BATTLE OF THE BUNNIES

I believe the legend which says the first time Major-General Louis Berthier met Napoleon Bonaparte (above), in March of 1786, he afterward confided to a fireside comrade, "I don't know why, but that little bastard scares me."   Well, I know why. 

He was called "Berthier the Ugly" because of his squat build, a head that seemed three times too large for his body, featuring a large hook nose that thrust out from between his cheeks like a prehistoric parrot's beak.  In addition he was clumsy and given to chewing his fingernails.  Add in a dose of social ineptness, and you had Berthier, the man.  But he was also a genius of detail, and that is what Jacques Pajpou showed in his 1804 salon portrait of the great man.  Berthier spent his entire adult life in the military, rising through the ranks under the “Old Regime”.   He fought with distinction under Rochambeau at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 helping America win their revolution. And then, during the French revolution, he met his doppelganger - Napoleon Bonaparte.

The young Napoleon was  handsome, almost pretty. And a short firebrand of constant energy.  At 26 years of age he was already a blazing comet on the French political scene, the fresh faced new man of action.

Meanwhile  42 year old “ugly, little” Berthier,  had survived the revolution by keeping his huge head so low it could not be conveniently guillotined.  But perhaps Berthier sensed impending disaster on that blistery March morning when they first met.  Perhaps on some level he understood that the “Little Corsican” who stood before him would use him over the next 20 years to slaughter a million Frenchmen and three million who would die opposing Napoleon.  I wonder if he also sensed the sacrifice of all those bunnies, as well?

Napoleon’s amazing string of victories with Berthier began at Montenotte, in Piedmont, Italy, on 12 April and continued at the bridge at Lodi on 10 May 1796.  Berthier was there both times, sharing the hardships and basking in the reflected glory as Napoleon’s Chief of Staff and then a Marshal of France, organizing the now Emperor Napoleon’s (below) complete victory, at "Austerlitz" in 1805.
By the summer of 1807 Napoleon was the master of the continent, referred to by his implacable English foes as "The Beast of Europe".  And "Bonney" would not have been half so accomplished if it were not for the efforts of the ugly, efficient little Berthier.

And so it was obvious that when the Emperor sought an afternoon’s diversion, a summer picnic and a hunt in the Paris countryside, it would be short little, ugly little Berthier (above)  who would organize the entire event.  Surely the man who had planned  the conquest of nations could arrange a simple afternoon’s hunt.

The humans arrived en mass, like an attack column swarming a defensive position. The Emperor went nowhere alone anymore. A regiment of cavalry stood guard. Messengers arrived and were dispatched forth all day -  for an Empire run by one man cannot survive long without assurance that the master is always watching, and always watching everything.There were ambassadors and royalty and a dozen Marshals covered in glittering gold braid. There were Generals to carry the Marshals' eyeglasses and purses and fans. There were servants to serve the lunch and keep the Champagne glasses bubbling over. There were chiefs to cook the lamb and fish and chicken Marengo. There were dozens of carriages and wagons to carry them all from their palaces and mansions and back home again.And once the open air repast was digested the Emperor and his guests put away their knives and Champagne glasses and took up their weapons. Berthier had prepared this too, down to the smallest detail.  Marshal Berthier had attempted to obtain wild rabbits captured locally, but the peasant farmers had been taxed so heavily to pay for all that gold braid, all those cannon and horses and muskets  that they had stripped the local woods and fields of wild rabbits.So the ever resourceful Berthier (That's him in another 'official' painting above, with the reality edited out of him), had ordered every domesticated rabbit in the Paris market to be bought, some 30,000 of them in all.  The fuzzy furry harmless beasts had been fattened in pens and cages all their lives. They were released the afternoon before the hunt, in the chosen field.  And there they waited. There were beaters, to drive the bunnies to the guns, for an Emperor does not have all day to spend stalking his prey. So as the Emperor Napoleon advanced into the field with his musket held at the ready, Berthier gave the signal, and the beaters advanced.And such was the sight then seen, the likes of which had never been seen before in all of history. And never would be seen again, either.Thirty-thousand Leporidae Oryctolagus cuniculus (European bunny rabbits) charged desperately toward the first human they had seen in 24 hours - a human being the source of all food and warmth in their entire sheltered lives.  The figure must have seemed the answer to a domesticated rabbit’s hopes and prayers after a cold night in the strange, forbidding emptiness of a field. And the mother figure out front was the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.It was a harebrained stampede! If they could have spoken they would have cried out in unison in their little bunny voices, “Take me home, take me home, get me out of here!” But they could not cry out. They could not speak. Bunnies don't talk. And so what Napoleon saw as he entered the field with “rodenticide” in his heart, were thirty thousand bunnies stampeding remorselessly toward him, perhaps with regicide in their hearts.Where they afflicted with a pestilence? Where they part of a devilish English plot to murder him?  Napoleon had no way of knowing, and little time to decide. But even if the Emperor had suspected the actual cause behind the stamped of cottontails, hunting is not much of a sport when the prey rush you and demand to be butchered en mass.The servants thrashed at the rabbits with whips.  The ambassadors and royalty snickered behind their lace cuffs. And the loyal Generals and Marshals of France threw their gold braid between the homesick bunnies and their Emperor. The sacrifice was futile. For the first time in his life (but not the last) the Emperor of Europe, Napoleon I, was forced to retreat to his royal coach, and then to withdraw back within the walls of his palace, his afternoon sport spoiled.It was prescience of the night after Waterloo, of the snowy road home from Moscow, of the voyages to exile on Elba and then St. Helena. At a time when no human force could stand up to the 'Beast of Europe', Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated by an army of bunny rabbits.  Vive la Peter Cottontail!

