ONE MORE ADVENTURE
But Marco’s adventures weren’t over. Italy was divided into rival city-states in those days, and Venice was at war with Genoa. Marco joined up, and in 1298, was captured as a prisoner-of-war and thrown into a Genoese jail. That’s where he met a writer of romances named Rusticiano of Pisa. The two hit it off, and Marco soon began dictating the story of his travels.
He took the manuscript with him when he left prison a year later and published it under the title, Description of the World. Marco intended it to be the ultimate geography book. Most of it was based on his own firsthand experience of life in the Mongol empire, but some of the remarkable places he wrote about, like Japan and Ethiopia, were descriptions based on hearsay, told to him by relatives or acquaintances he’d met on his travels.
And even though printing hadn’t been invented yet and each copy had to be written by hand, the book was an instant success and was eventually translated into all European languages.
Great, right? Wrong.
THE PROBLEM WAS. . .
No one believed a word of it. How could such things be true? According to the book, everything in China was bigger, faster, richer, more splendid, more civilized. How could the Kublai Khan host a banquet with 40,000 guests? And who would believe that there were people living south of the equator when the whole world knew it was uninhabited? Obviously, the book was a fantastic, romantic fable. So fantastic and imaginative that the buzz went out. Everyone wanted to read it. Kublai Khan joined the ranks of mythical hero-kings. And, against his will, Marco joined the ranks of great storytellers. Nothing he could say would convince anyone otherwise.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were vegetarians.
Because the book mentioned such vast distances and such immense riches, it was nicknamed “The Millions.” And Marco, to his humiliation, was nicknamed “Marco Millions.” After that, in carnivals throughout Europe there was always a clown called “Marco Millions” who told the most extravagant lies.
THE ADVENTURE ENDS
Marco had experienced enough adventures to last a lifetime. He lived the next 20-odd years quietly in Venice with his wife, Donata, and his three daughters. He spent his time managing his fortune, which on his death—ironically—proved to be smaller than he’d boasted.
The curse of Marco Millions followed him for the rest of his life. When Marco lay on his deathbed at age 70, his friends begged him to admit that he’d made it all up. He answered with irritation, “I have not told half of what I saw.”
HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER
Historians eventually proved Marco Polo’s claims to be largely true. In fact, Christopher Columbus owned a copy of the book and was so inspired by it that he used it to convince Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to fund his voyage to “Asia.” The object of his exploration was to find evidence of the Great Khan and the treasures that Marco Polo described.
If Marco Polo hadn’t been imprisoned in Genoa—the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, by the way—he might never have written of his travels. And the New World might have been discovered by someone else. We Americans owe a lot to Marco Polo. So how do we show our appreciation. . .?
MORE HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER
In 1928, a Eugene O’Neill play called Marco Millions opened to raves at New York’s Guild Theater. According to the review in Women’s Wear Daily, the character of Marco Millions was “a smug idol of overstuffed self-sufficiency. . ..”
Sometimes a guy just can’t win.
After the American Revolution, John Paul Jones served in the Russian navy.
COWBOYS? WE CALL ’EM SISSIES!
* * *
Those weather-beaten, tall-in-the-saddle cowboys are the epitome of manliness. What if we told you that sometimes, after the sun went down, they loved to boogie?
After weeks and months of riding the range, eating beans and biscuits cooked over a fire made from cow chips, sleeping in the bunkhouse or on the ground, a cowboy was ready to have some fun. And there wasn’t much that a cowboy liked better than goin’ to a dance. Yup. A dance. (‘Course, in some places it was called a hoedown or a shindig or a stomp, but it was still a dance.)
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
The hospitality of the West was as big as the sky. And when somebody decided to give a dance, they didn’t send messengers or invitations. The word went around, that’s all, and if a cowboy heard about it, he could consider himself invited. He’d ride 60 miles to get there if he had to. But first he had to get slicked up.
AT THE BUNKHOUSE
Most every cowboy had something resembling “Sunday-go-tomeetin’ clothes.” These were dug out and laundered. Boots were greased till they were shiny. The cowboys shaved themselves and cut each other’s hair—only to get covered with trail dust on the way there. But they didn’t notice as they joined upward of 100 people who were also making their way to the dance.
BEEF ON THE BARBIE
Part of the lure was the “chuck”—what a cowboy called his food. This particular barbecue supper would have been days in the making. And all the womenfolk would bring fresh-baked pies and cakes and doughnuts. Enough to feed a cowboy army. Washed down by coffee from a pot that sat on the stove all night. But the food wasn’t the reason why the cowboys had come from miles around.
Benjamin Franklin preferred the turkey to the eagle as the American national bird.
SWING YOUR PARTNER
After supper, the tables and chairs were moved aside and the fiddler warmed his fiddle. That signaled the start of the dance. Dancers took their places and the “caller” called the steps. The couples on the dance floor would somehow manage to follow calls like:
Choose your partner, form a ring,
Figure eight, and double L swing,
Swing ‘em once and let ‘em go,
All hands left and do-see-do.
