TO LIGHT ONE CANDLE, Seeing the Light From Whale Oil

 

I wonder if you realize how dark the world has been for most of the last 10,000 years? To create light humans could burn wood. But firewood was not a quickly renewable resource and Emperors and Kings preferred to use wood to build ships and thrones,  rather than incinerate it.  Sure, you could burn olive oil in a lamp, but burning olive oil creates smoke, and it has a limited shelf life. 

And then some Etruscan genius in the eleventh century B.C. invented a thing you could carry in your pocket until you needed it, and which, when you lit it,  burned very slowly.  It was such a great invention and was given the Sanskrit name “cand” meaning 'to give light'.  And whoever that Etruscan Thomas Edison was, I bet he got stinking rich. Around the Mediterranean Sea they were usually burned olive oil, which, like rock oil today, became the basis of the economy.  

But up in northern Europe, and around the rest of the world, they were stuck using candles out of  rancid animal fat, called tallow, and this tended to produce a powerful stench when it was heated. It is stunning to realize how much human effort over the next 3,000 years was devoted to inventing the stink-less candle. The guy who finally did it was a Jew who had escaped Seville just ahead of the Spanish inquisition.

Jacob Rodriguez Rivera landed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1748 because eight years earlier the English were so desperate for people willing to settle in America that King George II had rescinded the requirement that colonists must pledge their loyalty to "...the true faith of a Christian", i.e. The Church of England.  With the removal of those six little words America was endowed with all the brains, blood and brawn the rest of the world didn’t approve of on religious grounds. That is what made us what we are, which is not a Christian nation, but a multi-religious nation, the most consistently successful nation (over the last 200 years) in the world. Until Donald Trump.

Anyway, Jacob went into business with his brother-in-law, Moses Lopez, who was a candle maker. And while wandering the docks of Newport looking for supplies of animal fat, Jacob stumbled upon the slaughter of a sperm whale. Now, whale blubber had long been boiled down for the oil it contained, but burning whale fat stank even worse than cow or pig fat, and since whales were difficult to find, kill and slaughter, blubber was usually mixed with other fats to reduce the stench and stretch the more expensive stuff. But since the blubber was cheap, Jacob bought a couple of barrels to see what he could make of it, and while he was at it, he also bought some Spermaceti, because nobody knew what to make of that, either.

See, if you poke a hole in a Sperm Whale’s head, you will find gallons of the stuff. Maybe it helps the whales eco-locate their prey, and maybe it helps them dive so deep. No human is really sure. But it’s white and it's sticky and it looks like…well, you know what it looks like. That’s why they are called them Sperm Whales.

Within a few years Jacob developed the following process; each fall when the whaling fleets returned, the Spermaceti was off loaded from the whalers. They had collected it  in 42 gallon barrels. (The barrels were filled with water going out, and after the crew drank the water, the empty barrels were returned, filled with Spermaceti.) The stuff was boiled down and the residue was allowed to congeal over the winter into a spongy, sticky stinky mess. Yuck. Over the winter it froze, and it's molecules re-arranged themselves. Then, in the spring, the congealed stuff was shoveled into bags and pressed until the “winter –strained oil” was squeezed out. This oil,  was considered the creme-de-la-crème of whale oil and sold for the highest price.

After more processing and squeezing, Jacob was left with a cake that could be melted and molded into smokeless, stink-less candles, ready for shipment in the summer. When they burned, they actually smelled sweet and produced almost no smoke. And the light they made was such a pure white light that a “foot-candle”, the amount of light a Spermaceti candle produces at a distance of one foot, remains the standard for measuring pure white light to this very day. Jacob got un-stinking rich. His only problem was that within a couple of years several competitors had guessed or stolen his process.

So in 1761 Jacob and Moses helped to found the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, and pushed for the formation of a cartel, a Spermaceti cartel. Jacob Rivera teamed up with Obediah Brown and Company, primarily a Quaker family business based in Providence, and with other whalers all the way down the coast to Philadelphia. They were generally labeled 'The Spermaceti Trust’. The rules of The Trust set a top price of six pounds Sterling that its members would pay for a pound of Spermaceti, and set the bottom price its members would sell 100 finished candles at one pound and one shilling.  Everybody in the trust got very, very rich.