- 30 -

BATTLE OF THE NATIVITY

I am tempted to call it a primeval struggle, drenched in antiquity, shrouded in religious fervor and destined to feed future conflict until come judgment day, whenever the heck that may  be. Except it just ain’t so. It is much simpler than that. The day after Christmas 2007, two rival gangs got into a turf dispute and started a  rumble. Somebody called the cops, who managed to separate the combatants, The Jets (AKA the Greek Orthodox Priests), and the Sharks (AKA the Armenian Apostolic Priests) were battling inside the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birth place of the Prince of Peace in Bethlehem, Israel, Palestinian Territories. And nothing about this melee made any more sense than your standard gang brawl. And yet I blame the French Emperor Napoleon III for the entire mess.

First, a word about all that antiquity – it does not appear to have happened where or when everybody now thinks it did - assuming it happened at all. Roman census or no census, there was no reason for a pregnant Mary to be making a 90 mile donkey ride from Nazareth, on the Galilee plain of northern Israel, to Bethlehem in the mountains just south of Jerusalem, in the west center of Israel. Being the man, Joseph was expected and qualified to speak for his entire family. He would have been the only one required to travel. But why require anybody to travel? The Romans census takers did what census takers still do today - they counted people where they were. That would be where their property was, and where their money was. Why disrupt business all across a rebellious province, in the name of counting people where they were not? It makes no sense.

And there is another problem, an archaeological problem. There is no archeology in Bethlehem from that period. The ground under today's Bethlehem contains Iron Age artifacts and Byzantine artifacts, but nothing in between, nothing from the age of Jesus. The village outside of Jerusalem did not exist on the night that Jesus was born.. However, there was another Bethlehem, “Bethlehem Ha Galilit”, Bethlehem of Galilee, just about 7 miles to the west of Nazareth. It seems far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem Ha Galilit, than in Bethlehem Judea. But because Bethlehem Ha Galilit no longer existed in the fourth century of the common era, when the Byzantine Christians came looking for Jesus' birthplace, they jumped to the wrong conclusion and picked the wrong Bethlehem. So did the followers of Islam, when they first captured the region in year 627 B.C.E.  After all, Jesus is one of their prophets. But after this, things got really complicated.