You swing me and I’ll swing you,
And we’ll all go to heaven in the same old shoe.
Swing your partner before you trade,
Grab ‘em back and promenade.
Everybody was a little bashful at first, but after a while even the shyest cowpoke was out there rompin’ and stompin’.
NO WALLFLOWERS
Just like anywhere in the old West, there were never enough women to go around. Every last woman, no matter what her age or allure, got to dance till her feet were sore, but there was still a shortage. Those cowboys loved to dance so much they found it impossible to sit out an opportunity to “stomp.” And the dances were “square dances” and required a certain number of couples to complete the set. What to do?
ARE THERE ANY VOLUNTEERS, HONEY?
It’s a simple solution. When there weren’t enough womenfolk to go around (which was pretty much all the time), some of the rootin’-tootin’ manly-man cowboys would tie bandannas around one arm. This meant that they were willing to play the part of a female dancer—to dance what they called “lady fashion.” And so they did, long into the night.
For 20 years, Rudolf Hess was the only occupant of Berlin’s Spandau Prison.
THE QUEST FOR LONGITUDE
* * *
A quest for a geographical unit of measurement doesn’t have the same romance factor as a quest to slay a dragon. But finding an accurate gauge of longitude opened up the world, whereas slaying dragons never did anybody any good (least of all the dragons).
Now, you do remember longitude, don’t you? Yeah, we know. Fourth grade was a long time ago for us, too. Look, find a globe. Now, on the globe, you’ll notice the planet is sliced up by a bunch of lines going two separate ways. The horizontal lines are called “latitude.” They tell you how many degrees you are north or south of the Equator, remember? Duh!
The vertical lines, by process of elimination, are longitude. They tell you how far east or west you are, using the longitude line that runs through Greenwich, England (for no really good reason) as the prime meridian. By using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, you can find any spot on th
e globe.
LATITUDE-FATITUDE
The catch is getting an accurate reading of your coordinates. Latitude has never been too much of a problem; humans figured out early on that the Sun’s path reaches higher or lower in the sky depending on how far north or south on the planet you are on any particular day. If you know what day it is, simply take a reading of the Sun’s position at high noon, do the math, and presto—you know where you are, in a northerly or southerly sort of way.
WHERE AM I?
This was a perfectly serviceable arrangement for a time, but as humans and their ships navigated farther and farther from the shore, however, it became apparent that there was a need. Traditional methods of measuring longitude were laughably inaccurate. Take, by way of example, the method in which distance was measured by counting how many rope knots, spaced about 50 feet apart, slipped out of a sailor’s fingers in 28 seconds (thus the nautical term for speed, “knots”).
Two small Alaskan islands were the only part of North America occupied by the Axis.
This would be fine as long as you traveled in a direct straight line and were constantly gauging your speed. But no one on a ship ever did either; the former because of waves, cross-currents, and winds, the latter because, oh, I don’t know, the sailors were busy singing sea shanties and dancing the hornpipe. This way of measuring distance was known as “dead reckoning,” in which a navigator deduced the ship’s position based on speed and direction of travel and time elapsed since the last known position.
WANTED: A CLOCK
While latitude only required the knowledge of the date and the ability to determine the angle of the Sun, longitude required another determining dimension: the knowledge of the exact time at a place that was not where you were (let’s call this place “Greenwich, England”). Due to the rotation of the Earth, noon comes at different times at different places east and west on the planet. If you spotted the Sun at high noon wherever you were, and then noted the time difference between you and Greenwich, you could determine your longitudinal distance from that point. What you needed was a clock, set to Greenwich mean time, that kept excellent time.
This was no problem if one was on land. By the 17th century, thanks to the principle of the pendulum, there were some reasonably accurate clocks in Europe. However, pendulum clocks aren’t practical on sailing ships, particularly the rickety deathtraps people used to cross the seas back then. A ship that’s rocking and rolling on the waves is really not the ideal place for a timepiece that uses pendulum motion.
A COOL 20,000 LBS.
After a navigational mishap in 1707 that killed thousands of sailors (English navy ships thought they were farther west than they were and tore open the bottoms of their ships on coastal rocks), the British Parliament offered a reward of £20,000 to the person or persons who could provide an accurate system of longitudinal reckoning. Twenty thousand pounds was an astounding sum of money at the time (compare 10 million dollars, which itself was a huge sum until all those Internet IPOs), and the contest coordinators, among them Sir Isaac Newton, found themselves wading through some really stupid ideas.
Only a tenth of one percent of all people on wagon trains were killed by Indians.
THE STUPIDEST IDEA
For example, one suggested stationing warships in permanent positions across the Atlantic; at midnight Greenwich time, they’d send up fireworks that could be seen for 100 miles around. Ships at sea could take their reading from there. Of course, this solution assumes there was a practical method for the “firework ships” to know when it’s Greenwich time; obviously, were that the case, there would be no need for the ships at all. The entries became so cockamamie that the “quest of longitude” became a shorthand phrase for insanity.
