THE STORM

I would describe 1775 as a year of significant events; Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill; in Germany it was the year the last woman was hanged as a witch; and then there was the hurricane. One random afternoon that late 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.

Of course the Sahara alone, for all its hot breath, cannot produce a monster. It also requires a womb,  - in the case of the great Atlantic hurricanes , the Sahel, an Arabic word meaning “shoreline”. Far from the sea, this is where the sands of the great desert meet the shrub and trees of the savanna. Every April to September, at about 16 degrees north latitude, (what is called the Intra-Tropical Convergence Zone) the hot dry easterly Jet Stream off the Sahara meets the rainy season humidity spinning westward over the Sahel, and pulses of thunderstorms burst forth from thin air, one after another, with a new wave forming every three to four days.

Most of the storms which 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 a few 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, once the thunderstorms grow large enough and last long enough, their squall line of angry air passes yet another Sahal, this one the border between Africa and the tropical Atlantic Ocean.

Some 300 miles off the African coast, what was at first an easterly wave of thunder storms, sailes past the Cape Verde Islands like a stately fleet of wooden sailing ships of the line. And now it is persistence that choses which storm will earn fame. Over time the friction between the troposphere below and the jet stream above convert the vertical heat engine of the thunderstorms into a horizontal sweep, gathering thogether squals and storms and driving them in a counter-clockwise spin. Sometime in mid-August of 1775, as one spinning storm set sail for the new world, it became a nameless tropical depression over the open sea.

When Christopher Columbus first invaded in 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 never heard of the Sahara or the Sahel, the residents of the Windward Islands of Martinique and Dominica, could not have imagined the source of the violence that assaulted them almost without warning on Friday, 25 August, 1775. So, of course, they ascribed it to the mysterious work of the god, Hurricane.

 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 each year 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 British 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, as 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 3 September, 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”, what we would call a storm surge.  At Newport, Rhode Island, the wind shifted from the Northeast to Southeast between 10am and 2:30pm. As 3 September 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 their share of the bounty.

 But this season the squid had made no appearance until late in the afternoon of Saturday, 9September  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 dying 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 felt 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 onto rocky shores. In Northern Bay (two above) three hundred sailors and fishermen drowned by morning, their white 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 (above), 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 dismasted and left adrift.

At St. Johns (above), 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 human 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 $40 million today). There was barely a house left on Newfoundland with an intact roof or chimney, even if they had not been flooded out. The hurricane of September 1775 remains, more than two hundred years later, Canada’s deadliest natural disaster. For decades afterward the survivors on Conception Bay claimed to still hear the desperate cries of the lost souls in the cold surf.

As for the storm itself, conceived over the hot dry 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, Ireland in 1775, and 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 such a significant storm in such a significant year.

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ITS A WONDER

I might have voted with the rest of the jury in the Perry trial, voted for guilt, even though one of the defendants had been charged with being a witch, and I don’t believe in witches. That was Joan Perry. She and her sons, John and Richard, were also hanged, but she was hanged first. The authorities were hoping the older boy, Richard, freed from Joan's witchcraft, would confess. But he did not. Which leaves me to wonder if being a witch was just an ‘eggcorn’ for that other crime women are often accused of being guilty of.  And then to everyone’s surprise, after Richard, too, was dead, the youngest boy, John, whose confession had led to the prosecution of his entire family, recanted. Still the judges remained certain. So John was duly hanged as well. If I had been the judge, I like to think that John's recantaion would have led me to have second thoughts. Of course, by then it a little was too late. (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/eggcorn.html)

The story behind the trial takes place in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswold of England. "Chipping" is an old Welsh word for market, and “wold” is Welsh for an upland meadow, so this was a market town amidst the rolling limestone hills and open fields which were once the property of the Saxon King, Harold.

Under the Normans it became sheep country. In 1340, in Chipping Camden, the wool merchants were already so wealthy they built a hall on the High Street, using the honey-colored “Cotswold stone” as facing.

Even today Chipping Camden looks as if it were untouched since the middle ages. In fact, this western corner of England was a violent incubator for the industrial revolution.

It is human nature that wealth surrounded by poverty requires a justification. So it was no accident then that the Nuevo-rich Calvinist wool merchants in the Cotswold welcomed a belief in predestination – the certainty that they were wealthy and successful because God predestined them to be wealthy and successful before they had even been born. Thus the will of the successful was God’s will. Of this the Calvinists were certain. And they were certain that opposing them was to oppose God’s will.

Thus, in 1649, after seven years of civil war, these dead-certain Calvinists were comfortable in beheading their intransigent King, and suspected Catholic, Charles I. But the Calvinist experiment in government came to an end on January 1st, 1660 when soldiers under Colonel George Monck crossed the River Tweed at the village of Coldstream, thus earning the regiment the eternal and future title “The Coldstream Guards”.

A month later they were in London, and in late April Charles Stuart, son of the last King of England, was crowned Charles II, the next King of England. But if anybody thought the restoration of the monarchy was going to return a certain stability to Britain, they were about to suffer a very rude awakening.

