Adrift With the Mary Celeste

On December 4, 1872, the ship Mary Celeste was found floating, unmanned, and abandoned, in the Atlantic Ocean between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. She was an American brigantine merchant ship, and she’d been at sea for about a month. When she was found, she was fully stocked with six months’ worth of food and supplies, she was completely seaworthy, and the weather was calm. She was flying no distress signal, and there were no signs of violence or mutiny, but all of her passengers and crew had vanished without a trace.

It is a sea mystery. It is one that I heard as a boy and it fascinated me. I still find tales of things lost fascinating. Lost cities led me to lost worlds. I was even interested in lost weekends, some lost words, and lost skills.

On one extreme, I even worked at getting lost myself, and at the other extreme on finding myself either literally using some kind of navigation or spiritually.

Concerning the Mary Celeste, what we know is that it was a brigantine merchant ship that had been at sea for about a month leaving New York City for Genoa. When found, her passengers and crew were gone, but the ship’s lifeboat was gone which leads to the conclusion that they had abandoned the ship. The ship’s papers, navigation equipment, and two pumps were also missing. But their personal possessions and valuables were left, so they must have left in a hurry.

The ship’s logbook remained. The day before they reached the Azores, they changed course and headed north of Santa Maria Island. The night before the last entry in the ship’s log, they faced rough seas and winds of more than 35 knots. Were they seeking temporary safety? In a small lifeboat?

From 1872 through now, theories, myths, and false histories have been put forward. Sea monsters, alien abduction, storm, waterspout, tsunami, piracy, mutiny?

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote a story called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” based on the mystery. He spelled the ship’s name as Marie Celeste mistakenly but the mistake got traction and is sometimes attached to some of the stories about the ship.

We still don’t have a definitive answer to this mystery of a “ghost ship,” which makes it more interesting.

An 1861 painting of Mary Celeste (named Amazon at the time) Link

The Lost Season

I didn’t post last weekend, so I thought I’d do a quick “lost weekend” post this morning. I was pretty sure I had written one before and a search shows that I have done several. One was in a June and another in a July, so maybe it’s a summer thing.

The term alludes to the film directed by Billy Wilder from 1945. Unlike the Ray Milland character, I did not go on an alcoholic bender for the weekend. I can’t even use the excuse that I was very busy with other things. I just didn’t have anything inspiring me during the week that I wanted to share.

That brings me to a bigger feeling that I have which came to me this week as I did some catching up on my physical journal with pen and paper: spring 2020 was lost season.

For that, I can point to the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back and ignoring that, the only event I seemed to write about was the birth of my first grandchild in April. And yes, that should be the big event. It was strange occurring in the center of the pandemic here in the Northeast. There was a question about whether or not my son could even be present at the birth. Happily, he was there and the hospital locked hem down and got them out in 24 hours and all is well.

But in these sheltering-in five months I have had more “free time” at home then ever – and yet I have been less productive. I have written less. I ambitiously set up all my paints and easel and took out sketches I wanted to paint. They are still piled on a table in the basement. I started measuring out wallboard for some basement redo. It’s still there. My To-Do list of big projects is longer than ever and nothing has been crossed off. I’m behind in my journaling and I don’t know that I can even recall what happened in the past weeks to write about it.

Is it just me or has this strange time had this effect on a lot of other people? I’m not depressed. I’m not ill. I haven’t lost my way literally or in the “finding yourself” way.  I’m not even very displeased with myself about not getting things done.

It’s not that I haven’t done anything at all. I do write, though less than “normal.” I have completed things that had deadlines – web work for pay, online consulting, teaching commitments – and things I enjoy doing that are time-sensitive such as getting vegetables into the garden.

It’s the calendar midsummer in Paradelle. I still have time to finish things before another season passes by. I plan to write some posts here this weekend, but there’s no a lot of pressure to do so other than my little blog calendar where I keep track of what is being posted where. Maybe I’ll be like Don in that old film and have a few drinks.