See, after the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land in 1187 the Muslim rulers had enough respect for Christianity that they were willing to protect the Christian holy sites, and, of course, tax them. But they did not trust the Roman Catholics, who had invaded them and now made up a majority of Bethlehem Judea’s population.  So the Muslim rulers split control of the profitable tourist sites in Bethlehem Judea between the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, in particular the church built upon the “traditional” site of the birth of Jesus. The Greek Orthodox were given control of one part of the building, the Armenian Orthodox control of another part. This allowed the Muslims rulers to play the two Christian sects one against the other, and to play them both off the Roman Catholics, who were now the poor relations in town.

And thus some calm was achieved in a region not famous for calm, at least until 1852, when a “firman” (or edict) was issued by Abdulmecit I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of the Muslim World (above). Abdulmecit issued his edict because…well, because first, in 1847 some thug stole the silver star which marked the “traditional” spot of Jesus’ birth, in the floor of the Church of the Nativity, and, more importantly, because the Sultan was weak and because Louis Napoleon III of France was a pompous political hack, who believed that he had been chosen by God to fix, first France, and then rest of the world.

Louis Napoleon III was elected to a ten year term as the first President of the Second Republic of France in December of 1848. He immediately started plotting to follow in his uncle’s imperial boot prints. By early in 1852 Louis had helped to restore the Vatican’s independence in Rome (which pleased French Catholic voters), but he had also insisted that the new Papal government be drawn up along “liberal” lines, to placate the liberal (meaning non-Catholic) French voters. But no Church ever likes to be lectured about liberal policies from secular politicians. Just try it some time and see.

In an attempt to placate the now angry Catholic voters, Louis III suggested that the theft of the star from the Church of the Nativity (five years earlier) proved that the Church of the Nativity was no longer “safe”, and control should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church for protection - yet another politician declaring a crises which needed his genius to solve. This particular crises pleased Pope Pius IX., who had come to the conclusion that Czar Nicholas I of Russia was intent upon wiping out Catholicism in his country - which Nicholas was, the Czar being the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Louis' demand also pleased Abdulmecit I, because Albdulmecit had the distinct feeling that Czar Nicholas was about to invade Turkey - which he was. So,  under Abdulmecit's edict, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were now handed over the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time the edict also required the Vatican to maintain the church “in statu quo res errant”, or, “as it was before”. This edict is linguistically important because it popularization the Latin phrase “status quo”.

Now, all of his life Russian Czar Nicholas I had been told that Russia was a military superpower and protector of the true faith, that faith being Russian Orthodoxy. And Nicholas was not about to allow a mere “politician”, least of all a trumped up “Bonaparte”, to usurp his regal and holy authority. Nicholas demanded the keys to the Church of the Nativity be returned to the Armenian and Greek priests, who would, he was certain, be controlled by him. And when the keys were not handed over,  he declared war on Turkey - of course, he had been planning on doing that anyway.  Britain and France then came to Turkey’s defense. And so Louis’ gambit to impress French voters led directly to the Crimean War, and 118,000 dead; of whom 20, 000 were French, and 73,000 were Russian.

In his rise to power Napoleon III (above) had shamelessly played one political faction off another, and eventually abolished democracy in his own state, created a throne for himself, invaded Algeria and Vietnam - both of which actions came back to haunt France a century later - and was finally goaded into the 1870 Franco-Prussian War,  which resulted in his humiliating defeat, the creation of Germany,  Louis’ own overthrow and his death. This guy was the Donald Trump of 19th century French diplomacy.

The Crimean War also cost Nicholas I his life. While on campaign against Turkey he caught a chill and died of pneumonia on 2 March, 1855. The Ottoman Sultan, Abdülmecit, lived long enough to see his nation plunged into debt by that same war.  By Abdulmecit's death from tuberculosis in 1861, Turkey was flat broke. His successor was dethroned.

Amazingly, the same war left Pope Pius IX alive but very frustrated. Because France had been distracted by the Crimean War, there was no help from France when Victor Emmanuel took control of Italy in 1860 from the Catholic Church and established the modern semi-secular nation of Italy.  But Pius achieved a measure of revenge when, in 1869 he issued the decree of Papal Infallibility and declared the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Together these meant that Mary, mother of Jesus, was born without sin because the Pope said she was without sin. And the Pope was never wrong, because he said he was never wrong. Neither of these were official Roman Catholic dogma until 1869, but it has been church dogma ever since. The last American President to declare this was Richard Nixon, and he got impeached anyway - so evidently it only works for religious leaders.

