I would describe 1775 as a year of significant events; Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill; and then there was the hurricane. One random afternoon that summer, over the bone dry high pressure incubator that is the 3 ½ million square miles of the Sahara Desert, where the summertime temperature can reach 135 F (57.7 C), a monster was conceived.
But the Sahara alone, for all its hot breath, cannot produce a monster: it also requires a midwife, the Sahel, an Arabic word meaning “shoreline”, where the sands of the great desert meet the shrub and flat savanna. Every April to September, at about 16 degrees north latitude, (the Intra-Tropical Convergence Zone) the hot Easterly Jet off the Sahara meets the rainy season humidity over the Sahel, and waves of thunderstorms burst forth from thin air, one after another, with a new wave forming every three to four days.
Most of the storms that form over the great Niger River Bend, over Mauritania, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote Diviore, fade and are forgotten like drops of water in a dry riverbed. But some cumulus towers collide with the cold air above 42,000 feet, forming anvil topped thunderheads. The anvils form because as the air rises the temperature and its ability to hold moisture drops. The flat lid marks the boundary between the humid troposphere and the arid stratosphere. And eventually this squall line of angry air passed yet another Sahal, this one the border between Africa and the tropical Atlantic Ocean.
Some 300 miles to the west, what was then a Tropical Depression sailed passed the Cape Verde Islands like a stately fleet of wooden ships of the line. And now it was persistence that chose which storm would earn fame, as over time the friction between the troposphere below and the jet stream above would convert the vertical heat engine of the thunderstorms into a horizontal sweep, gathering the squals and driving them in a counter-clock spin. Sometime in mid August of 1775, as this storm set sail for the new world, it became a nameless Tropical Storm in the open sea.
When Christopher Columbus first invaded the Caribbean at the end of the fifteenth century he found people across the region who revered a capricious god of storms known as “Hunrakan”, “Hurakan”, or “Aracan”. Having barely heard of the Sahara or the Sahel, the residents of the Windward Isles of Martinique and Dominica, could not have imagined the source of the violence that assaulted them almost without warning on Friday, August 25, 1775. A report from St. Croix described how ships at anchor desperately slipped their cables, seeking the relative safety of the open sea. It was as likely as not that such gambles resulted in an enigmatic death. Fifty years later the British Admiralty would estimate that each year 5% of all ships in the Caribbean were lost to such storms, taking as many as a thousand sailors to watery graves.
One such sailor, Captain John Tollemache of HMS Scorpion, fought this particular storm of 1775 as he crossed down the coast from British occupied Boston to Bermuda. A week later, on Saturday, September 2nd, the storm brushed across the outer banks of North Carolina, causing extensive property damage, taking 163 lives in the port of New Bern and destroying the corn crops of Parasquotank County. The Williamsburg, “Virginia Gazette” mourned that, “…most of the mill dams are broke, and corn laid almost level with the ground…many ships…drove ashore and damaged at Norfolk, Hampton and York”. The Britsh warship H.M.S. Mercury was forced from her blockade of Norfolk, “…and driven aground in shoal water.” Patriots picked her bones and liberated her cargo, a gift of the gale.
With its center still off shore this unnamed hurricane swept up Chesapeake Bay. Philadelphia, under a heavy constant rain at 8am on the morning of September 3rd, saw the wind from the Southeast and a pressure drop to 29.5 inches of mercury. By three that afternoon the wind had shifted to the Southwest, and records speak of the “highest tide ever known.” At Newport, Rhode Island, the wind shifted from the Northeast to Southeast between 10am and 2:30pm. As September 3rd ended and the 4th began, the storm turned northwestward, and headed out to sea. There was only one landmass in the new world remaining between the hurricane and its ultimate fate over the cold waters of the Labrador Current; Newfoundland.
There were thousands of fishermen on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. September was the peak season for the long finned squid (Logilo pealiei), used as bait for Cod fishing, and fishermen from all around the Atlantic basin came here every fall to take a share of the bounty. But this season the squid had made no appearance until late in the afternoon Saturday, September 9, when they suddenly descended on the jigging hooks in an ominous blizzard. The squid were even attacking each other while writhing on the hooks. What was driving these cephalopods to such as frenzy? As the fishermen happily pulled in their abundance they noticed that the dieing sun was blazing in an odd orange tint, and that the wind was freshening and gathering. As darkness enveloped the fishing fleets the more cautious captains made for Salvage Point or Ochre Pit Cove. But none of these anchorages were protected enough.