THE HERO OF THE PIECE
The ultimate hero of the “quest of longitude” was a very unlikely fellow indeed: a certain John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker and a carpenter by trade. Harrison did three things. First, he replaced the pendulum with balance springs. Second, he made the springs with a combination of metals to compensate for shrinkage and expansion. Finally, for the wood casings and other wood parts of the timepiece, Harrison used a tropical wood that was self-lubricating to reduce friction. At the end of it, Harrison had created the first timepiece that could keep accurate time at sea.
He took the first version, the H1, on its maiden voyage to Lisbon in 1734 (and got so violently seasick he never sailed again). Harrison went through three variations of the timepiece before developing the ultimate winner, the H4. In 1761 the H4 went from England to Jamaica—a trip that took more than 80 days—and only lost five seconds. The contest board was so skeptical of the achievement they made the clock do it again. Even then, they only gave Harrison half the prize. It took the direct intervention of King George III (you might remember him as the supposedly “mean, crazy king” from whom American colonials sought independence) to make the board cough up the remaining dough.
IT’S ABOUT TIME
Harrison not only created the means to establish positions at sea, he also gave the world the most accurate time measurement it had ever seen to that point. He understood that it’s not just where you are, it’s when you are. In this sense, the quest of longitude was also another quest entirely: the quest for time. Timing is everything when you’re looking for your place in this world.
Harald Fairhair united Norway as part of a campaign to impress a girl.
MEN IN SKIRTS
* * *
It may sound like heresy, but the Scottish kilt is not an ancient tradition. And it was the ingenious creation—not of a Scot, but an Englishman!
How many men, not just in Scotland, but all over the world, are proud to wear the tartans of the Scottish clans of their ancestors? How many of these men occasionally put on a kilt to show their pride in this ancient heritage? They’re all the victims of one innovative industrialist and two ingenious con men.
WHEN IS A KILT NOT A KILT?
The modern garment called the kilt was invented around 1727 by an Englishman named Thomas Rawlinson. Before that date, the Highland Scots’ traditional dress was a plaid knee-length thing belted at the waist, kind of a cross between a blanket and a shirt. (In fact, the Gaelic word “plaid” means “blanket.”) Rawlinson owned an ironworks and thought his employees’ cumbersome blankets interfered with their efficiency. So he invented the kilt. To encourage his workers, he started wearing one himself. It caught on so well that Parliament banned it in 1745 as a threat to the British way of life. Suddenly, every Scot wanted to wear one.
Meanwhile, the English fell in love with Highland mythology and costume. Sir Walter Scott’s novels of Highland adventure were bestsellers, and the Highland Society of London became very influential. The real Highland Scots had become a despised under-class, but British Army generals and great lords and landowners could now be seen wearing kilts and listening to the bagpipes. Even the English royal family started dressing up in kilts—a tradition that survives to this day.
WHEN IS A PRINCE NOT A PRINCE?
Enter our two con men, tall, charming, aristocratic young men who called themselves John and Charles Edward Stuart. They arrived in London in the early 1800s, and started telling people that they were the secret—but legitimate—grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. His wife, the Princess Louise, fleeing his drinking, had run away to a convent. They claimed that while she was there she gave birth to their father in secret. Dear old dad had told them the whole story, and here they were to claim their birthright.
The Tombstone gunfight was actually in front of a photography studio, not the O.K. Corral.
Their ambition was to convince London society of this outrageous story, but when that didn’t work, they moved to Scotland, where they found a much better welcome. Soon, some of the leading aristocrats of Scotland were treating them like royalty. They now called themselves Sobieski Stuart, “Sobieski” being the name of the Polish royal family, a connection they claimed through their alleged grandmother, the same
Princess Louise.
They set themselves up as authorities on Scottish tradition and started publishing various books about it, based on ideas they invented themselves. There were books of history and traditional tales, but their real stroke of genius was to announce that their father had a Latin manuscript from the 16th century describing the costumes of the Highland clans. They produced what they said was a copy of this remarkable document, and soon they had all of Scotland rushing to put on what they said was the authentic version of Scottish costume. Eventually, in 1842, they published an expensive illustrated book of this material, and ever since, the fantasy world they created has been accepted as the true tradition of the Highlands.
WHEN IS A TARTAN NOT A TARTAN?
At the time, there were perhaps two or three tartan patterns that were traditionally associated with a particular family or clan. Which is probably where the Sobieski Stuarts got the brilliant idea of including a catalog of “family” tartans in their book. Of the 76 tartans they illustrated, over 50 were invented by them, the others being various patterns they had found in Scotland. Their invented patterns are now accepted by hundreds of thousands of people around the world as proud family history, and the number of tartans in use has expanded to over 2,000. In fact, there’s nothing to stop anyone from inventing new ones.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History Page 23