But, let us finally return to the Church of the Nativity on 27 December, 2007. According to the Associated Press; “....dozens of priests and cleaners came to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January...  But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the {Greek) Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue...Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly injured.”

Traditionally both the Orthodox and Armenian churches have recruited their priests for this sacred post from tiny isolated villages scattered across Greece and the Balkans, where Christians (and Muslims) have been slaughtering each other for a thousand years. These naive young men now suddenly found themselves working in intimate contact and sharing the most precious artifacts of their faith with heretics. Nothing in their lives or their training prepared them for any kind of peaceful coexistence.

And the whole thing was Louis Napoleon III’s idea.  But try explaining that to a bunch of uneducated foreigners.

- 30 -

A VERY ROMANTIC CHRISTMAS

I find it curious that Ernst Theodore Hoffman (above) is considered a romantic. I think of him as a manic depressive, and justified at that, considering that Napoleon spent most of Ernest’s life turning Europe into a slaughterhouse. As a young man Ernst did fall in love, but the lady was married. And when she turned up pregnant Ernest’s family shipped him off to Poland, where he labored as a petty bureaucrat.  But he spent his free time composing classical music and writing vaguely creepy stories. One of his more successful tales was a sort of 19^th century “Jaws”, except instead of a 25 foot Great White Shark, Ernest’s villain was a mouse bent on revenge. In Hoffman's story seven year old Maria receives a mechanical doll as a Christmas present, which her older brother Fritz promptly breaks. She sits up late trying to repair the toy, until an army of mice attack her doll.  She saves the toy by throwing her shoe at the rodents.  Now, maybe I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I think this idea has ballet written all over it.  Interestingly, that idea never occurred to Ernst.

Nor did it occur to Alexander Dumas (above), the vulgar and prolific son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave woman. See, Alex liked the Parisian good life a lot more than he liked writing. He had at least 40 mistresses, but he made enough to afford his profligate lifestyle by out doing Andy Warhol at marketing his art. Alex kept a warehouse full of writers who ground out stories under his direction, such as “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”, and its sequels. And one of his minor best sellers was a direct steal of Ernst's hallucination, which Dumas changed just enough to avoid a lawsuit – like changing Maria's name to Clara.

Then, seventy years after Ernst died of syphilis (the ultimate romance disease), and 12 years after Alex died of a stroke in 1870, the ballet idea finally did occur to Marius Petpa (above), celebrated head of the Bolshoi Ballet Company in Russia. In 1882 the Imperial Theaters hired Marius and Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky to create the “Sleeping Beauty” ballet. This was such a critical and financial success that it established the Bolshoi as the world's premier ballet company, and Marius as a world class genius. And then like a modern Hollywood producer looking for a project to fit the marquee talent, in 1890, the theatre brought the pair together again.  But this time, having over inflated these two monumental egos, the management merely suggested a sort of theatrical sandwich – a double header, both a serious but short opera and a light, meaning short,  ballet staged on the same night.. Marius would script the story for both, and Pyotr would put them both to music. 

The one act opera was clearly intended to be the meat in this theatrical happy meal, and being the foremost Russian composer of the day, Pyotr (above) got first choice of subject matter. He decided on a Danish story of a blind princess named Iolanta.. But then, early in February of 1891, in Saint Petersburg, Marius handed Pyotr a detailed synopsis and bar-by-musical bar outline for a two act classical ballet based on the story Dumas had filched.  Pyotr was appalled. He though it childish and unworthy of serious application. But, if it meant he got paid to write another opera, he would somehow make the silly ballet work. After struggling for a month he tried to remain optimistic. He wrote to one of his brothers, “I am working with all my strength and reconciling myself to the subject of the ballet.” But he also admitted “I am experiencing a kind of crisis.” This was good, since Pyotr had a lot of experience with those.