The hunt for the Sperm Whales was on. From 1770 until the start of the American Revolution, The Spermaceti Trust produced 45,000 barrels of sperm oil annually, compared to just 8,500 barrels a year of oil from all other types of whales.

After the War of 1812 The Trust became unofficially based on the Quaker power center of Nantucket Island, 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where some 36 chandlers made the precious Spermaceti candles. So much money was made on Nantucket that the Brown family endowed an entire university with the profits. By 1846 the tiny harbor in Nantucket supported more than 700 whaling ships and more than 70,000 jobs, full and part time.

Then, just after 11:00 p.m. on 13 July of 1846 a faulty stovepipe led to a fire on Nantucket which was whipped by high winds. By morning it had destroyed 250 buildings, seven chandler factories, tens of thousands of barrels of Spermacti oil stored in warehouses. Three of the town’s four wharves burned completely. Blacksmiths’ shops, rope-makers’ shops, and Sail-makers’ workshops were all consumed. Over 800 people were left homeless. The proud town was reduced to begging for “…provisions, clothing, bedding, money…” Help poured in but the golden age of the Spermaceti Trust was over. Nine years later the Trust was completely broken and the industry had been cut by half. By 1875 the island’s population had been reduced by two thirds, down to just 3,200 souls.

The reason for the breaking up of The Trust was not just the Nantucket fire, of course. That didn't help. And the wholesale slaughter of whales meant they were getting more difficult to find, that voyages to hunt the Sperm whales which had had once lasted six months, now took three years. But what really hurt was the discovery of gold in California. A ship owner could make as much in six months carrying miners and mining equipment to California, as he did on one three year voyage in search of Sperm whales.

In the forest of masts of abandoned ships in San Francisco Bay, left adrift when their crews went hunting for gold, at least half were the masts of ex-whaling ships. And The Trust was also doomed by the development of drilling for petroleum, or rock oil, in Canada and Pennsylvania. Kerosene lamps replaced Spermaceti lamps and candles because they were far cheaper and almost as odorless.  Their light had a yellow tint, but at those prices most people decided they could live in a yellow world.

The new baron of oil would be John D. Rockefeller, who called his company “Standard Oil” to sooth buyers used to variations produced from mixing oil from different species of whales. And he supplied his product in the same 42 gallon barrels used to supply Spermaceti.  We still measure oil in terms of those 42 gallon barrels. John D. seemed to be reassuring his customers that nothing had changed in the oil business, except the names of the people who ran The Trust.  

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS Chapter Ten

 

I doubt anyone in the county courthouse (above) on Monday, 10 June, 1895 was surprise at the first words James Reavis-Peralta, spoke. When he stood up the self proclaimed Baron of Arizona asked for a delay, while he tried to find a new attorney. When Mathew Reynolds, lawyer for the government, objected, Reavis was granted a one day continuance. Encouraged by that little success, Reavis counter punched, and made a motion to have the case dismissed entirely. This motion was just as quickly dismissed.  This Federal Judge was not going to be lead down any rabbit holes.

And when the trial reconvened on Tuesday, 11 June ,  the Baron announced that he was going to be doing a single: lawyer, plaintiff and witness all in one. He spent most of his direct testimony by describing his dealings with Huntington, Crocker, and various Senators and cabinet members. None would testify in his defense. None would admit to even knowing him.  If the jury was impressed by his name dropping, they had little time to be, because Reynolds began his cross examination that very afternoon.

No matter what question Reynolds presented to him,  Reavis' answers were endless and rambling. Did he not notice that the documents he claimed to have discovered in the San Xavier record books, were on a different paper than the other pages in the book, and at right angles to the standard pages? What about the questionable testimony regarding Sophia's noble birth?  Did he pay anyone to lie in  their testimony?  But no matter how long Reavis talked, no matter how many twist and turns he made in responding, Reynolds just kept attacking. By Wednesday, 13 June, Reavis had been forced to admit that even he had doubts about some of his documents. His explanation was that he just filed them, he wasn't vouching for them.