That night the sea and the air conspired to murder men and their works. Ships which had thought they were safe were battered into rocky shores. In Northern Bay cove three hundred sailors and fishermen drowned by morning, their bleached and bloated bodies strewn across the rocks like beached dolphins. They now lie in a mass grave in the Provincial Park. Human bones would continue to wash ashore on this beach for years to come. At Harbor Grace, 30 miles to the south, 300 boats and all their crews were lost while at anchor.
In Placentia, dawn found the most substantial community in Newfoundland at the time, with almost 2,000 souls, awash in a six foot storm surge. Those who survived did so by climbing into the rafters of their attics. A fishing schooner was thrown up on the beach overnight. The only surviving crew member was a boy, lashed to the wheel. Off the Avalon Peninsula two navy schooners were sunk and dozens of fishing ships demasted and left adrift.
At St. Johns, on the west coast, the storm surge was 30 feet, and seven hundred boats, large and small in the narrow harbor were submerged and smashed to bits against each other and the rocks. Fishermen from St; Johns, pulling in their nets on Tuesday, the 12th of September, found between 20 and 30 bodies tangled in them.
After it was all over a review of the losses listed by Lloyds would produce the startling figure of 4,000 dead, mostly Irish and English, in the fishing fleets off Newfoundland. Rear Admiral Robert Duff, Governor of Newfoundland, attempted to detail the disaster for his superiors back in London; “I am sorry to inform your Lordship that…the fishing works in those places…were in a great measure defaced…I cannot give your Lordship a very correct estimate of the damages sustained by this storm; but (you) should image…that the amount of it in shipping, boats, fishing works etc. cannot be less than thirty thousand pounds…” (about $2 million in 2007). 
There was scarcely a house on Newfoundland with an intact roof or chimney, even if they had not been flooded out. The hurricane of September 1775 remains Canada’s deadliest natural disaster. For decades afterward the survivors on Conception Bay could still hear the desperate cries of the lost souls in the cold surf.
As for the storm itself, conceived over the Sahara and born of the warm equatorial waters, it could not simply die. Once over the colder currents of the North Atlantic the storm converted from a warm core to a cold one, drawing a diminished power not merely from air pressure variations but also from temperature divisions, becoming just another in the unending string of common “baroclinic” cyclones that march across Europe. But I like to think that this was the particular storm that passed over Carrickfergus castle, outside of Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1775, which brought with it such violent and continuous lightening and thunder that it was said the Scotch and Irish fairies were doing battle in the heavens above. That would be a significant enough ending for a storm in such a significant year..jpg)
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Corvallis was (and is) a farming community on the West bank of the Willamette River, about half way between Portland and Eugene. At the turn of the 20th century it was home to nine churches, an Odd Fellows Hall, a Freemasons Lodge and a small core of about 25 adherents to the relatively new Salvation Army. But by 1902 the 28 year old local commander, Lt. Creffeld, was beginning to find the doctrine and command structure of the Army to be too restrictive. By 1903 he had begun to seriously shift his preaching away from the dignified structured Victorian ideas of the Salvation Army to something with more of an American free spirit; his Salvation Army commanders described Creeffeld’s adherents as “Come-Outers” but they described themselves as “Holy Rollers”. 
Being so possessed by The Spirit as to writhe on the floor and babble in tongues had been a practice of the great William Booth, the Salvation Army’s founder, and the Army was one of the few social or religious organizations at the turn of the century in which woman could hold respected leadership positions. Creffeld built upon all of this. His congregation contained a majority of women. In the summer of 1903, in an act of extraordinary sexual independence for the time, the two dozen women built with their own hands a meeting house on Kiger Island, a 2200 acre wooded sanctuary between the Boonville Channel and the Willamette River, just south of Corvallis. That summer the sect was bursting with curious women and girls drawn to the power of Franz Creffeld and the forbidden hints of feminism. Come winter the revolution shifted back to town, into the home of prominent local businessman and convert, Mr. O.P. Hunt,, Mrs, Hunt and their young daughter Maude Hunt. Mr. Hunt hung a sign over his front door: “Positively No Admittance Except on God's Business”. 