See, Pyotr had a secret that held the potential to turn every problem in his life into a crises. He was approaching fifty, and had reached an uneasy equilibrium with his homosexuality. He had tried to go straight but his marriage to Antonina Ivanova (above) had blown up after little more than a month. This raised again the threat of exposure by envious and bigoted court and church officials, who at any moment could end his career.  Each contract, including this one, could be his last. What little stability existed in his life was supplied by his younger sister Aleksandra and her seven children with Lev Davydov. Pyotr wrote many of his 11 operas, six symphonies and three ballets on their Ukrainian estate near Kamenka. And now, in March, while on his way to a concert tour of America, and still trying to come up with something presentable for Marius's ballet, he learned of Aleksandra's death.

He had just seen Aleksandra (above) over the Christmas holidays, so he must have known how ill she was. Still, Pyotr was hysterical. And then, pausing in Rouen, France, he managed his agony by putting it to work.  His genius was always his ability to combine the Russian musical themes with Western ones, and to subjugate his true identity into the restraints of his art. And in the “grand pas de deux” for the lead dance character of Clara, he weaved in threads from the Russian Orthodox funeral service  The musical themes of the entire ballet became darker and more nuanced. As one critic has put it, “In Clara, he found a parallel for his sister.”  A ballet about wealthy Victorian children, became, with the talent of Pyotr's genius, a work for people of all ages and for all time.

When Pyotr returned from his wildly successful 25 day American tour (he inaugurated Carnegie Hall in Manhattan) he delivered his musical score to Marius in St. Petersburg, to be animated.  But as the opportunity approached, the world renown genius, Marius, suffered his own crises of self confidence. The primary symptom of this understandable panic was an attack of Pemphigus vulgaris, a debilitating skin disease, usually afflicting Ashkebazi Jews – of which Marius was one. Scratching his itching skin produced open sours, which made it impossible for Marius to concentrate on the ballet. So his assistant, Lev Ivanov, took over.

Lev (above) had been with the Bolshoi since he was eight, and had a natural talent as a musician, as well as being an excellent dancer. But where Marius was a classical ballet master, Lev was, like poor Ernest, a romantic. He followed Marius's general guidelines. He had to, the music had already been composed based on them.  But Lev also arranged his dancers like an impressionist painter, throwing patterns of sugar plumb fairies and swirling lines of snowflakes on point, about the stage. It was the shape and flow of the dance that interested Lev, and somehow the combination of all these hearts and souls, the romantic Ernst and the hedonist Alexander, the classicist Marius and the dark Pyotr, and now that other romantic Lev, they all gave birth, on 15 January, 1890, to the premier of “The Nutcracker” ballet at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The audiences seem to have been enthusiastic, giving five curtain calls to the Sugar Plum Fairy. The next morning Pyotr wrote to his brother, “The opera in particular was to everyone’s liking ... The productions of both...were superb” But it was a very long evening, with the Nutcracker not ending until well after midnight. 

The weary critics took it out on the dancers, calling the lead ballerina (above) corpulent and pudgy. The battle scene between the mice and the nutcracker confused them: “Disorderly pushing about from corner to corner and running backwards and forwards – quite amateurish.” The Grand Pas de Deux, so inspiring to the composer, was labeled ponderous and “completely insipid”. A week later Pyotr wrote to another brother, “Once again I am not embittered by such criticism. Nevertheless, I have been in a loathsome spirit, as I usually am...in such circumstances.” After 11 performances the double bill was closed.

Less than a year later, in October 1893 Pyotr would die during a cholera outbreak, his secret still secure. Although many have suggested he committed suicide, he did not. Lev Ivanov followed nine years later. Finances forced him to work until his death “in harness”, in December of 1901. About the same time the Bolshoi brought in the upstart Alexander Gorsky to replace the aging Marius (above) as director. While watching his intended replacement rehearsing on his stage, Marius was heard to shout, “Will someone tell that young man that I am not yet dead?!.” Within a year it did not matter; Marius was quietly retired. He did die in 1910, at the age of 92.