On Monday, 17 June, the Baroness Sophia Reavis Peralta took the stand. She admitted she had no knowledge about any of the documents filed supporting her noble birth. Perhaps it was the paternalistic Victorian machismo at play, but the courtroom was convinced the lady was telling the truth, as she believed the truth to be.  Presented with convincing evidence that she was in fact the daughter of John A.Treadway and an Indian squaw named Kate Loreta, she broke down in tears, but still insisted, through her sobs, that she was the wife and granddaughter of the Baron of Arizona.

Having put his wife through this emotional torture, on Tuesday 18 June,  1897,  Reavis introduced a portrait he claimed was of Don Miguel Nemecio de Peralta de la Cordoba (above), and noted the facial resemblance to his own two sons (below).

After that he just ran out of gas, and was reduced to rants about grand conspiracies and lunatic explanations and justifications. During his closing Reavis did not even bother arguing his case, but rather entered a list of 52 objections to rulings the court had made. They would all be ignored.

The government did not even bother to present a final argument. Ten days later, the Court of Private Land Claims, created by political allies to defend the Peralta Grant case, found “the claim is wholly fictitious and fraudulent”, and dismissed it entirely. That was, of course, not the end. James Reavis (above) had gone too far for that to be the end of the affair.

Reavis was arrested as he left the courtroom, and charged with 42 counts of forgery, presenting false documents to the Land Court and conspiracy to defraud the United States Government. Bail was set at a lowly $500. And although the court allowed him to telegraph his connections in California and Washington, D.C., nobody stepped up with the cash. James Reavis-Peralta  spent the next year in jail, awaiting trial. It finally began on Saturday, 27 June,  1896 and ended on Tuesday 30 June,  with a verdict of guilty. Two weeks later, on Friday 17 July, James Reavis-Peralta was sentenced to two years in jail – one year of which he had already served – and a $5,000 fine –about $130,000 today.

To pay the fine, the mansion in San Francisco was sold. Arizola  the home and fortress which had represented the single reality of the Peralta grant, was seized by the U.S. government. It was later converted into a barn.  When James Reavis was released from prison in April of 1898, he and Sophia and his children lived in Denver, where he tried for many years to find investors for his various schemes and plans. But all that any one was interested in buying from him were copies of his book, “The Confessions of the Baron of Arizona”, which had been serialized in his old newspaper, "The San Francisco Call".  He may not have even written it himself.

But whoever the actual author, it was presented as a classic Victorian morality tale. “The plan to secure the Peralta Grant and defraud the Government," wrote the author, "was not conceived in a day. It was the result of a series of crimes extending over nearly a score of years. At first the stake was small, but it grew and grew in magnitude until even I sometimes was appalled at the thought of the possibilities. I was playing a game which to win meant greater wealth than that of a Vanderbilt. My hand constantly gained strength, noted men pleaded my cause, and unlimited capital was at my command. My opponent was the Government, and I baffled its agents at every turn. Gradually I became absolutely sure of success.”

"As I neared the verge of triumph”, wrote Reavis, “I was exultant and sure. Until the very moment of my downfall I gave no thought to failure. But my sins found me out, and as in the twinkling of an eye I saw the millions which had seemed already in my grasp fade away and I heard the courts doom me to a prison cell. Now I am growing old and the thing hangs upon me like a nightmare until I am driven to make a clean breast of it all, that I may end my days in peace.”

No where in his “clean breast” account did James Reavis mention Mr. Huntington, or Charles Crocker or any of the other wealthy and powerful men who had financed and backed his scam. It seemed that Reavis had learned something from the affair, after all. Sophia had certainly gained in knowledge. In 1902, she filed for divorce on the grounds of “non-support”. And the old forger who began his career at 18, faking passes for his army buddies, died alone, at the age of 71 on 20 November, 1914, in Denver Colorado. Cause of death was listed as bronchitis, but I suspect he just ran out of ideas. He was buried in a paupers grave. Sophia, once the child of royalty and then just the daughter of and a single mother,  lived the last years of her life under the name Sophia Treadway Reavis.  The poor soul died on 5 April, 1934. Her obituary in the Rocky Mountain News failed to even mention the Peralta Grant. That was probably not an accident.

