lancehead attack, especially when on an otherwise isolated island, is a tall order.
The only way to guarantee survival is to avoid these two-foot-long monsters altogether, which is primarily why Snake Island is closed to tourists—encountering a golden lancehead there is an all-but-certain fate. Even the most conservative estimate suggests that the golden lancehead population density on Queimada Grande is one per square meter; others suggest the population is as high as five per square meter. Regardless, as Atlas Obscura points out, even at the lower estimate, “you’re never more than three feet away from death.”
BONUS FACT
Another reason to keep Snake Island free from visitors is to protect the snakes themselves. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, is an international organization that publishes the “Red List of Threatened Species,” the leading taxonomy of species that are at risk of extinction. The Red List has three levels in the “threatened” risk category, with “vulnerable” being the lowest risk category therein, followed by “endangered,” and finally, “critically endangered.” The golden lancehead is considered “critically endangered” by the IUCN because the snake meets two key criteria: It only exists at a single location of less than 100 kilometers-squared (Snake Island) and that habitat is in decline, due to human interference. For a while, Brazil wanted to slash-and-burn the terrain and turn it into a banana plantation. Those plans never came to fruition, and since 2004, the golden lancehead population has been stable.
WHERE THE BODIES GO
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A HOMELESS NEW YORKER DIES?
Roughly 7 million people live in New York City, and, like everywhere else in the world, some of them die. Sometimes, they die with no family and/or no money. In New York, a few thousand such people die each year in the city’s hospitals alone. But these people’s stories do not end with their deaths. What does the city do with the bodies?
The answer? They’re buried on Hart Island.
Hart Island is located in the western part of Long Island Sound, a few miles offshore from the Bronx and only a bit farther from Queens. This tiny island—131 acres—has been uninhabited for years, at least by the living. Since 1869, the city of New York has used the island as a potter’s field, a burial ground for those who could not afford burial elsewhere. The potter’s field now takes up roughly 101 of the island’s 131 acres and is the largest tax-supported graveyard in the world.
More than 850,000 people have been buried on Hart’s Island, and roughly 2,000 more burials occur each year. Dismembered body parts constitute a small minority of the burials. An estimated one-third of the burials are of very young children. With one exception—“special child baby 1 1985,” the first child to die of AIDS in New York City—the bodies are buried in mass graves. Children are buried in trenches numbering as many as 1,000 each, whereas adults—whose bodies are often disinterred when relatives later claim them—are buried in three sections of roughly fifty each.
What to see if you know anyone buried there? To find out, you need to peruse the records, which are maintained by the city’s Department of Correction—a strange quirk of how the island is administered. Because of the cost of burying 2,000 or so bodies (or parts thereof) each year, the city uses prison labor for the job. Inmates from Rikers Island, New York City’s jail, are ferried over to Hart’s Island and paid 50 cents per hour to stack coffins for burial. Since the 1950s, the burials occur without any sort of ceremony; grave sites are not even outfitted with markers indicating those buried.
The city, generally, does not allow visitors, press, or tourists to see some still-present historical landmarks on the island, citing security concerns due to the fact that prisoners work there. The only exceptions made are to family members of the deceased who may be buried there, and even in that case, the visits must be scheduled with the Department of Correction and the visitors are not allowed to visit the gravesites unaccompanied.
BONUS FACT
Legend has it that Hart Island is haunted. This isn’t the case, of course. But if you were a homeowner on Hart Island (again, not the case, as it is uninhabited) and told tales about such ghosts, you couldn’t sell your home without disclosing that to a would-be buyer. In 1991, the New York court system decided the case of Stambovsky vs. Ackley, holding that if
a seller promoted (in that case, via years of stories to the local press) his or her home as being haunted, the courts would hold him or her to that belief. As a poltergeist in one’s home is a material defect of the house (assuming you aren’t a Ghostbuster) that cannot be detected by any nonparanormal method of inspection, the court held that the seller must inform the purchaser of the presence of the ghosts. Failure to do so, as seller Ackley did in the above-mentioned case, entitles the buyer to his or her deposit back.