A year after its premier the opera Iolanta would be preformed by itself in Hamburg, Germany. But although still performed occasionally, it is now largely forgotten. The Nutcracker, on the other hand, had to wait almost 20 years before it would be performed again, staged this time by the Bolshoi's new director Alexander Gorsky, in Moscow. He saved it.  Alexander savaged Marius choices, paring away minor roles, replacing the children cast as Clara and the prince, with adults, thus adding a romantic story line for them.  Standing alone, the ballet was now far better received, and short enough for modern attention spans. And after the Second World War, it became the classical Christmas season production for every ballet company in the world, responsible for up to 40% of their income.

It just goes to show you – those silly romantics may be naive simpletons, but their ideas grow stronger with time because they are positive and simple, and keep being reinvented. When in doubt, we are always inspired by the romantics within us.

- 30 -

A VERY CRABBY CHRISTMAS

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 1915  T.S. Elliot

I want to tell you an odd story that might make you believe in Christmas again. Or not. It's human characters include a virgin queen, a dope addicted Emperor, a crusty sea captain clawing his way to the top, some cannibalisticely inclined pirates, a pair of Scottish kings and a serially espoused alchemist. Its non-human benchmarks run from a bowl of boiling urine to a great pile of bird poop and culminate in a crimson decapedal arthropod, all bringing new meaning to the phrase, “Merry Christmas”.

“The crab instructs its young: "Walk straight ahead -- like me." “

Indian proverb

It all begins in 1591 when English Queen Elizabeth I (above) dispatched three ships on a three year voyage to seek the wealth of the Spice Islands, beyond India. That gamble paid such huge profits that three years later, when the second expedition sank, the investors wasted no time dispatching a third. And three years later, when it came back with several Queens' ransoms in its holds,  "The Virgin Queen" Elizabeth granted a charter to the investors, known as the Governor and the Company of Merchants of London,. And thus was born the English East India Company.

“You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.”

Aristophanes

But there was already a Dutch East India Company, and a Portuguese one as well, and they did not want to share their profits. The competition got so cut throat, and profits so tight that in 1609 King James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland) threatened to revoke the company charter if it didn't show a profit for three years running. So in September of 1612, when the rap-scallion Captain Thomas Best led the tenth trading squadron into the north western Indian port of Surat, and found 16 Portuguese ships waiting for him, he had claws for concern.

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.”

H. L. Mencken

Captain Best made a quick deal with the local Mughal Governor, Sardar Khan, to open a trading post, probably because Khan was putting down a local rebellion and needed the bribes Best was offering.  But any deal had to be approved by Kahn's boss, the Emperor Jahangir (above), a Sunni Muslim who was best known for four things: his opium addiction, his alcohol addiction, his sex addiction, and the Jesuit Catholic priests who resided in his court. Captain Best worried that Jahangir would favor the Portuguese Catholics over the Protestant English, so he sidled his ships 12 miles south to the little port of Suvali, to await the Emperor's decision. Then, on 28 October 1612, four Portuguese galleons appeared, trapping Best against the shore.

“If you didn't catch anything when fishing, then a crab is a fish.”

Russian proverb

After thinking things over for 24 hours, Best decided to start shooting. He broke out of the trap, sailing rings around the clumsy Portuguese ships and leading three of them to run aground. Captain Best's boldness impressed Jahangir, and actually he didn't like the Portuguese Jesuits very much, as they were so militantly anti-Muslim, and his promised share of the new English business profits also helped him decide. So in January of 1613 the Emperor granted the English a trading post, or a factory,  in Surat. The shell was cracked, and the omnivorous English came scurrying in, snapping up everything they could.

“Let the crab take counsel with its leg.”

Samoan proverb

Over the next thirty years, Great Britain mussel-ed first the Portuguese and then the Dutch out of India. And in December of 1643, the 800 ton East India ship “Royal Mary”, under Captain William Mynors, was exploring the edges of their new shell, 220 miles due south of the western tip of Java and ten degrees south of equator, when a lookout spotted green earth on the southern horizon. Mynors did not attempt to land, but he noted the island's position on his charts and he named the mysterious 9 mile long landmass with a mountain on each end, after the date of its discovery. Over time, and by general agreement, the division between the English sphere of influence in India and Burma, and the remaining Dutch influence in Malaysia, ran right down the middle of Christmas Island.

