WAR AS EDUCATION

 

I hate to admit it but that the effete, arrogant, pompous, intellectual, asthmatic and snobbish Frenchman Marcel Proust (above)  was right about at least two things - first, when he observed that “We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history”, and second that “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

Both of those profound insights struck me again recently when I stumbled upon an article in the  archeology magazine "Antiquity", which illuminated a forgotten memory of the work of a quiet rock hound  named Gerald Clark Bond. It may seem a complicated train of events, but please bear with me, while I try to explain how my mind works. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Professor Bond collected and cataloged rocks from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Bermuda. This may have once seemed an esoteric pursuit, but in that seemingly meaningless me'lange of bottom cores, which Professor Bond drilled through were thin layers of limestone pebbles,  which had nothing to do with the ocean floor nor the great rivers which dumped their detritus onto the Continental Shelf in that region.

How did they get thousands of miles south and hundreds of miles off shore into of the Atlantic Ocean?  Professor Bond concluded the only delivery method that made sense was that an ancient glacier had ground against limestone cliffs, scrapping off pebbles and holding them trapped in its grip.

When the glacier then calved icebergs into the Atlantic, these floated south until they melted, and then dropped their limestone pebbles into the abyss. With extraordinary perseverance, Professor Bond matched those pebbles with a specific limestone cliff along the Canadian coast. And when other rocks from the same drill cores were identified as coming from nearby areas to those cliffs, the professor's suspicions were confirmed, and with it a way to measure climate change. 

More pebbles in a given core layer indicated more melting ice bergs, which hinted at warmer temperatures and rising sea levels.  Fewer pebbles thus meant cooling seas, and more water locked up as ice in glaciers.  What was amazing to Professor Bond was that there have been eight cooling periods, now called Bond Events, since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. 

Bond Events come in roughly 1,500 year intervals, giving an almost respiratory aspect to our planet's atmosphere. And like a smoker who develops a cough, the deposits on the sea floor, as well as ice cores drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic have recorded the increasing impact of humans burning fossil fuels on our planet's health, from wood fires to coal to oil. But they also record something else, equally as ominous.

See, when the weather cooled for Bond Event Seven -about ten thousand years ago - it seems that humans responded with the invention of agriculture.

Bond Event Four occurred about six thousand years ago, and it seems humans responded with the domestication of sheep and the invention of bronze. 

And Bond Event Three, which came four thousand years ago, brought on the collapse of great empires in Asia and Egypt, and, of more interest to this story,  in an act of war at a crossing of a slow, meandering river about 80 miles northeast of Berlin, Germany.

The river is the somnambulist Tollense (above). For more than ten thousand years, beginning in its namesake lake, the Tollense  has followed a sinuous 58 mile course through forests and bogs, winding this way and twisting that, as it hesitantly approaches the Peene River, which winds another 30 miles to the Baltic Sea just below the island of Usedom. 

In the peat bogs lining its banks and the mud of it's bottom, the Tollense has preserved for the last 3,200 years a record of one day, an example of humanity and inhumanity, and a desperate battle for survival in the high summer of  about 1250 BC.

The invaders were from the forests and mountains to the south, and were members of the Unetice culture. They were armed with bronze daggers, spear heads and hand axes. They were adorned with engraved bronze bracelets and wooden shields, and their robes were held together with bronze pins. They came mounted on horses, which ate millet, which did not grow this far north. That suggests rations, which suggests an organized raiding party, perhaps what would one day be called an army.

The Frisian villages close to the Baltic coast were the likely target of the Unetice. The Frisians buried their dead in stone crypts, and prayed to the earth god Inguz, who drove his chariot across the sky as easily as he dived beneath the sea. The villagers enjoyed probably the best diet in Europe, with plenty of surf and turf. They fished in the lakes and the sea from long plank canoes and hunted the forests with curved bows. They raised cattle corralled behind their village palisades. But their weapons and tools were stone axes and baseball bat like wooden clubs. 

The bronze age was late in coming to the Frisian Baltic coast. Copper and tin had to be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit before they would form bronze, and that takes a lot of wood, and a knowledge of ceramics. A culture cannot afford that technology unless it has something to sell. And it was not until recently that these proto-Scandinavian tribes had organized and improved the production of their “metallum sudaticum”, amber. 