The return to town brought increased scrutiny from the unconverted males of Corvallis, and they did not like what they observed. Even less did they like what they suspected. . Rumors made the rounds of naked rambles in the wilds of Kiger Island. And when the wooden walks around the Hunt home were torn up and burned, along with stacks of furniture and piles of kitchen utensils, all to cleanse the soul of as much physical property as possible, one of the local newspapers suggested “…a condition bordering on insanity”. His flock were encouraged to wear old clothes instead of new. Members were discouraged from having contact with family members who were not also followers. Indeed, Creffeld had begun referring to himself as a prophet. He announced that he as henceforth to be called “Joshua II” It was too much for a good Christian manhood of Corvallis to tolerate.
On the night of January 4, 1904 a dozen or so self described “white cappers” (adorning themselves after the Klu Klux Klan’s white robes) set upon Franz Creffeld and dragged him to the edge of town. There they threatened Franz with tar and feathers. (I doubt they actually applied the treatment since the usual effect of hot tar on human flesh was serious burns, often eventually resulting in the victim’s death. No such injury was recorded on Creffeld.) More likely Franz was merely roughed up, frightened, stripped naked and then chased into the woods; where later Mrs. Hunt and Maude were able to find and secretly escort the prophet to their home. Shortly thereafter the town was appeased by news that “Joshua” and young Maude Hunt had been married. The sexual escapades of “Joshua”, real or imagined, would seemed to have been ended.
Still it was clear that the locals had reached some sort of limit. A half dozen of his young female followers were committed to the “Boys and Girls Aid Society”, including O.P. Hunt’s son and his new bride, or were shipped off to relatives out of state. One or two women were even committed to the state lunatic asylum. A sullen quite catching of breath settled over the town that ended in April of 1904 when the Portland police issued an arrest warrant for Franz on a charge of adultery with a young adherent from that town, Esther Mitchel. In addition the aggrieved party, George Mitchel, the young ladies’ elder brother, even posted a $150 reward.
Franz immediately disappeared, and was not seen again in Corvallis again until August when he was discovered, filthy, nude and starving, secreted beneath the Hunt household. Arrested and tried in Portland, Franz was found guilty and sentenced to two years in the state prison. And it was upon his arrival there that we get our first (and only) clear look at Franz Creffeld; five feet six inches tall, weight, 135 pounds. There is something mystical about his eyes, “hypnotic”, glaring defiantly, almost mockingly, into the camera. For the first time you can begin to get a feeling for the power of this man, and the power of his lunacy. Jail was not going to stop him. He was released, with time off for good behavior, in February of 1906. What he could not know at the time was that he had barely three months left to live. Franz Creffeld was ready for his close up.
Out of jail, Franz immediately reconstituted his flock, especially the Hunt family, who sold their property in Corvallis and used the funds to purchase property near the small town of Waldport, where Alsea Bay meets the Pacific Ocean. The Hurt family had deep roots in Waldport, but even here the rather bizarre practices of Creffeld’s church caused friction, in particular when a young girl spied several female followers cavorting naked on the beach. Franz began to consider the advantages of moving to the more cosmopolitan Seattle. 
Esther’s use of the word “us” right after the shooting probably contributed to both her and Maude being arrested and charged with George’s murder. Maude had bought the gun and Esther had used it. While awaiting trial Maude took strychnine. Her father, O.V. Hurt, arrainged to have Franz’s body reburied next to Maude’s. And Esther Mitchell survived an attack of typhoid fever contracted in the Seattle jail. At trial she was judged to be insane and for three years she survived in the Washington State Asylum at Steilacoom. She was released on April 5, 1909, “thoroughly disgusted with herself” according to the hospital staff. O.V. Hurt collected the girl and took her with him back to Waldport. There Esther managed to find some peace, and in 1914 at the age of 26 she married. But three months later she too drank strychnine, just like Maude. It was time for the final fade to black. 
P.S.: on March 26, 1997, outside of San Diego, California, some 40 members of the religious group “Heaven’s Gate”, committed suicide. About twenty of those unfortunates were decedents of the Franz Creffeld’s movement, who had been recruited from Waldport in September of 1975.
P.P.S.; Tom Stoppard, another Englishman, observed, “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means”.
He found all the doors of his home locked and the house dark- except for what looked like a single candle burning in the attic room where two servant girls slept. M. Lancine was concerned enough that he immediately went to the police station. Several officers accompanied M. Lancine home again, and one officer climbed over the back wall of the house and thus gained entrance. In side, on the landing half way up the main staircase, were the battered and mutilated bodies of Madam and Mademoiselle Lancine, still wearing their coats and gloves. The murder weapons were scattered about the landing, dropped from the hands that had wielded them; a kitchen knife, a hammer, and a heavy pewter pot. But the bludgeoning had only been part of the assault.. The eminent psychiatrist Jazues Lacan put it succinctly; “They tore out their eyes as Bacchantes castrate their victims.” One of the daughter’s eyes was found on the carpet. Both of Madam Lancine’s eyes were found in the folds of her scarf, still around her neck. And in the bare attic room the police discovered the two servant girls, Christine and Lea Papin, naked and huddled together in one bed. The police wrapped them in bathrobes and brought them in for questioning. Already the press photographers were showing up. Both girls readily admitted to having committed the murders. But they failed to offer an explanation for the brutal slaughter.