Lost Words of the Season

This is a topic that I am more likely to write about on my word origins blog: words of the winter season that seem to have gotten lost over the years. An article on the quite wonderful mentalfloss.com website calls a group of words “obsolete Christmas words,” but I think most of them are more winter season words. Because they are English (Modern, Middle or Old) and German, they tend to be associated with the Yule or Christmas season.

I probably won’t be drinking wassail this month. That is a beverage of hot mulled cider, drunk traditionally as an integral part of wassailing, which was a Medieval Christmastide English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year. (I may very well down a few hard ciders though, so hopefully that will please the apple gods.) Wassail probably comes from a Germanic phrase meaning “good health” and was a greeting.

One word that is totally new to me comes from Latin. You can say that it looks ninguid outside when the landscape is snow-covered.

You all know that to hibernate means sleeping throughout the entire winter. It is something animals do – not people, though some of us seem to hibernate. But some of you probably do hiemate (which my spellcheck is not happy with) which means to spend winter somewhere.

Actually, searching online for hiernate turned up nothing, so I kind of wonder about the validity of these words. Are they so lost that even Google can’t find them? For example, doesn’t the term “yule-hole” seem fake or very modern? It supposedly means the hole you need to move your belt to after you’ve eaten a massive meal. And yet, going back to the 1500s, the terms belly-cheer or belly-timber was used for fine food and somewhat gluttonous eating that may occur in winter and around holiday celebrations from Thanksgiving through New Year’s and into those stay-at-home days of February too.

If you give a tip when you’re at the bar for your drinks, that can be called a pourboire. The word comes from French and literally means “for drink.”

Many of us give or get gift cards and money as a gift. To distinguish a thing that is a gift (or present) from one that is money given in lieu of the traditional gift, the term “present-silver” has been around since the 1500s.

Another word that is brand new to me but old is xenium. It sounds like a new drug or tech company, but it means a gift that is given to a houseguest, or a gift given by a guest to their host.

Do you know nog, a word that comes from ancient English ales but still shows up in words we use during the season, such as eggnog.

While you are celebrating, keep in mind “apolausticism,” a long-lost 19th-century word derived from Greek meaning “to enjoy,” that describes the total devotion to enjoying yourself.

And after you totally enjoy yourself, a word that looks and sounds just right is crapulence. The OED tells us that this 18th-century word describes “sickness or indisposition resulting from excess in drinking or eating.”

Lost Worlds

I have updated an earlier post to reflect the recent release of a film, The Lost City of Z, based on Grann’s book of the same name. Both tell the true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett who went into the Amazon in 1925 with his son looking for an ancient lost city. They both disappeared. For decades, explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and the Lost City of Z. Since then, perhaps another hundred people have died or disappeared searching for Fawcett.

I read David Grann’s The Lost City of Z in 2010 and halfway through it I realized what attracted me to it. It takes me back to a book of my youth – The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – which was a novel I loved as a kid.  I probably read the Classics Illustrated Comic version before I actually read the book. That was the case with many books from Treasure Island to Hamlet. The comics didn’t replace the originals; they led me to them.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is much better known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Even if you have never read any of his fiction, you probably know a few of his stories and characters because according to the Internet Movie Database there are at least 215 films based on his writing.

I took out my old comic book version and also my paperback of the novel and rediscovered Doyle’s little introductory verse:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.

There was another book titled The Lost World which was Michael Crichton’s sequel to Jurassic Park, but I have nothing to say about that book. To me, The Lost World is the one published in 1912 and it is the fictional story of an expedition to a place in the Amazon where prehistoric animals still survive. (Hmmm, did Mr. Crichton get inspiration for Jurassic Park from it?)  The book introduced the character Professor Challenger who appears in other books by Doyle.

Exploration and lost worlds captured the fancy of the public and authors in the early part of the 20th century. In 1916, Edgar Rice Burroughs (who is better known for his Tarzan and science-fiction stories) published The Land that Time Forgot, which was his version of a lost world story. In that rather ridiculous tale, sailors from a German U-Boat discover a world of dinosaurs and ape-men in Antarctica.