With each successive Bond Event, with each successive glacier pulse, the level of the Baltic Sea rose and then fell, Over and over great coastal pine forests grew, matured and were then drowned in the Baltic basin.  And with each storm tide more fossilized pine tree sap from those long dead forests washed up on the sandy Baltic beaches as amber.

Villagers gathered the amber in hand held nets, then carved it into beads, rings, bracelets or even Venus religious figures (above), and then traded them southward, up the "Amber Road" that reached all the way to Rome and Egypt.  On the return trip traders brought ceramics, bonze rings and gold pins. But few weapons.

By 3,400 years ago the Amber Road was a well established trade route, increasing the wealth of the villages on the namesake lake of the Tollense river, where Baltic amber could pause, be collected and worked, before moving on.  And the wealth of these artisans, fishermen, farmers and herders, 

attracted the interest of the Unetice forest peoples to the south and east. 

After a generation or two of escalating raids , about 4,125 years ago, shortly after the summer solstice, perhaps a thousand occupants of the scattered Frisian villages along the Tollense valley decided to gather their tools and their children and flee north, beyond the reach of the raiders. 

The logical place to rally the farmers was on the western bank of the Tollense, where a 10 foot wide causeway (above), had been built and maintained for over some 300 years,  about 7 miles south from where the Tollense' joining with the Peene River. 

For a wooden causeway to have been maintained for so long (above), the western bank must have been a traditional gathering place, perhaps with religious connotations.  

It seems likely the Frisians waited for the indecisive or the cautious to join up. Perhaps the old were too slow.  But it seems the farmers and herders were slow in discovering the causeway  across the river and bogs represented a bottleneck in their line of retreat.  Because it was here the raiders with their bronze axes fell upon the famers and herders with their stone arrow heads and wooden clubs.

The first indication of the death along the Tollense saw daylight in 1996, when a human femur  surfaced. Jutting from the base of its ball joint was a stone arrow head (above).  Rarely does archeology find such conclusive proof of a murder. Early excavations uncovered more human bones and wooden clubs. 

When the raiders were seen approaching, the livestock, the elderly, the women and children were sent downstream, with a small escort of the best fighters. But the majority of the Frisian men stayed behind, sacrificed to delay the attackers at the causeway.   

In 2007 massive excavations were begun, and have continue up and down the valley.  By 2018, after the bones of at least 100 individuals had been uncovered, it was estimated at least 5,000 men were caught in this battle, mostly young men of draft age - between 20 and 40 years old. The estimated death toll ranges from 750 to a thousand souls. 

Most of the bones carry injuries inflicted shortly before death; broken faces, damaged skulls, bronze arrow heads embedded in arm and leg bones , even one penetrating a skull (above).  One fractured thigh bone was discovered displaying an injury still commonly suffered by horseback riders. 

A genetic sample of the bones uncovered so far show that none of the adults possessed the thymine nucleotide which would have allowed them to digest the lactose in cows' milk, something which only developed in European humans some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In addition, five horse skeletons have been found, with bronze bridle fittings, hinting at an officer class among the invaders.  

The fighting at the causeway was desperate, with bodies left along the riverbank, and no quarter given.  The Frisians stone daggers and wooden clubs killed some of the first attackers, but the heavier bronze swords allowed the Unetice warriors to maim from a greater distance, and for longer.  Gradually the invaders cut down the outnumbered defenders. 

As with all battles before firearms, once the shield wall was broken the slaughter truly began. Running for their lives, the Frisians were struck down from behind, or, if they turned to fight, they were overwhelmed. Many of the bones show the cutting slices of bronze swords - although no bronze swords or axes were left on the field. The bodies lay were they fell, later being stripped of any metal of value, as the pursuers murdered their way up the valley toward the Peene.

Using ground penetrating radar to locate likely dig sites (above),  a mass of human bones were found  downstream a mile north of the causeway site. It seems the bodies were left unclaimed and unattended until a storm washed them downstream to a bend in the Tollense, where the current buried and preserved about 140 bodies in the mud and peat (above), "... like an ancient memento left between the pages of a forgotten diary". 

The wounded and crippled Frisians left behind were dispatched, often with a quick and brutal club blow to the head (above). We do not know yet how far up the valley the slaughter continued.  Nor do we have any accounts of the battle. Written history of this region would not begin until the old high German runic inscriptions carved 800 years later. 