In 1963 the National Park Service decided that it was not financially feasible to save the the fortress south of Casa Grande. The ten room mansion of Arizola was allowed to slowly decay and collapse into the desert. The next year they erected a maker on Arizona route 84 at milepost 181, to explain the significance of the spot to any passersby.  It reads (inaccurately), “James Addison Peralta Reavis was a brazen forger who claimed over 12 million acres of Central Arizona and Western New Mexico as an Old Spanish Land grant. He and his family lived here in royal style until his fraud was exposed. From the barony he went to federal prison in 1895 “

And that is all most people will ever know about this story. But now,  you know more.

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS Chapter Nine

 

I am always surprised by people who despise politics, because that is like despising vaccination needles; try living without them.  And the way in which James Reavis-Peralta responded to Royal Johnson's report is a perfect example.  Of course he sued the United States, claiming the government was stealing a million and a half acres from his “Arizona Development Corporation”, and demanded compensation of $11 million ($2.5 billion today). That got a lot of headlines. But more practically, he called on his allies in Washington. 

The railroad's man in the President's Cabinet (and therefore Collis Huntington's man), was Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble (above). In turn, he put pressure on the Federal Commissioner for the Land Office, Lewis Augustus Groff,  who was technically Johnson's boss.  

On February 20, 1890, Commissioner Groff (above)  fired off a critical letter to the Arizona Surveyor General -  Royal Johnson. The letter said Johnson's report was biased and instructed Johnson to “strike the case from your docket and notify Mr. Reavis of the action, allowing the usual time for an appeal to the Hon. Secretary of the Interior.” In other words, John W. Noble. Problem solved – except for the lawsuit.

Lawyers for Reavis-Peralta and the Development Corporation were Harvey Brown, Robert Ingersall and James Broadhead, who had already publicly endorsed the Peralta claim. All three men were also attorneys for Huntington's Southern Pacific Railroad. Mr. Huntington must have been a little annoyed he'd been forced out of the shadows on this point. Never-the-less the lawyers began a delaying action while Senator Roscoe Conkling (another Huntington ally) came to the rescue, pushing for the creation in March of 1891, of the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims, which was given jurisdiction over old Mexican and Spanish land claims, i.e. the Peralta grant.

While all of this was going in Washington, D.C.,  back in California James Reavis-Peralta's personal attorneys managed to find just the right people who were willing to swear under oath they had known the little orphan girl Sophia Peralta at various stages in her life. One man even claimed to have been a employee of John Treadway, who had supposedly provided for the child after her father left California for Spain. 

And in February 1893, an express wagon pulled up in front of the Land Office in Sante Fe, New Mexico (above) and unloaded “an array of boxes and packages, all...marked 'Peralta Grant.'  This was the evidence attacking the Surveyor General's report.  

Along with this mass of documents, old and newly discovered, was a large oil portrait of the Marquis de Peralta, to put a face on the fraud.  James Reavis-Peralta and Sophia , Baron and Baroness of Arizona, now moved back into their desert fortress of Arizola, where, on March 8, 1893 , Sophia argued her own case by giving birth to twin boys, thus proving, said James, that she had been born a twin herself. Also that spring, another group of investors were lined up to supply another $2,500 (today's equivalent of $60,000) a month,  for operating expenses for the Arizona Development Corporation, and the Revis-Peralta household.

At the same time the prosecution was also getting ready. The newly formed Court of Private Land Claims had hired Mathew Reynolds to defend the government, “"a lawyer of splendid ability”, and he fought to hire William Tipton as  an expert on document analysis, Sevaro Mallet-Prevost, a Mexican-American,  who was an expert in Mexican and American land laws, and Henry Flipper, an expert surveyor. All these men and their staffs were a major investment by the government. But with his lawsuit Reavis had changed the economics of the case, making it reasonable to invest the time and money needed to prove Reavis was a fraud. It was James Reavis' first really big mistake. He had overplayed his hand.

In January of 1894 Mallet-Prevost and Tipton went to Tucson to examine the original claim files. Once that task was completed, Mallet-Provist went on to Mexico City and Guadalajara. There he found that the Royal Cedula naming Don Miguel Peralta as the Baron of Arizona was real, but it had been altered. Originally it had been a Credula advising the City of Guadalajara that the Count of Fuenclara was the new Viceroy of New Spain. In June Mallet-Prevost moved on to old Spain. While in Seville he discovered that the Spanish authorities had actually caught Reavis trying to slip a doctored document into a library, and had issued a warrant for his arrest.  But Reavis had used his connections with Spanish royalty to discourage the police from pursuing their case.