The case was an immediate sensation and a cause celebre’ for every side of the moral and political debate in France - to the Paris tabloids the sisters were “The Monsters of Le Mans” and “Les Arracheuses d’Yeux” (The Eye Gougers), and the murders were “…the most terrifying and cruel murders ever committed.” Jean Genet, author of “Waiting for Godot” was inspired by the trial to write a play, “The Maids” in which he has Christine say, “Madame likes us like she likes her armchairs. And maybe not that much!” Simone de Beauvior commented, “…there are no doubt women who deducted the cost of a broken plate from their maid’s wages, who put on white gloves to find forgotten specks of dust on the furniture:…one must accuse their childhood orphanage, their serfdom, the whole hideous system set up by decent people for the production of madmen, assassins and monsters.” And to the new science of psychology there were dark undertones of incest and the assault upon the victim’s eyes was thought significant. The case was a theatre d’ete (a summer theatre), or perhaps a sarriette (a summer treat), in much the same way that the murder of Sandra Levy and the O.J. Simpson trial were to be a half century later. But after 77 years the central mystery of the Papin sisters remains; why?
The sisters were born into the brutal and cruel life of the French peasantry, still common in rural France between the World Wars. It was a life with little education, and what passed for a social safety net was administered by the Catholic Church as charity and moral lesson. There were originally three Papin sisters. The eldest daughter, Emilia, had been raped by her drunken father when she was nine years old. The mother had divorced the beast, but that threw the family into bitter poverty. Emilia had been sent to a nunnery and she rarely saw her family again. The mother hired out as a house maid. The younger sisters were sent to an orphanage. And when Lea and Christine were thought to be old enough (their early teens) they too became servants. As often as possible the sisters worked together. But after a few years they no longer spoke to their mother.
When the Papin sisters moved into the Lancine home, Christine was 24 and Lea just 20. They had worked in several other homes around La Mans, and had good work records. And they worked for the Lancine family for seven years without trouble. Mademoiselle Lancine was known to be strict about cleanliness, and often ran one of her white gloves across surfaces to check the sisters’ work. But the only thing that might have been unusual about that particular afternoon was that mademoiselle and madam must have come home unexpectedly. It was then that the rulers of the home would have discovered that the fuses had been blown by a badly repaired electric iron. It was that relative minor inconvenience which had somehow precipitated the explosion of bloody violence on the landing.
After their arrests, the sisters were separated. Christine began to wail and cry out for her sister. After several days they were allowed contact again, and Christine showered Lea with kisses. The doctors sent to examine the girls decided that Lea was a simpleton and that Christine was mentally and emotionally unstable. At one point Christine became so distraught at the separation that she tried to gouge her own eyes out and had to be restrained in a straight jacket. When their trial finally came in September of 1933 Christine was sentenced to the guillotine, but this was later commuted to life in prison. Being alone again in prison she went into a profound depression and stopped eating for long periods. She lost weight. Eventually she was transferred to an insane asylum, where in 1937 she died of “cahexia”, a diagnoses which basically meant that she simply gave up fighting to stay alive. Lea was sentenced to ten years of hard labor, of which she served eight. After she was released, Lea was reunited with her mother and they moved south to Nantes, where Lea worked as a chamber maid at a hotel under an assumed name. She died in 2000.
It is a sad story, and I have not more than touched on the details here. It highlights a world now long gone, and the life of two bourgeoisie peasant girls, born into a universe that seems to have had little use for them until they achieved fame by doing something despicable. And the instant they did it no longer mattered who the Papin sisters really were. At that point they became merely characters in someone else’s play.
Officer Barron then testified that as a 19 year employee of the Corrections Department she considered the response “Oh, Lord. Okay” as an indication that she should deliver the prisoner on her own, even though she had never been asked to do so before. As she explained it, the supervisor didn’t specifically tell her not to deliver the prisoner so she presumed he must have wanted her to. 
