At the end of the war, Poon Lim decided to emigrate to the United States. Unfortunately, the limit of 105 Chinese immigrants had been exceeded, and he was denied citizenship.
Luckily, he was a famous war hero, albeit a flat-footed one. President Harry Truman signed what is known as “Private Law 178” on July 27, 1949, to “provide for admission to, and the permanent residence in, the United States of Poon Lim.” Funny, 1 always thought that it was the United States of America.
When it was pointed out to Poon Lim that he was the holder of the world’s record as a sea survivor on a life raft, he was quoted as saying quietly, “1 hope that no one will ever have to break that record.”
So do 1.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
mount Pelee
how an election killed the entire electorate
Politicians will do almost anything to win an election, even if it means killing off their entire electorate. Such a case occurred in 1902 in the beautiful town of St. Pierre, Martinique.
if you’re like me (failed to pay attention in geography class) and don’t know exactly where this island is, 1 will save you the trouble of checking your atlas. Martinique is located in the Caribbean Sea, about four hundred miles northeast of Venezuela.
By the way, Columbus may never have discovered America, but historians are pretty sure that he discovered this tiny island in 1502. (Two questions: 1) How can you discover an island that people already inhabited? and 2) How could Columbus miss an entire continent yet somehow crash into some dinky little island in the middle of nowhere?)
Back to our story:
An election to choose a representative to France from each of the island’s two arrondissements (districts) was slated for May 10, 1902. The outcome of the election stood a great chance of changing the balance of power on the island.
In one corner, there was the ruling Progressive Party, which stood for total white supremacy and had ruled the island for centuries. In the opposing corner, the newly formed Radical Party, which represented Martinique’s black and mulatto major ity. Just three years earlier, in the 1899 elections, a black man named Amedee Knight had been elected as the island’s senator. The Progressive Party was determined to make sure that no other black man would hold political office. It was a heated battle of the rich against the poor, black against white.
But even more heat was coming from the giant on which the island was built-Mount Pelee.
In early April, Mt. Pelee started to rumble. It began to spew out clouds of ash and noxious fumes from its crater. The narrow streets of St. Pierre started to become buried in layers of the fine ash.
The people were worried, but no one was more worried than Governor Mouttet. He had just been appointed to his position seven months earlier by the French government, and it would be a great embarrassment to him if both of the elected representatives to France were members of the Radical Party. The election would be a close call and the governor was doing all that he could to manipulate it. The last thing he needed was for people to panic and leave the island. He knew very well that the only people with enough money to leave were the white minority. If they left, the Progressive Party would lose the election to the Radicals. He had to do something to keep them from leaving.
Mouttet persuaded the island’s major newspaper, Les Colonies, to downplay the dangers of the volcano and to blame the ever-growing panic and fear of Pelee on the Radical Party. For years, the paper had supported the ruling governor on every issue, and this was no exception. Mouttet convinced the editor, Andreas Hurard, that the paper should dismiss any threat of Pelee’s danger. Hurard had no choice but to abide by the governor’s request, since Mouttet was in a position to cause a great decrease in advertising revenue.
On May 3, a fissure blew on the volcano and the ash and mud destroyed a mountain village and flowed down the river that passed through St. Pierre. The American consul dispatched a telegram to alert Washington to the danger. Mouttet intercepted the telegram and sent his own message stating that the eruption was subsiding and the danger was gone.
Unfortunately, this was not true. Ash continued to rain down and roofs collapsed all around the city. Hundreds of people who lived in the country closer to the volcano had been killed during various eruptive episodes. Those who survived crowded into St. Pierre and its population swelled to about thirty thousand people. The city residents wanted to leave, but Mouttet just could not afford to let this happen. It had been rumored at the time that the governor had given orders to keep the entire population of St. Pierre from leaving.
Coincidentally, on May 7, the volcano Soufriere on the nearby island of St. Vincent erupted. Nearly two thousand people died from its deadly force. The eruption of Soufriere actually offered some comfort to the residents of St. Pierre; they reasoned that the eruption caused the pressure on their volcano to subside.
That same evening, the governor and his wife visited St. Pierre and stayed at the Hotel de l’lndependance. He was there to help restore the confidence of his people. When he arrived, he realized just how bad things really were and decided that it was time to evacuate the city. He decided to make his announcement after the High Mass celebration scheduled at the cathedral the very next day. Unfortunately, Mouttet would never get to give the evacuation orders. At seven fifty-nine the next morning, several cracking explosions were heard from Mt. Pelee.
It was the beginning of the end.
A large black cloud blew out of the volcano. Lightning bolts shot from the billowing smoke. Even worse, a searing avalanche of volcanic gases and debris raced down the mountain. This glowing cloud, known technically as a nuee ardente, moved down the slopes toward St. Pierre.
With temperatures in excess of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius), the avalanche moved at speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour.