Meanwhile, Mathew Reynolds had gone to California, where he was contacted by the lawyer for Mrs Elena Campbell de Nore, who had a signed contract between her husband and James Reavis, in which Miguel Nore (the husband) had been promised $50,000.00 if he lied for Reavis. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a widow cut out of a payoff.  Also, Reynolds had made a side trip to the grave of John Treadway, the friend of Don Peralta who had supposedly cared for the infant Sophia. According to the dates on his tombstone, Treadway had died six months before Sophia was supposedly born.  As details of the evidence being collected in Mexico, Spain and California began to leak out, Reavis' investors began to quietly drop away. As the money dried up, Reavis' lawyers quit, one after the other. By the time his case came to trial, James Reavis-Peralta was left flat broke, and representing himself in court..

The trial was supposed to begin in Santa Fe, at 10:00 Monday morning, 2 June, 1895, but nobody from the Reavis-side showed up. The court adjourned until 1:00 that afternoon, when the only business was a motion from  J.T. Kenney,  a lawyer representing 106 Peralta family members from Arizona. They had filed a companion suit, hoping to catch some dribbles from Reavis' bounty, but Kenney told the court, “from a cursory examination... it (the Peralta Grant) is a fabrication...We wash our hands from all of it.” First thing Tuesday morning the court began taking testimony from government witnesses, even though Baron James Reavis-Peralta was still no where to be seen.

The Government case was laid out in full. There never was any one named Don Miguel Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Corboda. There had never been a grant of land issued to the nonexistent Baron. The nonexistent grant had not been approved by the Inquisition, and had not been confirmed by the Viceroy, who had died a few days after he did not sign the nonexistent grant. The nonexistent Don Miguel Peralta had never married, and he and his imaginary wife had never had children, who, of course had not had children, who had not had children, who, needless to say, had not delivered sickly twins in an isolated California mission, where the nonexistent mother had not died along with her nonexistent male child, and there had been no Sophia Peralta who survived, because her mother had never existed. The friend of the nonresistant Baron Parlata had existed - John A. Treadway. He was real. But he had died six months before the nonexistent Sophia Peralta had not been born.

Documents supporting the Peralta claim had been forged, usually badly, and inserted into existing files and books. Legitimate entries in diaries and record books had been erased to make room for forged names and titles. The entire Peralta case was a tale of lies, cheats and broken promises, and had survived in the courts as long as it did only because of the support by rich and powerful men like Collis Huntington and Charles. Crocker, who had become rich and powerful because they had no scruples about lying and cheating to make money.

Finally, on 10 June, 1895, the Baron of Arizona, James Reavis-Peralta showed up in the flesh in court in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to answer the Government's charges. He should have stayed in bed.

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS Chapter Eight

I doubt James Reavis-Peralta (above), the self styled Baron of Arizona, could have imagined a worse person to review his new filing for the Peralta grant than Royal A. Johnson. They New York lawyer's  son had never expressed an interest in politics. He had come west out of curiosity, and stayed because he found a good job as a clerk in the Arizona Territory Surveyor General's office. He'd been one of the clerks who had received the original voluminous Perlata Grant filing in 1883. And from that morning he'd been suspicious of Reevis. Royal had risen to second in command of the office when his boss, Joseph W. Robbins, had died, and was universally approved as Robbins's replacement.

Then in 1884 Democrat Grover Cleveland won the White House, and in the wholesale shifting of political favors, Royal was replaced as Surveyor General by the Democrat John C. Hise, a realtor and  the son of rancher from Payson, Arizona.  Thus, when Reavis-Peralta filed his new claim, it was John Hise who was to pass judgment on the it. However, Hise was also suspicious of Reavis, and delayed making his decision.  Reavis appealed to Hises' boss, looking to shake things up, but that failed. And then 1888 the Republican Benjamin Harrison was elected President, and in July of 1889 Royal Johnson, the one man who knew almost as much about the Peralta Grant as James Reavis-Peralta,  was back in as Surveyor General.