Three months later, on Thursday, 16 August,  1660, the estate manager for a wealthy Calvinist merchant left his home in Chipping Camden, tasked to walk the two miles to the village of Charingworth. His name was William Harrison and he must have been an amazing fellow, as he was already 70 years old, and facing an eight mile hike to collect rents for his merchant master and return home by dark; except, he did not return.

 At about 9 p.m. his servant, John Perry, was sent out to look for the old man at Charingworth and Paxford. The next morning Harrison’s son went out to search for them both. The son found John Perry, who explained he had been looking Mr. Harrison all night. Together they continued looking, and later that morning found William Harrison’s hat, slashed by a knife, and his shirt, caked in blood.

Over several days of constant questioning, John Perry told several stories but finally admitted he suspected his own mother and brother of robbing the old man and then murdering him. And even though Joan and Richard both insisted on their innocence, the investigators felt certain that John had not lied, since he had implicated himself by admitting he had suggested the crime. Wells, ponds and streams were searched for poor Mr. Wilson’s body, or the rents he had collected. No trace of the old man or the money was found. The Perry family was held over the winter for trial.

On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, fifty lunatics (most of them ex-soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s Calvinist army), calling themselves Fifth Monarchists, stormed into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and started roughing people up. They shot one poor fellow who talked back to them. They were preparing the way, they said, for the return of Jesus Christ, whom they intended to crown the next King of England. It took an armed band of militia to chase the loonies out of the church.

Three days later they stormed a prison and tried to free the prisoners. None of the prisoners was insane enough to follow the fanatics. They stayed in their cells. This time it took the loyal Coldstream guards to trap the loonies in a couple of taverns and through musket fire and the bayonet, finish them off. The leaders were captured, tried for treason, hanged, drawn and quartered. It seemed there was such an air of uncertancy hanging over England, inspiring the citizens to begin to demand certainty.

In April of 1661 the Perry family were brought to trial and duly hanged, one after the other. And if there were second thoughts after John's gallows conversion to innocence, they were put aside.

For even if Joan and Richard Perry had not killed poor Mr. Harrison, then John Perry, the self confessed murderer, certainly had. And it was certainly important that justice was seen to be done. Without the certain avenging hand of justice there would be no respect for the law, and English society would return to the rule of the beast, the rule of eat or be eaten. And then in 1662, wonder of wonders, William Harrison walked back into to the village of Chipping Camden, certainly alive and allegedly well.

When questioned the old man (he was now seventy-two) told a murkey tale of being set upon, stabbed, kidnapped, hustled aboard a ship, and sold in a Turkish slave market. He escaped, he said, when his master had died. Mr. Harrision claimed he then caught a ship back to England. As others have noted, “The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false.” And as a Mr. Paget noted, “much profit was not likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave…especially as the old man was delivered in a wounded and imperfect condition.”

So where did Mr. Harrison disappear to in the summer of 1660? Given that transportation in that age was mostly limited to “shanks mare”, William Harrison could not have walked more than a few miles. He must have been close enough to Chipping Camden to have heard, in the eight months between his disappearance, the trial and the hanging sentence of his accused murderers, of their impending deaths. And yet the old man did not return.

But why did he wait two years to return? Why not sooner? Why return at all? And why did John Perry tell such wild tales? Why did he send his own mother and brother to the gallows? Why did he not recant until the last moments of his life? Could torture, the standard meathod used for questioning at the time, have produced this false testimoney? Perha;s; it all remains a mystery. 

And all we know for certain is that John Perry, Richard Perry and Joan Perry slowly strangled at the end of a rope, as punishment for a crime which they did not commit. Every thing else about this case is a mystery and a wonder. It is the Camden Wonder.

It is a wonder that, 300 years later, juries remain so certain that they continue to take the lives of those accused, when they have no earthly reason to be so certain, and certainly no heavenly justification either.

http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/

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AN UNLIKELY COMBINATION OF EVENTS

I don’t know the truth of what happened to Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, and it is unlikely I ever will. And if it seems strange that someone so famous could die so mysteriously, you must remember that he was a hero of the Soviet Union, a place and at a time where truth and lies were so intermingled as to make reality as thin as tissue paper.  

On 27 March, 1968, so the story goes, Yui died in a training crash, and not even his widow Valentina, and daughters Yelena and Galina, will ever know with certainty what really happened to him. In the Soviet Union, rumors were part of the disguise. It was a very different world, then.

In 1961 the average yearly income in America was $5,315.00 and gallon of gas cost 27 cents. The city of Seattle completed the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river, the Space Needle. The 200th McDonald’s resturant had opened in Southern California. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls produced electricity for the first time. An X-15 rocket plane reached the edge of space at 31 miles high, and President John Kennedy asked Congress for $531 million to “…put a man on the moon in this decade.” And on 12 April, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space.