But we can safely assume the Uentice and Frisian story tellers (above) sang about the honor and courage of those who fought, and the sacrifices of the brave men who died along the ancient banks of the Tollense. And we know the battle of the Tollense Valley had a major impact on the lives of people in the region. But, why in God's name were these young men murdering each other? Was it amber or gold? Was it slavery or freedom? Was it fish or faith? 

We have known for a hundred years that shortly after this battle, that we did not know about until recently, the people of northern Europe no longer lived in scattered settlements. Within a generation they began building fortified settlements (above), living safely behind walls with their animals and commuting daily to and from their farms outside.  And it seems logical to believe this change was all because of a 3,000 year old battle which we were ignorant of until 25 years ago.

Marcel Proust (above) began his most famous work, with the following words; "I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive... in some inanimate object...until the day...when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice...We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. "

But Proust wrote something else, while confined and working for three years in what would become in 1922 his death bed (above). "Remembrance of things past", he wrote, "is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”  The same can be said of the warriors of the Tollense valley. 

The latest thinking by the archeologists digging along the banks of the Tollense is that the battle was not a war but a robbery on a large party of traders.  Academics will likely argue the issue for decades, But to call it a war or a robbery is a game of semantics. Three thousand years after the event such definitions have little meaning.

Whatever the reality along the Tollense 3,000 years ago, we can be certain the elders of the Uentice and the Frisians both sang of the honor and courage displayed by the participants. But their religion, their nations, their cultures, their languages, their  homes, their hatred and their love, all they murdered and died for has long since turned to dust. They no longer matter. They are all dead and gone. Until we dig them up.

Excavated, they live again,  because we choose to make them live. We choose to resurrect their bones and recreate their world in our minds and our hearts. And in doing so, we recreate our own world. As Proust put it, "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

- 30 -

BLAMING GOD

 

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

KJ Bible, Genisus 2:17

I admit it may be unfair to blame 53 year old Boston Puritan, Increase Mather for the 4,000 deaths in Jamaica - unlike the 25 "witches he helped murder in Salem.   But he was so damn certain in his ignorance, that he lacked any compassion which might have honored those 4,000 lives.  

An Anglican minister and an Anglican preacher, "The Godly" Increase always pontificated from a pulpit standing on solid moral bedrock - even as the sand beneath his feet liquefied and swallowed his soul.  The Reverend Mather was certain, for example, that what Yehaweh said about the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 was "All of those people were sinners and deserved their fate!"  And that seems a little arrogant, doesn't it?  Considering he did not actually know any of those people.

"God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand."

Richard Feynman Nobel winning American physicist

As the 17 million square miles of the South American Tectonic Plate drove west at just over an inch a year, it elbowed aside the 1 million square miles of the Caribbean plate, shoving it at half an inch a year into the southeastern edge of 29 million square miles of the North America plate. These large collisions accommodated the curvature of the earth by cracking like a plate of glass dropped onto a concrete slab. For example, Cuba rested firmly on the North American Plate. 

But just off its southern shore was the 25,000 foot deep and 250 mile long Cayman trench, which was consuming the 73,000 square miles of the Conave micro-plate, driving north.  Ninety miles to the south the island of Jamaica is thus being shoved inexorably toward that trench, until, eventually, it will be consumed by it. But in the meantime Jamaica was also being pulled apart by the Walton fault, moving west at half an inch a year, connected by transverse faults to the Plantain Garden Fault, slipping west at a full inch a year and running 300 miles from the island of Hispaniola to the once volcanic Blue Mountains in Jamaica's interior. As the waxing quarter moon set on the evening of 6 June, 1693, the delicate balance of all this intricate geological machinery was on the verge of snapping.

"Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah...Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities..."

KJ Genesis 19:24 - 25

Dawn of Wednesday, 7 June, 1692 greeted Port Royal - the second largest English city in the New World and "the richest and wickedest city in the world"- with the continued promise of unending wealth. 

Approaching Jamaica from the Caribbean Passage any Spanish or French threat had to first navigate the mile wide entrance between the eastern heights of Salt Pan Hill, defended by a row of cannon called the 12 apostles, and the 14 guns in the star shaped brick edifice of Fort Charles, perched on western tip of the 18 mile long sand spit called the Palisadoes.

Protecting the 60 full rigged transports, slave ships, schooners and cutters anchored safely in Cagway Bay this morning were the additional 26 cannon in Fort James and Fort Carlisle.  