Even during the four years he was out of office, Royal had continued to investigate the grant. So in September, when the acting United States Commissioner of Land sent Royal a letter asking, "please report to me the exact condition of said grant...and all the information you can obtain in regard to it.", Royal was loaded and ready to fire. His broadside was fired on 12 October (Columbus day), 1889 and the title said it all; “Adverse Report of the Surveyor General of Arizona, Royal A. Johnson, upon the alleged Peralta Grant”. The word “alleged” must have particularly stung Reavis.

First, Johnson noted that the Royal Cedula, the document which had supposedly started the entire enterprise, was written in a form different than every other Royal Cedula every issued, and in such bad Spanish that Royal suggested it must have been written by an American using “bad California Spanish”.  In addition the seal on the Royal Cedula had been printed on the page, and not impressed into it, as it was in every other Credula. Finally, the signatures had been made with a steel pen, not invented until a century after the 1748 date on the page.

Considering the report of the "Mexican Holy Inquisition", Royal observed that the seal was legitimate, but it had been glued on the page and not impressed, and it was cracked and had a brown tinge, suggesting it had been heated and removed from another document. And when discussing the Viceroy's decree directly awarding the grant, Royal wrote, “No certificate of a modern date nor any other reliable certification appears on the copies which would point to the originals being at present in the custody of some custodian of archives where they could be readily located and seen...to enable me to ascertain the whereabouts of originals or to prove their existence, and if they were to be obtained it is the duty of the claimants to produce them or to obtain and submit undoubted proof of their existence in their proper archives ... .”

In fact, at times the Surveyor General seemed to be scolding Reavis. “...it seems in poor taste that the old books of the San Xavier Mission, wherein were recorded the births, marriages and deaths of persons under the cognizance of the Church, should be selected to have inserted, and rudely inserted, among its withered leaves a copy of the grant of Peralta by the viceroy, and a copy of Peralta’s will." Royal went on to point out the obvious signs of a forgery committed under time constraints and in difficult places. "In the first place, the (forgery) is pasted in at right angles to the other sheets and is one-third larger than the regular sheets. The upper end of the pasted-in sheet is inserted in that part of the binding that holds the back of the large book together, instead of being in regular order...”

Royal further noted that under the laws existing during the 16^th century, the King would not have communicated to the Viceroy of New Spain, but rather through the bureaucracy, to the Council of the Indies, who would have then contacted the Viceroy.  And there was no copy of the Peralta Grant in the Council's archives. And, asked Johnson, why was there no record or even mention of the noble deeds achieved by Maguel Peralta anywhere in any other records? Given that this was the largest individual land grant made in the Americas by the Spanish crown, should not the achievement equal its reward? And, noted Johnson, Spanish law at the time said, “No memorial from any person whatever shall be received for services which shall not be supported by certificates from viceroys, Generals, or other chiefs under whom such services shall have been performed, except those persons who shall have served in the councils.” And, again, the Council of the Indies had no record of the Peralta grant.

Royal also noted that although the Inquisition was extremely powerful in Mexico, no obsessive Spanish bureaucrat – and any good bureaucrat is obsessive - would have asked that body to investigate the Peralta Grant. It should have been reviewed by the Audiencia Guadalajara Nuev Galidia.  And in those records there was no mention of the Peralta Grant.  Then, Royal Johnson dealt with the conflicts between the 1883 and 1887 claims. Noted the Surveyor General, if the 1864 Willing bill of sale was legitimate, then that superseded Sophia's inheritance.  And as to the photograph of Sophia standing next to the “Inicial Monument” (above), Johnson showed that the Peralta family crest carved into the rock was, in reality, a native American holography.

The report went on to detail the vagueness of the boundaries of the claim, pointing out that under long established property law in America and in Mexico, you cannot claim what you cannot locate. “Speedy and final action should be had on this base claim in order that the people of this territory may enjoy their homes with peace of mind. And parties guilty of forgery or the fabrication of papers that have caused so much trouble should be vigorously prosecuted by the government and that without delay. I recommend that the alleged grant should not be confirmed as it is prayed for, it being to my mind without the slightest foundation in fact and utterly void.”

The Baron of Arizona, James Reavis-Peralta,  responded as any good con man would respond when he was caught red handed. He sued the United States government for $11 million.

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