I read all of them. I didn’t really pay attention back then to the chronology of publication. If I had noted the dates, I would have realized that another one of my childhood author heroes, Jules Verne, had introduced the whole prehistoric-animals-in-the-present-day adventure story with his novel Journey to the Center of the Earth which was published back in 1864. Those explorers find a prehistoric world of people and dinosaurs inside the Earth.

By the way, you can read The Lost World as an “e-book” free online at Project Gutenberg – if you can handle reading on a screen. I can’t.

Now, to get back to where this post started, the setting for The Lost World was probably inspired by reports about British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett’s expedition to Venezuela and Brazil, in a mountain region called Mount Roraima.

The modern-day non-fiction book, The Lost City of Z , tells the tale of Fawcett who launched his final expedition in 1925 into the Amazon.

His goal was to find the fabled lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold.” El Dorado has captured the imaginations of kids, armchair explorers, and real anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for about 400 years – even though there really has never been evidence that it ever existed. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of expeditions from going out looking for it.

Fawcett was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London.  It humbles me to think that at age 57 he headed out again because he really believed in El Dorado, which he called the City of Z.

He set out with only his 21-year-old son Jack and one of Jack’s friends. He wanted to travel light and fast, eat off the land, and not harass the natives. They vanished in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.  Subsequent attempts to find Fawcett and the city have failed.

What happened to Fawcett? David Grann thinks he knows. The author is not an adventurer, but he ended up in the jungles of the Amazon to try to find an answer.

Fawcett’s expeditions inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of a lost world. Grann wrote an earlier book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

I’m not ready for any Amazon adventures, so I’m happy to follow Grann’s digging through Fawcett’s old diaries and logs for clues and doing my own armchair adventuring.

I liked that the book also deals with how in the past 40 years in Brazil alone, the Amazon has lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover. That’s an area bigger than France. Tribes are being threatened with extinction. Many animals and plants, some we never even knew existed, are also vanishing.

Much has been lost in those jungles.

More Reading
Vanished!: Explorers Forever Lost     
The Lost City

Finding Your Way

How much do you rely on GPS, and maps on your phone to navigate? Once upon a time, we didn’t even use paper maps very much. We relied on environmental clues and simple instruments.

I read an excerpt from a book by John Huth called The Lost Art of Finding Our Way and it got me thinking about this topic again.

Huth was kayaking in Nantucket Sound in 2003 when a fogbank rolled in and disoriented him. He didn’t panic because he knew some basic navigation skills and returned safely to shore. But he found out that only half a mile away, two college students in that fog mistakenly turned their kayaks out to sea and died. That day got him into exploring the principles of navigation, from ancient times to modern.

In his book, we learn about how the Vikings used a sunstone to detect the polarization of sunlight. Arab traders learned to sail into the wind. Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and were able to “read” waves to guide their explorations.

All of us – land dwellers and sea-goers – have lost the ability to make close observations of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents and weather and atmospheric effects in order to read the planet and find our way.

Lavishly illustrated, Huth’s account of the cultures of navigation gets you into a narrative that is a scientific treatise, personal travelogue, and also a re-creation of navigational history. His premise is that by seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.

An article I found online asks, “Do our brains pay a price for GPS?”   There’s no doubt that GPS is a useful technology, but does using it interfere with our ability to do “mental mapping?”

Mental mapping and spatial memory are what allow us to remember where we have put things in our homes. It helps you to lay out a garden, plan a trip, pack a suitcase, arrange furniture, navigate your neighborhood and an office building.

Can you give clear directions to someone to get to a particular place in your hometown? When I was a kid riding my bicycle all summer, I knew almost every street in my hometown by name and location. Now, I don’t even know all the streets within a mile of my house.

John Huth is a professor and a high-energy physicist, and he teaches a course in “Primitive Navigation” about the rudiments of the analog methods of wayfinding using sun, stars, tides, weather and wind. He certainly is not anti-technology. He is an experimental particle physicist and was involved in the discovery of both the top quark and the Higgs boson, but he questions our reliance on smartphones and GPS.