“Until a crab finds itself in a very hot pot of soup, it will never understand that water can be both cold and hot.”

African proverb

Then, in 1669, and 12,500 miles away, in the German port of Hamburg, a merchant named Hennig Brand was slaving over a hot bowl of urine. Brand had already gone through the dowries of two wives, and his financial failure bore all the marks of an amateur alchemist – he was almost blind from reading ancient books on sorcery by candle light, almost broke from buying ancient books on sorcery, and his hands were scared with acid and alkali burns. Brand was intent on finding the miraculous Sorcerers Stone, which would turn base metals into gold and make him rich, and the unpleasant recipe he was trying to tweak called for boiling urine for 16 hours.

“A crab does not give birth to a bird.”

African Proverb

Brand's second wife, Margaretha, must have been shell shocked. The stench from her husband's

experiments was discouraging to visitors, the heating bill to keep the urine boiling was literally burning a hole in their savings, and they were reduced to eating see food. The minuscule amount of urine syrup Hennig Brand produced did not turn anything into gold. Dried to a powder, it did however faintly glow. And that, what ever “that” was, was enough to get a couple of sympathetic scientists to buy the formula, giving Hennig enough to redeem his wedding ring from the prawn broker.

“A lame crab walks straight.”

Afghan proverb

In 1737 another broke scientist sold the recipe for urine syrup to the French Academy of Sciences, and the world finally learned what Hennig Brand had actually synthesized. He had called it “phosphoros” - Greek for the bringer of light. It took another forty years before a Swedish scientists discovered that Brand had actually been throwing away most of the phosphorus he had produced, and that the element phosphorus made plants really, really happy - it was a revolutionary fertilizer, or would be if anybody could find a large enough toilet to harvest enough urine residue.

“The crab that walks too far, falls into the pot.”

Haitian Proverb

Proof of just such a gigantic toilet arrived via the Royal Mail in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1885. It was a package containing a single fist sized tan colored rock which the sender had picked up on Christmas Island, twenty years earlier, but could not identify it. He was now seeking the help of a Scotsman, raised and educated in Canada – Geologist Doctor John Murray.  To his shock, Dr. Murray found the nondescript rock was almost pure phosphate of lime – solidified weathered bird poop. Dr. Murray quickly did some research and discovered that no one had ever actually claimed to own Christmas Island. Even though he had never set eyes upon the island, Murray immediately urged the British government to seize it. And in June of 1888, the H.M.S. Imperieuse raised the Union Jack over this ancient avian toilet, claiming Christmas for Queen Victoria.

“That means that the crab can eat his victim's brain, absorbing his mind intact...Once they were men; now they are land crabs.'”

Attack of the Crab Monsters” 1957 – Roger Corman

Dr. Murray also filed a personal mining claim, which caught the attention of another avaricious Scotsman, this one with his own kingdom 350 miles south-southwest of Christmas Island - George Clunies-Ross - the recognized King of the Cocos, or Coconut, Islands. Assuming this other Scottish geologist must be looking for gold, Clunies-Ross sent out claim jumpers. They found no gold on Christmas Island, but an estimated 200 million tons of phosphate. There was so much molting rock at both ends of Christmas Island that the two greedy Scotsmen agreed to share.  And in 1891 Dr. Murray and Clunies-Ross were granted a joint license to mine phosphate as “The Christmas Island Phosphate Company”. The first shipment was sold to Japan in 1901.

“We will rest in the caves and plan our assault upon the world of men!”

“Attack of the Crab Monsters” 1957 – Roger Corman

After one visit to the toilet source of his new wealth, the newest member of the upper crustaceans, Doctor Sir John Murray, contented himself endorsing royalty checks and accepting honors, while George Clunies-Ross ran the open pit mines on Christmas.   In response to George's kelp wanted ads, he hired 200 Chinese coolies, five Shikh policemen to watch over them, and eight European bosses to boss them around. The workers were encouraged to bring their wives, but their rent for company housing was deducted from their paychecks, which could otherwise only be used in the company store. The Kings and Queens of Christmas even insisted on approving the name of every child born on their property. Any employee who quit was permanently expelled from Christmas And they may have been the lucky ones. In the first four years of mining 550 workers died of beri-beri.