Blocking any land assault across the narrow neck of the Palisadoes was Fort Rupert with another 22 guns. And for good measure defending the south sea side of Port Royal were the 26 cannon of Fort Morgan, named to honor the 4 year deceased Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and infamous privateer, Sir Henry Morgan.

"Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped."

William H. Bragg 20th century British Nobel physicist, chemist, and mathematician.

During the first 50 years of English occupation, Jamaica's income had come from stealing what the Spanish had stolen from the Aztecs and Incas - in other words, piracy. But within the last decade the economics had shifted. Jamaica's Royal Governor, the Earl of Inchiquin, was no longer the unquestioned lord, and the dominant arm of the British government was no longer the Royal Navy, Both of those powers had been superseded by  the corporate-like Board of Trade and Plantations. 

Civilian lawyer and businessman John White, the new Vice President of the Jamaica Council, was the regional head of operations, directly responsible for the 4,000 Europeans in Port Royal that June morning, men, women and children, who were all employees one way or another, of the Board of Trade. There were also 2,000 to 2,500 Africans - but  almost all of them were not people, but property

"Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."

KJ Bible Judges 1:7

Port Royal was a company town - a slice of London transplanted to the Caribbean, 2,000 Tudor brick and mortar multi-story homes and shops tightly packed into 51 sandy acres between the sea and Cagway Bay, where Puritans, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews and Muslims labored with one purpose - to get rich. The venal sins of the sailors and pirates were tolerated since they were making so many so wealthy. 

In the words of observer Edward Ward, Port Royal was “...as sickly as a hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot as Hell, and as wicked as the devil”.  Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck saw, "The parrots of Port Royal gather to drink...ale with just as much alacrity as the drunks that frequent the taverns that serve it."  

As Rector of St. Peter's Anglican Church near the junction of the High and Lime Streets, the Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Heath was God's official representative to this den of hypocrisy. Before ten this morning he walked the few yards south to the Merchants' Exchange, to have coffee with Vice President White. The Reverend would later credit Mr. White's lively conversation with delaying his luncheon date with the garrison's commander, Captain  Rudend,  and his family, on Queens Street along the harbor front - and thus saving Dr. Heath's life.

"I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance."

Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan author

Some 20 minutes before noon, on 9 June, 1692, the rocks which restrained one of the faults to the north or west of the Jamaica snapped.  As it did the primary compressing wave of energy raced away from the epicenter of the break at 4 miles a second, like a giant hammer, slamming each successive molecule of rock into the next. Just behind it came the Secondary wave, "...perpendicular to the direction it is traveling" and moving at 3 miles a second. The combination of the 2 waves produced the shaking, which lasted for about 4 minutes - estimated as the equivalent of a magnitude 7.3 on the standard Richter scale. 

In that brief time the over 4 million square miles of Jamaica jerked a foot or more closer to Cuba, dropping parts of the southern shore of the island as much as thirty feet. A pocket watch found on the harbor bottom 260 years later recorded the time of doomsday as 11:43am.

"Let death steal over them...for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart."

KJ Psalm 55:15

Seated in the tavern, Emmanuel Heath and Vice President White felt the earth begin to "heave and roll". "Said I, “Lord, Sir, what’s this?” He replied, very composedly, “It is an earthquake, be not afraid, it will soon be over.” But...(when) we heard the church and tower fall...we ran to save ourselves." In other words, they did the one thing you should never do in an earthquake - run outside where your head has no protection and all the heavy things are falling to the ground. 

Another survivor described the scene which greeted him. "The sand on the street rose like waves at sea, lifting up all persons that stood upon it....And at the same instant water rushed in...Some were seen catching hold of beams and rafters of houses."

"It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law."

Franz Kafka, 20th century writer

It seems likely John White was hit by some of the falling debris, and in a panic the Reverend abandoned him, running south for the safety of Fort Morgan. But as he reached it, "...I saw the earth open and swallow up a multitude of people, and the sea mounting in upon us over the fortifications." The sea did not so much rush in as rise up from the sand." The vibrations released the water table bonded to the sand grains a few feet below the surface, which could no longer support weight. Forts, buildings, animals and people simply sank into the quicksand. 

A Frenchman, Lewis Galdy, was swallowed by it.  But as the street that swallowed him dropped thirty feet into the harbor, his buoyancy sent him bobbing to the surface of what was abruptly the enlarged bay. Half an hour later he was picked up by a rescue boat.

"For, behold, the LORD cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain."