The last word the outside world would ever hear from the city was at 8:02 A.M. when the St. Pierre telegraph operator sent the message of ‘Allez” (go) to the Fort-de-France operator. Just one minute later, a wireless operator aboard the ship Pouyer-Quertier sent the message: “St. Pierre destroyed by Pelee eruption. Send all assistance.”
St. Pierre was in flames in seconds. From the distance, scores of blazing people could be seen fleeing the fireball, heading for the apparent safety of the sea. Their scorched flesh sizzled as they entered the water. A wall of flaming rum, which had poured off the docks and trading ships, spread across the water ultimately killing those who made it this far.
Rescue teams were slow to arrive. The distant ships that did see the eruption thought that it was Soufriere and totally bypassed Martinique. The great maritime powers of Great Britain, Japan, Germany, and the United States had all sent help to St. Vincent. They had no idea how much worse things were in St. Pierre.
Of course, rescue teams would have been of little help. The eruption would eventually prove to be the deadliest of the twentieth century and the third deadliest in the past two thousand years.
It was assumed that all thirty thousand residents, including Governor Mouttet and his wife, were boiled alive. Most of the deceased were found stark naked. Their clothes vaporized right off their bodies. The heat was so intense that both glass and steel were easily melted. The city was totally demolished.
When rescuers arrived to search for survivors, they surprisingly found three. Yvette Montferrier, a housewife, had survived by taking shelter in a ditch about one mile outside of town. She was badly scalded and it is not known if she survived more than a few hours or days.
One man, a twenty-eight-year-old cobbler named Leon Compere-Leandre, was lucky enough to have been on the outskirts of the city near the waterfront. Prior to the explosion, refugees had invaded his house and had refused to leave. Instead of arguing with them, he took shelter in the basement of his home. When Compere-Leandre emerged after the eruption, he found his house demolished and all of the refugees killed. Though his legs, arms, and chest were bleeding and raw with bums, he managed
to get to “Le Trace” (about 3.5 miles away), which was the main road to Fort-de-France. He was picked up by rescuers, taken to the hospital, and nursed back to health. He lived until 1936.
The ultimate twist in this story, however, had to do with a nineteen-year-old man named Auguste Ciparis, who was found in an underground jail cell. He was badly burned, his cell was filled with rubble, and he had to wait three days before rescue arrived.
Why was he there?
It seems that Ciparis was a black man who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a white Frenchman. He was scheduled to hang on Thursday, May 8-the same day as the eruption! Of course, his captors never came to take him away. In a great twist of fate, thirty thousand people, including those who sentenced Ciparis to death, ended up being the ones killed. The man sentenced to die was the only one in the city who survived.
This is tragic irony at its best.
Ciparis was lucky enough to have his sentence commuted. It was later learned that the governor had planned on granting him a pardon in a last-ditch effort to throw the election his way. Ciparis later went on to earn a living as one of the sideshows in the Barnum Et Bailey Circus. His act? He spent his days living in a replica of his cell. Ciparis eventually died in 1929.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
A man looking over the ruins of St. Pierre after the deadly eruption. (Library of Congress)
PART 6:
un6elieuable!
gadshg
an a-less novel
Did you know that the letter E is the most commonly used letter in our alphabet? Some people claim that it is used nearly four or five times as much as any other letter.
Now try to author a paragraph without it. You will quickly find out that it is a difficult thing to do. In fact, this paragraph lacks this bit of information in all of its words.
1 had a tough time just writing the last few sentences without the letter E. Now try writing a few pages without this character. While you’re at it, try writing an entire book. (Such constraints are known as lipograms.)
This surely sounds like an impossibility. Even if you could avoid the letter E in your writing, the product would not be easy to read. Think of all the words that you would need to avoid. You would be forced to skip almost any word in the past tense; it seems as if they all end in ed. While you’re at it, forget about using any number between six and thirty. (You can’t cheat by using the numerical equivalent.)
Good luck in writing your book.
But wait! Stop the presses!
It turns out that one man already achieved this goal way back in 1937. His name was Ernest Vincent Wright, and he just happened to author a 50,110-word novel named Gadsby that was entirely E-less.
Gadsby was not Wright’s first effort at writing. This American author had previously completed The Wonderful Fairies of the Sun (1896), The Fairies That Run the World and How They Do It (1903), and Thoughts and Reveries of an American Bluejacket (1918).
Here’s a reprint of the first sentence in Gadsby:
If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you would constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.” (page 10)
And here’s another passage:
“Why, good gracious!” said Frank Morgan, “if anybody should sit in that Mayor’s chair in City Hall, it’s you! Just look at what you did to boost Branton Hills! Until you got it a-going it had but two thousand inhabitants; now it has sixty thousand!” (page 45)
And another:
“Gadsby was walking back from a visit down in Branton Hills’ manufacturing district on a Saturday night. A busy day’s traffic had had its noisy run; and with not many folks in sight, His Honor got along without having to stop to grasp a hand, or talk; for a Mayor out of City Hall is a shining mark for any politician. And so, coming to Broadway, a booming brass drum and sounds of singing told of a small Salvation Army unit carrying on amidst Broadway’s night shopping crowds. Gadsby, walking toward that group, saw a young girl, back toward him, just finishing a long soulful oration, saying” .. and I can say this to you, for I know what I am talking about; for I was brought up in a pool of liquor!!” (page 201)
Not everyone can claim that he or she was brought up in a pool of liquor …
As you can tell, these passages are quite constrained, although the book is surprisingly fairly easy to read. (Could Wright have used any more semicolons?)