I ordered his book, which sounds quite encyclopedic in its coverage, touching on astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography and telling the ways of early navigators whose lives depended on paying close attention to the environment around them.

Reviewers of the book point out that he is not interested in junking the technology, but relearning the old ways. One reason is that it’s still unclear what losing those old skills has done to our modern brain.

Many of my posts here are about maintaining touch with our natural world, and I would agree that losing our visceral connection to the natural world is a tragic loss with broad repercussions personally and globally.

I doubt that I would find many people of any age who know what “dead reckoning” means or how to use a map with a compass. Would you be able to point out major stars in the night sky and use them to find your way?

I used to teach classes in map and compass and basic land navigation at the Pequest Education Center in New Jersey, but I don’t see any offered anymore. Maybe it’s time to do it again. But are people interested, or are they satisfied with the tech doing the work for them?

A Lost City That Was Never Lost

I saw a news story this weekend about continuing exploration in Luxor, Egypt in the tomb of Ancient Egypt’s boy-king Tutankhamun. Many people are intrigued by Tut, but what amazes me is that this tomb from seven centuries ago still has passages and hidden chambers that we haven’t discovered. The real quest there currently is to find the last resting place of the lost Queen Nefertiti.  Nefertiti, who died in the 14th century B.C. and is thought to be Tutankhamun’s stepmother.

My own explorations have been of the armchair variety, but date back to my childhood. My mom bought me many of the How and Why book series about science.

I wrote one of my ronka poems about them.

The How and Why books of childhood
took me into space and into Earth,
back in time, to lost cities, dinosaurs.
I dug in, flew high, and wondered –
no question, thankfully, was ever fully answered.

One of those books took me into the jungles of South America to find the Maya and Inca lost cities. That introduced me to the ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu is on the eastern slope of the Peruvian Andes.

It was built about 500 years ago, at the height of the Inca Empire. A “lost city” made up of about 200 buildings, including temples, houses, and baths, it was rediscovered by an American archaeologist in 1911.

It is a place that probably is on a lot of bucket lists. There is something about a mysterious civilization and “lost city” that intrigues us. Hundreds of thousands of people visit it every year and it is one of the largest tourist attractions in South America.

Huayna Picchu towers above the Lost City of Machu Picchu, Peru.

Really, the city was never “lost” to the locals, but Hiram Bingham was one of the first outsiders to see it. He was in Peru in search of the lost Incan capital, Vitcos. Locals led him to a ruined city on top of one of the nearby mountains. The explorers were surprised to see families living in the area and farming on some of the lower terraces of Machu Picchu.

The following year his team cleared vegetation and started restoring the buildings. Bingham also took artifacts back to Yale with him. In 2010, the Peruvian government successfully petitioned President Obama for the return of the artifacts.

Machu Picchu has many terraced levels connected by 3,000 steps with a sophisticated irrigation system. Like other ancient structures, the construction is a marvel, even by modern standards. The stone blocks they used to build were shaped using only hard river rocks – no steel or iron chisels – but they fit so tightly together that a knife blade can’t be slipped between them.

The terraces were a way to grow crops and also deal with heavy annual rainfall. Not unlike some modern landscaping, they used layers of stone, covered by smaller stone chips, sand, and topsoil that allowed water to drain and avoided mudslides on the slopes.

The location might have also been used for defensive protection from enemies. But it is thought that it might have been built as a resort or estate for the Incan nobility. It could have been a religious site. We still aren’t sure, and a little mystery makes it more interesting.

I support the theory that, as with the Maya, at least part of its use was for astronomical observations. At the highest part of the site, the Intihuatana stone was used to mark the equinoxes and other celestial events, and local shamans consider the stone as a gateway to the spirit world.

If I ever get to visit, I will want to touch the stone with my forehead to open a vision to the spirit world., and visit the temple of the Moon, the temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows.

The Inca abandoned it at the time of the Spanish conquest when it was only a hundred years old. There is no evidence that Spanish conquerors ever found the city. One theory is that an epidemic of smallpox, carried by the Spanish, wiped out the people.