KJ Bible Isaiah 26:21

"Careened" at the docks - tilted so barnacles could be scrapped off her elm wood bottom - the HMS Swan, a 74 foot long fifth rate warship, snapped her lines and plowed into the sinking homes and shops along Queen street, perhaps killing Captain Rudend and his family.  In a primeval fit, the Reverend Heath chose now to run home. "The houses and walls fell on each side of me; some bricks came rolling over my shoes...When I came to my lodging, I found all things in the order I had left them." Emmanuel Heath was lucky. His home was one of the 10% of buildings not destroyed, in the one third of Port Royal not swallowed by the bay.  He lived. His breakfast companion, John White, would also survive the shaking, but die of his injuries a few hours later.

"Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things."

Richard Dawkins, 20 century British evolutionary biologist

There were 2,000 dead in 4 minutes, and another 3,000 who would die over the following year of broken bodies, hearts and minds. The brick forts of James and Carlisle disappeared into Cagway Bay.  Fort Rupert flooded. The least damaged was Fort Morgan. More morbid, among the 33 acres dropped into the harbor was the graveyard, leaving the recently dead floating with their ancestors. Quaker John Pike later wrote his brother, “Great men who were so swallowed up with pride...now lie stinking upon the water, and are made meat for fish and fowls of the air” - and the target for human scavengers, “...their Pockets picked, their fingers cut off for their rings, their gold buttons taken out of their shirts."

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

KJ Isaiah 66:24

The survivor Samuel Bernard dealt directly with the trauma. "We shall be unworthy of God’s mercies if we be not by His judgments taught to learn righteousness.” John White's survivors on the Council declared themselves "an instance of God Almighty's severe judgment." But distance made the ignorant more certain, and mercenary. Wrote one distant observer, "A God of limited patience had punished a wicked people." 

London Presbyterian minister John Shower used the deaths as pulp for his first publication: "Practical Reflections on the late Earthquakes in Jamaica”, blaming the disaster on "Atheism, and infidelity...and barefaced deism..." He denounced those who thought there must be a rational cause for such horrors, because, "...the Hand of God is not to be overlooked in such things", and warned his readers, "If you do not truly repent...your judgment is near, your destruction is at hand." 

And in the largest English city in the new world, Boston, the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote to his uncle John, in terms that were almost jubilant. "Behold, an accident speaking to all our English America." He was looking for a victory, as that summer his father had executed five "witches" in Salem, but those executions would only lead to more witch trials.

"For the belief in a single truth is the root cause for all evil in the world."

Max Born, Nobel physicist and mathematician

Increase Mather was busy that summer, and would not set down his reaction to the Port Royal Quake for a decade - by which time his reputation was suffering because of the witch hunts. But disaster tales are always popular, and time had moderated the old Puritan's views. He now acknowledged  "...many times, earthquakes proceed from natural causes."  

But then he asserted they were "...usually, a sign that men have sinned, and that God is angry.  Certain it is, that if men had never sinned, they had never been terrified with earthquakes...Whole towns...with all the people in them...(have) gone down alive into the pit.  Would such a thing be, if God were not infinitely displeased by the sins of men?"

"Early the next morning Abraham...looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah...and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace."

KJ Genisus 19: 27-28

But Increase, now over 60 years old, was just warming up, reminding his readers, "...Was it not so with the Sinners in Sodom? An earthquake swallowed up their houses, and all the bodies in them. But what became of their souls? Does not the scripture say, that they are suffering the Vengeance of eternal fire?...Shall we that call our selves Christians be worse than the heathen Romans, of whom it is said, that when they saw the earthquake they feared greatly...have we forgotten what God did in Jamaica ...  when two thousand people (whites and blacks) perished by the earthquakes there."

"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

J.R.R. Tolkien writer

The people of Jamaica did not forget. Almost half a century after the earthquake, in solid ground across the bay in the new city of Kingston, they buried the mortal remains of Lewis Galdy. He had experience a religious rebirth after the earth spit him back up, but had used his time not to preach faith but live it, for better and for worse.  He remained a businessman, and in Jamaica. If he left little of value behind, that was not an act of God, it was an act of Galdy.  And when he died at 80 years of age - 16 years after and ten years older than Increase Mather when he died - Lewis's tombstone would read, "Beloved by all and much lamented at his Death".  If he was, he was more loved by his peers, than bitter old Increase Mather.

"Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone."

KJ Bible John 8:7

- 30 -