SLAYING THE SILVER BALL
PROOF THAT ALMOST ANYTHING CAN BE BANNED
Fiorello LaGuardia was elected mayor of New York City in 1933, and, on January 1 of the following year, took office. One of his first acts as mayor was to crack down on mafia activity, especially mob-owned slot machines, seeing them as a direct line into the coffers of organized crime. LaGuardia paid personal attention to the confiscation and destruction of the machines, taking a sledgehammer along with the media in tow to snap pictures.
But with this one income source down, the mafia was not about to give up on gambling altogether. As Mental Floss magazine noted, the mobsters turned to something else: pinball machines. LaGuardia’s ire refocused on pinball as well.
LaGuardia was already anything but fond of pinball; according to Popular Mechanics, he stated in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court that pinball hit the “pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money.” And he was probably correct. Pinball operators were known to allow players to exchange the replays and extra balls they earned for cash. This effectively turned the machines into complicated slot machines, especially in cases where these bonuses were awarded randomly, and not due to player skill. Over time, he succeeded in getting the game declared an illegal game of chance, and in 1940, New York City banned pinball within its borders.
Like most contraband, this simply pushed pinball underground, into seedy parlors and strip joints in Greenwich Village and Harlem. Popular disdain for pinball did not approach that for slot machines, making it hard for LaGuardia to muster up support for raids on illegal pinball establishments—until December 1941. That year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thrusting the United States into World War II. In January 1942, the Federal government established the “Salvage for Victory” campaign, calling on Americans to turn in scrap metal to be used in the war effort. As reported by The New York Times, LaGuardia and team went on a hunt for pinball machines to further these efforts. By February, they confiscated (and again, sledgehammered) more than 3,000 machines, turning roughly 2,500 of them into one ton of metal for the war. The pinball ban in New York lasted for decades, outliving LaGuardia (who died in 1947).
Music may have been the driving force behind the reintroduction of pinball into New York and other cities. In 1969, The Who released the album Tommy, which told the story of a “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who became a superstar pinball player despite his apparent disabilities. The album hit number four on the Billboard pop charts and the song “Pinball Wizard” peaked at number nineteen on the U.S. Billboard charts that year. In 1975, Tommy was adapted as a film, further reinvigorating demand and interest in pinball.
In 1976, New York City reinstated pinball—but perhaps only due to a stroke of luck. Roger Sharpe, a magazine editor in his mid-twenties, testified in front of the city council that pinball was a game of skill, not luck, and therefore shouldn’t be regulated as a game of chance. The city council required more convincing. So Sharpe took to the machine, pulled back the plunger, and told the council members that he’d skillfully drop the ball into the middle slot, in what he’d later admit was a bluff. The ball went exactly where he said it would, and the council voted to allow pinball back into the city.
BONUS FACT
Another thing LaGuardia banned in the name of fighting the mob? Artichoke sales. In December 1935, LaGuardia announced what, according to The New York Times, he called a “serious and threatening emergency”: The price of artichokes had greatly inflated due to price fixing by the mafia. LaGuardia barred the sale, display, and even possession of artichokes. Amazingly, this worked. When prices came down a year later, LaGuardia rescinded the order.
THE FREE CITY OF TRI-INSULA
NEW YORK CITY CONSIDERS A SOLO CAREER
The 2002 movie Gangs of New York takes place in the mid-1800s, during a period when New York City was divided over the possibilities of a civil war. Although the movie itself is fiction, many of the plot points are drawn from history. For example, in July 1863, many working-class New Yorkers rioted over the Union’s decision to institute a military draft. During the four-day clash between rioters and federal troops, more than 100 people were killed and another 2,000 were wounded. The riot was, eventually, suppressed.
This wasn’t the first time New York City’s skepticism toward the sanctity of the United States came into play. In early 1861, the city considered leaving the country and becoming its own nation.
In December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, sparking troop mobilizations and dividing the populace. Although northern states such as New York (and by extension, New York City) were, by and large, antislavery and pro-Union, this was hardly unanimous. Feeling of unity with the South and disdain for the Union was, probably, a minority opinion, but those sympathetic to the rebels had an ally in high places: the mayor’s office.