“Well, Herman told his folks about the girl that he found, They said, 'Herman there must be other girls around. 'Cause crabs walk sideways, lobsters walk straight, and we won't let you take her for your mate.'”

The Smothers Brothers

And at last we arrive at that other, previously unappreciated, natural resource in Christmas's open forests between the twin highland toilets  - something between   44 to 106 million red Gecarcoidea natilis (the red land crab of Christmas). Miners could easily capture the 4 ½ inch wide Decapoda (10 legged) creatures, and one crab easily provided a meal for two men.  And the chickens and pigs abandoned on Christmas Island, which every where else in the world had decimated native species, merely fed the opportunistic omnivorous, carnivorous arthropodal occupants of Christmas Island.  Which is how the crabs here have survived. For ten months each year these mini-monsters remained hidden in their burrows and caves inland, eating wayward pigs and chickens. But every October, as the full moon approaches, and with males leading the way, the Christmas crabs march in mass,  cross-country to the sea.

“She said, 'Let me talk to your mom and dad, I'll show them crabs really aren't that bad.' But they turned her away 'What will the neighbors say.' And they laughed at the funny walk she had.”

The Smothers Brothers

For ten thousand years the Christmas crabs had only to contend with each other, and the 40 other species of crabs on Christmas. With the invasion of humans to mine the phosphate there were now roads and railroads, dogs, horses, cars and cattle and bored children with sticks. But in an echo of other tales, the greatest threat to the Christmas crabs remains their fellow Christmas crabs. And still, with clinking and clapping claws, the Christmas crabs march to the coast to mate, brood their eggs, and then spew the offspring in their hundreds of thousands from their abdomens, into the surf.  So numerous each year are these tiny plantonic future crabs that they have fed generations of 20 ton whale sharks which appear off Christmas Island to scoop up the bounty with yawning mouths, without endangering tomorrow's crab domination.

“Then one day on the sandbar what did Herman see, But his little ol' Sally walking straight as can be. He said, "Sweetheart now they'll take you in the family!" She said, "Don't you sweetheart me! Hic!"

The Smothers Brothers

In 1955, the United Nations paid off the last King of the Cocos and Christmas, John Cecil Clunies -Ross, paying him $6 ¼ million to go away.  He promptly sank the windfall in a shipping company which promptly sank, leaving John an empty shell of himself,. Today Australia owns Christmas, and the workers own the Phosphate mines. The democracy down under now uses Christmas as an out of sight out of mind refugee center, storing those boat humans who didn't drown while seeking freedom from poverty, political and religious oppression, under secure lock and key,  until they can be returned to their oppression.

“Christmas for crabs; their island blooms with a rare largesse of flesh mashed to pulp on rocks —

They too migrate, ten million scuttles, on their yearly prickly walk from forest to sea. But roads are cleared for them, cars parked, as the needful eggs pull them down —a crimson shawl over grinning cliffs. We make space for the moon-mad crabs...”
P. S. Cottier

The heartless annual death toll in crabs and in humans is enough to make you lose faith in Santa Claws, and to see precious little difference between the opportunistic omnivorous, carnivorous cannibalistic humans on Christmas Island and the Christmas in the island crabs.

“The right eye looks south. Apricot moonscape, centuries upon centuries of fish and crustaceans digested from sea to sky to soil. The left eye looks north. In and out of view, the swell permitting, Charging  from Flying Fish Cove to the other side of Murray Hill, the refugee bus squelches the carapace of a red crab on its way to breed. Both eye stalks face west, seeing without seeing...at the edge of hearing, wave upon wave of scarlet crabs scuttling like lunatics across the forest, the spectacular migration of a hundred-million-strong battalion scratching its way toward the camp, a red carpet unstoppably rolling, two hundred million pincers now hacking at the razor wire, klikk, klakk, klikk, klakk, klikk”

Antoine Cassar

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