So what would possess a person to want to take on such a task? Wright claims that he had read a four-stanza poem that was entirely e-less along with a statement that this particular letter occurred five times more often than any other letter.
To accomplish this entirely e-less goal, Wright actually tied down the “E” key on his keyboard which, in effect, made the key virtually useless. Somehow, he managed to finish this novel in just 165 days. It clocks in at 267 pages, although the first nine pages are used by Wright to describe his madness for writing this book. Since the book’s introduction, as well as the cover, are not actually part of the story, he is able to use the letter E very freely here. The final line of the book is, very understandably: “Note: Not a word containing the letter ‘E’ has appeared in this story of over 50,000 words.”
That’s Ernest Vincent Wright reading the manuscript of his E-less book Gadsby. Wright only allowed himself to use the letter E in the Introduction to the book, which starts on the page shown above.
This is an incredible feat. But, we have to ask ourselves just one question: Why would anyone even attempt such a useless project?
Apparently this project was even too much for Wright. He died at sixty-six years of age the very day that Gadsby was published.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
niaoara falls-Hart 1
the day the falls actually went dry
If you have never been to Niagara Falls, then you are missing quite a wondrous sight. It is almost impossible to describe in words the force, fury, and unparalleled beauty of the falls. Prior to diversion of some of its water to the great hydroelectric plants located on the Niagara River, it was estimated that approximately 93 million gallons of water dropped some 190 feet over its edge every minute. Not exactly your typical home shower.
if you happen to be one of those people planning a trip to Niagara Falls for your honeymoon, vacation, or whatever, you’d better hope that the falls actually has water going over it. After all, a dry falls is nothing more than a big rock cliff and we all know that there is nothing special about that.
Perhaps you have heard about the time that the United States Army Corps of Engineers shut off the American Falls by placing a dam across part of the river way back in 1969. However, this did not shut the falls off totally; the water was actually diverted to Horseshoe Falls and the power plants.
What I’m talking about here is the strange series of events that took place on March 29, 1848-the day the falls went totally dryand there wasn’t even a drought.
So what happened? Here’s the scoop:
It seems that on the evening of the twenty-eighth, residents accustomed to the falls’ roar were awakened by a very strange silence. The mighty Niagara was silent. 1 suppose that it was like living under the elevated trains in New York City; after a while you don’t even notice the noise. But when it’s not there you experience an unexplained strange feeling. (At least that’s my mom’s claim. Every time that 1 slept over at my grandparents’ apartment as a kid, the train would keep me awake all night.)
It’s hard to believe that the mighty Niagara could actually stop flowing. (Library of Congress)
Hundreds of people came out of their homes to see what had happened. The residents quickly realized that the falls had diminished to just a few small streams of water. They were positive that the water had been flowing at normal levels when they went to sleep.
No one was quite s
ure what happened. After all, they couldn’t get into an airplane to see what happened upstream. There were no phones to call others. And, of course, they didn’t have the luxury of television and radio.
In other words, people were clueless as to what happened.
Some assumed that this was the end of the Earth, the day that many religions had warned about. They filled the churches in the area and prayed for everything to turn out fine.
Others decided to earn some money. Since this was the first time that the riverbed had actually been exposed, souvenir hunters decided to do some hunting. They examined the river floor and found lots of junk-mainly old guns, swords, tomahawks, and rusted artifacts left over from the War of 1812. One enterprising man hauled logs out of the riverbed; after all, it was easier than actually chopping the trees down (no chain saws in these times). Rocks that had always hindered the navigation of boats were blown to smithereens.
So what caused this to happen?
To this day, no one is exactly sure. The explanation most often cited claims that the wind had been blowing very strongly that day, causing the water level in the river to drop. At the same time, an ice block occurred at the entrance to the Niagara River at the point where it drains from Lake Erie. The result was the dry falls that everyone woke up to. The ice jam lasted for thirty hours and by April 1 the falls had returned to normal. (1 guess it was nature’s way of playing an April Fools’ joke on the residents of Niagara Falls.)
This article from the April 5, 1848, issue of the Buffalo Daily Courier describes the day that Niagara Falls went dry.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
niaoara falls-part 2
an unusual contest
While researching the previous story on Niagara Falls, 1 discovered that the first bridge to ever cross the gorge was being built during this time period. A company headed by Charles Ellet Jr. had contracted to build a suspension bridge to carry carriages, trains, and bipedal humans. (That is, walkers.)
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 12