Mayor Fernando Wood, who served as the city’s chief executive for two nonconsecutive terms, was what was known as a Copperhead—a Northern Democrat who was in favor of a peaceful resolution with the Southern states, in most cases even if it meant a continuation of slavery. In 1861—a few months before the Civil War began—Wood believed that the Union was destined to crumble and, in any event, saw the national government as no friend to his city. Much of New York’s mercantile industry’s business—one of the largest industries in the city at the time—came from the cotton trade. Tariffs imposed by the federal government—plus the likelihood of trade disruptions due to secessions, if not war—put that at risk. (Wood was no abolitionist either—he had a reputation for racism and for facilitating slavery, legal and illegal alike.)
On January 6, 1861, Wood proposed that the city leave New York State, and therefore the Union. Wood’s plan was for Staten Island and Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens, which at the time were not part of New York City) to form an independent city-state called the Free City of Tri-Insula. When he proposed it, the city council’s reaction was lukewarm at best, although hardly unanimously against declaring independence. Before Wood could drum up support for his plan, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter, and by and large, the city’s leadership rallied around Abraham Lincoln. Wood failed to win re-election in 1862. His successor, George Opdyke, was an antislavery Republican whose most notable act as mayor was recruiting troops to quell the anti-draft riots of 1863.
BONUS FACT
When was the last time a politician proposed that New York City secede from the state? That occurred in 2008, when a city councilman, Peter Vallone Jr., from Queens, offered a bill that, if passed, would (purportedly) lead to New York City becoming the fifty-first state. Earlier that week, Michael Bloomberg, the city’s mayor, testified that New York City paid out $11 billion more in taxes to the state than it received in services. Seceding, Vallone argued, was the only solution. The bill went nowhere. To date, New York City is still part of New York State.
THE NORTH IN THE SOUTH
THE CIVIL WAR’S TINY CIVIL WAR
In January of 1861, representatives from across Alabama gathered at a convention to decide whether to adopt an ordinance of secession, the formal document by which the state attempted to secede from the Union. (Each of the other seceding states issued their own such documents in various different ways.) The convention, by a sixty-one yea, thirty-nine nay vote, decided to secede and become part of the Confederate States of America, and almost all the delegates signed the ordinance once the majority established its passage. One exception to this was Charles Christopher Shea
ts, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, and the lone delegate from Winston County.
Although Sheats’s decision made him an outcast if not an outright enemy of Alabama and the Confederacy as a whole, he accurately portrayed the desires of his home in Winston County. Winston, covering a generally hilly region unsuitable for typical plantation-style farms, had a relatively small population and even smaller population of slaves; per the 1860 census, fewer than 3,500 white people and 122 slaves lived there. (For comparison’s sake, the state as a whole had a population of about 520,000 free people and 435,000 slaves.) With an end to slavery being an important, if not the only, driving force behind the South’s collective decision to leave the Union, the Winston population feared that plantation owners were looking to expand their power, which would certainly come at the expense of nonplantation areas of Alabama such as their own.
Over time, Winston’s dissent from secession became increasingly tangible. As the Civil War continued, Winston’s government took a neutral stance, refusing to support either side. Citizens of the county did not enlist in the Confederate ranks and refused to take loyalty oaths pledging themselves to the Confederacy. And as Confederate actions in the area (such as attempts at forced conscription) increased, Winston’s citizenry became less and less receptive to the South’s cause, turning pro-Union. Sheats himself was jailed by Confederates for his support of the North, and at one point the county considered a resolution to, themselves, secede from Alabama—if the state could secede from the Union, they argued, the county could secede from the state. News of the resolution spread throughout the region, leading many to believe that Winston had declared itself an independent nation, separate from both North and South.
But the resolution never passed, in large part because of the still-significant number of pro-Confederate people in the county. The county became a microcosm of the country, with people on both sides seizing arms, destroying property, and taking each other’s lives. Some Winston men enlisted with the Union army when the North invaded Alabama in 1862, joining the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which later accompanied William Tecumseh Sherman in his famous march to the sea. Others joined up the Confederate Home Guard, a militia designed to track down deserters and act as last defense against a Union invasion. Those Unionists who did not join the cavalry created their own version of the home guard, adding to the violence in the region.