His call sign was “Cedar”. The 5’ 2” cosmonaut was a typical fighter jockey, self confident and cocky, described as “virtually unflappable” by his instructors.  He was launched from the desert steppes of Tjuratam, Kazakhstan, just after 9AM (Moscow time) and he whistled a tune during his 90 minute orbital flight. “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, Where her son flies in the sky.” 

But unlike the American astronauts who landed at sea, Yuri had to eject from his Vostok 1 spacecraft at over 15,000 feet. And instead of an aircraft carrier crew,

   on landing Yuri was greeted by an old woman, her granddaughter and her cow. But once the Soviet leadership was certain he had survived, he became a prop in the propaganda wars. And like Alan Shepherd, America’s fist man in space, Yuri longed to fly again, this time to the moon. He was trying to get there, when he died.

The Soviet leadership showered him with medals and awards. He was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the rubber stamp legislature. But all the glittering medals soon grew dull and he was allowed to return to Star City, the home of all Cosmonauts, in the Moscow suburbs. But he was not allowed another space mission. He worked on spacecraft design, and was eventually promoted to the rank of a full Colonel. He became deputy training director for the cosmonaut corps, and in 1968 he began the process to re-qualify as a fighter pilot, perhaps as his first step back to flight status.

On January 10, 1968 the U.S. lost its 10,000th military airplane over Vietnam. The average income in the U.S. was up to $7,850 a year, and gasoline was up to 34 cents a gallon. On January 23rd, North Korean naval boats captured the US Intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, and its 83 man crew. On January 31, 70,000 North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet offensives by briefly capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and during just the second week of February the United States suffered 543 dead and 2,547 wounded in Vietnam; for that week alone. And on March 27 at 10:17 AM Yuri Gagarin climbed into the front cockpit of a MIG-15UTI trainer with Colonel Vladimir Seryogin in the back seat. On takeoff  Serogiin pushed the throttles to 9,000 rpm’s and headed for Kirzhach, 30 miles to the Northwest of Moscow.

The weather was horrible, and a heavily overcast quickly enveloped the Korean War era fighter/trainer. The Mig 15 was small by modern standards, just 33 feet long, with a 35 ft. swept back wing span.  It was capable of well over 600 mph and had a ceiling of over 50,000 feet.  

But the “Babouskha” (grandmother) also had a tenancy to stall and go into a tight spin at anything under 160 mph. In fact, according to one pilot who recently flew a similar two seat Mig 15UTI trainer, “Turning at that speed could be a delicate exercise, and inadvisable at low altitude. The Mig didn’t seem to care for doing anything under 250 knots.”

Minutes after take off , Seryogin requested permission to alter course. It was granted. But those were the last words heard from the aircraft. Fellow Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was flying a helicopter in the area and he heard two loud booms. An investigation reported that a Sukhoi 11 (above) was also in the area, also in the overcast, and had gone supersonic. That would have accounted for the first boom Leonov heard. The second was probably Gagarin’s Mig slamming into the ground. So great was the impact that no human remains could be positively identified. The plane’s clock was stopped at 10.31 AM. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old. He left behind a widow and twin daughters.

Two hundred officers and technicians conducted a thorough investigation. But because of the Soviet obsession with secrecy the report on the crash was never released to the public. And so rumors filled the void. Rumor said the pilots must have been drunk, the plane must have been sabotaged by a jealous superior, the parachute cords were cut and the ejection seats were disconnected, the plane had hit a weather balloon or a bird or someone had forgotten to close a vent or the Mig had been caught the turbulence of that Sukhov 11.  There are a hundred theories, and you can argue that, like all conspiracy theories, an open investigation would never have refuted them all. And given the provable conspiracies that governed the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century, that would likely never be possible, We will never be able to say with absolute certainty why Yuri Gagarin died. But there does seem to be a most likely sequence of events.

The SU-11 had been intended as an all weather interceptor, and was capable of almost twice the speed of sound. But the Soviet design bureau considered it a failure, and it was no longer in production. The most likely assumption is that the Sukhoi pilot was disoriented by the dense overcast and was lower than he thought when he lit his afterburners. The ground radar system that was supposed to provide altitude information to all pilots in the area was out of order for the day. And Soviet fighter aircraft of that era had no cockpit radar.  So the SU-11 might have roared past within 2-300 feet of Gagarin and Seryogin’s jet, maybe even closer and basically, sucked the air out from under their wings. 

To put it another way, the turbulence produced by the SU-11 would have robbed the wings on the smaller Mig-15 of their lift, particularly if it was flying slower than 160 mph. That would have  dropped it into a flat spin. In the overcast, whoever was piloting the Mig would have unable to orient himself before impact in the trees. If either plane had taken off a minute sooner or later they would have never come close to each other. So the death of Yuri Gagarin was most likely a combination of unlikely events; a bad day for a radar system to be down, a bad day to fly, a nasty combination of flight characteristics and some very bad luck. Combat pilots like Yuri would call such combinations of unlikely events the normal risks of flying so high and so fast. Which is what he loved to do.

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