A jury later convicted Marcus Anderson "in absentia" of being a convicted felon in procession of a firearm and transporting a firearm in a motor vehicle. He faces five years without parole as well as the three years he was already facing for violating his parole on the drug conviction. Felony escape charges are still pending, since nobody has seen Marcus Anderson since he was remanded into the custody of Officer Barron. Yes, a sad tale indeed.
A much more engaging tale was recently presented to Judge Brigitte Koppenhoefer, one of the most respected members of the Superior Court in Dusseldorph, Germany. Normally Judge Koppenhoefer presides over complicated cases involving corporate law and dealing with hundreds of millions of Duetchmarks and Euros, such the Mannersmann trial she just completed against Duetsche Bank and its CEO Josef Ackerman. But as the summer vacations came around Judge Koppenhoefer found herself rotated by luck to decide a simple property dispute between two neighbors. The honorable judge listened with a straight face as the litigants detailed the escalation of conflict between them, as their war of words escalated to insult filled letters, to letters adorned with cockroaches, followed by an actual egg fight, culminating in the express delivery of packages filled with feces. And through it all Judge Koppenhoefer maintained her judicial restraint, and a straight face. 
But then, as the litigants were overcome with emotion and began to shout at each other across her courtroom, describing each other as schinehunds, smelly bum and donkey face, poor Judge Kippenhoefer lost her composure and burst out laughing. She was forced to call for a brief adjournment so she could retire to her chambers and release the belly laughs she had been restraining. Five minutes later the Judge resumed the bench, but just long enough to dismiss the case as “ridiculous” and hit the plaintiff with a $750 fine for having wasted the court's time with the whole mess. At which time Judge Koppenhofer repeated, “This was just so ridiculous.” 
It is a phrase that should be displayed above the front door of every law school in the world. And maybe it should be on the bar exam, too, just as a reminder. 
The only problem was that $5 million the “smart money” had just squeezed out of the market had to come from someplace. Lots of the “suckers” who had bought RCA on a standard 10% margin were suddenly caught short by the switch to “dump” mode. They would now either have to pay the 90% they still owed for the stock (which most could not do) or come up with another 10% to maintain their margins. The rush to raise cash to meet the margin calls did two things at once. First, as people sold other stock to meet their short falls on RCA, that drove down the price of lots of other stocks. The New York Daily News called it a “selling avalanche”. And two: as those who either could not or chose not to sell other stocks to avoid the “margin calls” on RCA looked for the funds to meet their margins, their demand for cash drove the price of loans higher and higher. It was an instant liquidity crises- sound familiar? In a single day, Monday, March 25th, the market abruptly dropped 4% across the board. 
What stopped Monday, March 25, 1929 from becoming Black Monday was that on Tuesday, March 26, 1929 at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Charles Mitchell, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, boldly walked onto the trading floor and placed a loud “buy” order for U.S. Steel at higher than the then depressed market price. He also announced that he had $25 million to stabilize the market ($300 million in 2007 value). Immediatly the panic on Wall Street stopped, and conservative Democratic Senator Carter Glass called for Mitchell’s resignation because he had violated "purity" of the market. 
The famous “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce would write a letter in the first weeks of April 1929 famously predicting the October collapse of Wall Street. In fact the near collapse at the end of March was repeated again with another 4% drop in value on May 22 and again on May 27 and yet again on August 9 and yet a fifth 4% drop on October 3, and a 6.3% plummet on October 23, and all of these preceding the infamous Black Monday collapse, when in a single day the market dropped 12% of its total value. You would have had to been deluded not to have seen the market collapse was just around the corner. Unfortunately, Wall Street was filled with desperate, deluded people who for lots of reasons refused to see the approaching abyss. And Edgar Cayce has been making converts ever since with his mystical prediction that doesn’t seem so mystical in retrospect.
In the immediate aftermath of the debacle of 1929 Senator Carter Glass helped fashion legislation (The Glass-Steagall Act) that divorced commercial banks from intimate ties with brokerage firms, one of the primary fuels in the collapse. And Joe Kennedy helped write new rules that banned “insider trading”, such as pools. But the Glass-Steagall Act was largely repealed in 1999, because the magicians on Wall Street are still selling the idea that secret knowledge and magical skill can trump luck on Wall Street, and they are still finding idiots who want to believe them and are willing to pay for the idea. And where ever he is at the moment, heaven or hell, Old Joe Kennedy must be having a very good laugh about the “spike” in oil prices that the experts assure us is certainly not the product of speculation. 
